the Roommate Mistake

by Elizabeth Stevens

  “Naw,” Birdman joined in. “You like us.”

  “I’m doing this for Fret,” I clarified, pointing at each one in turn. “Just for Fret!”

  Fret threw his hands in the air. “She likes me!”

  I dropped my head in my hands and sighed, but the smile wouldn’t wipe off my face.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I didn’t know why I’d agreed to this, much less been the one to suggest it!

  I’d been hurrying backwards and forwards between the bathroom and my bedroom, trying to remember how to dress up nicely. There was a reason I wore tights or pants at every available opportunity. I hadn’t worn a dress or skirt with naked legs in years – so thankfully all my schools had had either pants and/or year-round tights options.

  “You don’t have to shave, do you? Inclusivity and all that,” Alex called.

  “No, I don’t have to,” I called back. “I want to. Personal choice and all that. My pasty pale legs aren’t usually on show!”

  I came back out of the bathroom in just a towel and found four sets of surprised eyes and Alex being very much ‘eh, I’ve seen it before’.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, then dashed into my room again.

  “Are you okay, Lottie?” Birdman asked.

  “Leave her be, she knows what she’s doing,” Alex told him.

  I poked my half-dressed person out of my room long enough to say, “Actually, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t do all this girly shit. You owe me big for this!”

  Rationally, I knew I wouldn’t hang this over any of them. I’d suggested it and I was willing to do it for Fret, but I was in a panic about getting out of my comfort zone. It had never been something I’d been particularly good at, and just the idea alone seemed to give me weird anxiety.

  Finally, I was dressed and coifed and supposedly stunning. If you believed Flick when she’d talked me into not only buying the dress but also packing it for boarding school because, in her words, ‘you never know when you’re gonna need to slay’.

  I didn’t feel like I was going to slay, but I also recognised I was perhaps not the best judge of my personal appearance.

  “Oh… You can’t go looking like that,” Alex said when I walked out of my room.

  I looked at him incredulously, anger bubbling away to a rather persistent boil.

  “Excuse you?” I asked.

  “Duuude…” he whistled. “You look so uncomfortable.”

  I shook myself out and wobbled on my heels. “I am. Thanks for pointing it out.”

  Zac was shaking his head. “You can’t go.”

  Fret was also shaking his head. “Even for love, I can’t let you do it.”

  None of them thought I looked even half decent?

  I looked down at myself. “I look that bad? Gee, thanks guys.”

  “No,” Birdman said. “You look amazing. On the surface.”

  “But just so…not you,” Zac said.

  “Just super uncomfortable,” Fret agreed.

  “Go put your starchy button up back on. Cook can be the girl,” Alex said, pointing at him.

  Luke beamed. “Really?”

  Alex shrugged. “Why not?”

  “I’ve always wanted to know what I’d look like as a girl.”

  “Have you seen your sister?” Zac asked and got thumped for his troubles by Alex.

  “You know who Kayla is?” Fret asked, because of course the only thing he was concerned about was whether the mission was accomplished.

  Luke nodded. “Yeah. I know her.”

  “No!” Fret cried. “If you know her, she’ll recognise you.”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “I don’t know her, know her. I know who she is.”

  “How are you going to get past the teachers?” Birdman asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ll make it work.”

  “That’s nice and all, but what about clothes?”

  “Drama department has a bunch of stuff that’d fit him,” Zac suggested.

  Alex went into leadership mode. “Okay. Birdman and Zac, go to the Drama department and find him a wig and an outfit,” he said.

  The two of them nodded and headed off.

  “You’re going to trust them to pick out an outfit?” Luke asked.

  “Birdman, yes. Zac’s just there for the breaking and entering.”

  “Good point.” Luke nodded.

  “Now we just need to get Luke in makeup.”

  “Will I need to shave my legs?” Luke asked.

  Alex looked at him quizzically. “Did you want to…or are you asking if you have to?”

  Luke shrugged. “Either.”

  “You’re going to shave your legs for a one-night only dress-up party?” I asked Luke.

  He looked at me quite seriously. “Why not? You did.”

  I blinked. “Touché, sir.”

  “All right,” Alex said to him. “Go and de-hair yourself.”

  “I’ll get my makeup back out,” I said, kicking off my heels and wandering to the bathroom.

  Once Luke was washed and shaved and coiffed to the nines, he strode out of my room like he owned the bloody joint. Heels and all.

  “I still can’t believe you found heels to fit him,” I said with a shake of my head.

  “I still can’t believe you made him look so good,” Alex said to me.

  And, Luke did look good. He made a surprisingly feminine girl. It made me try to picture what the other boys’ female counterparts would look like.

  “Just because I don’t care about that stuff, doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about it,” I answered.

  Alex smiled. “I wasn’t throwing shade. Imagine not knowing…I’m a swimmer, then challenging me to a race. You’d be pretty freaking surprised when I beat you so well.”

