NINETEEN
‘It’s not possible,’ my mother told Linda. ‘There’s no other explanation for how he got all that stuff.’
It made no difference what Matty or anyone else said, she just couldn’t accept he didn’t have another girlfriend stashed away.
Listening to her going on at him made me want to punch the wall, but looking back through adult eyes, I can see she could never have given him the benefit of the doubt. Not with her Bible-before-bed upbringing and the monochrome sense of how to behave drummed into her by Grandad and Nanna G. A fact her critics, so adamant she must have known about Matty’s extracurricular activities, would do well to remember.
If anything, it was me who turned a blind eye.
‘Can’t you lay off him? Trust him for once?’
You’d have never known it to listen to her, but ever since his disappearance over Christmas, she was nervous of pushing him away again. I worried about the same thing.
Having him back reinforced how much I’d missed him, spotlit how empty life had been without him. How he’d turned our house into a home. Made our family whole.
Things began to shift between the three of us like the continental drift I was learning about at school. I moved closer to Matty and further away from my mother, the hot chocolate moment on the bench long forgotten.
Perhaps it was my hormones kicking in, the inevitable breaking away that signals the first step towards adulthood. Or perhaps I was simply trying to make Matty stay. I’m on your side. Don’t leave again.
I started confiding in him, an unconscious attempt to draw him to me. Creating a bond through the sharing of secrets. An alliance that isolated my mother and established us as an independent unit.
I had my first crush. Joey Peterson, smart and cute and no idea I existed.
‘He sits in front of me in maths class. I spend the whole time just staring at the back of his head. Don’t say anything to Mum though. You know what she’s like.’
Matty tapped the side of his nose.
‘Scouts’ honour.’
I imagined confiding in Linda. No way she’d have been that cool.
Do you think your mother never had a crush on anyone? You should talk to her.
Yeah right.
‘You’re a guy. What do I do? Should I say something?’
Matty shook his head. Mm-mm.
‘Definitely not.’
‘But—’
He leaned back against the couch, left ankle over his right knee.
‘Men are hunters, pumpkin. They like to catch their prey. It takes all the fun away if you hand them their meat on a plate.’ He spoke slowly so it’d sink in. ‘If you want this boy to like you, he needs to think you’re not into him.’
I gave him an ‘Are you nuts?’ look; an expression I’d been perfecting for a while, along with the sardonic eye roll.
He smiled, cocked a brow.
‘Trust me. Guys like a challenge.’
My mother was being a challenge, but I suspected not in the way Matty was recommending. I’d eavesdropped on a phone call between the two of them a few nights earlier, a habit of a lifetime I saw no reason to give up.
‘I just don’t understand,’ she’d said. ‘Why are you being like this?’
‘Being like what?’