It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,18

Dad texts me: ‘Are you still at the party?’ Dad is still living in the same house as Mum. Why wouldn’t they be talking to each other about this? This is a preview, I understand suddenly. Life with divorced, overly invested parents means having to tell them both where you are at all times. It means having to come up with lies that will work on them both if I need to lie about stuff. It means making sure they are treated equally in everything, down to a damn text message.

I get out of the car at my house and before I walk inside, I text Alex Home safe. I was going to be cute with gif or an emoji, but I decide not to be, because I can’t think of anything that hits the right tone of I’m funny and adorable but also I don’t care at all, and many men and women are in love with me and I’m probably messaging them right at this very minute too. He writes back Good. See you soon. I don’t write anything back to that, but later that night, I lie in bed and look at the messages, and run over a million scenarios of things I might have written, and what he might have written back, and what might have happened then.

I can’t stop thinking about the Kiss. On. The. Cheek. (Aka The Greatest Thing To Romantically Happen To Me, If In Fact It Is Romantic.)

Thinking of the cheek kiss is like pressing on a bruise, but instead of pain, I feel a burst of happiness. Right now is the best time—before I can be disappointed, before I find out Alex isn’t interested in me at all, before I can ruin things. Tonight, everything is still possible.

6

A House Full of Gryffindors

‘What happened?’ Zach says.

‘Every detail,’ Lucy says.

The three of us are lying on the deck at Zach’s house the next day. Lucy has her head on Zach’s chest, hair fanned out in all directions. It still hurts my selfish heart, seeing her lying on him so casually. I love them both so much, so it doesn’t make sense that I am still ever so slightly unhappy that they’re so happy. But I guess it does, because they don’t need my love like I need theirs anymore, and that hurts.

Today, I am on edge anyway because I am nervous about running into Alex. I don’t want to talk to him, but I need to see him in the light of day to formally assess my feelings. Everyone knows you can’t really trust any feeling you have at night—and the later the hour, the less trustworthy it is. Anything you feel after 10pm is suspect, anything after midnight should be discounted altogether.

I washed my hair this morning and I’m wearing my best jeans and a top that Lucy and I call the Boob Top, for pretty self-explanatory reasons: it makes my cleavage look great. Normally little thought would go into my outfit, and I wouldn’t call it an outfit, it would be just clothes I picked from the cupboard (or maybe the floor), and my unwashed hair would be in a messy bun, and I would avoid looking in the mirror because sometimes I can get stuck in a cycle of self-loathing if I make no effort in my appearance and then see myself making no effort, and start hating what I look like when I make no effort, then hating myself for making no effort, and on it goes in a really boring, looping way where I expend a lot of energy in making no effort. But this morning, I made an effort, and I wore something that makes me feel good.

Lucy said, ‘Why are you wearing the Boob Top?’ when I arrived, and I shrugged and said, ‘It was the only clean thing I had,’ all innocent, and I could see from her face that she didn’t believe me.

The thing is, I quite like my breasts. When I stand naked in front of a mirror, I like the way they look. Full, reasonably perky and only slightly uneven in size, which is normal according to the billion times I’ve checked on the internet. If I were ever to become famous and be the subject of a series of tasteful black-and-white nude photographs taken by a renowned photographer, my breasts would be without a doubt the artistic highlight. Or, in an only marginally more likely scenario, if I ever have the