  I nodded my head in thought. “Yeah. All right, I guess.”

  Alex nudged me companionably. “Exactly. I might have to get you to do my makeup for formal,” he teased.

  “Oh, you coming, Lottie?” Luke asked.

  I looked between them all, waiting expectantly for an answer as they were. “Uh, I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it.”

  “You should totally come. It’ll be a great night,” Zac said.

  “How would you know?” Birdman asked. “We’ve never been before.”

  Zac nodded. “Sure. But everyone knows the Green and Grey is top shit.”

  Alex wrinkled his nose. “I wish they had a better name for it than that. Royal Green would be way better.”

  “Don’t the girls’ schools call them ‘Royal’s?” Zac asked.

  The boys all looked at me.

  I held up my hands. “I am not a font of all female knowledge!” I laughed. “I don’t know these things. I was public before I came here. Anyway, Luke has to get going!”

  “It’s Bonnie,” he said.

  “All right, Bonnie, get ye to the ball,” I said, ushering him out.

  He gave us a little flourish of his hand and sauntered away. We all stuck our heads out of the door to watch him walk down the corridor.

  “He’s hot,” Birdman said.

  “Hotter than his sister,” Zac commented.

  “I just hope this works,” I said as I trudged over to the couch and dropped into it, still dressed up myself.

  On one hand, I felt like a bit of a failure. Wasn’t the girl supposed to do the big transformation and the guys thought she was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t even pull that off? I guess it showed they cared about me more than just for my pretty face. That thought cheered me up a bit, but I still felt like I’d failed on the girling-front somehow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Eventually, we’d had to pack it in before we’d heard anything from Luke-Bonnie about the success of the mission, but we heard about it the next day.

  “She’s interested,” Luke said at breakfast the next day, still with the re
mnants of eyeliner visible.

  “Have trouble getting it all off?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Secret?”

  I shrugged. “Yet to discover it.”

  He nodded more resignedly. “Fair enough.”

  “Back to the important stuff,” Fret insisted. “She likes me?”

  Luke nodded as he started shovelling breakfast. “Yep. Thinks you’re cute.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Luke grinned. “I didn’t have to do anything. It just came up and I heard her. You know girls talk about guys a lot, right?”

  The boys all looked to me for confirmation.

  I nodded. “This is true. One would think we had nothing better to do.”

  Alex looked at me calculatingly. “I smell bullshit.”

  I shook my head. “No. Honestly. We talk about guys a lot. Guys we like. Guys we don’t. Famous guys. Funny guys. Cute guys. It’s like a whole thing.”

  “Huh,” Zac said, leaning back in his chair. “What do you know?”

  “Not much, obviously,” Birdman said with a laugh as he pretended to sweep Zac’s chair out from under him but caught him before he fell.

  “What do I do?” Fret asked, eager to bring the conversation back to him.

  “Now would be the part where you ask her if she wants to go out,” Alex said, although he looked at me as though he was checking if that was right.

  “If you want to go out with her, you’ve just got to do it,” I said.

  “If it helps,” Luke said. “I asked her what she’d say if you asked her out.”

  “And?” Poor Fret was beside himself with a mixture of excitement and terror. “What did she say?”

  “She giggled and said she’d say yes.”

  “There you go,” I told Fret as the other cheered. “Just go and ask her out.”

  Fret looked over to Kayla’s usual table and nodded. “Just go and ask her out,” he repeated to himself, like it was his new mantra.

  He pushed himself up out of his chair, his face set with determination.

  “Okay. I’m going to ask her out,” he said.

  “Go get your girl!” I said to him enthusiastically.

  He gave me a distracted smile and stalked off.

  “Did she really tell you that?” Birdman asked.

  Luke gave us a shit-eating grin and shook his head. “No. She said he’d have to ask and find out. She did giggle though.”

  I shrugged as I ate some bacon. “That’s usually a good sign.”

  “What is with the giggle anyway?” Alex asked.

  I shrugged again. “Dunno. Maybe we think if we’re cute, we’ll be more likable.”

  “By who?”

  “Whoever we’re trying to attract.”

  “I do like a giggle,” Zac admitted.

  “You don’t giggle very often,” Alex observed.

  I nodded. “I guess I’m not trying to attract anyone.”

  Alex looked at me for a minute and I looked at Alex.

  Finally, he blinked and whatever connection we’d been holding broke.

  “Well, Harman will be heartbroken.”

  I elbowed him playfully. “Shut up.”

  “What?” he asked innocently. “Maybe he really liked you.”

  “He’s got a funny way of showing it,” I said as Fret was making his way back to us.

  “Well?” Zac asked.

  “She said yes!” Fret squeaked, throwing his arms up and spinning.

  He then dropped them quite quickly, looked around like he hoped no one had seen him, and dropped into his chair, making himself as inconspicuous as possible.

  “She said yes,” he whispered, beaming happily.

