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Seventy-One
BJ
My Dad’s on the board of a charity for a food poverty foundation and every year we throw this big gala for the donors and the sponsors to raise money.
It’s a big deal both in my family and outside of it.
My mum becomes a complete melter every year in April in the lead up to it.
Me and Parks are getting ready at my parents’ place, which seems annoying and overcrowded to me, but Mum and my sisters like having her there to dress them, which she’s done all afternoon. There was some chaos about how Jemima’s dress was £14,000 and Madeline’s was only £8,000 because Mads is a brat like that. Parks has been overseeing all their hair and makeup, loving the control. She’s bossing everyone around and yelling about clashing colours and, to quote her, ‘a ghastly lack of pigmentation’, but I managed to steer clear of most of it. Only briefly dragged in when Allie made Madeline cry because she called her flat-chested. It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to be brought in on, wasn’t a conversation I ever wanted to have to think about. The look I gave Parks when she said, “No, don’t cry, Madeline, you have wonderful breasts, doesn’t she Beej?”
So now Henry and me are playing GTA 2022 in our tuxedos. Me in Tom Ford, him in Givenchy; both of us styled by the girl lying next to me who is still in her robe.
“Ey.” My brother elbows her and nods his chin at the TV. “This giving you sexy crime lord flashbacks?”
She glares up at him from her phone.
“He wasn’t a car thief.” She rolls her eyes. “He wasn’t a thief at all.”
Henry and me exchange looks over her head. Ah well, what she doesn’t know won’t kill her.
“Magnolia!” Mum scolds, standing in the doorway, hands on her hips looking at Parks like she’s still fifteen. “You’re not dressed!”
“Oh—” Parks swats her hand dismissively. “No, I know. I like to be the last one ready so when I walk down the stairs everyone goes, ‘Oh wow, you look so amazing. Who are you wearing? You’re so pretty.’”
Henry starts laughing, and from some other part of the house, so does my dad. I turn to her.
“Do you think there’s a red carpet here?”
Mum points upstairs. “We’re leaving in twenty minutes. You move exclusively at a phlegmatic pace.” Magnolia pouts but it falls on deaf ears with Lil. “Go upstairs and get dressed immediately!”
Parks grumpily obeys her, dragging her feet up to my room. I follow her because I know my role here.
Whatever dress she’s wearing, she’ll need me. She’ll have picked a dress that needs my help to get in to. And out of. Old tricks of hers that I hope never die.
I walk into the room — my bedroom from when I was a teenager, Mum’s left it as it was. I still stay here sometimes if Jo’s being particularly suspect.
Parks sees me walk in. She slips her robe off her shoulders and it pools at her ankles.
She’s standing there in nothing but knickers. Close the door as fast as I can, steady myself against it.
I press my hand into my mouth to keep it together. Her eyes are amused.
“What?” She blinks brightly. “I get changed in front of my other friends all the time.”
“What other friends? You have two friends — your sister and Tausie.”
“And Henry,” she tells me.
I give her a look. “You get changed like this in front of Henry?”
“No, but he is my friend.”
I roll my eyes at her, try not to stare. Toss her a T-shirt of mine and she dodges it, laughing, and my resolve is weakening.
“Magnolia Parks, I swear to god if you aren’t dressed when I open this door,” Mum bellows from the other side. Then, without waiting even a second, she swings it wide open and Parks darts behind me.
“Mum!” I growl.
