by Kate Gordon
Viggo MacDuff had immaculately gelled blond hair and spring-grass-green eyes, and chiselled cheekbones, and an actual, honest-to-Ben-Folds cleft in his chin. He had biceps that pressed against his designer shirt, and strong hands …
And he was almost literally pulsating with success.
I was not pulsating with success.
I was barely flickering with half-hearted meh.
Viggo MacDuff was so out of my league. He was an extraordinary gentleman. I was just … Connie.
There was no chance, no hope, no—
“Galactic Republic to Connie?” Jed said, waving a skull-ringed hand past my face. I blinked.
“Huh?”
“Viggo just asked you a question.”
My cheeks heated. How long had I been spacing out for? “Sorry,” I mumbled. “You were saying …”
“I wanted to know if you’d like to come with me to Ronaldo’s tonight?” he said, smiling dazzlingly. “Both of you. I heard the linguini there is sublime. I thought Jed and I could catch up on old times and I could get to know his other best friend a little bit better.”
“I’d love to,” I blurted, hoping Viggo couldn’t tell just how bunny-boiling much I really would.
What in the actual Ewok was wrong with me? Why was I going all gooey over this boy? All the boys I’d crushed on before were moody, hipster musos—all dreadlocks and fedoras and retro seventies’ blazers. Viggo was the complete opposite of that. So why did I feel as if I was about to keel over every time he fixed those emerald eyes on me?
“But Viggo, seriously, Ronaldo’s?” Jed laughed. “Connie and I are totes Wong’s Chinese people. You can go there in your pyjamas if you want to! And the number 23 is actually fricking heaven. Or, if you want to go somewhere without the slight risk of salmonella poisoning, how about we try out that new retro cafe instead? Connie’s been dying to go there.”
It was true. I had been looking for an excuse to try the new cafe in town. It was also true that I had no idea how to dress for a place where bedwear didn’t meet the dress code.
I looked at Viggo hopefully, but he just shook his head and said, “I’ve already made a reservation, anticipating your acceptance of my invitation. And I’m sure Constance would not dream of wearing anything like those …” he cleared his throat, “skating shoes to Ronaldo’s. I’m assuming there is an accepted attire at such an establishment. Collared shirts? Ties? Elegant formal dresses for the …” He paused and flicked his eyes my way. “Ladies?”
My face coloured again as I looked down at my Wilco tee-shirt and my Beezus-shredded jeans. Lady? Me? Hardly.
“I think a shirt might be in order,” Jed admitted. “What a pity. I was going to wear my new Wintersun tee. The one with the dead guy slumped against the tree. Shame. I’ll have to save that one for next time. And yeah. Might be an idea to pull those dresses out of the mothballs, Connie-girl. Hey! You could wear that Hello Kitty one. Or the one with the cherries.”
I winced, thinking of the op shop frocks that were the only ones I owned. “I don’t know if they’d meet the dress code either, Jed,” I said.
“Why?” He shook his head. “They’re awesome.”
Not awesome enough for Ronaldo’s. “I could borrow one from Em, I suppose,” I said. I looked at Viggo. “She’s my neighbour. She goes to the Catholic school. She wears dresses.”
Viggo smiled. “You’d look good in a dress.”
I swear my jaw hit the floor.
Was he …
He wasn’t …
There was no way …
Viggo MacDuff, The Most Gorgeous Boy Alive couldn’t actually be hitting on me.
Could he?
I stared at Viggo for what felt like an eternity. And Viggo stared right back, with those sparkly eyes.
And then …
“I broke the spell,” Jed says. “I remember. You two were going all goo-goo eyes at each other and it was making me want to throw up my cold pizza breakfast. So I said …”
“Constance does not look good in a dress.” I mimic Jed’s gravelly voice. “She’s got hairy legs like …”
“An exceptionally hirsute Wookie,” Jed moans, smacking his forehead. He looks at me sheepishly. “You know I was just being a Dalek.”
I grin. I’ve missed our shared habit of turning swear words into monsters from Doctor Who and Star Wars.
