f o r t y - n i n e

*

The worst thing about having friends in other countries is the time difference. I guess if it’s only an hour or three it’s pretty manageable, but Young-mi is a full eight hours behind, which became painfully clear when I stayed up until four o’clock in the morning talking to her last night, and when I couldn’t go on any longer, she was just heading out to eat at eight.

The next year or so is going to be hard, when we have so few waking hours together unless she gets up ridiculously early and I stay up stupidly late, which I don’t plan to do again. I wake up at nine, feeling groggy and raw after too little sleep and wondering why I’m up, until I hear my sister’s voice.

“March! March! Are you naked?”

“Yes,” I call back, sprawled out on my front with my face squashed into my pillow. Until we made it to San Francisco and exchanged a tent for a hotel room, I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d missed naked sleeping. There really is no other way.

“Are you covered?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

I grunt into the pillow, and apparently that’s a yes to Flo, because the door swings open and she bounces in. I squint at her, both arms wrapped around the pillow, and make no effort to suppress a mammoth yawn.

“Morning,” she says.

“It is, so why are you here?”

She frowns a little and pulls over a beanbag from the other side of my room, dropping onto it with a soft thump. The sides puff up around her, enveloping her amongst the beans. “Today is our day.”

“Hmm?”

She leans back, arms and legs draped over the bulging cushion like a beached starfish. “You said you’d spend time with me when you were back from America. Now you’re back – you’ve been back for two whole nights – so today’s our day. Mum gave me money so we can go to the coffee shop, or the park, or the new pudding place.”

“There’s a new pudding place?”

“Yes! It has everything. Pancakes and waffles and ice cream, and cakes and doughnuts and brownies and every other kind of pudding you can think of.”

“It’s a bit early for pudding, Flo. I’m still half-asleep.”

“We don’t have to go now,” she says, clumsily sitting up as she tries to rearrange the beanbag.

“I don’t know if we can go at all, Flo,” I say. Her face falls. I poke my foot out from under the covers and weakly flex my swollen ankle. “I’m a bad enough driver as it is; I can’t really work the pedals with a sprain, and I’m under doctor’s orders to rest.”

Well, not really. I haven’t been to the doctor since I got home, but in the past, every doctor I’ve seen has told me to rest, and Dad drilled it into me yesterday when my ankle seized up and I lost my footing, and almost threw my supper over Pebs.

“You can rest in the cafe,” Flo says.

“It’s almost a mile away, I can’t walk that,” I tell her. It has nothing to do with not wanting to take her out – of course I do; I’d love to go and chill in a coffee shop with my little sister and let her ask questions until she gets tired or distracted – but I already pushed the limits in California. If I keep trotting around on a sprain, on an already weak ankle, who knows what could happen to it?

“Mum can drive us,” she says, clasping her hands and leaning forward. “Please, March. I can put you in the wheelbarrow and push you there! Or, I think Rocco’s old pushchair is still in the garage. Though I don’t know if you’d fit in it.” Pursing her lips, she furrows her brow as though seriously considering it. “You’re a bit bigger than a toddler.”

I snort. “Yeah, just a smidge.” I stretch and sit up, and pull on a t-shirt I discarded on the floor next to my bed last night. “If someone can get us to the cafe, I’m more than happy to have an us day. Or we could stay here and make milkshakes.”

Flo pulls her legs up, wraps her arms around her knees. “It has to be special. You’ve been away for three whole weeks and I want us to go out. Mum can drive us, or Dad. We could go out for breakfast!”

“You go and beg a parent for a lift, and I’ll get changed, ok?”

She grins like she’s just won a battle and scampers out of the room, and I close my eyes for a couple of minutes of precious extra sleep before I can persuade myself to roll out of bed.

*

Half an hour later, thanks to a lift from Dad, Flo and I are sitting in the nicer of our town’s two Wetherspoons with a couple of breakfast menus in front of us. Flo’s stolen my phone to download the app so we can order food straight to our table, and she’s taken control of the ordering process – after asking why I bother with my glasses when it still takes a year to navigate the app.

I caught myself before I called her a cheeky little shit, and she looked devastated when she thought she’d upset me. I laughed and told her I’m not that sensitive, and that she was right. But when I took the glasses off, I wondered how I lasted the past three weeks without them.

“Do you want a regular breakfast or a big breakfast?” she asks after she’s added a vegetarian breakfast and an orange juice for herself. “Tea? Coffee?”

“Big breakfast and a hot chocolate,” I say. Her face lights up.

“Ooh! I didn’t realise hot chocolate was an option. This changes everything.”

It doesn’t. It changes her drinks order.

