by Sara Barnard
“That’s a nice jacket,” Rosie said to me when I sat on the stool next to her. “Tarin’s?”
“Tarin’s.” I leaned over and tilted the book so I could see it. “What are we making?”
“Macaroons,” Suzanne said happily. “The best things ever.”
“MacaRONS,” Sarah corrected distractedly, striding past us and poking her head into what had to be the pantry. “Where’s my purse?”
“Macaroooooooons,” Suzanne said, unruffled. She was grinning. “Your purse is probably still on your bed.”
“Could you grab it for me?” Sarah reached into the pantry and pulled out, of all things, her car keys.
Suzanne went without complaint.
“You girls have fun, and feel free to call me anytime if there’s a problem. My number’s on the fridge,” Sarah said to Rosie and me. She was smiling, but her eyes seemed anxious. She lowered her voice slightly. “Make sure you don’t leave Suzanne on her own for too long, particularly in the kitchen.”
She said this last point just as Suzanne walked back into the kitchen, brandishing the purse. For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard, but then she looked at me and Rosie and said, head slightly cocked, completely deadpan, “I’m not allowed to be left alone with the oven in case I stick my head in it.”
This was so clearly meant to be a joke that I laughed out loud, but I was the only one who did. Rosie looked confused and Sarah exasperated.
“You are a piece of work,” Sarah said, taking the purse from Suzanne and putting it into her bag. She sounded like she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or amused.
“Caddy thinks I’m funny,” Suzanne replied. She flashed a grin at me.
“Caddy doesn’t have to live with you,” Sarah said, but she was smiling now.
“Neither do youuuu,” Suzanne sang.
Throughout this exchange, which ended with Sarah draping a tea towel over Suzanne’s head, Rosie alternated between looking from me to them with the same confused expression on her face. She would later ask me if I thought it was normal to joke about such horrible topics, a question that had never occurred to me. There was no “normal,” just Suzanne, who was spiky and self-deprecating and sardonic. It made sense to me that she dealt with her heartaches by making light of them, any time it was possible to do so. And really, what was the alternative?
By the time Sarah finally left—“Please don’t burn the house down!”—it had started to get dark. Suzanne turned the kitchen light on and then flipped open the laptop that had been left on the counter.
“Music?” she asked, tapping a few keys.
“Oh my God,” Rosie said in response. She was peering at the recipe for the macarons, her eyes widening with each step. “I thought we were going to bake something easy! Can’t we just make brownies?”
“But music.” Suzanne pointed at the laptop. “Music first.”
“We have to whisk egg whites,” Rosie said to me, pointing. “And pipe stuff.”
“It’s really easy,” Suzanne promised. “Is it okay if I play the Lucksmiths?”
“Who?” Rosie and I said at the same time.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The music started, bouncy and cheerful. “Okay, so . . . what’s the first step, Roz?”
Rosie looked at her, her eyes narrowing. “Haven’t you made these before?”
“Nope,” Suzanne said cheerfully.
“Suze!” Rosie practically wailed.
“What? They’re really easy, honest. Sarah said so, and I’ve watched her make them.”
“Let’s make brownies,” Rosie said decisively, shutting the recipe book.
A flash of annoyance passed over Suzanne’s face. She reached over and opened the book again, flipping through it to get to the right page. “We’re making macarons.” She pointed to the ingredients laid out across the table. “I got everything ready.”
Rosie let out a huffing noise. “Why does it have to be macarons? If we make brownies, we know they’ll turn out good.”
They looked at each other, belligerent. I reached out and took the recipe book, sliding it toward me to see the first step. “Egg whites and caster sugar in a bowl,” I read out in my firmest voice. “Four egg whites, seventy grams of sugar.” I opened the box of eggs. “How do you just get the white bit?”
Suzanne laughed, her face relaxing. “You have to separate them.”
Rosie still looked mutinous, now with a side of betrayed. I avoided her gaze, opening the bag of sugar and weighing out seventy grams.
