‘Bring what up?’
I hope she’s not going to try to make me admit I’m still fixated on Dylan or something. I mean, obviously the heartache shows I’m still not a hundred per cent inside. The whole experience made me feel like everything I ever liked about myself, that I thought Dylan liked too, was nothing in comparison to what he thought I should have been. What would have made me enough for him.
‘You can’t be completely blind to it,’ Emily says.
I notice that I’ve stopped right in the middle of the shopping centre, and we shuffle to the side of the walkway so we’re not blocking other shoppers pushing prams or carrying oversized packages.
‘Emily, come out with it.’
Normally I wouldn’t sound so stern, but if we’re going to have this conversation, I want it over as quickly as possible.
Emily sighs. ‘You don’t have anything to say to your best friend about your radical transformation in the last eighteen months?’
Oh. Maybe I don’t look like a lovelorn obsessive. Maybe last night’s whole rose-shoving, door-slamming incident has convinced her I’m a different girl to the one who left Jefferson.
‘You mean my whole “don’t take crap” vibe?’
‘I’m not talking about an emotional transformation; I’m talking about a physical one.’ She drags me by the hand into the Victoria’s Secret shop a few stores down and points to the fashion show footage playing on the multiple screens. ‘You look like that now. Insanely tall, crazy long legs, and boobs!’
‘Yeah, I had a growth spurt.’ I shrug. I have been gone eighteen months.
The whole thing feels awkward, to be honest. I shot up twenty centimetres while we were away and I’m still not used to being a giant. All too often I find myself underestimating my height and smashing my head on things, like the overhead luggage compartment in the plane. And the boobs? That’s even more embarrassing. With breasts springing up in the middle of nowhere and no hope of turning to online shopping to buy new bras, I had to strap them into sports crops, as the little A-cup scraps of material I’d bought at fourteen no longer covered anything. And my lack of underwear wasn’t something I wanted to go to Dad about. Ugh. I’ll have to try and get some bras today, before school starts. I don’t even know my size …
‘The eyes! The teeth! The lips!’ Emily’s jabbing her index finger at each of my features as she loudly announces them. I can feel the shop assistants staring at us from the front counter.
‘Okay, the braces are gone, and Dad got me contacts cause my glasses kept slipping off my nose in the humidity.’ Sometimes I still instinctively put my fingers to the bridge of my nose to push my non-existent glasses up. ‘I’ll admit I look slightly less freakish now.’
‘The only way the word “freakish” could ever be applied to you now is in the sense of “freakishly beautiful”! Have you even looked at yourself?’
Emily looks exasperated with me. I know that expression inside out — she flings it at me when I’m over-analytical, when I worry too much, when I’m being indecisive and spend two whole minutes dragging out an ‘umm’ when she asks me if I want hot chocolate or coffee.
‘Emily, I don’t know. We had one small mirror in the bathroom in Borneo — half the time I was sweaty and covered in mosquito bites.’
‘You need to look properly now.’ She grabs my shoulders and pushes me over to one of the shop mirrors. ‘Look!’ She gestures at my reflection like a crazy person. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t like one of those teen movie moments when some girl who is already a total babe but has been made to look nerdy takes her glasses off and magically becomes a beauty queen. You know, the whole She’s All That effect. What’s happened to you — it’s crazy. Anyone would think you’d had plastic surgery.’
I gape at her. Surgery?
‘That was totally rude, wasn’t it? I’m sorry. But seriously, you have to take another look in the mirror. Maybe if you see what I’m talking about, we can get through this shellshocked phase together.’
I look in the mirror, ninety per cent because I want to end this embarrassing conversation and go get that hot chocolate, and ten per cent because of curiosity about Em’s total freakout. I have to admit, it’s nice to not have the gappy teeth any more, or the braces. I also love that my face is no longer half-obscured by big glasses. I hated seeing the world through black rims. My hair is longer and streaked from the sun. Besides that though, I don’t get what she’s freaking out at. Sure I’ve noticed in the last few months that I look more regular instead of ‘geek personified’, but that’s about it. Still, I humour her.
