Page 75 of Little Miss Fortune

‘Grounded? What are you, 12?’

‘For your sake, I bloody hope not, nonce.’

‘So... will you? Go on a date with me?’ he asks, so full of the light of blinding hope.

‘Only if your suspension clears.’

‘Damn, that might be weeks.’ The light dims just as fast as it appeared.

‘Put all that extra time into planning.’

‘You are not making it easy to date you, Fuko Brewer.’

‘Difficult is my middle name.’

‘Yeah? Is that in kanji or katakana?’ He asks about the Japanese writing systems.

We talk for a minute, ignoring the fact that I need to leave. He asks for my actual middle name. I have none. He asks why; I tell him that it would have been a foolish thing to do in Japan, as some forms accept limited characters. He tells me that his middle name is Dean. I make fun of his triple-name name. He asks what I mean. I say that Toby Dean Lewis is three first names. He is weirdly put off by that fact, and I can see the thought of his nomenclature lingering on his mind for the rest of the conversation. He asks to see my phone and taps his number into it. He calls himself and rejects the call on his watch, promising to text me only if it’s something important and to not spam me with messages.

I think that maybe I wouldn’t have minded even if he did, but instead I thank him for showing some restraint.

When I get home, I receive a message from him for the first time.

Toby: You have opened my eyes. I think I have to change my middle name. It needs to be something glorious. Dean is just…

I laugh at the content—I guess this was something important to him.

Fuko: it rhymes with bean. You could be Toby Bean Lewis.

Toby: I feel like you’re not taking this as seriously as I need you to. This is a mission for you, then. Come up with a new middle name for me for our first date.

The word date makes my heart flutter. If this was achieved with my small misfortune, I wonder how good the lucky people have it.

CHAPTER 26

John doesn’t know what it means, but it’s unfortunately provocative

John is buzzing around me on set like a bee around a flower. Except the flower is getting nauseous from the bee’s buzzing. The flower wouldn’t even be here, but the flower’s boss spent the last week preparing the flower to get involved in the bee’s advert filming. According to the flower’s boss, the flower can gain some invaluable experience if it spends some time with the bee, who to this day is trying its hardest to get into the flower’s petals.

The metaphor doesn’t quite work, as worker bees are mainly female and quite cute, and John is feeding into the macho man rhetoric, which is rather disturbing to witness. He is on his third protein ginger energy shot of the day. He tried his hardest to down them, as if they were Jäger Bombs, but choked on the third one because it burnt his throat too much.

I don’t know why I am allowed to be on set, when part of the reason I was almost fired was because John and I looked too close in a picture. Malik, who cringes and grimaces every time John gets too close to my ear to whisper his directorial vision, is the only friendly face in CM Shot’s studio.

‘And then the honey drips down her hand,’ John tells the crew but winks at me.

This is so uncomfortable. Steven is too involved in his e-mails, trying his hardest to send off some document that he didn’t ask me to help with (feeling bad about almost firing me), and is now typing away in the corner of the room. He has been extra saccharine with me these days, like that teacher I had who was told that my mum had died from cancer and that he needed to be gentler with me than with the rest of the class, but instead he ended up completely alienating me.

‘Steven, are you sure you don’t need my help?’ I ask, desperately trying to get away from John.

‘No, no. This might be an excellent opportunity for your development, at least another £3000 per annum if you put it correctly into your CV,’ he says without looking up.

I manage to avoid expelling a loud displeased grunt. It’s not that I am ungrateful to be stuck in a shooting studio. I just feel as if this would have been easier if Toby were here. He’s been an excellent texter. Not too much, a nice mixture of jokes, casual and deep conversation. We stayed up one night talking in detail about his favourite video games. Normally, I would not give a donkey’s, but somehow I let him explain all about some vampire game that was split into the main game and DLC, but the main game lacked some key plot points that make no sense without the DLC, but it would be criminal to force players to buy a DLC if your base game was incomplete (he said DLC sixteen times over the phone). He then let me talk his ear off about the film Leon picked for film night. Her by Spike Jonze, which is a response to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, is an absolutely beautiful piece of media, wonderfully shot... But it just highlights how easy it is for a man to misunderstand a woman, as both directors made those films about divorcing each other, but Jonze made it seem as if he was a completely clueless man, which somewhat poisoned my pleasant memories of the film.

‘This is probably the most passionate I’ve heard you about anything,’ Toby said after my rant.

‘I am not that passionate,’ I said, hugging my knees on the bed.

‘Beg to differ,’ he murmured.