“Rosie and I used to make brownies a lot,” I said to Suzanne. “Basically because they’re really easy.”
“And they taste good,” Rosie said, a sulk in her voice.
Suzanne had cracked an egg against the side of a cup and was maneuvering the yolk from one half of the shell to the other.
“Remember that time we tried to put treacle in them?” I said to Rosie.
“Oh my God,” Rosie said, dissolving into laughter. “It was like sludge. Actual sludge.”
“When it came out of the oven it had turned into a brick,” I continued, grinning at the memory. “We had to put it straight in the bin.”
“So they didn’t always taste good?” Suzanne asked, her voice teasing. She was onto the third egg, her fingers deft and shiny with eggy remnants.
“The treacle was a mistake,” Rosie conceded. She seemed mollified by our reminiscing, and she leaned across me to look at the book. Her hair tickled my face. “But usually they were great.”
“These will be great too,” Suzanne said. She poured the egg whites from the cup into the mixing bowl, gesturing to me to add the sugar.
“A new tradition,” I said, doing so. Suzanne’s whole face seemed to lift at these words, making her look suddenly very young. She smiled at me, hopeful.
“They better be good then,” Rosie said.
They weren’t.
The macarons we pulled out of the oven did not in any way resemble the beautiful, colorful treats I’d seen in books and patisserie windows. The circles we’d piped onto the tray had ballooned in the oven and merged into several gigantic cracked blobs.
“Oh,” Suzanne said. She looked confused.
“We piped them too big,” Rosie said.
“Oh, did we?” Suzanne’s voice was sarcastic. “What was your first clue?”
“It’s just the first tray,” I said quickly, before Rosie could respond. “We’ll pipe the rest smaller, and with more space between them.”
We took no chances with the next batch, piping small discs of the mixture into lonely pink islands on the tray. They turned out perfect and they tasted like sugary almond heaven. We took the broken pieces from the first batch and, with the help of cream and raspberry sauce, salvaged them into a gloopy, delicious mess that we heaped into one bowl to share.
Together we squashed onto the sofa in the living room, Suzanne in the middle with the bowl on her lap, the two of us on each side with a spoon each.
“Did you know it’s Suze’s birthday in a couple of weeks?” Rosie said to me, and Suzanne made a face.
“No!” I said. “Why didn’t you say something? What are you going to do?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Suzanne said.
“It’s your sixteenth—of course it’s a big deal,” I said, thinking about the hall my parents had booked for my birthday. “Are you having a party?”
“Where would I have it?” She gestured around the living room, which was indeed too small for revelry.
“You could hire somewhere,” I suggested. I picked a piece of broken macaron off my spoon and nibbled at it.
“That costs too much,” Suzanne said. She shrugged. “I really don’t care. I don’t want it to be a big thing.”
This made no sense. “Why not? Your birthday is, like, the best day of the year.”
“Not for me,” she said tightly, and I finally got it.
“Oh.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, before Rosie adjusted herself o
n her side of the sofa and pointed her spoon at us importantly. “I have an idea. How about you spend the whole of your birthday weekend with us? We’ll both come to yours on Friday night, have dinner or whatever, and then on Saturday we can go to the beach, meet Lev and the others, have a few drinks and stuff, then crash at yours. Then on Sunday, on your actual birthday, we’ll do things like have birthday cake and whatever. Sarah will make you a birthday cake, right?”
Suzanne nodded slowly. “But, the beach in November?”
“Sure. We’ll take blankets.” Rosie was in full-on planning mode. “Say yes. You can’t not celebrate your sixteenth. And you should celebrate it with us.” She caught my eye. “Shouldn’t she?”
“Definitely,” I said.
A small smile had lifted Suzanne’s face. “That sounds nice.”
“Of course it sounds nice,” Rosie said. “It’ll be great. Quiet but celebratory. With presents.” She looked pleased with herself. “Are you in?”
