Page 123 of If We Were Young

“Just remember that with best friends, I am it!” Ange clinked her glass against mine. The wine tasted sharp on my tongue and it burned on the way down. Distracted, I turned the bottle and checked the label.

“Hey!”

I smiled, but it took effort. My energy supplies, the burning determination I’d run on since Edinburgh had sizzled out. “You are, I know. And for the record I’ve never said otherwise.”

Ange heaved herself up, using one elbow to anchor on the couch from where she sat on the floor. “So how was it? And don’t even pretend that you didn’t do anything. Don’t even think I haven’t noticed you’ve taken your ring off. Does this mean we can go out double-dating now? I mean I assume that you and Matthew amounted to nothing just like I always said.”

My cheek warmed but I also winced. Jeez, she didn’t need to be so brutal about it. “Shh. Hannah is in the kitchen.” I cast a glance at the door. Hannah had willingly sat down at the kitchen table and cracked on with her maths. There’d been very little snorting and breathing fire. Things to always be positive about. “Anyway, don’t be so mean. Sometimes you are so cutting.”

Ma was out and had been all afternoon since I’d got home. A bit strange for her.

“Cutting? I call it realism, babes. Come on, Ronnie. No one else ever got close to him. I mean he was the best-looking guy on the whole campus, but he was never once tempted by anyone no matter how much they begged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well you know. He never even looked at anyone, did he? You could say anything to him, and he’d just be oblivious. Like he just wasn’t interested in anything with a pulse and a warm place to park his—”

“Angela!” I put my glass down on the table. The wine had been to celebrate the closure of the Carling Supersaver project. Secretly, I’d been hoping it would stop my heart from pulsing with the erratic beat it had maintained all day, but it didn’t seem to be fulfilling its purpose. “What do you mean? I don’t remember any girls even approaching him. I mentioned it to him. He was always—”

“With you.” She rolled her eyes and made gagging noises into her glass.

My memory sparked with images of dark corners. His breath on my throat as we whispered conversations. A kaleidoscope of lights flashing around us, but his skin lit with rainbow colours, the only thing I could see.

“He wasn’t always with me.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She rolled her hand. “And even when he wasn’t all he would talk about was you, over and over and over. It was never-ending. Ronnie this. Ronnie that. Do you think she likes me? I can’t tell what she thinks.”

I stared at her, but Ange seemed far away, in the past. She was stuck in conversations I had never been a party to.

“You never told me that.”

“Because it was soooo boring, Ronnie. Do you know what it was like being stuck between two people who didn’t stop talking about one another?”

“But why wouldn’t you tell me? You knew how I felt.”

“I mean, you could climb on the guy’s lap and he wouldn’t even notice. You could beg and he’d just be oblivious.”

“Angela, what are you talking about?”

“Matthew and his saintly ways. Ridiculous really.”

“Ange, did you try it on with Matthew?”

I pushed back, trying to get some space between us so I could think.

She snorted and waved her hand at me and I glanced at the bottle again, this time turning it around so I could see through the green glass and not read the label. Nearly empty.

“Which time are you talking about? I didn’t get a chance at the reunion because he left not long after you bolted.”

“What? You gave me the impression that he’d, what was it you said? ‘Enjoyed himself thoroughly’.”

“No! I was talking about Scott. That man is not happily married. I tell you, Ronnie, he went at it for hours.”

“Angela! I can’t make sense of anything you are saying. Can we focus here for a moment? Who went at it for hours?”

“Scott.” She blinked slowly, like a schoolchild in trouble with the teacher.

“At what?”