“Can we pay with cash with that? I’m not sure how much I have left on my card,” I say when I realise that we need to pay on the app too and I doubt I can use Mum’s twenty for that.

“Dad gave me his card,” Flo says, whipping a debit card out of her pocket. “Don’t worry, I gave Mum her money back. Dad said don’t abuse it or overuse it and I said we were only gonna buy breakfast, and maybe go to the pudding shop.”

She enters Dad’s card details with practiced ease, and I have a feeling she probably knows all the numbers off by heart, and not for any reason other than that’s the kind of the thing Flo knows.

“So,” I say, leaning back in my window seat so that the sun catches my face and warms my cheeks through the glass. “What’ve you been up to while I was away?”

Flo hunches over the table and shrugs, her shoulders almost meeting her ears. “Not much. I saw Lily a few times; she came over to babysit a couple of times when Mum and Dad went on a date, when Uncle Kit and Auntie Bree weren’t around. And I learnt a new piece on the piano!” She perks up at that and sits straighter. “Can I play it for you when we get home?”

“Of course. Seen any friends?”

She lifts one shoulder and lets it drop. “I went to a party. I don’t like parties, though. I like my friends, but ... in small doses. And one at a time.”

“Big mood.”

“And I finally taught Burt to  give me a high five, though Mum said he overdosed on treats while I was teaching him. But you haven’t missed much. Maybe that’s why it felt like you were gone so long. There wasn’t anything else going on.”

“Sounds like a typical summer to me,” I say. “There’s never that much going on.”

“Except everything is going on in your life,” she says. She scoots her chair closer, pinning herself against the table, and widens her eyes at me. “You have a very cute new boyfriend, and you told Mum and Dad that you’re bi, and everything about the G-word. And you’ve been all over America. And hurt yourself, too.” She nods at my head; my hand goes to my Togo-shaped scab, which I’ve resisted picking at for a whole week.

“I’m always injuring myself.”

“But you’re not always getting a new boyfriend. I like him a lot. He seemed really nice when you called me from the Giant Sequoias, and I like his Instagram.”

“Flo.”

“What!” she squeaks. “It’s not private. Anyone can find his page and see all his photos and read all his captions. He’s very stylish. I like his clothes.”

“Mmm. Me too.”

Flo grins and clasps her hands. I can’t help but grin back at her, and she slips out of her seat to come round to my side of the table and hug me. “I missed this March,” she says. “I’m glad you left sad, mopey March in America.”

“If I’d known you all realised I was miserable before I left, it might’ve been easier to talk to you all. I had no idea my misery was so obvious.”

“Only because you’re usually loud and bubbly and fun.”

“You knew that George and I had broken up, though.”

“Yeah, but...” She trails off and lets out a heavy sigh. “I didn’t know why. I didn’t know he was a horrible, awful person who clearly doesn’t have a heart. I thought you were just sad that it was over, not that he lied to you the whole time and cheated on you.”

“Mmm. It was pretty bad. But I’m over it now,” I say. It’s not fully true. In the end, it’s only been a couple of months since George twisted my heart right out of my chest and crushed it in front of me. But I don’t love him anymore. I don’t crave him; I don’t ache for him to love me again. I’m just sorry that I wasted two years loving someone who was loving someone else.

“Are you sure?”

I nod. “Yup. He’s nothing to me now.” I can’t bring myself to say he’s dead to me because he isn’t, he never will be. He’ll always be my first boyfriend, the first guy I fell in love with. He just happens to also be the first guy who took advantage of my love.

“And you love Arjun? And he’s officially your boyfriend?”

Hearing Arjun and boyfriend and love in the same sentence from someone else has me grinning. I can’t help it. It’s the only reasonable reaction to his name, and hearing Flo talk about him makes it seem all the more real, like this wasn’t just some summer thing. This wasn’t some crazy fever dream. I wish he was here right now, that I could wrap my arms around him and sit next to him at supper with my family, and watch his reaction to Flo’s overenthusiasm about his existence.

But he’s not here. He’s ... I don’t know where, actually. I want to say Wales. Well, no. I want to say here. But he’s with his family and I’m with mine, and I remind myself that there were so many times I wanted this while I was away and I need to appreciate these moments with my little sister.

Before we know it, I might be off to uni. I’m still not sure I want to go or what I’d study, but now the option’s there, and I can’t ignore it. And if I make a decision fast enough, I could be starting in just a few weeks.

The thought makes my gut churn with a sudden onslaught of nerves and apprehension and anticipation. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll wait until next year; maybe I’ll get a job and save every penny so I can splash out on a trip with Arjun and Young-mi without worrying that my bank account’s running low.

