Note: This is written in British/South African English, although almost all the media I consume is American, so that will have its influence too. For the sake of keeping the note short, I'll post a comment to explain my use of language and obscure terms, if anyone is interested. The note is also more extensive in the first chapter.
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I was very quickly reminded of the first reason why I didn't like going to parties. The waiting. Maybe it was just me, but once I had gotten ready, I couldn't really do anything else or relax until it was time to go. Maybe I should just be one of those people who only starts getting ready really late, but I'd be too nervous that Ellie and Jamie would get annoyed with me if I made them wait. But now I was the one waiting for them, and once I was at the party I'd probably be waiting for something interesting to happen, or waiting for it to be over. There was so much waiting involved. Maybe I wasn't doing parties right.
I'd also spent the whole day frantically cleaning my room, so I was already worn out. I'm not exactly messy, and my room is huge, so it never really looks cluttered, but my mess felt very personal. Usually, I'd leave the books I'd been reading strewn around, and I'd just cycle through stacks of clean laundry without putting them away. The books were basically a series of hints about what I'd been thinking about over the last several months, and the laundry stacks had my underwear casually sitting on top. It was a weird juxtaposition that felt far too private, especially for Jamie's eyes.
So I'd frantically tidied things away, dusted and wiped down surfaces, and then I'd progressed from doing that into getting ready. Which was a mistake. I'd finished far too early, even though I spent much more time getting ready than I usually do. So not only was I anxious and at a loss for something to do, I was annoyed at myself for being too concerned about my appearance. I usually never cared this much, and I didn't want to admit to myself what exactly was making me put in all the extra effort. I had nothing left to do except mull that over, so when my phone buzzed with a message from Ellie, it came as a relief.
[Are you ready?]
______________[Yes. Why?]
[I'm coming over]
[In about 5 minutes]
[I need to use your bathroom]
______________[Is something wrong with your bathroom?]
She didn't respond, so I just went in to my bathroom to check that it was clean enough, and I quickly looked in the mirror on my way out, to make sure I hadn't already done something stupid like mess something on my shirt or get something in my hair.
My hair was the only thing I was still really worried about. Well, that and my personality, but I couldn't really do anything about that. Not that there was much I could ever do about my hair. I usually relied mostly on luck. My general approach was to put in some hair product — gel or mousse, whatever I had lying around — and just randomly tousle my hair until I could generate a pleasing effect. Except it wasn't really going well today. Hair as curly as mine made managing it an ongoing war with chaos, and chaos often won.
At least I was fairly happy with my clothes. One of the benefits of being a teenager around here, and specifically a guy, was that the range of what you were supposed to wear to a party was pretty limited. A nice button down shirt, a pair of jeans that weren't too stylised, and whatever shoes you wanted, provided they weren't too obtrusive. I usually don't like structure — I hated wearing a school uniform — but parties were far enough out of my comfort zone that I could appreciate the fact that dressing for them never became one more thing to worry about.
I checked my room one more time to make sure I hadn't left anything lying around. As rooms go, it's fantastic. I think it was meant to be a pool-house or a servants quarters, originally. I'd lucked out majorly when we'd moved in, because there was one more child in my family than there were available bedrooms. It wasn't a small house, there were just seven of us — it was a yours-mine-and-ours kind of situation, with my mom's three kids, my stepdad's two, and then the twins they'd had together. We were a big family.
When we'd moved in my brother Brian was already at university most of the time anyway, but my sister Candace and my step-sister Dan still had a few years left of high school. So to prevent a civil war between the two of them, it was decided that I would be the one who got the room. There were a few conditions attached, naturally. When Brian was back home, he slept on the sleeper couch, and it essentially became 'Our room', which I didn't mind, because we got along pretty well. On the rare occasions when family stayed with us, I'd also have to sleep somewhere else.
It was a small price, and I was happy to pay it. I loved my room. It was set up like a studio apartment, with one big open space, a reasonable bathroom, a decent sized closet and even a small kitchen area. We'd put a sleeper couch in there for Brian's visits, and over the years I'd managed to scavenge various other things — a big desk, a cafe table and four chairs, a fridge and a microwave for the kitchen, and even my own TV. I'd put in a lot of effort to make it nice, since I spent so much of my time in there.
