Picture Perfect (29 page)

“Now,” Kenderall says as she leans back in the polished wooden chair and picks the prawns off her prawn salad, “we need to talk.”

Sugar cookies
.

I kind of thought we’d been doing that all afternoon. I was hoping to focus on my super-American club sandwich.

“Do we?”

“Yes. They said at college that as a stylist you have to understand the private lives of your clients so that you can properly express how they are feeling on their behalf.”

“Oh.”

Apparently the gap in time between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Stegosaurus is bigger than the time between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and us.

Kenderall can’t be more than eighteen months older than me, but it suddenly feels like a similarly enormous gap.

“So, how’s the love life?”

“Huh?”

“Babe, who you are dating is
fundamental
to your brand. People will judge you by the company you keep. I can’t un-style you from a loser.”

I flush with anger and put my club sandwich down. “Nick is
not
a loser.”

“
Nick
.” Kenderall tests the word out a few times. “Hmm. Bit of an unremarkable name. What does he do?”

Unremarkable?
“He’s a model.”

She looks at me expectantly. “
And …
”

“And what?”

“What’s his hyphen? I can’t be expected to style him as well as you, you know.”

I blink. “He’s … just Nick.”

As if Nick could ever ‘just’ be anything.

“Perhaps we should look at upgrading,” Kenderall says thoughtfully. “I know a double hyphenator who might be interested. Would you be prepared to exchange?”

I glare at her.

“I don’t want to
exchange
my boyfriend. He’s not a jumper that doesn’t fit.”

“Babe,” Kenderall says, lifting an eyebrow. “If he’s the wrong guy, that’s
exactly
what he is.” She frowns and puts another tiny lettuce leaf in her mouth. “But does he L.O.V.E.
you
? Does he send you roses and profess his undying affection for you very publicly on a daily basis? Would he leap about on the sofas on Oprah in front of the world? Would he? You don’t want to put effort into a guy who’s not into you. It’s very unstylish.”

Light is the fastest thing in the Universe. It travels at 299,792,458 meters per second.

Kenderall catches me looking desperately at the door.

Even if I was light, I
still
wouldn’t be fast enough.

“This is a lovely sandwich,” I say, opening it up and staring at the inside. “Did you know that the average American eats 17.9 pounds of bacon every year?”

Sorry, Francis
.

Kenderall pulls my plate sharply away from me. “How can I be expected to style you if you don’t know who you are?”

I flinch.

“How do you expect someone to love you if you aren’t
somebody
?”

“I don’t know,” I admit in a tiny voice. And suddenly I don’t know which question I’m answering.

According to the little blue stickers I used to stick to the inside of my diary every morning, I have now known my boyfriend for nine months.

Which is thirty-nine weeks or 273 days, or 6,552 hours.

Or, you know, 23,587,200 seconds.

But the fact I’ve been trying to ignore all summer is: I
still
don’t know if Nick loves me or not.

Kenderall reaches into her handbag and pulls out a magazine with a flourish.

“Then I think it’s about time we found out, don’t you?”

uddenly I don’t want to be here.

At all.

The coldest place on Earth was identified by satellite in 2010 in the centre of Antarctica. It’s minus 93.2 degrees Celsius, which is nearly as far below freezing as boiling water is above freezing.

Scientists may have to measure again, because I’m pretty sure the inside of my stomach has just achieved a new record.

“Did you know,” I say, peering again at the inside of my almost uneaten sandwich, “that until 1820, North Americans believed that tomatoes were poisonous?”

Kenderall flicks through the magazine, ignoring me, and then opens it stridently on the table.

In enormous pink letters, I can see the words IS YOUR BOYFRIEND IN LOVE WITH YOU? emblazoned across the top of the page.

My stomach drops a few extra degrees.

“OK,” she says. “This should be easy. All you have to do is answer
Yes
or
No
and the professionals will do the rest.”

On any other occasion, I would be thrilled at the opportunity to take an exam.

“Mmmm,” I mumble, shoving as much of my sandwich into my mouth as humanly possible.

Kenderall makes herself comfortable. “Right. a) Does he go long periods of time without contacting you?”

I chew deliberately slowly and make the universal hand motion of
I can’t answer until I’ve swallowed.

Then I shake my head.

Kenderall’s eyebrows lift. “This isn’t going to work if you don’t tell me the truth, babe.”

