Harper’s Holiday Romance

1

Thank God for Google.

At least once a week I contemplated how anyone used to survive without access to the internet. It was a live conversation. I was yet to have someone convince me otherwise. I only had to go back to prehistoric times, circa the early 980s—my mum would kill me if she heard me refer to her “prime” as prehistoric times—when the average life expectancy prior to my birth was 70–73. It’s since increased to 80–85.

The only difference? The internet was invented.

Okay, it wasn’t the only difference, and I might have manoeuvred the narrative in my favour ever so slightly. I wasn’t saying it was purely down to having no internet, but I was confident in the belief that Google saved lives. I said it. I don’t take it back, and I would’ve written it on my gravestone if I had to.

Essential Holiday Items was the latest phrase I ferociously typed into the famous search engine. Yes, fifty thousand suggestions on travel lists were a tad excessive, but each of them offered me something different. The sheer number of helpful hints and tips calmed my brain and eased the tension. I wouldn’t categorise myself as a nervous traveller, but I felt like someone was repeatedly trying to dig their way out of my forehead with a rusty old shovel. My best friend told me that wasn’t a normal feeling, but neither was her obsession with themed bottle openers, and I didn’t judge her. Who knew you could get a bottle opener shaped like an octopus? Not me. The eight tentacles had great traction for the tougher wine bottles.

My brain processed information the same way a search engine did. I had sixty-five tabs open, like a revolving filing cabinet with no organisation, until I discovered Tab Groups—game changer.

The tabs were categorised like so:

The things I need to do

The things I want to do

The things I can’t find the time to do

Miscellaneous

The Miscellaneous tab was vital; whoever thought of that word was a genius. It comes from the Latin word miscere which means to mix. The internet taught me that too—every day was a school day.

My miscellaneous tab group contained TV recommendations, holiday destinations, and random questions like— Can dolphins talk? and How much are the Kardashians worth? —both understandable things to search, in my opinion.

Of course, there was the occasional self-diagnosis. We’ve all done it. It was like having a doctor in your pocket, and I didn’t need to explain the benefits of that, or the cons. My best friend Sarah took self-diagnosis to the extreme; an insect bite on our previous holiday had her convinced without “proper” treatment immediately, her injury would result in an amputated limb. A cold compress soon relieved the itch.

The latest query–– How do I get rid of a cold sore ?

Yes, I had a cold sore, sadly. Who develops a cold sore five days before going on the holiday of a lifetime to Mexico?

Me.

The worst part—I’d never had one before. Ever .

I won’t pretend I was surprised. The reality—I was unlucky. I refused to buy a lottery ticket because I would end up owing money. I once entered a radio competition where the prize was ten thousand pounds cash. It couldn’t hurt to try, I’d thought. I marked the day in the events on my calendar. I manifested good positive energy out into the world, and I missed the call. I was in the shower, and I missed the goddamn call.

My mum tried to reason with me. “You were lucky to get the call in the first place,” she said.

My mum was the best. She’s kind, supportive, and generous, but her ability to evoke rage in me was a gift.

The Essential Holiday Items list told me not to forget all the obvious things like my passport, money, phone charger, underwear, sun cream, and a bunch of other things I’d already crammed into my overweight suitcase: twenty-three kilograms was not enough .

The bottom of the list gave me the one thing I didn’t know I needed—a mosquito plug-in. I made a note in my phone to pick one up at the airport.

My name was Harper Fox, and I was twenty-eight years old. My occupation was an estate agent, and I was originally from Manchester, England. It was the first job I got when I left school. I loved it. I’d always had a passion for people’s houses. The different interior style choices left me reeling with excitement or hiding in shame. Every day was different, and the battle for a popular house was my favourite part. I’d always been told my strength was my gregarious way with people. My energy mirrored those around me, as soon as I saw a clients face light up knowing they’d found their forever home, my heart filled with a warmth I rarely felt in my personal life.

My grandma was married at the age of nineteen and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight, as she so often reminded me. I told her millennials were different. We’d be lucky to stay together long enough to have three kids; that was the reality.

I was also unlucky in love. Surprise.

My unwillingness to go on dates contributed to the problem. I didn’t like dating apps. Trying to think of something witty to say that was below a level three on the cringe scale was harder than sitting the bar exam. I wasn’t speaking from experience. I’d never taken the bar exam, but my cousin failed it, and she was Oxford educated.

I attempted Tinder once. I swiped right when I saw an attractive woman. I waited patiently for us to match, and we did. The chatroom glared back at me whilst my brain tried to conduct itself in an orderly fashion. If there was a box in the brain titled, Chat Up Lines , mine was empty. The pressure caused my body to itch. I typed, retyped, and retyped again until I gave up. It took two days for my match to message me first. She said:

Leo4life

Don’t make me say it . . .