“I know, Jeremiah. You were worried Viggo and I would get together and leave you on the outer,” I say.
Jed shakes his head. “I was worried he’d break your heart.”
My grin slips. I laugh but it sounds bitter. “Well, that happened.”
“You know, Connie, you’re so much better—”
I hold up a hand. “You don’t get to talk about Viggo,” I say. “Remember? This is my time for talking.” Just then, my belly lets out a long, loud grumble. “Except enough talking for now. All I’ve had to eat today is twenty-five advent calendar chocolates.”
“But it’s Christmas …”
“Exactly,” I say. “So, you want to go to Wong’s?”
Three
Wong’s is Bangarra’s local all-you-can-eat twenty-four-hour Chinese buffet. It’s cheap and it’s greasy and that’s exactly why Jed and I love it.
And why Viggo hates it.
I haven’t been to Wong’s for more than a year; not since Viggo swaggered into my life and swept me away.
I stopped wearing my Joe Cool Vans.
I stopped staying in my pyjamas until lunchtime on a weekend, watching old Recovery videos on YouTube and eating microwave waffles.
I stopped reading graphic novels (“glorified comic books”).
I stopped dyeing pink and green bits in my hair.
I stopped singing along at the top of my voice to cheesy nineties’ pop songs on commercial radio.
I stopped spending my entire income on music magazines, art supplies and crazy outings with Jed.
And Viggo thinks Wong’s is an abomination. So I stopped eating there.
But now Viggo MacDuff hates my guts, so I can eat as much Szechuan prawn and fried ice cream as I like.
Jed is happy. “I’ve missed coming to this place with you,” he says as he loads up his plate with rice and sweet and sour chicken.
“You still come here?” I ask, surprised. I thought Jed gave up Wong’s when I did. “But Viggo hates it.”
“Viggo also hates Iron Maiden, facial piercings and boots.” Jed gestures down at his tee-shirt and clompy shoes. He raises an eyebrow and his silver stud sparkles. “And all manner of other awesome things. And I actually don’t give much of a Flying Millennium Falcon what Viggo hates.” He nods at my feet. “I’m glad the Snoop Dog Vans have made a return. You really never were a high heels sort of girl.”
“I tried,” I say, sinking into a red plastic chair. “I tried heels and skirts and a ponytail and clever books and fancy wine and no Wong’s …”
“I’m glad you’re back.” Jed grins.
“I’m not,” I mumble. “Not if it means Viggo hates me.”
“Well, I don’t think you should give a rat’s a—”
“Jed!”
“All right. Sorry. I forgot. No Jed talking. Only Connie talking. So spill already.”
“I need more satay squid first,” I say, smiling to make up for the snappishness. “Ben Folds, I miss this place.”
“I miss you saying Ben Folds instead of ‘God’.”
We walk together back to the buffet. “I never said ‘God’ when I was with Viggo either. It’s—”
“Blasphemous and uncouth,” we say, in unison.
“God, isn’t it?” I say, smiling.
“Good to see you smile,” says Jed. And that what makes the smile fall off. Because I remember why I wasn’t smiling before.
“Are you ready to tell me your next one?”
I nod and wipe black bean sauce from my mouth with the back of my hand.
Viggo hated it when I did that, too.
Uncouth …
Jed shrugs. “My two best friends getting together? Of course a guy would remember that.”
“But we didn’t get together that night.”
Jed snorts. “Far from it, if I recall.”
I look down at my plate. “It wasn’t my finest hour, I’ll admit.”
“And yet he fell for you. Of course.”
I look up at Jed. He has rice stuck in his beard. It would be kind of cute, if it wasn’t Jed.
And, like a kick to the gut, I remember one time I had a brioche crumb on my cheek and Viggo wiped it away and his fingertips were so gentle …
Oh Ben Folds I miss him.
