Page 47 of Unnecessary Drama

‘Brooke was my high-school girlfriend,’ Tristan says, all nostalgic-sounding, as if we are at our school’s twenty-year reunion not barely six months into our post-school lives.

Before Harper can say anything else, Tristan turns back to me. ‘So. Wait. I’m sorry. How did you two get together? Because this is wild,’ he says.

I need an amazing getting-together story. No, wait, I don’t. Keep it simple. Simple is believable. But I could add some fun, romantic details. He can’t prove me wrong. I’ll say I fell off a boat and Jesse dived in to save me, no, maybe Jesse fell off the boat and I saved him, or probably neither of us should fall off a boat but I feel attached to the admittedly very improbable boat idea now.

‘We moved into the same share house, and started spending a lot of time together, and it just happened one night,’ Jesse says.

Fine. That sounds normal and believable. It doesn’t sound romantic though. I need Jesse to be a little more ‘head over heels in love’, and less ‘her room is near the kitchen and it’s convenient to stop there after I get a snack’.

‘Wow. Wow. I just can’t get over this. Brooke used to, I mean, she really didn’t—’ Tristan stops himself from outright saying that I hated Jesse. I am starting to remember that I did complain to Tristan about Jesse on occasion. Multiple occasions. Tristan wasn’t at Gretel’s party, and I never told him about what happened there, although he may have heard it from others. But I did tell him Jesse and I had once had a fight that ended our friendship.

‘Well, you know, people change, feelings change,’ I say quickly, to head off anything further Tristan might say on that topic.

‘So you’re living together? This is really serious then?’ Tristan says.

‘We’re not living together in the sense of living together as a couple. I mean, we live together, and we’re together, but we’re not living together. We just happen to be a couple who live in a house together. Harper lives there too,’ I say, descending into babble and making big hand gestures.

‘It’s very casual,’ Harper says, then pauses. ‘I mean, the living situation. Their relationship is serious, or semi-serious. Well, no, it’s serious, but our house is casual, it all has a casual feel.’ She’s worse than I am. She looks at me, helpless and apologetic.

My scalp feels itchy and sweaty. Is that normal, when you lie, for your head to sweat? And itch? I know I have lied many times before, I must have, but not like this, a whole big scenario.

‘I just can’t get over this,’ Tristan says, and he turns and sits down on the couch, next to Henry, as though he’s settling in for a long conversation. ‘I have so many questions,’ he adds.

This might have been a huge mistake.

‘I mean, there’s not much to tell,’ I say, sitting down too. Jesse sits next to me, and I am acutely aware of the amount of space between us. At a glance, about fifteen centimetres. That’s too much. That’s platonic space. We need to reduce it to a couple of centimetres at most. I shuffle a bit closer, in the most subtle way I can, until our legs are near touching.

‘Let’s go back to the beginning. How long exactly have you two been together?’ Tristan asks.

‘About a month,’ Jesse says without hesitation. A month. Okay, yes. That’s a believable amount of time. I just need to very quickly think of a potential month’s worth of fake memories and lies.

I lean back against the couch and Jesse does too, and his shoulder touches mine and his whole body is very close. We’ve never sat this close before. On the nights we’ve been sitting up watching TV together, we stay on opposite ends of the couch, a blanket sometimes stretching the distance between us, our feet bumping one another occasionally. To be this close, gently touching from shoulder down to our knees, feels good. No, more than good. It’s almost thrilling. It’s probably just the adrenaline from the lying, or maybe my body has developed an involuntary physiological reaction to Jesse’s body, a deep, automatic, biological response that is completely separate from my actual feelings.

‘So, I’m sorry, I know I’m dwelling on this, but how did you two get past all your issues?’ Tristan is asking.

‘All their issues?’ Harper says.

‘Jesse and Brooke really did not get along in high school,’ Tristan says.

I can see Harper absorbing this information, tucking it away to discuss later. She and Penny exchange a look.

‘It’s all ancient history,’ I say airily, waving my hand. ‘Now tell us about you.’

‘Who made the first move?’ Tristan says, ignoring my desperate attempt to turn the conversation back on him. He has always been a good listener, a good asker of questions. Too many questions. He likes to analyse. His parents are psychologists, after all. He loved saying, ‘Tell me what you’re thinking about right now’, or ‘Tell me what you think about this’ and would hand me his phone open to 5000-word article I didn’t have time to read on a topic I knew nothing about, but I would stop everything and skim-read it, determined to say something intelligent, because I never wanted him to think he was smarter or knew more than me, because I suspected he thought he was. It was exhausting. He’s a deep-diver, a person who needs to understand something intimately.

He also loves gossip.

‘Well, I mean, that’s kind of private,’ I say, and at the same time as Jesse says, ‘Brooke did.’

‘Brooke did?’ Tristan says. His eyes are wide.

Damn him. Him being both Jesse and Tristan.

‘Yes, I did,’ I say, because I have no other option and this whole situation is basically an improv sketch now.

‘She held my hand during an episode of The Vampire Diaries,’ Jesse says. It takes all of my power to stop my face from reacting with anything other than what I hope looks like a glow of happiness. On the inside, I am a desperate churn of emotions. Anxiety, as always, front and centre, the star performer.

‘Since when do you watch The Vampire Diaries?’ Tristan says to me, and it occurs to me how many bits and pieces of myself I hid from him to make sure he considered me an intellectual equal.