“A counselor? Wow. You’d be amazing at that. How cool.” I could feel her genuine joy for me as I pulled up my lock screen of Ben’s face. “Oh my God, he’s handsome.” Jessica took my phone and peered closer to inspect. “I love the whole beard thing men are doing at the moment, it’s super sexy.”
A shrill anxiety shot through me. A sudden burst of rage, and it took all I had not to hit my phone out of her hand. But Jessica was looking at the time. “Shit, Fern, I’ve to go! There’s still only one train an hour home, can you believe it? After all these years? I won’t be back ’til eleven as it is.” She returned my Samsung and stood up. “Sorry, I’d love to stay longer.”
“Oh.” I lurched out of my chair, and hovered while she applied scarf and gloves. “That went quick.”
“Didn’t it?” She pulled her hair out from her under scarf, and, with our time together ending, the surrealness of it all hit me full force. “Well...” Jessica pulled a cute bobble hat over her perfect sheet of hair “...if you don’t find the idea totally off-putting, do you fancy grabbing a drink soon? So we can have more of a catch-up? I still haven’t a clue what’s going on in your life, or your job. Like, do you still see Amy and Kim?”
“Not much. Maybe once a year or so.”
“God, don’t tell me. Kim finally married Matt?”
I couldn’t help laughing, and, again, like a burst water main, memories of Kim’s obsessive lovesickness roared in. “No, but she has actually married someone called Matt.”
Jessica grabbed my hand. “You’re kidding?”
“No.”
“This is too much. Fucking hell.” She wiped under her eye with a leather gloved finger. “Anyway, a drink? Maybe next week? Mum is being very good on the babysitting front, what with all the sympathy she has for me being a pathetic divorcée.”
I knew there’d been a time where it was abundantly clear I needed to cut Jessica from my life. That the only healthy option was to take a scalpel and carefully trace around our friendship, lifting it out clean. The anguished tears, regret, grief, and missing her before I’d even undergone the surgery. And yet, standing there in the green room, being offered a drink with her, I felt weirdly excited by the prospect. “Yeah, of course. Message me a date,” I said, reminding myself I could always blow her off if I needed to.
“That would be amazing. What’s your number?”
She peeled off a glove so she could thumb it into her latest iPhone and drop-call me. My eyes traveled across her phone, to her leather gloves, to the Chanel handbag draped casually on her arm. It had been a day of shocks that kept coming. “Right, there. I’ll give you a date ASAP. Shit, the time. I literally have to run.” She squished me into another hug. “Fern, this has been amazing. Tonight was amazing. All of it. I’m so happy to be back. Oh my God, my train’s in less than twenty-five minutes.”
“Go go go.” I watched her run off like a gazelle in her knee-high boots. Even in her mad dash, she was perfectly put-together. I pictured everyone noticing when she collapsed onto the Tube, glancing up from their phones and Evening Standards, and taking in this magnet of a woman.
I sighed into my chair and took in the green room around me, the excitable chatter from the theater seeping around the stage doors. Stacy let out a shriek that pierced my ears and I winced. I didn’t need to tell anyone I was leaving. Gwen was way too busy.
Jessica’s missed call sat on the screen. I pulled up the unfamiliar digits and clicked “save contact”—thumbing in her name. I hesitated and then added the “warning” emoji next to her name. Just as I’d saved it, two messages came through.
Heather: Did it go OK? Sorry again I couldn’t make it. Up to my eyeballs in coils. Don’t worry about being a sellout. Sometimes that’s just work. I mean, I have to help literally EVERYONE who comes into the clinic, even if they voted Brexit xx
Ben: How did it go, my glorious sellout? I bet you smashed it.
I reply quickly to Ben’s.
Fern: It went OK. Stacy was exactly who I expected her to be. But hey ho, and yay for the money. Just getting on the Tube now.
It was only later that night, as I fell asleep, it occurred to me I hadn’t mentioned Jessica to him. And I knew why.
14
october 2000
Eminem blasted from my CD player while we all got dolled up with Jessica, our friendship group’s new addition. Our plan for that Saturday was simple and foolproof. We’d ascertained through Kim’s stalking that Matt got a McDonald’s milkshake every weekend afternoon. So we were all to dress up attractively, but not so attractively that we would “outshine” Kim, head to town, primp up our faces even more with the testers in Boots, and then casually head to Maccy D’s to casually also buy milkshakes and sit there casually, laughing, and looking casually attractive until Matt showed up. At which point, of course, he would see how casual and attractive Kim was, and fall in love with her—despite his failure to do this every day at school. The four of us in my bedroom rapped along happily to a song where you literally hear a woman’s throat get slit. This was Kim’s favorite song as it had her name in it.
“Don’t you think Eminem looks a bit like Matt?” Kim asked, while outlining her thin lips with plum lip liner.
“No,” we all said in unison.
“They’ve both got blue eyes!”
I leaned back against my headboard and fed myself another handful of crisps. “That’s crazy,” I said. “What are the chances?”
Until that moment, Jessica had been sitting silently in the corner, flicking through my copy of J17. But she let out a quiet snort and we shared a fleeting moment of eye contact.
Kim, oblivious, smacked her lips together. “If Matt and I ever had children, the baby would have a three in four chance of having his eyes, because I have brown eyes, and blue eyes are a recessive gene... Oh God,” she shrilled. “Am I an intense person? I am, aren’t I?”
We all burst out laughing, and then Jessica held up the magazine. “You’re just a SAGITTARIUS,” she reassured her. “And look, it says here that today is your ‘red-hot love’ day, so I think Operation Casual is going to be a total success.” She flattened down the page to show Kim her horoscope.
“How did you know I was a Sagittarius?” Kim asked, her plum mouth stunned and open, as we all turned to Jessica as if she was psychic.
She shrugged. “You can just tell.”
“What about me?” Amy settled down on the carpet next to her. “Can you tell what I am?”
“Aries.”