Chapter 20
20
Drew
I’m not even sure why I invited her stargazing. Maybe it was because the way things have been with Mum, I wanted backup.
I’ve been struggling with this for so long on my own that I’m fraying at the edges. It would be so easy for someone to pull gently at the threads of my life and unravel everything. They’d see how bad things are, not sleeping, coming home from school with my heart in my mouth, holding my breath as I unlatch the flimsy back door with holes all through the fly screen— symbolic of our life, really—wondering what I’m going to find.
“It’s nice that you’ve invited a friend,” Mum says to me now. “Or girlfriend?” She looks at me carefully.
“Mum! I only just met her.” I leave out the bit about the formal. She’ll take that and run with it.
Evie is standing in front of her friend Breanna’s place when I swing by to pick her up, camera bag slung over her shoulder, tripod in her hand. A late-spring cold snap means she’s in jeans and a bulky blue sweater, knitted beanie rammed on her head like it’s trying to contain the wildness of her curls. It’s such a contrast to how she looked at the party around the pool. I wish I could take a photo of her right now in the car’s headlights, for the exhibition.
She opens the back door and slides in, pushing her bag along the seat beside my gear.
“Hello, lovely!” Mum starts. She calls everyone “lovely.” I found it annoying until she explained that it saves her from trying to remember names. Her medication gives her brain fog. She’s going to gush over Evie, badly. “Call me Annie.”
Please don’t say “Drew has told me so much about you.”
Predictably, she does exactly that, and I refuse to meet Evie’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“Nice to meet you, Annie,” Evie says brightly. She’s in a great mood. “Thanks for letting me crash your family night out.”
This girl seems as set on rescuing me from socially awkward situations as Mum is to dump me into them. Mum looks sideways at me now and winks without a shred of discretion.
I was fourteen when she first showed signs of something being wrong. She was always tired, but then she worked a lot of nights and was raising me as a single parent. That Christmas, she’d covered extra shifts—probably to have a bit more money to spend on me. The day after Christmas, things went downhill. When she collapsed, I called for an ambulance and she was admitted straightaway. That’s when they found secondary tumors. We’d missed the primary altogether. Not that it’s the cancer I’m most worried about now …
I turn up the music in the hope it will stop Mum from talking.
It doesn’t. “Busy day?” she asks Evie.
Evie is looking out the window, a dreamy expression on her face. “Not too busy,” she says. “Lazy afternoon with …”
I can guess.
“… a friend,” she concludes.
I snort. Can’t help it. The chance of Oliver placing Evie in the friend zone at this stage is less than zero. I saw the way he looked at her before he even got out of the pool.
“Coffee?” I ask, pulling a thermos out of my bag, waving it at Evie. We’ve set up on the beach, down one end near a cove, sheltered from the breeze by rocks. The ocean roars as waves crash onto the sand and I inhale the salt spray close to the water’s edge. She’s standing near her tripod, arms crossed as if she’s cold. “I came prepared,” I add.
Who am I? Lord Baden-Powell?
“Thanks,” she says, taking a mug from me, but then her phone pings with a message.
“Sorry,” she says as she checks it. It might be dark, but even in the glow of her phone screen I can guess who the message is from. She’s wearing the same expression she had in the art studio on Wednesday when Oliver turned up and while we were driving here tonight. She types something back, smiling, and puts her phone in her pocket.
I dig the thermos into the sand and pick up my camera, twisting the focus ring on my lens as stars blur before sharpening to pinpricks. With a twenty-second exposure I should capture a good amount of detail in the core of the Milky Way. “Everything okay?” I ask Evie once I’ve pressed the shutter.
She looks guilty. “Yep! What are we shooting?”
I let the camera capture and process the image, then show her the photo in playback mode. She looks up the beach a little way. “Do you think we could try to get that driftwood in the foreground?” she asks.
Mum is building a campfire on the sand a little way up the beach and playing ABBA on the portable speaker. “Dancing Queen” is just audible over the pounding of the waves as she sways in the firelight.
“Is this how you and your mum usually spend Saturday nights?” Evie asks.
It makes me cringe. “About Mum …” I begin, kicking the sand at my feet, unsure how to explain this without breaking Mum’s confidence.
“I think it’s nice, Drew.” Evie looks like she means it.
This conversation seems refreshingly unrestricted by the gauntlet of teen rules I’m used to navigating.
“I’m just happy to get her off the lounge for a couple of hours,” I explain. “She has a very small world at the moment.”
We’re setting up for the shot when Evie’s phone starts ringing. She ignores the call at first, because she’s attempting that long-exposure wave photo, but the ringtone bursts through a second time.
She moves a few steps away toward the shoreline to answer it and I watch her body language change. Every movement speaks volumes. The way she touches her hair and shifts her weight, accentuating her hips in those jeans. Pity he can’t see it.
What am I doing? I’m here for the stars. And for Mum. And to get to know my platonic formal date so the night isn’t an unprecedented disaster.
“Okay, tomorrow! All right? I have to go now, seriously,” she says, then she laughs, her voice catching on the evening breeze before it’s swallowed by the roar of the ocean. “Let me take photos, Olly!”
She ends the call and hasn’t had time to clear the elated expression from her face before her eyes find me and acclimatize. She adjusts her tripod to get the driftwood in the shot, tilts the camera, checks the focus, and turns to me. “Drew?”
“Yep?”
“Do you happen to know if Oliver Roche has a girlfriend?”