Another great feature was that it was also semi-detached, only connecting to the main house through the laundry room and garage, which resulted in a lot of privacy and protection from the general chaos of the rest of my family. I even basically had my own private entrance — a small garden path around the back of the house, with a metal gate that opened out onto the street. Which is where I went to unlock the gate for Ellie.
"Hey, I hope you don't mind," she said quickly, gliding past me down the path. "I just need to do a few things here before we go."
I left the gate unlocked, since Jamie would be here soon, and followed her inside. She walked over to the cafe table and put down a bottle of rosé wine with a pink bow on it, and hung her bag off the end of the chair. Then she took off her jacket, followed by the t-shirt she was wearing to reveal a slightly more adventurous sequinned, sleeveless top underneath.
I suppressed a comment about how weird it was that she'd come into my room and immediately started stripping, and she pulled some makeup out of her bag and headed to my bathroom to start applying. I stepped up awkwardly to the bathroom door, looking over her shoulder. She finished dusting some glittery powder on her eyelids and picked up a pencil, which she began running around the edges of her eyes.
"What?" She looked out at me through her reflection.
"Most people get ready in their own homes."
"Yeah, well." She put the pencil down and started putting on some mascara. "Most people don't have my mother."
She wasn't wrong. Her mother had been a teacher at the primary school we'd both gone to, halfway across the country. While she wasn't exactly oppressive or overbearing, she certainly had many opinions on how 'young adults should conduct themselves'. She was an English teacher, so she also had some pretty biting ways of expressing those opinions. She was also warm, witty, and great, but she did sometimes make me grateful for my mothers more hands-off approach to parenting.
"Yeah," I was suddenly feeling vaguely nostalgic. "Hey, remember when we were in year six and instead of letting us quietly read the set-work book she gave us a twenty-minute lecture on how those white candy sticks were a gateway to a smoking habit, and we should never buy them."
"UGH!" Ellie nearly poked her eye out. "Don't remind me. I still have stress dreams about those impromptu life advice sessions. That wasn't even the worst one."
"There were more?"
"Forget I said anything."
"Uh-huh." I grinned.
I stepped back and paced around my room. Eventually, Ellie came out of the bathroom, and packed her makeup back into her bag.
"There, how do I look?"
"Good." I shrugged.
Ellie was usually constrained at school — as were we all — by the very strict uniform and dress code. She also did ballet, which meant on any given day she usually had her hair up in a very functional, practical bun, and wore very little makeup. You didn't want one of the teachers or administration staff at the school to drag you aside and give you detention for 'looking like the whore of Babylon' or something like that. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not as much as you might hope.
"Seriously? Good?" She shook her head. "Can I at least have a multi-syllable adjective?"
I rolled my eyes, and looked at her. I'd learned by now, from my mom and sister, if you say something nice without looking you'll just get in more trouble. Ellie was beautiful, I could be fairly certain about that. I hung around enough gross straight guys to know that she was the main person most of the guys — and probably some girls, actually — were always lusting after, and that was when she looked like a God-fearing ballerina. With her perfectly styled hair, clothes and well-applied makeup, she took it to a new level. My fake crush on her had, at least, had a very believable target. I didn't want her to get the wrong idea though, given our history, so I didn't feel like I could tell her she looked 'Beautiful'.
"Um... Glamorous?"
"Thank you!" She perked up. I seemed to have landed on the right word. "You look great too. I like that shirt. Just... come here a sec."
I obediently wandered over, and she began poking and pulling at my hair. The shirt I was wearing was red, and it was one of the nicest pieces of clothing I owned. I go to parties so rarely that I'd had to do research — looking at photos on social media to make sure I hadn't worn the same one last time.
"Ow!" I said, when she gave a particularly sharp tug at my hair.
"Sorry. Just... there. How's that?"
She stepped back, and went over to the kitchen sink to rinse my hair gel from her hands, while I went to check it out in the bathroom mirror. It actually looked pretty good. She'd managed to get the messy, casual look I was going for, but what she'd done looked much more organic and effortless than anything I thought I could ever achieve. I could never get my hair to give off the impression that 'I just woke up like this', but somehow she'd done it.
"Huh. Thanks."
"You're welcome." She sat down at the cafe table, pulling out her phone.
My phone started buzzing next to my bed, so I went over to check it.
[Hey, it's Jamie]
