I know we are only fifteen but we’re really serious about one another. He is my One. We’re soulmates. Megan though? I’m pretty sure she will kick off. Explode with jealousy. I mean I love her, she loves me, but we are fifteen-year-old best friends so she also hates me sometimes and I hate her sometimes. Mum probably has a point; this shit is going to get real.
I hear the bathroom door slam. No! Logan got there first. He’ll take for ever and make it smell like hell. I pull on my robe and drag myself downstairs; I know there’s no way on earth Mum is going to let me ditch school, lottery win or not. She values education above everything else. Thinks it’s the biggest agent for change etc etc. Personally, I think maybe she overvalues education. I mean clearly, a lottery win is a big agent for change too, right?
As I pour myself a bowl of cereal, I glance over the lists we drew up yesterday. There’s always a notebook knocking around the kitchen in which Mum scribbles herself little reminders of things she needs to buy; it also has the scores from our family games night when we play Monopoly or cards, and sometimes Mum and Dad write notes to me and Logan in there if they are going to be late home. Just stuff about what there is in to eat and how long to heat things up for, as though texting hasn’t been invented. Yesterday, we used the ordinary little notebook to catch our dreams, I smile to myself as I flick through the pages.
On one page it says: red onions, gravy granules, bleach. On the next it says: Dad – Ferrari, Emily – holiday to New York, Logan – swimming pool (plus house), which was written as an afterthought when it was pointed out to him that we don’t have room in our garden to dig a swimming pool. Mum – new sofa. I don’t think Mum has the hang of this game; Dad had said he’d get us anything we wanted, anything at all, and that was the best she could come up with. When we all laughed at Mum and told her to think bigger, she got a bit huffy and said, ‘Well, our sofa is quite lumpy, we really do need a new one.’ Hilarious.
Dad said he’d book New York in the next day or two. He would have done so last night but he said the sort of style we want to do it in would more than max out his credit cards and the money from the lottery isn’t in their account yet. We’re going to fly first class. Obvs none of us have done that before but Dad says that’s the only way we are going to travel from now on. We looked at some amazing hotels, didn’t know where to start. We put in the search ‘Best 5-star hotels in New York’. We couldn’t decide. They were all out of this world. Unlike anything we have ever stayed in. Well, we don’t usually go on hotel holidays. Mum has a friend from work who has a flat in the south of Spain, we usually go there. She gives us ten per cent off the price that’s listed on the Owner Direct site. We stayed in a bed and breakfast when we did a city break in Edinburgh. It was nice; fluffy towels with a good-size TV in the room but these luxury hotels that we looked at in New York are something else! They all have spas, rooftop swimming pools, club lounges and amazing restaurants in cool subterranean basements. They are so stylish I don’t believe in them. We didn’t know which to pick and just kept jumping around from one site to another. Sort of overwhelmed.
In the end we chose the Ritz-Carlton, because we’d all heard of the Ritz and know it means posh. Mum and Dad kept singing some crazy old song about ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’. They didn’t seem to know the song very well though as that was the only line they sang, but when they petered out, they just howled with laughter because it was a unique, unprecedented, amazing day when we all thought everything was funny! Maybe, and I really want to believe this, maybe none of us will ever be angry or sad or irritated ever again. Not for real.
The hotel is right next to Central Park. I have always