“You look like you’re thinking so hard, your brain is going to squeeze out of your ears,” Flo says with a grimace. “Is it painful?”

“What, thinking?”

She laughs, and I realise she’s joking. Flo doesn’t often intentionally joke. I roll my eyes at her, and lightly kick my shin. She scowls.

“Hey. Don’t hurt me – you’re gonna need me to carry you to the pudding shop.” She kicks me back, and a yelp of pain attracts the attention of several tables around us. Flo’s olive cheeks turn red when she realises she’s just kicked my bad ankle, and I swallow down a string of obscenities.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry!” she cries out. “Are you ok?”

“Could be better,” I say, when the flash of pain subsides. At Flo’s stricken expression, I add, “Could be a lot worse.”

A flood of apologies flows out of her as our food arrives, and she only shuts up when I force her to take a mouthful of veggie sausage. Flo is not much of a multi-tasker, so our conversation abates as we eat and she devotes all of her attention to her plate. Every now and then, she casts her eyes at me and it feels like she’s checking I’m still here.

When I booked my trip, I had no idea how it would affect Flo. To be honest, I didn’t really think about it. I wasn’t in a generous or selfless place at the time: all I was thinking about was me, and how to drag myself out of my pit of despair. I never stopped, in my drunken booking stupor, to think how Flo would feel when I gave her barely any notice that I was going away for three weeks.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out when we’re halfway done.

“For what?” She’s staring at her plate as she slices up one of her hash browns and matches each chunk to a piece of mushroom. As fussy as an eater as I’ve known her be, she happily devours mushrooms, spinach, and sprouts.

“For leaving. For not giving you much notice.”

She gives me a look, abandoning her food for a moment. “I don’t think you gave yourself much notice.”

Damn. She’s good. And she’s right. I didn’t.

With a shrug, she adds, “It’s not like you said, right, I’m going to get cheated on and have my heart broken and then I’m going to go to America to find someone better.”

“True.” I pile up bacon, beans and hash brown onto my fork, and a sliver of tomato. “I just need you to know that ... I don’t know, I just didn’t ever want to upset you. I was only thinking of myself.”

“I know.” Flo smiles. “You didn’t upset me. I’m just not used to you not being around. You’re always around, so I missed you extra hard. But you’re back now. Just in time, too.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“I was about to replace you with Lily. If you hadn’t dated her, Mum and Dad could have adopted her and then we’d have an awesome sister.” She shakes her head at me, her cutlery motionless in her hands as she talks. “But you had to go and get your hands all over her.”

“Sorry, Flo. In my defence, I didn’t know. And, you know, she does have her own dad. She isn’t – and never was – in need of being adopted.”

“Her dad sucks.”

“I know.”

“We’re very lucky,” she says, pausing to take a bite of buttered toast loaded with beans. “Our parents are awesome.”

“They really are.” I think about some people’s horror stories of coming out to their parents, of being disowned and thrown out, compared to my parents’ reaction to my disorganised, rambling word vomit. Like it’s a non-issue. It is a non-issue.

*

We’re halfway to the pudding shop, even though we’re both absolutely stuffed, when I get a call from Arjun. I’m about to let it ring out – I’ll text him, and call him back later, when I’m not with my sister – but Flo catches sight of his name on my screen.

She squeaks her joy and answers the call for me with a yell of, “Hi, Arjun!”

“Hello, person who sounds too English and female to be March, therefore must be ... is that Flo?”

“Yes!”

I hear him laugh and I take the phone from her with an eye-roll. “Hey, Arjun. Sorry, I’m out with Flo and she’s a bit of a cheeky monkey.”

“I gathered,” he says, still chuckling. “Is this a bad time?”

“Not bad, per se, but can I call you back when I’m home?”

“No!” Flo yells.

“Of course,” Arjun says, a lot quieter than my overexcited sister, who seems high on her breakfast – or my relationship. Perhaps the pudding shop is a bad idea. She doesn’t need to be pumped full of more sugar.
“I’ll talk to you later. Unless it’s something important?”

“Not remotely urgent,” he says. “I’m just lying in the sun on a Welsh beach while my parents are at an art gallery, and I thought I’d see if you were around for a chat. But go, be with your sister. Are you making up three weeks worth of absence to her?”

“Something like that,” I say with a laugh. “I’ll ring you in a few hours. Love you.”

I almost don’t hear his response over my sister’s swooning. When I end the call, I pull her to a stop and give her a look.

“Flo,” I say. “You have got to calm down. What’s with all the crazy enthusiasm?”

She drops onto her heels and her face falls. “I’m just happy you’re happy,” she says. Hooking her arm through mine, she leads us towards the pudding shop without another word. There’s a tight feeling in my chest, an uncomfortable twinging that says I was too harsh. And that there’s something she’s not telling me. I have a feeling what it might be.

