The Trouble with Flirting

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

“Road trip!” I jump down the last three stairs into the entrance hall and throw my arms around Sarah.

“I wish I could go with you,” she wails into my hair.

I step back and gather my wavy mess of hair over one shoulder. “Sorry, didn’t mean to choke you. And yes. I wish we were still doing Take One: Livi and Sarah Road-Trip to Cape Town.” I peek into our Olympic swimming pool-sized living area, then turn back to Sarah and lower my voice. “Take two of this adventure is going to be super awkward. I’ve never spent so many hours with my mom in one go. We’ll run out of things to talk about before we’ve left the province.”

“Hey, this is a good thing, remember?” Sarah leaves her handbag on the entrance hall table and slides her phone into her pocket. “She wants to, like, bond with you, or whatever.”

I let out a dramatic sigh. “Right, because she’s spent the past nineteen years choosing her job over me, and now she’s suddenly realised I might be leaving home for the last time.”

“Exactly.” Sarah pokes my arm. “So you’d better make the most of the next few days.”

“Fine,” I say with a groan, even though I know she’s right.

“So, am I too late to help you pack?”

“Too late?” I take her arm and drag her up the stairs. “Sarah, my dear, I’ve barely begun.” We reach my doorway, and Sarah gasps at the clothes, shoes, books, DVDs and other belongings strewn across my bedroom. It’s as if every cupboard, drawer and shelf threw up.

“Oh my catastrophe. Livi! You’re leaving at 5 am tomorrow morning. How are you going to get everything packed before then?”

“Well, because you’re going to help me.”

“I can’t even see the floor. Where are we supposed to stand?”

“Don’t be silly.” I nudge shoes, a music stand, and a pile of photo frames out the way with my feet. I reach the bed and perch on top of the Harry Potter Marauder’s Map cushion Sarah, Adam and Logan gave me for my fifteenth birthday. “Look, there’s a path now,” I tell Sarah.

“Uh huh.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

“Okay, so there’s my one suitcase—” I point “—and there’s the other. And there are a whole lot of boxes in the bathroom. So we’re just going to pack as much stuff as will fit into my car, and then we’ll be done.”

“Oh, your car! I haven’t seen it yet.”

“It’s hiding in the garage. It feels embarrassed in front of all the fancy Zimbali cars.”

Sarah laughs as she climbs over a pile of sheet music and leans into my bathroom. “I know how that feels.” She tosses an empty cardboard box to me, then fetches another one for herself.

“You should have seen my parents’ faces when I brought it home,” I continue. “My dad was like, ‘You paid money for this piece of crap?’”

Sarah shakes her head, then points to the sheet music at her feet. “Are you taking all this?”

“Um, yes. So I told him that if he felt like donating a small amount of his obscenely large salary to his one and only daughter, I’d be happy to use it towards a new car.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t work.”

“No.” I start hunting my bedroom floor for shoes and packing them into the box. “So then I told them that my car is actually a Transformer in hiding, and if it wanted to, it could transform into a sleek new Ferrari or a Lamborghini or any one of those posh cars whose names I don’t know.”

Sarah smiles. “I bet they had no clue what you were talking about.”

“Of course not.”

I move on to choosing a selection of my favourite DVDs while Sarah starts folding all the clothes I threw onto the chair in the corner. “You said this was the ‘yes’ pile, right?” she asks after a few minutes. “The clothes you are taking with?”

“Yes.” I tape the box of DVDs closed and look up.

“Are you sure you want to take this?” She holds up a black lacy nightgown.

“Whoa! What the bleep? That isn’t mine.”

“Okay.” Sarah lets out a relieved laugh. “I was about to say you’ve got some explaining to do about exactly what went on in Germany last year.”

“No, definitely not. That must be my mom’s.” And I do not want to think about her wearing it.

Sarah throws the nightgown into the passage. “Well, we definitely don’t need Adam or Gross Cousin Luke seeing you in that.”

“Ew! No, no, no.”

“You know, he might not be gross anymore,” Sarah says. “We haven’t seen him since … grade nine?”

“I think so. He didn’t seem to visit Adam much after that.” I sit on the floor beside my sock and underwear drawer and cross my legs. I have way too many socks, so it’s time to chuck the old ones. “Anyway, maybe he’s not gross anymore, but all I can think of is that last summer holiday and how he used to stare at us every time we visited Adam.”

“And he had that dirty blond hair that was actually, like, dirty for real, not just dirty in colour.”

“Yes, all greasy and long.” I aim for the bin in the corner of my room and send two pairs of socks sailing towards it. “And it would hang in his face.”

“And he would suck the ends of it.”

