Page 8 of Yearning Difficulties

Charles Bergery. Deputy to the mayor of Lake Pristine. The Bergery family had such influence.

‘Fine,’ I exhaled. ‘But he’s snarky. One wrong word and I shove him off the horse.’

Dad’s face broke into a wide smile. ‘You’re the best. Come on. I’ll buy you dinner before auditions.’

Dinner consisted of microwaved burritos in Ma’s hair salon, Molly’s. My little sister Regine was in the middle of demanding to come to the auditions, even though my parents had told her no.

‘Swords, horses and lances, Reggie,’ I told her, finishing off my food.

‘And lots of hormonal teenagers,’ Ma added. ‘Too dangerous. You can go when you’re older.’

Later, as Dad and I walked from my mother’s small business to the town square, I marvelled at how beautiful Lake Pristine looked. It was a small town that never seemed to have an off-season. In the summer, it was a sweltering sauna made for frolicking in the lake and cooling down in the Book Festival tents. In the spring, the Maypole Fair brought floral auctions, beauty pageants for dogs and the Spring Fling Ball. In the winter, fairy lights lit up every inch of Main Street and the square was transformed into a giant maze and Christmas market.

Lake Pristine (and my father) filled the autumn calendar to the brim each year. As soon as the Book Festival was over, and the summer firework show complete, September and then October drew in and the Medieval Faire began. Weekends were now dedicated to knights pretending to fight, booth vendors selling fun little trinkets and jousting tournaments with real horses. The large town square lot, which had previously sported huge white tents for the book lovers, was now a medieval time capsule.

I admired Dad’s passion and enthusiasm. He just wanted everyone in town to have fun. I smiled at the sight of a merry throng of would-be knights and vendors, all waiting by the town bandstand for Dad to start the auditions.

‘Before we get into the mayhem,’ he said to me. ‘How was your first broadcast? Did your awful ex-beau behave himself?’

I hesitated before answering. My very decent parents had never liked Dave. That had made the whole affair exciting and rebellious in the beginning, but it had quickly grown tedious. ‘The truth would only upset you.’

He scowled. ‘I can bet. He’d better not be giving you a hard time now that you’re all back at school.’

I kept my thoughts to myself. School had always been an unmitigated social nightmare for me, ever since the crayons and face paints were exchanged for playground games and the whisper network. It was why Max and I had grown so close. Neither of us had ever been very gifted at socializing or obeying high school hierarchies.

When she’d moved away, my whole safety net at school had fallen apart.

Every friendship group I’d ever tried to rub along with had eventually grown tired of me. I’d been pretty close with Priya – had even helped her with her university applications, but that friendship was severed as soon as I’d ended things with Dave.

I, naively, hadn’t realized that breaking up with him meant being forced to break things off with my new friends.

I wished I knew why I’d never been good at friendships. I wasn’t big-headed enough to blame other people – I knew that the common factor in everything was me. I was clearly doing something wrong. Pushing people away without realizing it.

Max and I had talked about it once. The two of us had sat cross-legged on her bed and she’d told me she’d witnessed the way people would be drawn to me, only to violently reject me when I finally let them in. She assured me it wasn’t my fault.

‘Something about you intrigues them,’ she’d told me. ‘And when you can’t live up to their imagination, to the made-up person in their head, they drop you. I think it’s because you wear a guard in public, Zee. It forces people to project onto you. But that’s not your fault. The version of you that lives in other people’s insecurities isn’t your problem.’

Max was smart about things like that. She saw things that others couldn’t. I was never great at analysing people or understanding their motives, I got it wrong all the time. Not Max. She was a true observer. And God, I missed her.

I shook myself back into the moment to see Dad’s worried face. I wanted to tell him everything, but I’d stressed out my family enough in the past few years.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said truthfully.

He studied me for a moment but then seemed to believe it.

‘Good,’ he said cheerfully. ‘High school can be the best time in a person’s life. Don’t let him ruin it for you.’

I sighed. He and Ma had met and fallen in love when they were eighteen. Married and had me at nineteen. They were still happy and in love at thirty-seven and couldn’t conceive of how different things were for teenagers now.

So I said nothing.

Four

Knight School

Today’s Track: ‘Layla’ by Derek & The Dominos

The auditions were chaotic.