I am forced to second-guess everything. Is it movie night like always, or am I crashing their date? If I tell one of them a secret, will they automatically tell the other? If they have a fight, do I have to pick a side straight away, and can I change my side halfway through? How often, exactly, do they talk about me when I’m not there? (I hate the thought that they might, but I also hate the thought that they might not. I would like to be one of their top three conversation topics, but only if they are spending a significant amount of time reflecting on my sparkling personality.)
Zach appears behind Lucy, sliding in his socks. Zach is the yardstick that I measure every other guy against. Zach’s mannerisms, Zach’s way of doing things, Zach’s voice, Zach’s tallness, Zach’s lankiness—he’s just how boys should be, because he’s the only boy I’ve ever really been friends with, and the best one I’ve met.
Lucy hurries down the hall to hug me.
‘It sucks,’ she says. I told her about my parents last night.
Lucy is a good hugger. She’s my favourite person in the world, so even just seeing her face makes me feel better.
‘I’m sorry,’ Zach says.
‘Thanks,’ I say. I would like to say I don’t want anyone’s sympathy, but I generally quite enjoy my friends feeling sorry for me, especially about this. Firstly, it means I actually have friends who care about me, which, when you know what it’s like not to have any friends at all, means a lot. Secondly, ‘my parents are splitting up’ is a refreshingly normal and acceptable problem to have, and it’s far less embarrassing than an I-have-an-infected-pimple-that’s-so-huge-and-disfiguring-that-it-has-sent-me-into-a-spiral-of-depression-so-I-won’t-begetting-out-of-bed-today kind of issue.
I follow Zach and Lucy into the house, and Zach’s mother, Mariella, rushes out of the kitchen to hug me.
‘Darling, how are you? Zach told me about your parents. Don’t you worry for a second. Everything’s going to be fine. And don’t go blaming anyone. Relationships are hard. Sal and I have almost separated at least four times over the years. It’s actually a miracle we’re still together.’
Mariella is an oversharer.
‘Mum! Please.’ Zach puts his arm between us, as if this can stop his mother’s words.
‘Run, Natalie,’ Zach’s younger brother Anthony says as he walks past stirring an almost overflowing glass of Milo. Zach has three brothers, and I only truly understood the necessity of jumbo tins of Milo after my first visit to his house.
I laugh, and push Zach aside for another hug from Mariella. 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 You’re Tired, Stop When You’re Done’ in a very aggressive font. She works sixty hours a week managing her own business, and she started introducing Lucy to people as ‘my little champion debater and future lawyer’ from when Lucy was about twelve, before Lucy had even joined the school debating team.
Lucy’s mother is…a lot.
But now my parents have dropped this break-up bombshell and performed an elaborate charade for the better part of a year, I can no longer be soothed by the idea that my mother is less damaging than Lucy’s or Zach’s. My one life advantage is gone. I have family issues now, along with everything else.