Harps

Say what ?

Leo4life

What’s your star sign?

Harps

I’m a Pisces.

Leo4life

Oh, Leo.

Harps

I don’t really follow star signs.

Leo4life

That’s a red flag. Bye.

After that interaction I deleted the app. Why was everyone suddenly obsessed with astrology? I didn’t understand it, but clearly, I had to avoid Leos.

I reached for the small grey cabin case at the top of the stairs. I was determined to be prepared this time. I stuffed a large pillow into the top half, securely sealing it in place, before I crammed in three pairs of trainers. I was going for two weeks, so the three pairs of shoes I’d already tucked away in my checked luggage were not going to cut it. I didn’t work well under pressure. A short window of time to prepare for something was my worst nightmare, yet I still chose to leave the packing part until the day of travel—go figure.

The doorbell rang out across the house, once, twice, three times. There had to be some way to disconnect it. Lady, my white Ragdoll cat flew past me on the stairs. The doorbell signified some sort of World War II warning siren in her mind. Gaga, my white Pomeranian saw it as her opportunity to guard the house like a deranged maniac.

“Gaga, stop barking!” I yelled.

It didn’t make a blind bit of difference. With visitors I used the excuse that Pomeranians were untrainable, but I think Gaga was inhabited by Satan himself. She was my pride and joy. She knew how to sit; she even knew how to spin. She knew all the normal call signs, but she also had selective hearing, loved to flick mud until her freshly groomed paws were filthy, and she barked with a piercing consistency that made me want to rip my ears off. Regardless, she was still the love of my life.

The door flew open, and in walked my best friend, Sarah, with a large backpack, a small black crossbody bag, a carrier bag, and a suitcase only held together by the overworked strap. She was followed closely by my other best friend, Billie, who’d neatly and unbelievably packed the contents of her life into a compact, perfectly kept suitcase half the size of mine.

“Did you have to ring the doorbell?” I scowled.

“I like to make it known I’ve arrived,” Billie said. “I like your eyelashes.”

“Oh God, I don’t. She did them too long.” I glanced at my reflection in the hallway mirror. A few months prior I’d asked my hairdresser to give me a classic Dakota Johnson fringe. I liked it, but I’d resorted to trimming it myself every couple of weeks. It was longer now, so it took away some of the focus from my eyelashes, but they were still prominent. “If I bat my eyelids too hard, I might take off.”

“Didn’t you tell her?” Billie said whilst casually rolling her suitcase over by the kitchen door.

“No, I felt bad.” It had always been a problem of mine. The thought of offending someone made my insides bubble with fear-fuelled anxiety. Instead, I would spend the next three weeks until they started to fall out looking like a modern day Furby.

“I like them,” Sarah said.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Sarah Allen and I had been best friends since high school. She was the loyal, dependable friend everyone needed. We fell out once over our difference in opinions about a girl she was dating, but aside from that our friendship had been solid. We lived together for a short period of time in our early twenties. The small circle lesbian curse had never swayed our judgment or our feelings towards each other. We were like sisters through thick and thin. She recently turned twenty-nine, so the holiday was also a celebration of her final year as a twenty-something.

“What’s that?” I pointed towards the piece of string dangling like a necklace across Sarah’s chest.

She put a purring Lady to the floor and pulled on the toggle around her neck. A wide brimmed bucket hat appeared over her shoulder; she smoothed her hair behind her ears and adjusted the hat to fit.

“I’m trying something new. What do you think?” She crossed her arms across her chest and tilted her head to the side.

“Interesting,” I said.

“You don’t like it, do you?” Sarah asked.

“No, I think it’s actually pretty cool.”

Billie looked up from fussing Gaga and raised her eyebrow typically. “It depends; are we going fishing in Mexico? Or—”

Sarah used her middle finger to respond.

“I hope you didn’t spend too much money on it. You should’ve just asked; my grandad has a collection in his shed.” Billie winked.

Sarah knocked the hat off her head and proceeded to press her fingers hard into Billie’s collarbone. Let the fun commence, I thought.

Billie Hughes was also my best friend. We’d met through work six years ago. She was the most witty, hilarious, and cleverly sarcastic person I’d ever met. She was sweet-natured, fun, extremely practical, and unequivocally unbothered by people’s opinion. That’s what I loved about her. I introduced Sarah to Billie at my twenty-third birthday party, and we’d been inseparable ever since.

Unlike me and Sarah, Billie was straight—supposedly. The jury was still out on that one. I tried to coax it out of her in the first few years. She had a strong personality, loved sports, and had a long string of unsuccessful relationships with men. Now, I’m not saying that makes you a lesbian, but it certainly makes you the subject of speculation. Anyone that met Billie assumed she was gay, and she was fine with that.

