Page 63 of Unnecessary Drama

You’re all selfish and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.

No, I need something less obvious. I can’t tell them to be ashamed of themselves, I need them to come to that conclusion on their own.

I storm into the room, head held high, ready to make at least two of them feel intensely guilty, but it’s empty. They’ve all gone.

Somehow this is more upsetting to me than if they’d carried on singing.

My jacket is gone too. Now I really do have to walk home, cold and alone.

I go as slow as possible, hoping they’ve gone home and found me missing and they’re worried as hell.

27

I open the front door of our house and there is music pounding, and shrieking, and Harper saying, ‘Let me just get some paper towel to wipe that up’ in a stressed tone. If Harper is stressed about a spill, I am worried about what my reaction might be. I could legitimately have a heart attack. I vow not to even look at it.

I walk down the hallway and into the lounge room, and I can see Lauren and Kendra jumping on the couch in time to the music, and Penny and Henry doing some kind of complicated dance that Penny is explaining they choreographed in their childhood as part of a family talent show. Tristan is lying on a beanbag, and Jesse is nowhere to be seen.

‘Brooke!’ Lauren screams. ‘You’re okay!’

‘We were so worried,’ Tristan says, taking a long drink of whatever is in his glass, leaning further back in his beanbag, kicking off his shoes.

‘Yes. You seem very concerned,’ I say.

‘We are! We were!’ Lauren says, breathless from jumping around.

‘Brooke, you’re okay, thank god,’ Harper says, appearing behind me with a roll of toilet paper that she starts tearing pieces from and dabbing on the carpet. She actually sounds sincere.

‘Not that anyone here actually cares,’ I say, because apparently I’m not quite ready to give up my moment to be dramatic.

‘Brooke, I swear to god, life is so much easier when you stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ Lauren yells from the couch.

I am overcome with the urge to wrestle her again but I settle for giving her a nasty look. I want to ask where Jesse is but I’m scared to reveal I care.

‘Jesse is out looking for you. We were going to join him if you didn’t turn up in the next five minutes,’ Harper says, from where she is on the floor, holding a wad of scrunched-up toilet paper. ‘Do you think this will come out?’ she says, gesturing to the carpet. ‘Am I cleaning it right?’

I look at the red-wine stain. Who is even drinking red wine? I can answer that without looking. It will be Tristan. He always boasts of his parents training him to have a sophisticated palate from a very young age. He was eating brie and olives by age three apparently.

‘Put baking soda on it for now. I’ll clean it in a minute,’ I say. I can’t watch what she’s doing to the carpet right now. Little bits of toilet paper are sticking to it. She may as well be putting pins in my heart.

‘Can you call Jesse and tell him you are okay and to come back here, because I’ve made him a delicious cocktail?’ Harper says, looking up at me. Penny dances by and grabs the toilet roll and throws it, the paper streaming out behind it like a comet. Lauren and Kendra fall about laughing like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

‘Sure, I’ll let him know.’ I don’t want to but I can’t think of a good reason to say no.

I pull out my phone and see a bunch of missed calls. I forgot to actually check my phone—I was too distracted by my own outrage. Lauren, then Harper, then Jesse. At least Lauren called, I guess. That’s something. And Jesse. Well, so they all should. They pushed me into acting terribly, if you look at the situation through a very narrow lens, a narrow lens that is basically my brain saying It’s all their fault.

I send Jesse a curt text saying ‘I’m home’, and then I go and sit on my bed to quickly wallow a bit more. If I process these feelings, then I can go back out and have fun, maybe. I do want to see Penny and Henry’s choreographed family dance. I lie back on my bed, hugging the toy dog that Jesse bought me. Lauren is wrong. Feeling sorry for yourself feels really good sometimes.

The door cracks open and Penny pokes her head in.

‘Hey,’ she says.

‘Hi,’ I say, quickly pushing the toy dog under my pillow.

She walks in, sits on the bed beside me. ‘So. You’re having a night.’

‘I am.’

Penny is the one person I really wish hadn’t seen my outburst earlier. She doesn’t know me as well as Harper and Lauren do, and I still want her to think the best of me.