Thembi and I spent the day buying fabrics for my dress. It had started out weirdly; I didn’t know how to act around her, with her strange monotone replies. But after a while I kind of realized that she was just like that, always giving short, sharp answers to people and not putting much effort into her tone. In fact, she reminded me of Zac a little.
And by the time we’d finished shopping, we were chatting away like friends who’d known each other for years. I was surprised by how easily conversation flowed. I’m not sure why I’m always so surprised when I get on well with someone. Dr. Finkelstein said that I put up a protective wall around myself. That I go through life expecting people to be horrible to me, and when they’re not, it surprises me. Like with Jake. While I was thrilled, okay, more than thrilled, we were hanging out, it still surprised me.
When Thembi and I had finished shopping, we headed back to her house.
“Oh.” Thembi stopped us before slipping her keys into the front door. “Don’t say anything to my parents about fashion design, they don’t know that I’m doing it next year.”
“What?” I asked.
“They think I’m going to study medicine to follow in their footsteps. They don’t know that I’ve applied to the Paris School of Fashion Design.”
“Crap!”
“Yeah, crap,” Thembi echoed.
“Are you going to tell them?”
She forced a grimace. “I’m going to have to at some stage. Especially when they realize I didn’t even apply for medicine.”
I stared at her, and she shrugged playfully. But I could see there was nothing playful about the shrug. Painful maybe.
“I’m destined to be a designer, Lori. Besides, I hate blood.” She turned the key and the massive door swung open.
“Hey.” She walked inside and called out, her tone flatter than usual.
“Hey, love.” Her mom came around the corner and I tried not to do a double take when I saw her. And when her dad appeared, I had to try even harder.
“Mom, Dad, this is Lori Palmer, she’s new. She just moved here from Joburg.”
“Lori, hello. Nice to meet you.” Her mom extended her hand for me to shake, and so did her dad. They both looked so different than Thembi, and it wasn’t their skin color—that wasn’t the reason I’d had to remind my jaw not to fall open.
Thembi’s mom wore a pair of old beige corduroy pants and an ill-fitting paisley blouse in orange and brown. Her hair was long, almost down to her lower back, and looked like it had never been dyed. The rough, gray strands breaking up the dark brown made her look older than she probably was. She wore no makeup and the only adornments on her body were two strange wooden earrings hanging from her lobes. I turned my attention to her dad; he was also gray-haired, and looked even older because he was wearing one of those tweed jackets with the brown leather patches over the elbows. This was not what I was expecting. I was expecting glamour and glitz, a mother in Gucci and a dad like Kanye and . . .
“We’re going to study upstairs,” Thembi quickly said. “We have a biology test.”
I nodded quickly, feeling uncomfortable about this lie I was caught in the middle of.
“I suppose we don’t have to remind you how important biology is?” Her mother had a strange, probing tone in her voice.
“I know.” Thembi nodded.
Her father looked at her strangely now. “You’re withholding. Is there something you want to tell us?”
“Dad, can we not do this now, please.”
“Do what?” her father asked.
“Can you not analyze me for one day?”
“I’m just saying, your body language and tone seem to be concealing something.” Her dad leaned in.
“Are you slipping behind at school?” her mother asked. “Is that why Lori is here to help you study?”
“No, Mom.” Thembi started walking off, and I gave her parents a quick smile before following her.
“Can I bring you girls some juice or something?” her mom shouted after us as we walked up the staircase.
“No, thanks,” Thembi replied without looking back. We walked into her room, and again, it was not what I’d been expecting . . . at all. It was neat. Precise. And so bloody brown and cream and beige.
“I know,” she said with a long sigh. “It’s disgusting.”
I spun around. “Well, I wouldn’t say that, but . . . it’s not what I expected.”
“Yeah, I know.” She kicked her shoes off and then moved over to a small bar fridge by her desk. She took out two bottles of sparkling water and handed me one. I didn’t know what I was more impressed by, the bar fridge or the fact the bottles had her name on them.
“It’s a water delivery service. They deliver bottles with our names on them and then pick them up at the end of the week and return them filled the next day. My parents say that water is the single most important thing for optimal brain function.”
“I see.” I took the lid off and sipped. I should remember that for Zac.
“I forgot to tell you, I’m adopted,” she said glibly.
“Yeah, I kind of guessed that.” I walked in a small circle and then sat down on the leather couch against the wall. “Your parents seem, very . . .” I was searching for the words.
“Different?” She sat down next to me. “My dad is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and my mother is a neuroanthropologist.”
“A what?” I asked.
“She studies the ways that culture influences the structure of the brain and vice versa. She’s a professor at UCT and my dad has published a million books called A Thriving Adolescent, Understand Your Teen, and my personal favorite, Learn to Speak Teen.”
I chuckled at this.
“You have to watch your tone around him. Trust me, he will scrutinize everything you do and say. It’s like living with a surveillance camera pointed at you.”
