Living With Boys

seven // tough titties

Isabelle: I told Valerie. About the Will thing.

Zara: It's good to get it off your chest. What did she say?

Isabelle: Couldn't say anything for like 30 minutes. It would almost be funny if it didn't remind me that the whole situation is a shitshow. But she wholeheartedly agrees it is fucked!

Zara: It is fucked. Kick him in the balls for me xx

Isabelle: You're right, that would make my living situation way more fun

***

"Okay," said Kai. "Last stop."

We had spent all morning and the afternoon trawling through stores and picking up old furniture. The back of the truck was loaded with a bedside table, chest of drawers, a wooden desk and matching chair and a deep green loveseat, while the seats in the car were filled with lamps and coat hangers and a large blank canvas to decorate and hang above my bed. I'd only spent a few hundred dollars, borrowed from Kai to be paid back with my first cheque, and had everything I needed to make my space cosy and liveable.

But Kai had parked in front of a vintage furniture store that I had been obsessed with in high school, at the height of my carpentry phase. Because I had been so enamoured with their pieces, I also knew it was expensive as all shit.

I tapped my brother on the shoulder. "Hey, I don't know if you were aware, but my budget hasn't actually tripled in the last thirty minutes, by the way."

"I'll pay," said Kai. "You need a bedframe, and you shouldn't wait until you have time to flip one. I'm not letting you sleep on a floor mattress like a degenerate. I think only drug dealers do that."

I raised an eyebrow. "Do I look like someone who can afford a mattress? I was going to stack some yoga mats on the floor and cover myself with newspaper."

Kai turned around in horror, until he clocked the grin on my face. "Oh, shut up, Iz. What are you actually sleeping on?"

"I have a blow-up mattress for camping. It's comfortable."

Kai's eyes widened. "That mattress you were sleeping on this morning? I thought that was temporary!"

Kai had slept on a floor mattress until he got a job at fourteen. Maria, our mother, had bought him a bedframe, but, in a non-shocking twist of events, had never bought one for me. Kai had donated his to me the first time Maria went out. I appreciated his concern—he had always been a far better brother than he needed to be—but I didn't want him paying for me when he had already spent so much of his life bailing me out of hardship.

"Absolutely not," Will cut in. "You are not sleeping on a camping mattress."

I rolled my eyes. "Thanks, Dad. But I'm a big girl, I think I will be fine."

"You won't," said Will. "You don't have enough money to afford a physiotherapist to treat your impending back troubles."

"Aren't back troubles more your wheelhouse, old man?"

Will did not look impressed, but his expression was undercut by the floral lamp balanced on his lap. It was an excellent purchase for that reason alone. I gave him a pinky wave.

In some ways, it was easier to handle his presence since confessing to Valerie the sad, lonely truth of what went down—or didn't go down—between Will and I almost five years ago. For so long, the only person I'd been able to tell was Zara, and she was constitutionally obliged by the founding state of best friendship to support me entirely against wicked boys who broke my heart. But my secret fear for so long had been that our friendship was manufactured in my mind; that I had never been Will's real friend, and I was simply an obligation that came along with his real friendship with Kai. And that I was the village idiot who hadn't realised, where everyone else but me had known.