Speaking of dating, she’d just started dating a fireman with a very hairy back and questionable eating habits. Billie was full disclosure with me. She told me everything , whether I liked it or not.

“How are things going with Dean?” I asked.

“They’re not.”

“Oh. What happened?”

“He sweats,” she said casually whilst riffling through the cupboards in the kitchen. “Ah-ha.” Billie held up a small plastic sandwich bag and began emptying the contents of my tea jar into it.

“Okay, you’re going to have to elaborate. ”

“We had sex; he climbed on top, after a few minutes he started to sweat, and I mean there were drops of liquid forming on the end of his nose and dripping down onto my face like a leaky tap. It gave me the ick .” She shuddered.

“Eww.” Sarah gagged.

Eww indeed. “Now, if that were a woman—”

“Oh yeah, that’s hot!” Sarah clarified.

“Seriously? You would be okay with that?” Billie asked.

“I would welcome that,” Sarah expressed. She flicked open her phone and pulled up a social media profile of one of her many ex-girlfriends. “She’s hot, right?” She aimed the question at Billie.

“Erm, sure.”

“Well, what’s hotter than a hot girl?”

“An even hotter girl?” Billie questioned her own response.

“No. A hot girl that gets hot in the bedroom. It adds extra lubrication.” Sarah winked.

Billie raised her eyebrow. “Interesting concept.” She reached for a second sandwich bag and began filling it with sugar.

“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.

“They never do English Tea abroad, and I can’t be expected to function normally without one.”

“Okay, but why the sugar?”

Billie sealed the small plastic bag. “It’s just a precaution.”

“Billie, it’s a five-star resort in the Caribbean, not a shack in the depths of the Amazonian rainforest.”

“Sugarcane grows in the Amazonian rainforest, so that’s a bad example.”

I hated how smart she was. Ever since the three of us took a trip to Greece and the hotel didn’t provide adequate refreshments Billie resorted to bringing her own.

The taxi was due in twenty minutes, and I’d only achieved one physical sense check of my luggage, mentally cross-examined that with my holiday list, and searched the house top to bottom for anything I used on a regular basis. My twenty-three-kilogram suitcase had reached its limit, so I had to trust in the reliability of the hotel’s room amenities section on the website. They promised me a hair dryer.

I’d switched into holiday mode three days prior, working my way through the super ambitious to-do list. It was a month’s worth of tasks crammed into two measly days. I did it every single time without self-reflection. I spent the days leading up to my holiday a crippled, stressed, adrenaline fuelled mess, and I was about to feel the effects when my cortisol levels crashed. I’d spend the first three days of my holiday nursing myself back to health.

Whoops.

When we hit the motorway, I was internally cursing the taxi driver for arriving ten minutes late. Up ahead the unnerving red glow of taillights caused the churning in my stomach. There was a bend in the road, and I could see the queue of traffic in the distance.

“Can we get off at this junction to avoid the traffic please?” I asked politely .

The driver just grunted, but he took the next turning and the alternative route on my phone decreased our time by twenty minutes. Phew .

“That’s good, right? We have enough time, don’t we? I know we are supposed to arrive at the airport three hours early for international, but we’ll only be a few minutes late.”

“It’s a guide time, Harps. Chill.” Sarah said calmly whilst smirking at her phone, no doubt on to her next conquest.

“Yes, but I like to be on time. What if we don’t get checked in?”

My worst nightmare involved all three of us hurtling through Manchester Airport dodging pedestrians and luggage like a Mario Kart game whilst a monotone muffled voice announced final boarding over the loudspeaker. It was the ultimate walk of shame. If that happened, I didn’t know if I would ever fully recover.

“Harps—” Billie reached out and placed her hand on my knee. “Do I look concerned to you?”

I shook my head. She didn’t, ever.

“Exactly. It’s all good.”

“You also wouldn’t look concerned in the middle of a tornado, so—” Sarah added.

“Not helping!” Billie scowled.

After watching the precious minutes tick away before my eyes, we made it to the airport, gliding through check-in and security with ease.

“Duty-free isn’t any cheaper than online; you guys know that, right?” Sarah said, nodding towards the queue of people purchasing alcohol, chocolate, and beauty goods. I couldn’t remember the last time I purchased anything from duty-free, and the days of having foreign currency left over at the end of the holiday were long gone. Cost of living saw to that. I was lucky if I made it through a holiday without declaring myself bankrupt.