I looked at Thembi and wondered if that was the reason for her short, sharp, often flat way of speaking. She’d trained herself to have a neutral tone at all times.
“Sometimes, it’s so exhausting.” She sighed loudly.
“And they think you’re going to study medicine?”
“Apparently, I’m destined to be the next great neuropsychiatrist, or surgeon. Their greatest fear is that I would settle for something as pedestrian as a general practitioner.”
“They have no idea you want to do fashion?”
She shook her head. “I must have gotten my creative genes from my biological parents. Reality is, I don’t care about the brain. All I care about is how to make the body beautiful.”
“Do you know who they are, your biological parents?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I looked down at the bottle in my hand, and watched the condensation slip down the side and trickle onto my hand.
“Sometimes I think I’m adopted, but no one bothered telling me,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
I paused. I would normally never get this personal with someone so quickly, but Thembi had let me into her world. “You know Barbara Palmer of Palm Luxury Realty.”
She sat up straight and her eyes widened. “You’re shitting me? That’s your mom? The one from all the YouTube videos?” The flatness in her tone was gone now, and I got a feeling I was starting to glimpse the real Thembi.
“The very same.”
“And I thought my mom was weird. You know, she brings Neanderthal skulls to our house. And I once found human brain dissections in our freezer, and my dad once psychoanalyzed me because I told him I had a dream about being a peanut butter sandwich.”
I burst out laughing. “That’s equally weird!”
“And your dad?” she asked.
“My parents are divorced. My dad screwed some twenty-something-year-old in a hot tub.”
“More and more interesting by the minute.” She paused. “I wish my parents would get divorced.” There was now a hint of sadness in her voice.
“You don’t. Trust me.”
“No, I do. They can’t stand each other sometimes.”
“They don’t look like it.”
“Looks can be deceiving. My dad thinks his research and career are more important than my mother’s, and she thinks hers are . . . their jobs are the most important things to them.”
“My brother is autistic,” I blurted out for some strange reason, and immediately regretted it.
“My mother always says that neurodiversity is the next step in the evolution of the human brain. That neurodiverse brains actually have a competitive edge. Some companies are even seeking to employ neurodiverse people.”
“Really?” I went quiet and thoughtful for a moment, while I considered this. Perhaps it was true. The idea that Zac’s autism was some kind of a mistake had never sat right with me. I’d never viewed his brain as defective in any way. If anything, I’d always seen it as superior in the way it functioned, and saw things and drew connections that others couldn’t. There was genius inside Zac, and perhaps the world around us was just defective because it couldn’t understand his rare and special gifts.
“I wish I had a sibling.” Thembi broke my train of thought. “But they only wanted one so they could focus all their energy on creating the perfect child.” She stood up and walked into the middle of the room. “Oh well, they’re going to be so disappointed when they realize that I’m far from perfect.”
Thembi pulled a small stepladder out from under her bed and climbed onto it.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she reached up and pulled on the string hanging from the ceiling. As she did, the ceiling opened and a staircase folded out from the attic.
“We’re going up to my real bedroom,” she said with a mischievous smile, and started climbing. I followed her, and when I got up there, I looked around the room in shock.
“What the . . . ?” Now this, this was what I’d expected. The walls were covered in cutouts from magazines—models wearing amazing clothes, walking down catwalks. In the middle of the room stood one of those dressmaking busts, bright fabrics draped over its shoulders. A table was covered in patterns and fabrics, piles of tape measures, and more scissors than she probably needed.
“How do your parents not know you have this room?” I asked.
“They do. They just don’t know what’s in it. They believe in giving teens privacy and their own space, to allow us to express in a healthy manner.” She said that last part with a put-on voice; I guess it was meant to sound like her father.
She put the bag down and pulled out the fabrics we’d chosen—well, that she’d guided me to choose. I still wasn’t sure about them. I rarely deviated from black, and here were these bright emerald greens. But in a way, I didn’t really care, since I was never going to wear this dress anyway. I wouldn’t dream of wearing anything like this, and I probably—definitely—wasn’t going to my dad’s wedding, or the dance.
“Okay.” Thembi turned to me. “I need to measure you.”
My stomach dropped. She might as well get the scale out and weigh me too. It’s amazing how much power a number on a scale can hold. How much your self-worth can be wrapped up in those few little digits. I once read that your weight isn’t a constant, it actually depends on where you weigh yourself, because weight is the measure of how much gravity pulls on your body. So, if I was on the moon, I would weigh less. How I wished we lived on the moon right now.
“Uh . . . okay,” I said tentatively, trying to shut up my inner bully, who was being very vocal right now. My heart pounded in my chest as Thembi flipped a small book open, put a pencil behind her ear, and draped a tape measure around her neck.
What’s she going to think of you when she realizes how fat you are? the bully whispered in my ear. I took a deep breath and mentally told her to back the hell off. (I was trying a more aggressive approach with her now!)