“Jed,” I begin quietly. “Do you really think there’s no chance—”
“Just tell the story, Connie,” Jed says at the same time. “I know I remember it like it was yesterday but it will still be hilarious hearing you relive it.” He picks up his fork again—unlike Viggo, Jed is hopeless with chopsticks—and stabs a chunk of chicken. “Come on, Connie-girl. Entertain me.”
“So I wore a dress …”
“I remember. Trust me.” Jed waggles his eyebrows. “No man alive could forget your Ronaldo’s dress.”
I punch him on the arm. “Shut up, cretin. As if you could ever think of me as anything other than geeky old Connie-girl. Besides, you made fun of me all night in that dress. And besides, it wasn’t my Ronaldo’s dress, anyway, was it? It was Em’s. And that just made it worse.”
“I’d forgotten about that. And here was I thinking it couldn’t get any worse …”
“I should have known then, Jed.” My eyes burn. “I should have known right then that I would never be good enough for Viggo. I’m not good enough for anyone.”
Jed’s jaw twitches. “Enough of that, okay, Connie? Why don’t you just tell the story?”
“Okay.” My voice cracks. I take a sip of water. My skull feels hollowed out. Everything feels hollow. I feel like I’m weightless, floating through space. I feel like I’m nothing.
“Connie. You don’t have to—”
But I do. I do. Because what else can I do?
“I’ll start from when I borrowed the dress from Em.”
“Oh, goody.” Jed rubs his hands together. “You just know how much I love fashion talk.”
I roll my eyes. “I went over to Emily’s after school …”
“Wait on,” Jed holds up a hand. “Can you describe this ‘Emily’ for me?”
“You’ve met her before, like, a zillion times.”
Jed’s lip flickers. “Well, yeah, but Connie, the girl is, like, Karen-Gillan-level hot.” Karen Gillan is Jed’s favourite Doctor Who companion, and also his biggest celebrity crush of all time. “I’m looking forward to the mental image!”
I groan but I’m finally smiling again. “Because my only goal in life is creating sexy mental images for my best friend.”
“Humour me.”
I puffed out my lips. “So, Emily Chambers is approximately one hundred and seventy-five centimetres tall …”
Four
Memory 2
She’s also beautiful. Not just “hot”. Not just contour and bodycon dresses. Like, supermodel-movie-star-actual-angel beautiful.
If she wasn’t so gosh-darn nice, it would be all too easy to hate Emily Chambers.
But Emily has the heart of a Disney princess. Also, she genuinely doesn’t seem to notice how exquisite she is—a hangover, so her mum told me, of having been skinny and gawky and awkward until she hit puberty and turned into a swan.
I didn’t know Em back then. We only became friends when her family moved next door when we were both in grade seven. Mum made me go over to the Chambers’ house the day after the moving truck left, with a dish of Thermomix stew. I was reluctant. I’d been covertly spying on Emily for the past two days and I knew someone with looks like that would never want me for a friend.
Besides, I didn’t need another friend.
I had Jed.
“Aww.”
“Me talking.”
“Soz.”
I was relieved when nobody answered my knocking, and I left the dish on the front deck with a hastily scrawled note: “From the Chases at Number Five. Welcome.”
I thought I’d escaped but, the next afternoon, as I sat at the kitchen table reading Watchmen, the doorbell rang.
I opened the door to a beaming goddess carrying a gingham-covered tray of something that smelled so good my belly gave out a long, low growl.
The goddess laughed. “Sounds like I arrived at just the right time.” She held out the tray. “Blueberry muffins. Freshly baked. I made them to say thank you for the stew. Your dish is in the dishwasher. Maybe you can come over later and collect it and we can hang out? I’m Emily Chambers, by the way.”
“Constance Chase. Most people call me Connie.”
“Constance! Like Constance Adams.” When I returned a blank look, Emily went on. “She’s an architect. And she works on the space program. She designs living quarters for astronauts. My parents are architects,” she explained.
“Actually, I’m named after Connie Smith,” I explained, fully expecting a blank stare right back at me. Instead, Emily clicked her fingers.
“The country singer, right?”
