Page 20 of Unnecessary Drama

‘Yeah, it sounded horrible when I said it,’ he says.

I keep scrolling through search results.

‘This says I have a seventy-five per cent chance of dying,’ I say, holding up my phone.

‘What will distract you?’ he says, putting his hand over my phone screen.

‘Nothing,’ I say dramatically, and I put my head down in the crook of my arms.

‘I’m good at distracting people. Ask me anything,’ he says.

‘There’s nothing I want to know,’ I say, still with my face in my arms.

‘This is your chance. To find out my darkest secrets, the biggest scandals of my life,’ he says, using his most exaggerated voice.

‘There have been zero scandals in your life.’ If we ignore the scandal of his betrayal of me. It feels like we are edging dangerously close to that.

‘You’ll never know if you don’t ask,’ he says.

‘Fine. Tell me about your shitty dad,’ I say, sitting up. He wanted to tell me before, now is his chance.

‘Oh. Okay. Well, um,’ he clears his throat, and makes a face like he’s about to give a presentation to the class. ‘Where do I even start?’

‘You’re already bad at this. Start at the beginning.’

‘I thought you were going to ask me a fun question. Okay. My parents split up when I was five, and then they both remarried and both had more kids with their new partners, and I’ve always felt like…’

He pauses. I think he’s going to stop, because it’s weird, it’s definitely weird to be confiding in me about this. It’s weird to be sitting in the emergency room together, but he looks at me, my wincing-in-pain-but-also-trying-to-be-a-supportive-and-goodlistener face, and he decides to keep going.

‘I’ve always felt like I didn’t really fully belong with either family. I’m the odd one out. I’m the mistake my parents made before they started their real lives. And Dad and I really struggle to get along, which makes it worse.’

I knew that his parents had split up and had kids in their new marriages, he told me that back when we were friends, but I hadn’t really thought how that would feel, what it might be like. No matter what happened with Dad—how many times he cancelled plans or didn’t show up, how he talked of super-fun holidays we knew we’d never take, how obvious he made it that spending time with Lauren and me was always his second or third choice, never the thing he really wanted to be doing—I could deal with it because I had a real home with Mum, the kind of home you hold in your heart forever, a secret locket around your neck that protects you when things are going wrong. Jesse doesn’t have that. I regret asking him about it now, because I don’t want to know this: I don’t want the sadness of it, I don’t want the intimacy. I can’t hold him at arm’s length as easily when he tells me things like this. I can’t hate him as easily.

‘That sounds hard. I’m sorry,’ I say, and I mean it. ‘What do you and your dad argue about?’

‘Huh. Well. Nothing big. My stepmum, Bree, she likes things done a certain way. That’s fine. I get it. She’s got a house of six people to manage. But whenever I do something that annoys her, she gets Dad to come and tell me what I’ve done wrong. I stacked the dishwasher the wrong way, I was too noisy when I came home and I woke the baby—you get the picture. And Dad gets stressed by Bree getting stressed, so he yells at me, and I yell back, and we’re stuck in this stupid loop of arguing about things that don’t really matter. I just wish he would be on my side, just once, you know?’

‘Have you ever told him that?’ I say. My pain is impeding me from talking much.

‘Nah. He’s not really receptive to parenting advice,’ Jesse says, and laughs. ‘Anyway, it’s fine now I don’t live there anymore. They can just forget I exist.’

‘They haven’t forgotten you exist,’ I say.

Jesse looks at me. ‘Has your dad? Forgotten you exist?’

‘Ah,’ I pause. Jesse is being nice. This is nice. It feels like before, back when we were friends, but that’s the problem. I don’t trust him. I can’t trust him and this doesn’t change anything. And I don’t talk about my dad with anyone.

‘My dad hasn’t forgotten me. He’s just…he’s just not great at being a dad.’

I bend over in my seat a little more, trying to get comfortable. God, I hope they give me strong painkillers.

‘Let’s play Words with Friends,’ Jesse says suddenly.

‘Yes. Wait, no.’ I love Words with Friends but I’ll lose to him if I play in this state.

‘I feel like a competitive word game might be your best distraction.’

‘All right, let’s play but you have to remember I am in a weakened state, so you can’t judge me on this performance. My losses won’t count.’