Once we’re sitting at a table, with a couple of ridiculous puddings in front of us, I fold my arms on the tabletop and eye my little sister. It’s quiet in here, no-one else at any of the surrounding tables. I touch her elbow and ask, “Do you want to talk?”

She shifts in her seat and shrugs half-heartedly. “I’m sorry if you don’t like that I’m excited for you,” she murmurs. “I just like that you’re happy. I like that you can have a boyfriend and be in love and happy.”

I watch her, but she won’t look up at me, and I have a hunch about what she wants to say – or doesn’t want to, I can’t tell – and I try to take the most tactful approach.

“When I was in L.A., before the trip began,” I start, “I kept seeing all these gay couples, and I got so excited each time. I was only out to you and Lily and George – so weird how that’s not even a month ago – and it gave me this hyper, fuzzy feeling to see gay couples in love and think hey, that could be me, and it’ll be ok. It was like being lost in a foreign country and finding people who speak English. Like, I’m not alone and everything’s going to be fine.”

Flo pushes her plate to one side and looks up at me, her eyes huge and round and full of innocence and questioning. “When did you know?”

“On some level, pretty much forever. But I knew, and really understood, when I was eleven.”

She presses her lips together and slowly nods to herself. I ignore the scent of chocolate and batter and sugar and focus on my baby sister as she works out how to say what I think she’s going to say.

“I think I know,” she whispers. And then she bursts into tears.

Ankle be damned, I’m round to her side like a shot, and I gather her into my arms. She shrinks against me, snivelling against my chest, and I just hold her as she soaks through my shirt. I want to shush her tears and tell her there’s nothing to cry about, but I understand how she feels. Overwhelmed by something that feels so huge. So I just hold her.

Rubbing her back, I cradle her like a child – like the child she is – and I tell her I love her. That seems to make her cry more, until she hiccups and pulls away and says it back to me. I tilt her chin up and give her my warmest smile.

“You’re gonna be just fine, Flo. You’ve got me, and, like you said, we’ve got the world’s awesomest parents.”

She nods and her chin quivers, and she buries herself against me again. We sit like that for a long time, until our desserts call our names too loud to be ignored.

Much later, long after we’ve got home, I call Arjun back. We talk for hours on end about everything, except Flo’s coming out. That’s not mine to share. Instead, he tells me about being on holiday with his parents and how strange it is to have a roof over his head; I tell him about eating a chocolate-covered waffle the size of my head and hardly being able to stand straight afterwards.

He’s still on the line when I put on Schitt’s Creek; he’s there to laugh and console when I cry at Patrick’s rendition of Simply the Best. He’s there when there’s a knock on my door and when Flo comes in and asks if she can hang out with me. Arjun bids us goodnight, and Flo crawls into my bed.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I just wanted to be with you,” she says. “What’re you watching?”

I give her a rundown of the show, and how it might be my all-time favourite TV series. She seems sceptical, which I understand – it’s one of those you have to watch to fall in love with – until there’s a scene with David and Patrick.

“Are they together?” she asks.

“Yup. That’s kind of why it’s my favourite,” I say. From that moment on, she’s enrapt, leaning against me as we watch together. She drifts off against my shoulder, and only wakes up when Dad eases open my door and tells her it’s time for bed. I hear him reading to her, even though she’s been reading to herself since she was five, and then I hear the click of her door.

Dad comes back to my room and leans against my chest of drawers with his arms folded, concern written into the lines of his forehead like an elegy.

“Is Flo all right?” he asks. “She’s seemed a bit off today, and I thought you might know why.”

“She’s great,” I say, with what I hope is a reassuring tone and smile. “She’s just emotional, but in a good way. You know how she can get. She’s absolutely fine.”

“Sure?”

“Yup. She’s just overwhelmed,” I say. That’s the truth. “It’s been a weird three weeks for her, and now I’m back. It’s a lot, I think.”

Dad nods. “Ok. If you’re sure.”

“I am. I promise, if there was something wrong, I’d let you know.” I’m no snitch, but I know that if I was genuinely worried about Flo, I wouldn’t keep it to myself.

“Thanks, Scoobs,” Dad says. “Thanks for today, being with her. I know it meant a lot to her.”

“It meant a lot to me too,” I tell him. Not for any reason he’ll understand yet, not until Flo wants him to. But I feel good about today, knowing that Flo isn’t alone in this. Neither am I.

*

penultimate chapter, folks! this ended up being a lot more march&flo centric than i thought it would be, but i think it was about time. i hope you enjoyed this!
*