“Stand here.” Thembi pointed and I moved. She seemed a little far away now; she had that same look I got when I was about to start a painting. When I stare at a blank canvas and see a million possibilities of what it could be. Michelangelo once said that the sculpture was already inside the marble, his job was just to chisel it out. I wondered if that was the same for fabrics? The design was already there, just waiting to be cut out and sewn together. I waited for her to descend with her tape measure. I hoped she wasn’t going to turn around and say we hadn’t bought enough material, because she’d underestimated my size. But she didn’t say a word as she zoned out and wrapped and unwrapped the tape, instructing me to lift arms and put them down until . . .
“You have such huge boobs,” she declared.
“Oh, I . . .” I quickly folded my arms, feeling self-conscious.
She leaned over to the table and scribbled my bust measurement down. “I would give anything to have even ten percent of those. I’m as flat as a board.”
“What?” I said, taken aback.
“I was so self-conscious when everyone was getting bras.” She shook her head. “That was a crap time for me.” She said it casually, but it was anything but casual to me. I stared at her. I couldn’t believe that this person in front of me, this gorgeous, perfect-looking person, had something she was insecure about. It had never occurred to me that people who looked like her would have anything to feel insecure about. I wanted absolutely everything she had, and she was saying she wanted something of mine. She looked up at me again.
“I asked my parents for a boob job for my sixteenth birthday.” She smiled. “You can imagine how that idea went down. My father thought I was having some teen identity crisis.”
“I go to a therapist,” I said, without thinking.
“I went to a therapist, too, for a while,” she said, and I blinked. Why would someone like her need to go to a therapist?
“Wh-what did you go for?” I asked, even though I probably knew I shouldn’t.
“A while back, I sort of had some issues about being adopted. It’s weird not knowing where you come from sometimes; I guess that also makes it hard to know where you fit.”
“Oh,” I said, thrown by how candid she was being with me.
“Why do you go to a therapist?”
“Uh . . . anxiety,” I whispered, almost under my breath. I half expected her to look up at me with shock. But she didn’t even flinch.
“We’re done here.” She put down the measuring tape.
“Okay.” I breathed a small sigh of relief and then moved away and started looking at the walls.
“Did you do these?” I asked, pointing to one of the many sketches on the wall.
“Yes.” She came and stood next to me.
“They’re really good.”
“I know. Watch out, Paris Fashion Week!” I laughed and Thembi joined in. What she lacked in boobs, she made up for in confidence, and I admired that. Her phone beeped and she glanced at the screen, immediately rolling her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“My boyfriend is acting shady. We were supposed to go out tonight, and he’s canceling on me. Something’s up.”
“What do you think it is?”
She dropped her phone on the chair and then shrugged. “Don’t know. Are you dating anyone?” she asked, and I burst out laughing. She looked at me blankly, as if she didn’t know why I was laughing.
“No,” I said quickly.
“Leave your boyfriend or girlfriend in Joburg?”
“Well, kind of. I sort of left two back there . . . well, they’re my best friends, but they call me their girlfriend. Guy always jokes that we’re the only nonsexual threesome in the world.” I turned when I heard arguing coming from downstairs. Thembi threw her hands in the air in frustration.
“They couldn’t just wait a couple of hours before they started this! At least until you’ve left.”
I stood there awkwardly and tried not to listen as Thembi flopped into a chair, her usual bravado and confidence slipping off her. I felt sorry for her.
“I’m sure it will be over soon,” she said apologetically. “They’re ‘expressing’ themselves.” She gestured air quotes. “Apparently, it’s all part of having a healthy relationship. If you ask me, I don’t really know how healthy their relationship actually is.”
“My parents never used to fight. And they got divorced. Maybe you’re meant to fight sometimes,” I offered.
“Or maybe humans aren’t meant to be with one person for the rest of their lives. Maybe we were meant to be with a person for a period of time, get what we need from them in that moment, and then move on?” she said thoughtfully, and I immediately thought of Jake.
“Or maybe, some relationships are just toxic. Look what happened to Rose Maponyane. Did you see that art?”
My throat immediately tightened at the mention of it, and all I could manage was a small nod.
“Imagine getting into a relationship with someone who actually ends up harming you, or worse, killing you?” she said and looked straight at me. “It’s scary. But that’s a reality for many women in this country. And I tell you, whoever painted that stuff should be given a medal.”
I looked down at my hands when she said this, and that’s when I noticed the small dot of red paint on one of my nails. I rubbed it off quickly. I didn’t know if I deserved a medal; in fact, a part of me felt that I didn’t deserve this kind of praise at all. I had stumbled upon Rose by accident in a way; I hadn’t even known who she was. Banksy knew what he was saying with his art. Did I?
There are no such things as accidents. Only meant-to-be’s. I heard Xander’s words in my head, but was suddenly distracted when my phone beeped. I scrambled to get it out of my pocket. I looked at the screen and felt my cheeks go warm. I hoped Thembi hadn’t noticed that.
“Who is it?” she asked.
I shrugged. “No one.” Only it was someone. It was Jake.