It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,65

She was strong, unwavering. She rejected secrets, and lies, and pretty much the entire male population. Now I am weak and disgusting with feelings.

Also, there’s the glaring fact that I didn’t notice my parents weren’t together for ten months. This, more than anything, tells me that I can’t trust my judgment anymore.

If I can see Alex’s face, and look into his eyes, maybe then I can know. I once read a book on how to spot a liar. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I know looking someone dead in the eyes without blinking makes it much harder for them to lie, unless they’re a psychopath, and then they’ll stare straight back at you and lie with ease and you’ll probably be caught in their web of lies forever.

— Come over

I type it without really even thinking, but once I’ve written it, it feels very exciting.

— Okay

— I’m at my dad’s place.

I send him the address, and he says he’s on his way. Dad calls out to me then, asking if I’m ready to watch the next episode. We’re watching a new Netflix series that is very, very slow and it takes all my strength not to look at my phone every two seconds, but I’m trying not to ruin our first night together, because that might set the tone for the rest of our lives. Dad and I have to figure out a whole new relationship, one without Mum’s presence, and I have no idea how to get it right.

I walk into the lounge.

‘Dad, someone is coming over.’

‘What, now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s after ten.’ After 10pm, to Dad, is a time for quietly drinking a cup of tea and eating shortbread biscuits. It is not a time for going outside, being loud, or doing things of any kind, most especially socialising.

‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s important.’

‘Who is it?’

‘A friend.’

‘Coming here?’

‘Sort of. I just need to talk to them for a second. I’ll go downstairs, I won’t bring them up here.’

‘You can bring your friend up here.’

‘I’d rather not.’

He looks at me, and frowns. ‘You are being very mysterious.’

‘Says the man who lied to me for ten months.’

‘Well now…’ he pauses.

He and Mum are still really struggling to come up with ways to get around the fact that they did a terrible thing to me. They still won’t admit it was terrible—they won’t say it, but we all know it was.

‘For my peace of mind, tell me who it is,’ he says.

‘A boy.’

‘What boy?’

‘A boy called Alex.’

‘Is this boy called Alex nice?’

‘I’m still deciding.’

‘Okay. Are you going to go somewhere with him?’

‘No. I’m just going to sit in his car and talk.’

‘All right. What are you going to talk about?’

‘That’s private,’ I say, which is a mistake, because now he probably thinks it’s about sex.

Dad sips his tea and puts the cup down with a rattle. ‘You know you can always talk to me, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ This is true: Dad is far less judgmental than Mum.

‘I’m good at giving advice.’

‘I know,’ I say.

‘And I was once a teenage boy, so maybe I have insights you don’t know about.’

‘You would have been a very different kind of teenage guy to Alex.’

‘So he’s not a Star Wars super-fan who collects rocks?’

Dad was very much a nineties nerd stereotype as a teenager, as far as I can gather. I saw a picture of him once, as a fifteen-year-old, and I felt instantly sorry for him, even though he looked happy with his arms slung over the shoulders of two friends, all of them grinning, one of them delightedly pointing to his T-shirt which had an image from a movie I didn’t recognise on it.

Then I imagined my own child looking at pictures of me at fifteen and feeling sorry for me, except that was easier to know why, because of my skin, and the way I can never, ever relax in front of a camera, which comes through so clearly in every single photo. I’m always looking down, looking away, half-turning, straining, enduring, smiling in a closed-mouth, get-this-over-with way. ‘Gee, you’re not photogenic, are you,’ a friend of Lucy’s once said to me, choosing which group shot to post on Instagram, and I said, ‘It’s good because people are never disappointed when they meet me in person,’ and she nodded earnestly, like it was my master plan all along.

‘Not quite,’ I say now to Dad.

‘Still, try me.’

‘Fine. Hypothetically, and I’m not saying this is Alex, but if someone cheated on their previous girlfriend, does that mean