It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,61

few years too. We don’t know where any of us will be in five years, or how we’ll be feeling about things.’

‘Don’t say that.’

Growing and changing is only fun if my parents stay the same and I can show them how different and better I am without having to process their stuff too.

‘Are you worried about next week?’ she says.

Next week is when university places are announced, and the rest of my life will be decided. Of course I’m worried.

‘A little.’

I’ve decided I actually quite like the safety of this limbo period. Nothing is certain or decided yet. Next week, my choices will become concrete and I might have made the wrong ones and I’ll have to live with that forever and I don’t know how anyone makes these kinds of decisions and feels good about them. The whole thing makes me feel sick.

‘No matter what happens, I’m so proud of you, honey.’

There she goes, with the ‘no matter what happens’ stuff again. She has no idea that bringing up the fact that anything can happen is as unnerving as hell to someone like me.

I’m feeling bad now about how awful I have been to her tonight and for the phone snooping, and I’m about to apologise, when she turns to me.

‘Natalie, there’s something else I need to tell you.’

My stomach hurts preemptively. ‘What’s that?’

Mum clears her throat a little. ‘We’re selling the house.’

‘This house? Our house?’

‘Yes. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own.’

This probably should have occurred to me before, but I have been too busy wallowing in my own self-pity and thinking about Alex to consider logistics. I hate this. Without a big piece of shared real estate, the chances of Mum and Dad getting back together someday just got much, much smaller. (I didn’t even know I was holding out hope for them getting back together until this moment.)

‘Where will I live?’

‘With me, at my new place.’

‘Which is where?’

‘I don’t know yet. There’s a lot to organise before I get to that point.’

I swallow, afraid I’m going to cry, and wait until I know my voice won’t wobble to speak. ‘What if I want to live with Dad?’

‘You can do that,’ Mum says, and she looks like she’s trying to stop her voice from wobbling too.

‘So I have to choose one of you?’ I knew it would come to this. If Mum had kept the house, then staying with her wouldn’t have felt as much like choosing, because I would be at the home I’ve always known, my real home. But if they are both renting new apartments, in new areas, then it is a direct choice between them.

‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’

‘But it is exactly like that.’

‘You could do one week with one of us, and then a week with the other. Or a month each. Or a year. There are lots of ways for us to share you,’ she says, squeezing my shoulder, and then smoothing my hair back from my face.

As long as I am shared. As long as my life is sliced up into equal pieces for them both to enjoy.

24

Five Stages

The next morning, I lie prone on the couch and watch Netflix. It has been almost forty-eight hours since I last spoke to Alex. I have cycled through the five stages of rejection. (Stage one: I am too busy and carefree to even keep track of when he last contacted me. Stage two: he’s probably busy, I’m busy too, we are both busy people. Stage three: it would have been nice to hear from him by now but everything is fine. Stage four: maybe he dropped his phone in the toilet or left it somewhere. Stage five: it’s over and fuck him.)

Then a text from Alex appears on my screen.

— Hey, what are you up to tonight?

I clutch my phone and look at the words with relief and delight, grinning like a goof for a sad and shameful length of time before realising I need to respond. I consider saying ‘nothing’ but I actually do have plans. Lucy invited me to see a movie with her and Zach tonight, which is a transparent move on her behalf to smooth things over with me and Zach, but I figured I should go and give Zach the chance to apologise in person.

— I’m seeing a movie with Zach and Lucy

The more I look at that sentence on the screen, the colder and harsher and more closed off those words seem, so before