It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,4

I suspect I’m her favourite (out of Lucy and me), and that thought pleases me more than I care to admit. I’m not Zach’s number one, but I can be Mariella’s first pick.

Adult approval has long been my drug of choice.

Zach’s house is much bigger and fancier than mine. He’s richer than Lucy and me, although that’s not something we would ever talk about. It’s obvious though. It kind of seeps out everywhere, from his house to the fact that his parents send all four kids to a private school to the way he always suggests we see movies at IMAX in 3D, even bad movies that we’re only seeing for a bit of fun.

In his house, they have a room they call the den, which is a word I had only ever previously encountered in American books and movies and never heard said out loud in this context before. The den has a huge TV, various game consoles, two big, old leather couches and not much else. It’s the designated hangout space for all kids, because Mariella doesn’t like the boys in the good lounge room.

‘Too many teenage boys in one room for too long and it gets a smell, and that smell never leaves,’ Mariella says. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds true, and if anyone would know, it’s the mother of four sons. And the den does have a sort-of smell to it—a musk of deodorant, sweat and food.

We set ourselves up in the den. Lucy sits next to me and Zach sits on the other couch. I sense this is a deliberate move on their behalf, to de-emphasise their coupleness in the face of my parents’ separation. The thing is, Lucy and I used to be the inseparable twosome, and Zach was the one slightly on the outer. He could never quite crack the closeness we had. Until, well, I guess he found a way.

Lucy rests her head on my shoulder. Her hair tickles my cheek.

‘What’s going to happen with your parents?’

‘Dad is moving out.’

‘Wow. That’s fast,’ Zach says.

‘Well, not considering they’ve been broken up for almost a year. It’s actually very slow.’

‘Where’s he going to live?’ Lucy asks.

‘He’s renting an apartment. In Port Melbourne.’

I can’t picture him in an apartment. It seems like something for young people. Not forty-seven-year-olds who like playing chess, cooking paella and singing in a choir. Or maybe apartments are for exactly these kinds of people. Dad is single now. He will start online dating and I will have to sit through painful introductions to polite women who have as little interest in me as I have in them. I will have to take a photograph of Dad that he can use on the site, one that doesn’t make him look like a serial killer (this is tough, because he doesn’t smile in photos), and then check his dating profile for spelling mistakes, because he has no one else in his life to do these things. I can see my future unfolding before my eyes—hours spent editing the dating profiles of my parents and then consoling them when they are ghosted or, worse, scammed out of huge sums of money.

‘Say what you like about my mum, but at least I know she can’t keep a secret that big from me,’ Zach said, his mouth full of Tim Tam.

It’s true. Mariella tells you more than you ever want to know about anything. Over the years, she has told us about the man she lived with before meeting Sal (‘He left his toenail clippings in the sink, and if that’s not a sign of sociopath, I don’t know what is’), the time she was caught shoplifting (‘I was twelve and my cousin said she’d distract the salesperson for me, but she didn’t, and that’s why we don’t go to their house at Easter to this day’) and the time she saw a ghost (‘An older woman with white hair, standing at the end of our bed, but I wasn’t scared because I knew her rage was towards men, so only Sal was in danger’).

‘My mum would never leave Dad. Or let him leave her,’ Lucy says. That’s true too. Lucy’s mother would push through fifty years of deep unhappiness before she got divorced, because divorce might be misconstrued as failure, and that word isn’t in her vocabulary. That’s literally her phrasing, not mine. Lucy’s mother runs ten kilometres every morning before breakfast, wearing a singlet that says ‘Don’t Stop When