‘Okay, I admit I look a little different to when I left, but I can assure you I did not get plastic surgery. I know everyone jokes about cheap overseas procedures, but even after Dylan, I wasn’t that desperate.’
Emily looks dumbfounded. ‘You’re not getting it. Ade, when you came off the plane, I didn’t recognise you. As in, I would have walked right past you if you hadn’t thrown your arms round me. That is why Dylan was staring at you — because you look like a freaking goddess now.’ She’s looking from me to my reflection so many times it’s dizzying. ‘That’s right, I’m saying out loud what I’ve been obsessively repeating to myself since you got back. My best friend is a goddess. Adriana is a goddess.’
Emily’s prone to excitable rants, but this one’s extreme and she knocks a folded tower of rainbow undies to the floor. ‘Oh man.’ She drops to her knees and starts scooping up G-strings and boy-leg briefs. I’m embarrassed, but I join her.
‘Think about Dylan’s expression,’ she says, inspecting a pair of pink polka-dot undies. ‘It wasn’t horrified. It was awe-struck.’
I let out a dry laugh. ‘I know you want to make me feel better about yesterday, but that’s insane.’ Dylan, awe-struck over me? After everything, it’s ironic.
‘You’re insane.’ Emily whips me on my knee with the undies. ‘This isn’t a best-friend delusion. Dylan told me he was completely thrown by your appearance.’
‘Oh, so now I look a bit less ugly, he’s reconsidering his decision?’
The idea of Dylan doing a one-eighty because I’ve dropped the glasses makes me even angrier. We both called him superficial for the Tatiana thing, but still.
‘It’s not like that. The whole thing wasn’t about appearances —’ Em notices my expression. ‘Okay, I’m not going to try and tiptoe into that swamp. Dylan’s the one who needs to talk to you about that.’
‘I don’t want him anywhere near me,’ I mutter.
The smell of all the perfumes in the store, combined with jetlag, is making me lightheaded. I grab onto the side of the undies table.
Emily is staring at me. ‘Even when you’re angry you’re astronomically beautiful. This is weird.’
For some reason I start laughing. Maybe it’s a release of Dylan-related tension, or maybe because we look like we’re sitting in the remnants of an undie-throwing brawl.
Suddenly there’s a shadow over us. A sales assistant is peering down at us, looking irritated. Emily and I leap to our feet.
‘Sorry!’ Emily says, and starts flinging undies into untidy piles, knocking a few back onto the floor.
Fortunately the sales assistant doesn’t register this. Instead she’s now staring at me. Great. Emily starts some VS panty-scattering scene and I get blamed for it.
The assistant shakes her head. ‘Sorry, I was thrown for a minute. You look like a darker-haired version of her.’ She points at a screen where Candice Swanepoel is blowing a kiss at the end of a catwalk.
‘You see?’ Emily virtually screeches. She’s plonked all the undies back on the table, not caring they’re now crumpled balls. ‘My friend doesn’t realise she’s legitimately hot now. She’s a Victoria’s Secret doppelganger, right?’
I shoot daggers at Emily. My cheeks already feel hot from when the sales assistant appeared, but as the mirror across from me proves, my nose and neck are now splodged with patches of embarrassment.
‘Complet
ely.’ The sales assistant is staring at me as intently as Emily. ‘She’s part Candice with the lips, and part Adriana Lima with the skin tone and eyes. I’ll show you — if we put the lip gloss shade on you that the girls are wearing in that show, you’ll see it straight away.’
She grabs a tube of cherry-coloured gloss and moves towards me. As she closes in on my personal space, I feel like all the air has been sucked out of the room.
‘Sorry, I don’t wear much makeup,’ I say, and dart out of the store, even though I know it’s rude. I lean on the rails that overlook the escalators, steadying my breathing.
‘Hey.’ Emily’s come after me. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I may have been shouting in my excitement back there.’
‘May?’
‘Okay, I was shouting. I’m sorry — I’m just not getting how you don’t see it. You heard the sales assistant.’
