Chapter One
If there was one thing I was clinging to in these strange days that were the end of my time in enforced schooling, it was that I was already used to being a third wheel. So what did it matter that my third-wheel-ness had been expanded so that it was now taking over my entire existence?
This situation needs some context. The thing about me is, I’m not like other young women my age who exist entirely in one particular clique. I don’t mean this in a smug ‘not like other girls’ way; it’s not good or bad specifically. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. ‘Other girls’ have their group of friends and they don’t stray from them, but I tend to move around a bit. I can slot myself into a lot of different groups and I like to do it, though there are some I won’t touch. But even if you’re welcome all over the place you still need a ‘home’ to go to, and that’s where my friends Tamara and Callie come in.
The thing about Tamara and Callie is they’re soulmates. They have boyfriends now who may or may not end up being that sort of significant relationship, but they need one another in a way that’s beyond things like how recently they’ve even spoken. They’re the same sort of person, full of angst so tremendous they can’t even express it. That’s why they have to stay in each other’s lives, even if it’s just leaving their mutual doors open.
And they like having me around because I break up the tension. I keep things funny when they need to laugh, when they don’t want to laugh. But I’m absolutely the third wheel. Neither of them would pick me over the other under any circumstances. Even when Callie was ignoring Tamara for a while because she was so distracted by her own personal dramas, well Tamara spent time with me, but she didn’t suddenly want to cling to me the way she’d clung to Callie since before I switched to the same school as them. And when Tamara slipped down that same rabbit hole of drama that seemed to be the way it went with men, it ended in both of them completely forgetting about me until it was all settled, and the dust cleared with those two soulmates having boyfriends who were two best friends too.
It was like something out of a movie, honestly. Two Girlfriends For Two Arseholes? Now things had settled down and they were awkwardly fumbling around pretending they were all a big happy group who had never been at one another’s throats, and I almost thought everyone was looking at me now thinking maybe I’d hook up with someone in Lucas and Steven’s group and make it a happy sixsome.
Not likely. Let’s see… there was Mic, who seemed to care entirely about his appearance. Callie told me confidentially she’d seen him have a meltdown because one of his cufflinks went missing. Axel, who had been running around with them for years, was always perfectly dressed but more obsessed with money, and all the amazing ways he, in particular, could make more of it. Good-looking, dreamy-sounding voice, but utterly tedious. And then there was Donal who’d been hanging around with that group on and off ever since he switched to Burgundy late in the previous year. He was also good on paper, especially printouts of his bank statement probably, but I’d seen him drink too much at a party recently, and with Axel banging on in my ear about some glorious investment he was soon to see returns on, I’d paid far too much attention to the aftermath. The mind cannot forget what once made the eyes bleed.
So, there was nobody in that group I could see myself getting attached to, and that was a big downer for me.
I’m not like Tamara and Callie in one other critical way: I actually want to be in a romantic relationship. I’m not so twisted up in my feelings about guys that I am going to go on about how I don’t need one and then fall over the first one who seems a bit complicated. I want a nice, simple guy I can have a nice, simple romance with. I want to be attracted to him and to then go on to appreciate his career prospects, and I want a light-hearted romance that ends in him begging me to be with him forever as if I’m the one who could have absolutely anybody. And I’m willing to move on some of those goals, but there’s one non-negotiable detail: he has to be able to prove to me that I am more important than anything else in his life. That he would let go of anything he needed to if it meant he would keep me.
I don’t care about being a third (or fifth, I guess) wheel ninety-nine percent of the time, but I want to go to our school formal with a date, not Callie and Tamara who will be undoubtedly absorbed in their boyfriends the whole time. If that formal ended in a proposal, well that would be all right with me. We’d make it a long engagement, but I’d be engaged.
It had to be right, though. And I was never going to find the right guy hanging around the nastiest group at Burgundy, the ones I never had anything to do with before. But I felt like the girls really needed some support from me, so there I was offering it to them. Stuck at yet another party I never wanted to go to and on my own because Tamara and Callie had already disappeared, probably on the quest for more public boyfriend drama.
Well, it was worse than being on my own, because I seemed to have landed in a little clique Axel was at the heart of. And he was in fine form that night. He’d brought along a little mechanical model to illustrate… whatever the hell he thought he needed to illustrate to a bunch of preloaded people at someone’s house party.
“I got this idea from chatting with Lucas about some of the products his mum is bringing over this summer.” The model looked homemade, a little lopsided. “See, educational toys are really hot at the moment, parents will pay absolutely insane amounts to get their little darling something to keep them off the screens and learning something.”
“Yeah, but what the fuck do you know about educational toys?” called Donal, who was just about drunk again.
Axel put the model in his lap so he could clap his hands together so hard I jumped. “That’s the beauty of it! The parents don’t know a fucking thing about educational toys either. I’m not even sure the standards authorities who put their seals of approval or whatever on the things actually know shit. You just have to come up with something that seems plausible, make a science connection—coding or robots are really trendy right now, but these weird geometric things are absolutely about to be what everyone wants at Christmas, mark my words. And if I can get these off for a production run at an international factory in the next two weeks, I might even be able to capitalise. I can take advantage of that connection with Mrs. Starling, or if she?
??s not able to work with me at the moment I’ll get someone organised myself. There are plenty of options here.”
He was repulsively full of himself. I was going to just get up and walk away from the whole situation, but that comment about geometric things reminded me of something.
And I still knew I should walk away, but I didn’t seem to be packing my usual cool at this party and I couldn’t manage it.
I extended my hands towards the thing in Axel’s lap. “Let me look at that.”
His head went up, and he stared at me like he couldn’t even figure out what I was. It wouldn’t have shocked me if he couldn’t remember my name or that we’d actually been in the same car before on the way to yet another party. Being so absorbed in yourself you forgot that other people even existed seemed to be a side effect of joining Lucas Starling’s little club.