SO MANY THINGS SHE WANTED TO SAY IN THIS MOMENT. But she was trying to get a promotion from this jerk. “I actually have plans tonight,” she said.
“We’re in a time crunch, Marlow. Can’t you pitch in, be a trooper? That’d be awesome. Let me know if I can help.” And off he went. Oscar’s two favorite sayings were “let me know if I can help,” which he never did, and “I can take a pass at the draft,” which then turned into her cleaning up the new mess he’d created. Either way, he always took credit.
Fine. She’d revise the deck tonight after sushi. Marlow was not Yves or Gustavo, stunning the film world one lunch meeting or NDA at a time. She was an administrator of other people’s fine art with no idea how to find the off-ramp.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
She texted Sabine about sushi, but before she closed her laptop, she looked up woodchuck. It was a groundhog, belonging to the group of large squirrels known as marmots. So, a rodent. Also the most solitary of groundhog species, never forming stable, long-term pair-bonds and limiting its sexual activity to copulation during mating season. Basically, she was not kind of, sort of like a woodchuck, she was exactly a woodchuck. Shockingly depressing.
CHAPTER TWO
Sabine got her mum’s text while retrieving her bubble tea from the counter, picturing prom with total hottie Desmond, and fishing in her knapsack for her metal straw—a special bigger straw she’d bought to accommodate the tapioca balls found at the bottom of a daily bubble tea. She’d finally convinced his mum, Mrs. Nguyen, that she didn’t need a plastic one. It had only taken most of Grade 12. Mrs. Nguyen didn’t care about metal straws, even if they could save the planet. People had trouble seeing the future. Seeing what their impact might be.
She returned to her standard table at the window. Willa had finally arrived and was madly texting party hat emojis about the last day of school.
Bubble tea with Willa was time to debrief everything on the lackluster buffet that was high school. Every afternoon they sat here, doing homework, going over Willa’s adventures on the prom committee and any and all social disasters. Except today. Today, Sabine lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “Desmond just invited me to prom.”
“Holy shit!” Willa whisper-yelled, instantly inspecting Desmond behind the counter.
“Don’t look and keep your voice down! I’m going to say no.”
“What? Sabine. It’s fate. The universe wants you at prom. It’s so obvious! And this way, you and he and me and Max—we’d be a double date. It’s perfect!”
“Couldn’t buy a ticket now if I wanted to.”
“I can totally get you in.”
The moment Max and Willa had started dating, Willa had joined prom committee, which had astounded Sabine. They both loathed the girl who ran it, Peyton. And they ridiculed her PTA-running mum, Rachelle, who had her hands in prom, too. But Willa had explained, “I’ve been a loser my whole life, and now that I have Max, the coolest partner ever, I’m going to have a romantic finish to high school if it kills me.”
Sabine had to agree about Max, a.k.a. Maxine Pasternac–they/them, spikey short hair, tattoos on their serious biceps. Even though Willa and Max hadn’t kissed yet, Sabine got it. At this point, Sabine figured she was the only one who’d made it through all of school without dating.
She eyed Desmond behind the counter.Come on. A first-year university student with good bangs who also knows calculus just asked you to prom tomorrow. Can’t you ditch the brain fog and say yes?
“End-of-high-school sushi’s at seven,” said Sabine. “Wanna come?”
“You’re changing the subject, and I can’t. My dad’s taking us for Indian, the whole family’s going to be there, even my grandparents. He’d kill me if I bailed.”
“Food pic, then,” said Sabine. “Oh! Speaking of which—” Sabine fished a parcel from her bag and slid it over.
“We said no gifts,” moaned Willa.
“I know, but life’s not fair and then you die.” It was a chapbook. Sabine made them on all sorts of subjects, on all kinds ofpaper: biology reports, candy wrappers, old magazines—some were collage, some were hand-drawn, some had text, some no words at all. She’d taken a course at the art gallery in middle school and had made them since. This was a book of all their fave food moments. Bubble tea, pressed sushi, Korean hot pot, fried Mars bars at the CNE …
“The best food outings of our misspent youth,” said Willa. “I will treasure this forever. Will your uncle come tonight?”
“I’m sure. Kinda wish my dad was going to be there, too. I know. It’s super dumb.”
“It’s totally not.”
Sabine wondered where in the world her dad was at this moment. She followed him on Instagram. He was very busy, always working, always travelling, but he also didn’t always post where he was, maybe because he was famous. Anyway, it was hard to keep track.
Outside school, students milled: goths, punks, emos, nerds. It was clichéd how you could so easily identify which clique they belonged to. Sabine didn’t have a clique. Clothing-wise, she was no-name jeans, T-shirt, hoodie. Personality-wise, she was book-smart and introverted. Where did she belong?
Sabine slurped tapioca balls through her metal straw and waved a hand at the crowd outside the school. “It’s weird, isn’t it? We’re never coming back here. You’re going to Dalhousie in the fall—all the way to the East Coast. And I’m going who knows where. Literally and metaphorically.”
“Itisweird,” said Willa. She took another slurp through her boba straw. Willa cared about the environment, too, but could not remember her metal straw for the life of her. She was a mess who lurched from forgotten binder to lost gym shorts. In return for being treated like part of Willa’s family, Sabine made sure Willa had her act together. How Willa was going to make it in math at Dal without Sabine was beyond them both.
“Gonna miss it?” asked Willa. They burst out laughing. As if.