I attempt to gulp down my sandwich. “I mean, sometimes. Maybe. Now and then.”

“Right. So I’ll put a little tick here. b) Is there a long gap before he replies to messages?”

Yes.
“No.”

“Good. I’ll put a cross. c) Do you see each other lots?”

“No,” I admit in a tiny voice.

“Uh-huh. d) Is he always there for you on important occasions?”

Like my birthday. Or my exam results. Or when I arrive in a brand-new country. Or now.

“N-no.”

“e) Does he start fights with you for no apparent reason?”

I think of yesterday evening, and the fact that he hasn’t texted me since. The ice in my stomach is starting to spread: reaching out in tiny, freezing spikes into my chest and the top of my legs.

“Sometimes.”

“f) Does he compliment you?”

The cold seeps into my arms and knees as I try desperately to think of one occasion. But the only
beautiful
I can remember came from Cal.

“Not really.”

“g) Is he romantic with you?”

“
Yes
,” I say emphatically. Then I try unsuccessfully to think of any single occasion since we got back from Tokyo. “But … not for a while.”

“Finally, and this is the clincher, h) Has he ever
said
he loves you?”

And there it is.

The freezing cold iceberg in my chest that will take me down, just like the
Titanic
in 1912. Except that – unlike in that instance – I saw this one coming.

I’ve been waiting for this ship-sinker for months.

My entire body is now so cold it feels like I could put my fingers out and turn things into ice just by touching them.

“No,” I say in the tiniest voice I’ve ever heard come out of me. “He hasn’t.”

And every time I try to bring it up, he changes the subject.

“
Well
,” Kenderall scans the bottom of the page, “sorry, babe, but your boyfriend is Option D: Not Emotionally Invested. Your relationship is on its way out.”

I blink. “Its way out where? Where is it going?”

I suddenly have a bizarre image of my relationship opening the front door, popping out to the shops for milk and never coming back.

“Out. Done. Dead. Like,
over
.” Kenderall reaches over the table and grabs my hand. “Sorry about that.”

“But …” I can feel panic rising up my throat. “What if I ring him? What if I ring him
a lot,
all at once, and maybe send him some gifts and text him and make a T-shirt with our faces on it? Maybe then he’ll invest himself more?”

“Wow,” Kenderall says, tilting her head to the side sympathetically. “You
really
don’t understand boys
,
do you?”

And – without warning – the box in my head opens and the final item falls out with a
crack.

An imaginary boyfriend. That’s pathetic, even for you.

Oh my God.

Is that what Nick is? Is that what I’ve been doing all this time? Did I want this perfect romance so badly I painted it the way I wanted and then tried to live inside it, like the little girl in
The Witches
? Was this relationship
so
important to me I forced myself into it, whether it was there or not?

Suddenly it’s as if all the lights have been switched on; I’ve been sitting in darkness for months and hadn’t even noticed.

The fashion show, where Nick left me on my own for hours and barely acknowledged me. The roundabout, where he could have written something lovely but didn’t. The lack of picnics or flowers or gifts in the post. The lack of texts and phone calls. My birthday, where he didn’t care enough to read the directions properly. My exam results, when he wasn’t there. Shouting at me instead of being on my side. Treating me like a child. The birthday present he forgot to bring.

The time he called me a
geek.

In biology last year we studied osmosis and learnt that when there’s a selectively permeable membrane, small molecules – like water – can pass through, but larger molecules like sugar only stay in one place.

Is that what’s been happening? Am I the little water molecule, racing towards Nick, while he stays unchanged and unaffected exactly where he is?

Has my entire romance been in my head?

Was Alexa
right
?

I stare at Kenderall blankly.

Most hideous of all: am I
so
forgettable that after months and months of knowing me I can’t even get my own boyfriend to fall in love with me?

“No,” I finally say in a far-away voice. “You’re right. I really don’t understand boys at all.”

Without another word, I put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. And run out of the restaurant.

stare at my phone the whole journey back to Greenway station.

I sit on the train, wishing it would do something.
Anything.

It doesn’t.

And for the first time in nine months, I’m not surprised. Because for the first time in nine months, it suddenly makes sense.

Finally, I take a deep breath and write:

Nat, how are you? Hope you’re having fun. Can you ring me when you get a chance? Hxxx