I felt my eyebrows hit my dyed-pink fringe. “You know her?”
Emily shrugged. “My dad loves country music. It’s rubbed off on me over the years. Much to my mum’s horror. Although, really, I’m more of an indie girl.”
“Nineties?” I asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “Current, mostly. Triple J stuff. But nineties is cool too.”
“Awesome!” I couldn’t help smiling. I was warming to my new neighbour, despite myself.
“I have to admit, though, I don’t listen to as much music as I should,” Emily said. “I mostly listen to it while I’m doing my art.”
“I love art!” I cried, any hint of coolness melted. “I want to be a graphic novelist!”
“I want to be an abstract artist like Jackson Pollock!” Emily squealed. And then …
“Ahem.”
Jed is regarding me across the table, his fingers steepled below his chin.
“What?”
“Okay, I know it was me who asked for a description of Princess Charming, but I was thinking a fifty-word synopsis, not a whole novel. We’re meant to be talking about my man, Vig, aren’t we? Are you procrastinating, Connie-girl? Do you not want to talk about Viggo anymore?”
There’s a long silence that fills my head with noise. Finally, I manage, “I miss him.”
“It’s only been, like, two days.”
“Longest two days ever.”
“You two were apart for longer when he went with his family to Venice.”
“We weren’t together then,” I point out.
“You were together when he went to Auckland for the Future Leaders conference.”
“True … but we talked every night on the phone.” I lick sauce from my thumb. It tasted good when I was eating the noodles. Now it seems greasy and salty and bad. My stomach turns. “I held the fort back here for him. I ran errands and … I knew he still liked me.”
“Liked you? Don’t you mean loved you?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” I mumble. I’m not really lying.
I know he felt it.
I knew it was only a matter of time before he said it, too. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have said it when he was about to go on stage to give his speech for winning male dux at the end of year assembly. I caught him off guard.
He was distracted.
He would have said it back if he wasn’t distracted.
He—
“Connie?” Jed is clicking his fingers. “The story? Ronaldo’s? We’ll be here all night if you don’t get started, and much as I love Wong’s chicken for breakfast …”
“Okay,” I say. “Time for the
proper story. Time for Ronaldo’s.”
Five
“So, I borrowed a dress from Emily,” I say quickly. “She was all excited because she convinced herself I had a date with you—you know how she’s bizarrely obsessed with us getting together …” I roll my eyes.
“It’s in the stars …” Jed says breathily, wiggling his fingers.
“No, Emily isn’t silly enough to believe in astrology,” I correct him. “It’s some personality matrix psychology thing she did, remember? Anyway, I’m getting distracted already. So, she thought we had a date, even though I told her there was someone else coming …”
“Yeah, but he’s just some friend of Jed’s, right?” Emily said. “Jed’s probably just invited him because he’s nervous about being alone with you.”
“Jed and I spend half our lives alone together,” I pointed out, flopping on Emily’s bed. She was already inside her enormous wardrobe-room-thing. It was groaning with frills and ruffles and peplums. She was going to make me look like a toilet dolly. “Besides, it was Viggo who suggested the dinner.”
“Perfect cover for Jed’s cunning plan.” Emily emerged with an armful of brightly coloured fabric scraps.
“Em, not one of them is knee-length, is it?”
Em grinned wickedly. “Fair maiden never won the heart of sexy Jed wearing knee-length skirt.”
“Wait.” Jed holds up a hand. “Emily Chambers thinks I’m sexy?”
“Did I say sexy? I meant sleazy. Shut up. So, after, like, an hour of trying on handkerchiefs I finally settled on the one I wore. The red one.”
“The Princess-Leia-level hot one.”
“Whatever. And Em made me wear heels too …”
Six
Memory 3
I could barely walk in the heels. I had to lean on Jed the whole way from the car park to the restaurant.
Which Emily said was totally the point.
Viggo was already waiting for us when we got inside. “I forgot he’s always annoyingly early,” Jed grumbled. “For Viggo, ‘late’ is arriving on time.”