‘Em, she was trying to sell lip gloss.’
‘She asked me if you model.’
I’m levelling an ‘enough’ gaze right at her.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘obviously your own hotness makes you feel uncomfortable —’
I snort. ‘Em, I’m not under any illusion that anyone in this mall thinks I’m Miss Universe.’
‘Ade, you have to realise —’
‘Em, I said drop it!’ I don’t mean to be harsh, but talking about how I look now only highlights to me how ugly I must have looked before. ‘Let’s focus your energy on helping me choose some back-to-school stuff. After being cut off from the internet, I have no clue what’s in.’
Emily has a field day amongst the clothing racks. She loves fashion — she considers it to be like art, all about colour and shapes and expression. Seeing her running around makes me think of when we were little and Mum used to let us into her walk-in closet. Emily would crawl in between the skirts and coats, immersing herself in the materials hanging from the rails. Mum adored beautiful clothes, especially with delicate beading or silky textures.
Dad and I didn’t keep her clothes for long after she died. I always feel guilty about that. But walking into that wardrobe after she was gone and seeing the racks of impeccably kept items hanging there instead of being worn and enjoyed was horrible. What killed me the most were the clothes with tags on them, bought for ‘a special occasion’ — clothes she never got to make memories in. They were proof that all the assumptions we make about our futures and what’s waiting for us can, in one instant, be flicked into oblivion by fate’s fingers.
I feel the buzzing in my head, the one I always get when I think of Mum too much. The closest thing I can compare it to is when they did the hearing tests in primary school. At some point they’d test your upper range and fill your ears with a high-pitched noise that seemed to take over your whole skull. Grief is like that — it starts somewhere in your body and then within seconds your whole being is held hostage by it.
Hold it together, hold it together.
I force myself to focus on happier things as Emily brings options into the dressing room. After all, how lucky am I right now? The limit Dad’s given me for the day is generous — enough to get a bunch of things for this term.
‘We don’t want you to be a Ten replica,’ Emily is saying. ‘You don’t need butt-grazing short shorts. You can rest easy on your beauty. We’ll go a little more form-fitting than usual, but keep the pastel and floral style you love.’ She holds up a white dress with architectural-like frills at the bottom. ‘This is perfect for tomorrow. This says “I’m far beyond any incident with He Who Shalt Not Be Named”.’
‘Couldn’t we paint a T-shirt with the words “Dylan, back off”?’ I take the dress from her, thinking that in about seventeen hours I’ll be forced to see him again.
‘This dress does have a slight intimidation vibe,’ Emily says. ‘He probably will stay away.’
My chest tugs slightly at this and I feel angry at myself for the involuntary frailty. ‘Can you choose me a bunch of stuff like that then?’
At least the clothes Emily’s buying for herself don’t have to act like barriers to a former crush. Her change room doesn’t have as many things in it as mine does (I think she feels slightly guilty about using Isobel’s credit card) but they’re all brightly coloured and fun, like Emily herself. Looking at them, I realise how many billions of times in the last eighteen months I’ve desperately wanted to see her. She’s like vitamin D — you needed daily exposure to Emily.
The next time she comes back into the change room, I give her a huge hug. ‘I’m so glad I’m back.’
And, amazingly, I mean it.
Emily’s Diary
Adriana wasn’t listening to a word I said about her appearance. I didn’t know how to get it through to her that she was turning heads everywhere we went. If she’d only picked her gaze up from the floor, she would have realised. I loved seeing people’s reactions, some of them were so extreme they made me want to burst out laughing.
It was nice to be scanning people’s faces for a reason that wasn’t The Game. Stupid name, I know, but that’s what I’ve called forever — studying the crowd, scrutinising noses and chins and eyes, searching for features that look like mine. I guess turning it into a game makes it less charged with emotion.
It’s stupid really. For all I know, my dad doesn’t live anywhere near Jefferson. But the intoxicating idea that I could walk right by him means I’ve been scanning faces at malls, farmers markets, the pool, the post office, since I was tiny. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, except maybe features that I know I didn’t inherit from Mum. The high forehead, the prominent nose I’m always cursing, the blue eyes. I know without ever asking Mum that my eyes came from him, because sometimes I catch her looking at me a little too long with this sadness in her own eyes.