“I’m in,” Suzanne confirmed. She took a spoonful of macaron gloop. “I can’t believe how good this tastes. Why do people even bother with proper macarons when you could just do this?” She licked a spot of whipped cream off her wrist. “You know, this is what I want the rest of my life to be like.” She looked happy and relaxed, maybe more so than I’d ever seen her. “Baking with my friends.” She grinned at us both.
“I am definitely on board with that,” Rosie said.
“What do you think, Cads?” Suzanne asked me. “A new tradition?”
The macaron pieces in the cream were sweet and chewy and perfect.
“A new tradition,” I confirmed.
11
AS SOON AS I GOT home from school the Friday before Suzanne’s birthday I went straight to my room to pack my stuff for the weekend, something I’d been too lazy to do the night before, when I’d actually had time.
I was just flicking through my T-shirts, trying to find the one that featured Moomintroll, when I heard the phone ring. As it was the landline, I hoped immediately it was Rosie, and strained to hear Mum calling my name. When no shout came, I turned in slight disappointment back to my clothes. A few minutes later, just when I was pulling the Moomintroll shirt over my head, Mum poked her head in. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” I said, pulling my hair out from under the T-shirt.
“That was Suzanne’s aunt on the phone,” Mum said, her voice cautious and measured. She let out a long sigh and then said, “There’s not going to be a birthday weekend. It’s been called off.”
My first thought was that Suzanne had done something wrong, that she and Sarah had fought over something and Suzanne had lost. My second, far more ridiculous and yet right on the heels of the first, was that it was just me that had been uninvited, that Rosie would still be there. “Why not?”
Mum didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time. She looked like she was thinking hard. Finally she said slowly, “Suzanne’s finding things difficult at the moment, and she’s just not in the right frame of mind for celebration. Does that make sense?”
Not even a little.
“What do you mean, difficult?”
Another silence. “The word Sarah used was ‘sad.’ She’s very sad, overwhelmingly so.”
“You mean like depressed?” None of this made sense. I’d seen Suzanne so recently; in fact we’d all three met up in Starbucks earlier that week, and she’d seemed fine. And Rosie hadn’t mentioned anything about her being sad at school.
“I don’t think it’s like that. I think it’s just the case that a weekend of joviality is too much to expect right now.” It was just like my mother to use the word “joviality” in a sentence. Why couldn’t she just say fun, like a normal person?
The thought of Suzanne being so sad she didn’t even want to see her friends on her birthday was in itself so unbearably sad that I suddenly felt like I wanted to cry. Mum, seeing my face, reached out and gave my hip a reassuring rub. At least, I assumed it was meant to be reassuring. The fact that it was my hip diminished the comfort slightly.
“There’ll be other weekends,” she said, missing the point entirely. “Why don’t you have Rosie here instead?”
“Maybe,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t an option. There would be something callous about having Suzanne’s birthday weekend without her, and in my house, not hers.
It struck me after Mum left my room that only a few weeks ago I would have been thrilled at the chance to have Rosie to myself for the weekend, especially at Suzanne’s expense. But so much had changed in such a short space of time, and as surprising at it still sometimes seemed to me, Suzanne was as much as part of my daily life now as Rosie was.
I sent her a message saying I hoped she was okay and to let me know when she was feeling better. She didn’t reply.
* * *
On Saturday, Rosie and I met up in town and settled down in Starbucks with hot chocolates and cake. It was pouring with rain outside and neither of us was in the mood to navigate the sodden crowds of Saturday’s Brighton, let alone go to the beach.
“So what did your mum tell you?” I asked. We’d saved the most pressing conversation—Suzanne—until we’d secured the sofas.
“That Suzanne’s depressed,” Rosie said, arranging our two plates in front of her and picking up a knife. She raised the blade above the Danish, biting down speculatively on her lip before cutting decisively down through the middle. Custard oozed across the knife and onto the plate. “Does that look even?”
“Sure,” I said, picking up the smaller half and putting it on my plate. I watched as she cut the chocolate muffin in half. “Did she say anything else?”
