Page 7 of Our Secret Moments

The small kitchen and living room areas are a mess. Throw blankets are covering the floor and the couch, perfectly set up from our reading session before we went to the party last night. The sink and counters are clean, apart from the bowls of ice cream. I pull out a water bottle from the fridge, shoving a pill into my mouth to get rid of the nausea and the headache that is festering.

“What did you get up to last night?” she asks, her voice oddly chipper. Well, Nora is always chipper, but considering last night's fiasco, I assumed she'd be more concerned than she is.

“You seriously didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?” she asks, still pacing. “Wes made me stand by the pool for an hour while I watched him try to do backflips into the water. I had my phone ready to call nine-one-one the whole time. So, I was pretty busy.”

Wes Mackenzie is like the childhood friend you get forced to play with before you realise that you’re stuck with him forever. Ever since we were kids, he’s been attached to Nora’s hip like an emotional support puppy. I can't for the life of me figure how they’re still best friends when all they do is argue and annoy each other. Nora being a theatre major and him being a football player makes no sense to me. But it works for them.

They’re always caught in ridiculous situations. He once got himself stuck in a washing machine for a TikTok. Nora once asked him for help while Elle and I were busy to help pin up a costume and he accidentally stitched her in.

Regardless of any foolishness they get up to, they’re always laughing by the end of it. At least they have fun together because the second her boyfriend Ryan turns up, he’s frowning and he’s constantly telling Nora to quit being friends with him.

I don’t think Wes and Nora could ever stop being friends. The world would have to split in two, forcing them on two different planets for them to stop being the crazy, chaotic ball of sunshine that they are together.

“Right. Well, guess who got shoved into the Manifestation Chamber,” I mutter, adding the much-needed fake excitement to my voice.

“Oh my god! You know what that means right?”

I knew that the second the words left my mouth that Nora would be all over it. If I thought Elle and I liked romance, Nora was a walking Taylor Swift song. She’s been obsessed with love since she knew what it meant. Which is why she is always starring in productions where she plays a beautiful heroine who has the male leads at her feet.

“Yeah, but it was with, uh, Connor,” I say, ripping the bandaid right off.

I drunkenly admitted to her once a few years ago that I used to have a crush on her brother when we were kids, but she never brought it up again. What she doesn’t know is that I’ve been caught by Elle checking him out a few (at least five) times.

He’s as good-looking as he is stupid. Which is a fuckton. So that’s why I’ve been politely declining all of Nora’s invites to go see him and Wes play. I know for a fact if I saw him in his uniform, his helmet in hand, I would lose all composure andfold like a lawn chair. So, I’m staying as far away from him as possible and it has been working out great so far. Until last night.

“Connor as in Connor Bailey?” she gawks, saying her twin brother's name as if it physically repulses her.

“Unless we know someone else called Connor,” I say.

She stops still, dropping her hand with her script in defeat. She looks at me for a second, holding my stare, those bright chocolate eyes staring into mine. For a second, I thought she was getting ready to launch the highlighter at me, but instead she lets out a soft, “Ew.”

“I know! I mean, obviously nothing happened. He was just being annoying about the whole thing,” I say, my shoulders relaxing.

“Yeah, he was moaning through the door so people would think you were sucking him off,” Elle says nonchalantly.

I don’t know when she suddenly woke up, but she walks into the living room, her gym bag slung over her shoulder, looking as refreshed and put-together as ever, her curly hair tied into a bun on top of her head. Nora’s face turns pale at Elle’s comment.

“But that is not what happened.At all,” I say to Nora, trying my best to reassure her as she eyes me suspiciously. “I swear.”

“Okay…” she says slowly, packing away her script into the tote bag on the couch. “Because if you were doing anything remotely gross in that closet, I’d have to redact myself from both of your lives. You’d get all touchy feely and that would be uncomfortable forallof us.” She shivers at the thought, shaking her head. I stand, stunned into silence as I watch her take a deep breath. “Anyway,” she says, her tone suddenly bright as she hitches her bag higher up on her shoulder. “I’ve got to go to rehearsals. Good luck for your grade, Cat. I'm sure you’ll have done great.”

There’s something truly unique about how a Bailey exits a conversation.

The trudge to class is as gruelling as ever. Part of me doesn’t even want to go in there, sitting next to my more than amazing class friends who fly by these assignments with ease, while I'm constantly in fear of not living up to my potential.

My dad enrolled me into Drayton the second the applications opened. It’s where he and my mom met, and it got them both to where they wanted to be.

My mom was a romantic, a hopeless one. And my dad would do anything for her. He did everything to get her to notice him as she actively avoided him and pretended he didn’t exist. Until one day, she couldn’t ignore her feelings for him anymore, no matter how hard she tried, and she gave in.

They spent their days at the library, picking out books for each other and were doing ‘buddy reads’ before it was even a thing. From the stories I’ve been told by my grandma JoJo, they were inseparable and just being in their presence was what made everyone around them feel young.

When they graduated – my dad with a degree in literature and politics and my mom in literature and journalism – they both worked hard to get a stable career before they ever thought about having kids. They managed to balance their love, career and a child together and I was able to grow up knowing I was a product of their love and got to experience it first hand. As much as the fairy tales intrigued me, I wanted to know the deeper things. About my mom especially.

Since she passed away five years ago, my dad has found it hard to talk about her. Being born to immigrant parents from Jamaica, I wanted to know every single thing about my mom’s childhood.

When my dad told me stories about her, he never mentioned what she was like before they fell in love, or what she was like as a child or a teenager. He had always told me that she never wanted to talk about it and that never made sense to me.

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