  So, Fret had a date with Kayla and he was over the moon.

  n

  The next week, Birdman and I sat in class together – as we’d taken to doing – and I debated the sense in trying to work out who his crush was. After the success with Fret, I felt like Birdman deserved his own happy-for-now ending.

  “So, it turns out I could help Fret,” I said to him as the teacher went on at the front of the room.

  He looked at me with a knowing smile. “That you could.”

  “Maybe I could help you, too?”

  He grinned as he made a few notes. “Maybe.”

  “You’ve obviously thought about it…” I said slowly. “You came to me for advice before?”

  He nodded. “That I did.”

  “Was it bad advice?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “But you don’t want any more of my help?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say much of anything,” I pointed out.

  When did I become so invested in other people’s lives in the real world?

  “True,” he laughed.

  I thought I saw his eyes flick up quickly and not in the direction of the teacher. I looked around.

  “Is she in our class?” I whispered, trying to work out which one it was.

  “She might be,” he said with a cheeky grin.

  “Basketball… Basketball…” I muttered to myself.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Trying to work out who might play basketball.”

  “No one at the moment. It’s winter season.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Yes, I know. But you look like a basketballer.”

  “What makes you think she does, too?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Aren’t people who are good at something or enjoy something supposed to look like it? You know, like dancers look like dancers.”

  “I think you’re thinking about dog owners. You don’t really look like a book.”

  I stopped my search to look at him. “What would I look like if I looked like a book?”

  “Dunno,” he said with a shrug, then added thoughtfully, “Flat?”

  I elbowed him a little less companionably. “How about that one?” I asked, pointing to a girl on the other side of the room.

  He looked in the direction and shook his head. “No.”

  “That one?”

  “No.”

  “That one?”

  “Gee, we must have a lot of basketballers at this school,” he teased.

  “That one?”

  “Why do you want to know so badly?”

  “I actually don’t know,” I told him. “But I care.” A horrible thought occurred to me. “Maybe I inherited my mum’s nosiness?”

  “There are worse things to inherit,” he said. “Will you lay off if I tell you?”

  I nodded. “Definitely.”

  He looked around like he was worried someone was going to hear us. I mean, we’d been carrying on a conversation at the back of the classroom and no one had even batted an eyelid.

  He pointed surreptitiously. “Zahra Dawson, okay?”

  I peered ahead. I knew the name from rollcall and I vaguely knew the face that went with it. She was pretty. Tall and willowy with gorgeous black hair and tawny brown skin. Better still, from what I’d seen of her in classes, she had a brilliant brain on her. Whatever else Birdman was, boy had good taste.

  I nodded. “Impressive.”

  “What?” he laughed.

  “Substance and style. Colour me impressed.”

  He elbowed me now. “Shut up.”

  “No, really,” I chuckled. “You could pick way worse.”

  “Like your good friend Liz Spencer.”

  I gagged. “Don’t remind me.”

  It wasn’t that I’d had run-ins with Liz Spencer. Words hadn’t been exchanged. But plenty of looks had and, if looks could kill… I’d be slightly maimed and very much told off.

  “Okay,” I said. “How do we get you a date with Miss Dawson?”

  He threw her a wistful look. “I have no idea.”

  n

  Birdman and I took our new mission very seriously.
Well, I was heavily invested and he was, at best, humouring me. Instead of hanging out in the library studying, I’d go and find him and try to get him to brainstorm things to say to Zahra with me.

  Even if it took me weeks, I was going help him find the courage to ask her out.

  We went for walks around the grounds.

  We meandered between classes to talk.

  We hung out in the rec room.

  We hung out in either of our dorms, even without the other boys.

  We talked about Zahra and life and school and our friends.

  We spent a heap of good quality time together but, weeks later, I still hadn’t managed to help him find his courage. Although, it turned it might not be courage he lacked, but rather self-esteem.

  “I think she’s interested in Angus Curry,” Birdman said.

  We were in the Banksia rec room, sharing a party bag of Doritos.

  “So? You’re not going to fight for her?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not really the fighting type,” he admitted.

  I fake-punched him in the arm. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  He snorted, spraying a few Dorito crumbs.

  “No?” I asked, feigning disbelief. “Pity. Personally, I’d fall for it.” I put on a fake flirting voice that made Birdman smile.

  “Fall for what?” Alex asked.

  I turned to smile at him. “Nothing,” I said.

  Alex was looking between us again with that look like his brain was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t work out what it was.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” And then he left again.

  “What’s up with him?” I asked Birdman.

  He was silent a moment, then shrugged. “No idea.”

  Birdman and I hung out for a while longer, then I headed back up to the dorm to find Alex gaming.

  “Hey,” I said to him.

  He kicked his chin in greeting but didn’t look at me. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  He nodded. “Fine.”

  I nodded as well. As strange as his behaviour suddenly seemed, I wrote it off and curled myself up in the window seat with a book.

  “Fret asked Kayla to the formal!” Zac excited voice interrupted me a while later.