Rosie shrugged, already in the process of cutting her halves into bite-sized chunks. “Not really. What else is there to say?”
“Mum didn’t use the word ‘depressed,’ ” I said, not sure where I was going with this. “She said Suzanne was sad.”
Rosie laughed, but not meanly. “Isn’t it annoying that she tries to sugarcoat everything for you like you’re five years old?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m not sure that’s what she’s doing this time. I asked if that meant she was depressed, and she said this is different.”
“Different how?”
“I have no idea.”
“What difference does it make anyway?” Rosie picked up her first chunk of Danish. I’d already finished mine. “The end result is the same.”
I had a feeling that it made quite a big difference, and that Sarah had used sad as opposed to depressed quite deliberately. But the nuances of the two words, the look on my mother’s face and even the tone of Rosie’s voice seemed to belong to a world I didn’t understand, no matter how much I strained.
And then the answer came to me, so obvious I wasn’t sure why it had taken so long. “We should go and see her.”
Rosie paused, flakes of Danish still on her fingers. Her forehead wrinkled slightly. “What do you mean?”
“We should go and visit Suzanne,” I said. “Which bit is confusing?”
“But Sarah said not to.”
“No, she didn’t, she just said the birthday weekend was off. We should take her presents.” We’d bought Suzanne’s card together, along with a toy elephant and a hanging butterfly decoration for her wall.
Rosie exhaled a skeptical “hmmm,” then said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. She obviously doesn’t want to see people. What if you go there and Sarah’s like, ‘What are you doing here? I told you not to come.’ ”
“Then we can leave. But at least we’ll have made the effort, and that might help.”
“Help with what? You don’t even know what’s wrong with her.”
I wondered if she was being obtuse on purpose. “Well, obviously it’s something to do with her family.”
“You shouldn’t assume stuff like that.” Rosie picked up the last chunk of Danish and popped it into her mouth.
I tried to ignore my rising frustration and keep my voice lev
el. It was a waste of time for me to try to argue with anyone, especially Rosie, because I lost every single time. I was too weak to hold my ground. Soft all over, too easily dented.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said, trying my best to regain control over the conversation. “Either way, she’s unhappy and we’re her friends, so we should go and see her on her birthday.”
Rosie considered this, her brow still scrunched. Finally she said, “I do see what you mean, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea. We don’t know her like we know each other, you know?”
I didn’t see what that had to do with anything.
“I just mean that maybe we should let this one go and wait until we see her again,” Rosie said. She was watching my face carefully. “If it was you, I’d definitely go anyway, whatever you said. But it’s not you, and I don’t know how she’d react, so I really don’t think we should risk it.”
Despite my rising certainty that I was right on this, I was touched. She did still like me best, after all. She did recognize what our friendship had that theirs never could.
“Well, I’m going to go,” I said, making up my mind. “I’d rather you came with me, but I’ll go by myself if you don’t.”
Rosie’s eyebrows had risen. “Are you going to go today?”
“Tomorrow. On her actual birthday. Maybe I’ll take cake!”
“Sarah will have baked a cake,” Rosie pointed out. She was still looking at me with a look of curious surprise, as if I’d announced I wanted to learn to play the accordion or take up kitesurfing.
“Oh, good point. Maybe flowers then. I wonder if you can get sunflowers at this time of year.”
“Sunflowers?”
“Sure, why not? They’re the most cheerful flower there is.”
Rosie regarded me for a moment, an odd expression on her face. Then, cautiously, said, “Can I ask a question that is going to sound weird?” When I nodded, she said, “Why does this matter to you so much?”
The question did sound weird, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. “Well, why doesn’t it matter to you?”
“It does. I mean, Suzanne does, obviously. But I’m happy to wait until school to speak to her. I don’t think either of us needs to go above and beyond. Especially you—you only know her through me. We haven’t been friends for that long, not really. I don’t see why you can’t just wait.”