It’s just a chocolate chip. But it’s not, not really. It’s willpower. Or, on Daniel’s part, just power, full stop.
Daniel’s behind me then, his breath in my ear. ‘There’s certainly no mistaking you from behind though, is there, Isabel,’ he says, the smile in his voice as cool as his hand on my back, that flesh between my T-shirt and jeans. Two of his fingertips press and pull on my skin until Mum appears, and he sweeps his palm away, like it was never there, to her waist, easing her from the two remaining cookies. ‘Nah-ah-ah! Not on the food plan, remember!’ And he slides the plate along the work surface straight past me and across to the other side, scooting around to catch it before it falls. ‘Save!’
I don’t know if it’s the actor in him, but Daniel’s always saving things: biscuits, the day, us. I swear he’s waiting for a part as a knight just so he can come home in the shining armour. As if looking like George Clooney isn’t enough. He’d opt for the white horse too, come charging in like he always does with his facial-ed skin, his massaged cuticles and his dyed grey hair to cast his net across the room, hauling Mum in with those practised lines of his, not the ones from scripts but from the part of Daniel that personally wrote their wedding vows in which he promised to love her fully, endlessly, differently from the way anyone has loved her before.
‘He’s passionate,’ Mum’s said in the past, and my mates would back her up, swooning like they do when he dons the tux with the undone bow tie, suit jacket hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder in what appears to be a casual way but, believe me, I’ve seen him rehearsing it in the mirror before heading off to some party so middle-aged women can have their photo taken with their arms wrapped around a fake George.
So my stepdad isn’t some horsebacked prince but a look-alike, though he prefers to tell everyone he’s an actor really, the George thing is just for fun, but with Clooney being so popular, ‘and so handsome’, Daniel jokes in that way that manages to be self-deprecating even though he’s basically saying he’s, like, really hot, the celebrity-double work just keeps on coming so ‘it’d be foolish to say no’. Daniel is anything but foolish.
‘Come on then, Isabel, spill the beans.’ He winks at Mum. ‘I believe our little minx here may have bagged her first boyfriend.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘The lady doth protest too much.’ Crumbs from the second cookie spill from between his teeth.
‘He’s just a friend.’
Grace would kill me for even calling Max that. For even walking those few minutes with Max and shrugging my shoulders, like, yeah, when he asked if I was free later.
‘All I’m saying is I hope you don’t do anything you shouldn’t with your friend.’
What I want most is to snap Daniel’s fingers in half as he makes those air quotes around ‘friend’, but I don’t, obviously, cos if Mum’s anything to go by, the best thing to do is just ignore the fact that Daniel’s being a complete and utter dick and just sit there staring at that one last cookie like it might actually be the answer to your woes.
As if.
She won’t even look at me. Picks at her bitten nails instead, pushing them into her hairline, where the red, which looked so electric in those photos she’d begged her grandmother to take of the two of us when I was a baby, is now muted by thicker, wirier stands of grey.
‘You wouldn’t want to end up like Vicky Pollard here, would you?’ He nudges Mum with his elbow.
My face must be, like, I don’t get it.
‘Teenage mum,’ Daniel says. ‘What a slaaaaaaaaaag.’ His voice has echoes of a TV-show insult – a comedy, right. A joke? But Mum had enough of that at the time, I reckon.
I get it at college too. Boys spitting the word out in fake coughs as I walk down the corridor. The girls don’t bother with names, but their quick-up-and-down-on-me eyes are as lethal as slurs, and then there are their giggles behind hands, which have probably been in way worse places than mine are rumoured to have gone at that party.
Ugh, that party. Too much vodka and not enough dinner or Grace, and I couldn’t stop Jacob Mansfield doing whatever he did in that bathroom. The rest would have been a blur if it weren’t for the picture he took of me slumped into the wall, my up-for-it dress ridden over my thighs, legs slightly apart and mouth dropped open like he’d literally only just pulled out his tongue. Three fingers or four, he scrawled in red across my body in the photo, sending it to his mates, who sent it to their mates, who sent it to their mates, cos obviously it was, like, the funniest thing ever.
You know, someone once said how the things that aren’t great at the time are the things that will eventually become your best stories to tell in the pub. Dark humour maybe. So perhaps there’s hope, right, that, one day, I will tell the tale of Jacob Mansfield and his fingers out loud and it won’t feel like fire in my bones.
Today’s not forever, right? Things can change.
‘I’m just teasing, Isabel.’ Daniel’s voice is a don’t-be-ababy-now kind of chiding. ‘Joking aside, you should be careful though. Shouldn’t she, Stephanie?’
Mum looks at him, like, whatever you say, Daniel.
‘You want to save yourself for someone special,’ he says, not for the first time but for the first time in front of my mum. ‘Not like your mother here, sleeping with any Tom, Dick or Harry when she was sixteen.’
I swear her face doesn’t even flicker. My heart, on the other hand – my heart is raging. Because they may have been young, but Mum’s promised me my dad was special. She doesn’t say this now though, does she? Just sits there as Daniel takes his time chewing that last bloody cookie.
‘Oops, sorry,’ he says, hand over his mouth in Oscar-worthy shock at his greed. ‘I didn’t even offer you one. Probably for the best though, eh.’ Mum’s as blank as ever when he pinches her bum. ‘We all know what you ladies are like: a moment on the lips, forever on the hips. I’ll make us something healthy for dinner while you do your homework, shall I?’
Only I don’t do my homework. What I do is sit with my Jar of Sunshine, taking off its lid, removing the yellow beads my real dad gave me and rolling them between my fingers before tucking them back inside along with these whispers about how special he was. How different he was. How much I wish he was here.
And then I think about calling Grace. And then I sit and think about Grace with Nell. And then I sit and think about Grace with Nell and me with nobody, until my phone beeps with a message from Max Dale saying he meant what he said earlier, about meeting up, and, sure, Grace says a nobody is better than a somebody if the somebody isn’t the right body, but she’s not the one sitting on her own, desperate to avoid dinner and its inevitable scene.
Sure, I say to Max, a small part of my big body wondering if there’s some trick in his offer.
This isn’t a joke, is it? I ask him.
And he’s straight back with a No, promise.
So, before I have time to doubt the decision, I put my Jar of Sunshine back on the shelf, and I go.
FIVE
‘I’ve been working on the music I’d take,’ Max says.