So I scan the crowds, hoping I’ll spot a combination of features that will be a dead giveaway. Hoping some crazy sixth sense will take over me — i.e. the hairs on my arm will stand up, or I’ll get the shivers because my body just knows I’m near my father.
Who knows. Maybe if our paths do ever cross I won’t sense anything. Maybe the physical resemblance between us is so faint that I’ll pass by, unknowing. Maybe I already have. Resemblance can be incredibly subtle. Like kids who look like a replica of their mum, and you have no clue that the guy standing next to them at the school gate is their dad, except maybe for a slight curl in their lip that echoes his.
Recently in biology, we studied genetics. You have forty-six chromosomes in every cell in your body, and half of those genes come from each parent. In fact, within in each chromosome, half of the material comes from each parent. Meaning, I’m fifty per cent him. Fifty per cent a complete mystery.
Anyone would be curious. So maybe I’m not that crazy, trying to scan shopping centres and supermarkets like some kind of genetically obsessed Sherlock Holmes.
5
EMILY
I can feel Adriana’s tension as we leave the mall. She was a little quiet in the clothing store, and quieter still when we went bra shopping. I know she was wishing her mum was there.
We were lucky today — the bra lady was discreet and quickly found out Ade’s size, 10C. Ade showed me a couple of her choices. Seeing her in the pretty pinks and a cute black and white number, I swear my own chest shrank a little in shame, much as I wanted to do a little happy dance for her at the same time.
Now Ade’s even quieter. Obviously seeing daylight disappearing is reminding her the weekend is over. Even though Tatiana’s gone, I understand why she’s so on edge about going back to school. Our classmates have memories like elephants when it comes to embarrassing moments.
‘Stop stressing,’ I say as we wait for Mum to pick us up.
‘I’m not.’ She gives me a semi-smile.
‘I know your smiles.’
‘Mmm.’ She absentmindedly bites her lip.
I try to distract her with Operation Parent Trap. ‘I wonder how the gutter cleaning went.’
Adriana
laughs. ‘It doesn’t sound all that romantic, does it?’
‘I reckon anything can be romantic if you’re with the right person. You might be picking up leaves, but maybe you’re having the funniest conversation and you don’t notice the icky job you’re doing until you’re done, and then you’re disappointed that the excuse to be around them is over.’
‘Such a sentimental heart.’
‘Takes one to know one.’
She shakes her head. ‘Dylan knocked all the sentimentality out of me. I now believe you should approach love in a detached, logical manner.’
I stare at her. ‘Maybe you have had a new personality added underneath that shiny new exterior.’
‘I mean it. Before you give in to an all-out crush, you should spend at least a week weighing things up. Is he going to go for you? Do you have a chance? Instead of getting swept away by “Oh, imagine if we were together!”’
‘I think I’m doomed then.’
You’d think that given I’m the one with the missing dad, I’d be a cynic when it comes to love, but out of the thorns of disappointment grew an uber-idealist. Maybe it’s because I don’t have that shining example of true love right in front of me that I want so badly to believe in it. I want to know there are guys out there who will fall in love with a girl and stay in love with her. I want to know that sometimes love doesn’t let you down.
‘You’re ripe for some doomed crush,’ Ade says. ‘And I mean crush as in “get crushed”.’
I laugh. ‘Nice to know you’re anticipating some horrifying end to my first love affair.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘I don’t mean it like that. I mean, you’ll go straight into the deep when you fall for someone.’
I shrug. ‘Maybe I know what I’m looking for. I’ve put a lot of thought into it.’
‘You mean you’ve read a lot of poetry and Arthurian legends. I can tell you, high-school love isn’t anything like Tristan and Isolde. You don’t want to go all “my soul recognised his” — that kind of leap-before-you-look thinking leaves you out of your depth, praying you won’t drown.’
My Best Friend Is a Goddess Page 5