“So creepy.” My giggle joins Sarah’s laughter. I toss a knotted bundle of old socks at her and laugh even harder when it bounces off the side of her head and lands inside one of the handbags hanging on my wall.

“We shouldn’t laugh, you know.” She reaches up for the sock bundle and throws it back at me. I dodge, and it knocks a tube of hand cream off my bedside table. “I mean, we were hardly the definition of cool back then. The popular crowd at school probably called us gross.”

That wipes the smile off my face. “Really? They called us gross?”

“Yeah, you see? It’s not nice being called gross,” she teases.

“Hey, you called him Gross Cousin Luke just as much as I did.” I’m starting to feel a little guilty, though. Nobody deserves to be called gross, not even if they suck their hair or frequently do the creepy stalker staring thing. Or play in the school orchestra or sing in the choir. “Did they really call us gross?” I ask as I gather up a pile of underwear and add it to my suitcase.

“No idea,” Sarah says. “Who cares, anyway? You shouldn’t worry about what people think of you, Liv.”

“I know,” I say, hoping I sound like I mean it. I do worry, though. The nerd label never bothered Sarah and Adam that much, but it bothered me. And clearly it bothered Logan too, since he cut off all communication with his nerd friends after the four of us left high school. “Hey, you haven’t heard anything from Logan, have you?” I ask.

“Nothing since that last get-together we had before you and Adam went overseas and Logan left for Cape Town. Oh, hey, I wonder if you’ll bump into him.” She stands up and carries a neatly folded pile of clothes over to my suitcase. “He’s at UCT, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He’s in second year now, obviously, but we’re in the same faculty, so maybe I’ll see him. That’ll certainly be an awkward conversation.”

“And you have to tell me all about it, if it happens.” Sarah turns and surveys my room with her hands on her hips. “Can we move the packed things into the passage? There’s still barely any room to move in here.”

“To the passage,” I announce loudly, pointing at my doorway before picking up the nearest box of shoes. Sarah rolls her eyes and mutters something that includes the word ‘dramatic.’

We’ve lined up several boxes, a bag of hangers, my music stand, and my violin case when Dad appears at the top of the stairway in his work suit. He’s home earlier than usual. “You’ll be done soon, I hope?” he says. “It’s our last dinner together tonight. I was hoping we could enjoy it without being rushed.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” I look at Sarah. “Less chatter, more packing.”

She salutes, and I stick my tongue out at her.

It takes us two and a half more hours, but by 7:30 pm we’ve finished packing everything that will fit into my car. I want to hang out with Sarah for a while longer, but Mom is giving me that look and making comments about how she and I need to get to bed soon so we can be up early to face our full day of driving.

I walk Sarah out to her car. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’d ask you to stay for dinner, but I was told yesterday that tonight is Family Night.” Translation: awkward, tense conversation so my workaholic lawyer parents can tick ‘bonding with daughter’ off their to-do lists.

“Don’t worry, I understand,” Sarah says. Her car beeps at us as the doors unlock.

“And I’m sure you’re desperate to get back to Aiden, anyway,” I add.

Her cheeks go pink and she smiles at her feet. As the fair-skinned redhead, I think I’m supposed to have the monopoly on uncontrollable blushing, but I’ve never been as bad as Sarah. “Yeah, I haven’t seen him all day,” she says.

Oh, wow, ALL DAY? I want to make fun of her, but I think of a certain dark-eyed German guy and remember what torture it was when I went a whole day without seeing him.

“He was meeting with some professor dude today about studying further here,” Sarah says. “He has some options in Joburg, but obviously I’m hoping he’ll end up somewhere in Durban. Anyway, no matter where he chooses to study, he still has to go home in two weeks when his holiday ends. Then he has to organise study visas and all that other boring admin stuff.”

“But he’ll be back—that’s the important part.” Her blush intensifies, and I laugh at her.

“I hope you find someone equally amazing,” she says, nudging me with her elbow.

“Oh, I am going to find someone truly awesome, do not worry.”

We hug and squeal and giggle some more, and then I try really hard not to cry. “I’m not saying goodbye,” I tell her, “because I’ll see you again soon. I’ll be home in April for the short holiday, which is actually really soon. So make sure you’re in Durban then, not jetting off to some exotic writing retreat or something.” After a year of studying courses she hated, Sarah decided to leave university and focus on honing her writing skills so she can publish amazing stories that everyone will love. I have no doubt she’ll be famous one day, and then I can tell everyone my best friend is a celebrity.

“I’ll be here,” she says. “And don’t forget to tell me every exciting thing that happens to you.”

I squeal again. “This is going to be even more exciting than Germany!”