“It’s one of the most popular travel myths. Duty-free being inherently cheaper is a lie,” Billie affirmed. Duty-free was good for a few things: the trusty alcohol shot that calmed your stomach and the free sample of perfume that nose blinded you from godawful smelling passengers.

After Billie planted the seed in my head that the plane food would be horrendous, we spent the next thirty minutes purchasing enough food to feed all three-hundred-plus passengers on the plane.

“Expect to eat curry for breakfast,” she said. The thought made my stomach shrivel. Indian was my least favourite cuisine because my spice tolerance was abysmal. By the time I was done adjusting my order at an Indian restaurant, it was no longer Indian food. It essentially became pureed baby food with a side of chips and an extra garlic naan. The chances of me getting garlic naan on a plane were slim. The last time I went on holiday I received a stale bun and a hard block of butter; with all the will in the world there was no bringing the bread back to life.

Was it normal to spend a week’s food budget on food for a ten-hour flight? Probably not, but every shop I went into offered me something different until I ended up with too much.

“I wish I’d seen the sushi first. Do you think they’ll let me return this sandwich?” I asked. The boring cheese sandwich I’d planned to eat with crisps seemed extremely lacklustre after seeing a man bring out some freshly prepped sushi.

“I think it’s probably frowned upon to return food,” Sarah said .

She had a point, maybe embarrassing too. I decided against it.

Our gate was the furthest away from civilisation. Our plane could’ve been forty-five miles away at Heathrow Airport with how long it took us to get there. We made use of the travelators; the flat escalator solution was a clever idea. I almost tripped twice coming off the other end, but that was to be expected.

“Did you bring the first aid kit?” Billie asked Sarah.

“Yes. I specifically packed blister plasters, normal plasters, ibuprofen, sickness tablets, bite cream, and some antiseptic wipes.”

“What for? Are you hurt?” I turned to look at Billie. She looked completely unharmed.

“It’s for you,” she disclosed.

“Oh, but I’m okay.”

“Hmm.” Billie laughed.

“For now,” Sarah quipped.

“You guy’s hate me, don’t you?” I sulked.

“As if! We love your clumsy little ass.” Billie reached her arm around my shoulder, barely, she was at least three inches shorter, but it was a nice gesture.

“I am clumsy, so clumsy.” I carefully watched the escalator come to an end, and it took all the concentration I could muster to step off it like a normal human being, whilst Billie and Sarah practically skipped off and on to the next one.

The best thing about traveling in a group of three was not having to sit next to a complete stranger for ten hours. The seats in economy were quite intimate. Nobody would dream of climbing into bed with a complete stranger—who they didn’t find attractive—and going to sleep, but we do it sat upright on a plane. It was odd. Unfortunately, I was too poor to fly first class and too money conscious to pay double for premium.

My one prerequisite was the window seat. It was a non-negotiable condition any travel companion had to surrender to me. I was aware it made me sound like a diva, but I had a genuine dislike for the aisle seat. I felt less claustrophobic in the window seat, and if the plane was to take a nosedive into the unknown, I wanted to see what fate lay beneath me.

“Remember on the last holiday when you got a ‘windowless’ window seat,” Billie taunted.

“Yes, I do remember. It was traumatic.”

Yes, believe it or not, not every window seat has a window. As an obsessive window seat passenger, it gave me a slight panic attack. It took three glasses of wine and a large can of Pringles to calm my nerves.

My suitcase was small enough to be permitted as hand luggage, so I forced it up into one of the overhead bins. When we took a seat, the captain informed us there would likely be a twenty-minute delay due to missing our allotted takeoff time.

“Great.”

I leafed through the gossip magazine I’d purchased as the last few passengers took their seats. Two loud and distinguished looking southern men from the boarding queue were on the middle row to the left of us.

“Why us?” Sarah sneered.

“Kill... me... now.” Billie pulled the large over-ear headphones up from her neck and cranked the volume up.

I spent the whole flight flicking back and forth between playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on the games section of the entertainment screen and watching a mixture of films, whilst debating whether to continue diving into the paper bag filled with processed goods. The loud, obnoxious southern men made a racket for the first two hours, then they’d consumed enough alcohol to send them both to sleep, and the back of the plane fell silent.

It was peaceful, just how I liked it. I watched the small plane on the electronic screen glide across the map, the pilot occasionally informed us on the route. I looked out to my right to see Florida and the city of Miami along the coastline. The famous city was a collection of grey, blue, and green dots from forty thousand feet in the air, but the clear sky allowed for a much more pleasurable flight.

The final meal on the plane was a vegetarian lasagne; to the airlines credit, it was enjoyable. What wasn’t enjoyable was the bloating of my stomach after coming to the realisation I’d eaten four meals in a ten-hour period.

Bring on Mexico.