Scene 1
I would like to state for the record that it was never my intention to fall in love.
I was going to stay way away from all that, even after what happened in church. And maybe even after that, but you know Cupid: He’ll get you when you least expect it.
The whole thing was kind of Teddy’s fault, because if it hadn’t been for his ridiculous plan, I’d never even have known about the existence of Katherine Cooper-Bunting.
I’d reluctantly agreed to help Dad clear out the spare room for Grandad, but not five minutes into the endeavor, my phone dinged. I put down the bin bag I was holding and squeezed the phone out of my shorts pocket.
“It’s only Teddy,” I told Dad somewhat unnecessarily. No one else ever messaged me.
The thing is, when you’ve been friends with Theodore Booker forever, you kind of don’t question these things.
“Teddy is having some sort of emergency,” I said.
Dad rolled his eyes. “Fine. Go. But hurry back, I can’t carry that dreadful filing cabinet by myself.”
“Why do we even have it?”
“Everything used to be on paper before the internet. Bills, bank statements—you wouldn’t remember,” Dad said, and started ripping up A4 sheets and putting them in the recycling bag.
I quickly changed into my short florally summer dress (flowers equal cute, right?) and, not bothering to put on shoes, walked over to Teddy’s house.
We’d been neighbors all our lives; our parents are—well, were—literally BFFs, and Teddy and I were born only four months apart. And even though our mothers insist this was merely a coincidence rather than the result of meticulous reproductive planning, we knew the truth.
We were Teddy and Tilly, brother and sister but not.
The moment I walked through the creaky gate, his front door flew open.
“Come in, come in,” Teddy said, gesticulating manically.
“I’m coming. What’s the matter with you?”
“Here’s the story,” he said, and looked at his phone. “It is now sixteen forty-seven. At seventeen hundred hours, Katherine Cooper-Bunting is going to arrive for her last piano lesson before taking a summer break, and we have to find out what she’s doing for said break, so we can accidentally on purpose run into her, so I can ask her out, because I’m fiercely in love with her.”
“Who the hell is Katherine Cooper-Bunting? And why have you literally never mentioned this fierce love?” I asked.
“It was a silent kind of fierce love. Plus, I haven’t really seen her in person for a couple of years, and let’s just say there’s an almost ethereal difference between fourteen-year-old her and the now-sixteen-year-old her.”
“Ethereal,” I repeated, nodding, hoping he knew how crazy he sounded.
“I’m also fueled by testosterone,” Teddy said, and flexed his biceps as if they had undergone a gigantic transformation since he’d turned sixteen. “Why are you laughing, Matilda?”
“Because you being fueled by anything apart from Haribo is literally disturbing. Also, you’re wearing a Care Bears T-shirt.”
“Hey, don’t ever mock the power of the Care Bears. This is Love-a-Lot Bear, by the way.”
“Can you put on a Testosterone Bear one instead, maybe?”
“Ha ha, hilarious, Tilly, I’m finally a joke even to you,” he said, and led me into their narrow front room. “I thought you’d be really pleased at me making a conscious effort to move on from Grace.”
I looked at him.
We hadn’t talked about Grace in the longest time.
“Um, Teddy, why don’t you just ask out this Katherine Cooper-Something? Then we don’t have to stalk her. Because you realize that’s weird, right?”
“Bunting. Cooper-Bunting. For a number of reasons, all of which I could explain to you if time wasn’t of the essence right now, but it is with—no!—eleven minutes until her arrival. Are you listening to me?”
“I always listen to you.”
“Here’s the plan. She’s one of those punctual types, which means that at exactly seventeen hundred hours, she’s going to knock on the door. Mum is going to come and open the door, at which point we’ll have approximately fifteen seconds of ‘Hello, Mrs. Booker,’ ‘Hello, Katherine,’ before the front door will shut, at which point Katherine Cooper-Bunting is going to see me casually leaning against the doorframe here, and you’re going to sit in the green chair over there, and you’re going to laugh like I’ve just said the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.”
“Have you hit your head recently?”
“Fine, Tilly. Forget about it—you don’t have to stay.”
“No, I’m staying. Sorry. Continue.”
“Right, go and sit in the chair. I’m getting Rachmaninoff. You’ll be holding him. I’ll also grab a hoodie or something.”
Approximately forty-five seconds later, Teddy, now wearing a lumberjack-style long-sleeved thing I’d never seen on him before, carried the screaming, three-legged Rachmaninoff into the room and plopped him onto my lap. The cat then proceeded to shout at me, like I had something to do with him being torn away from whatever he’d been busy with.
“Sorry, mate,” I said, restraining him.
Rachmaninoff growled and tried to bite me.
“Fuck off!” I hissed, and held him down.
Teddy disappeared again, and when he came back, his violin in hand, I knew he’d lost his mind for real this time.
Both of us were born into musical families, but neither of us had inherited the musician gene, which was the cause of unspeakable embarrassment for our parents. Mum and Dad gave up on my musical education pretty early, but only because my older sister, Emilin, was already a genius on the piano. But because Teddy’s an only child, his parents literally didn’t want to believe how utterly useless he was and made him take Grade 2 violin exams when he was twelve and all the other kids were, like, six. When he couldn’t get through the theme tune of The Flintstones, they took him home and never spoke of it again.
“Teds, why this setup?” I asked, still wrestling with Rachmaninoff, who was trying to full-body launch himself off my lap.
“Girls like guys with cute animals,” he said, nodding at the still-screaming cat from actual hell.
“And I’m here because?”
“Because, seeing me with another woman will make me immediately more desirable. Especially if that woman is clearly appreciating my company, hence why you’re going to LOL.”
I raised my eyebrows at the violin.
“Every girl likes a musician. Also, it indicates I’m good with my hands, which, you know, is a really good quality. Sexually speaking.”
“Ew!”
“And she absolutely doesn’t have to know that I’m not a musician.”
“What if she asks you to play together?”
Momentary terror washed across his cute little face, but it was all too late, because—
Knock
Knock
Knock.
“Hell and damnation,” Teddy panic-whispered, and turned around on the spot for no reason. “And you have to call me Theodore.”
“The fuck?” I whispered back, and then his mum walked past.
“Hi, Tilly.”
“Hi, Amanda.”
“Are you all right, Teddy?” his mum asked him after spotting his violin.
Then she opened the front door, and the next fifteen seconds played out as predicted, all “hello, hello,” as did the closing of the door, Katherine Cooper-Bunting’s sudden presence in the hallway, and us appearing in her direct line of vision.
What happened next happened fast.
Teddy was suddenly frozen to the spot, but being the reliable friend I am, I remembered that I was expected to laugh hysterically, and so I threw my head back and made a noise I’d never made before, which scared the shit out of Rachmaninoff, who screamed, bit me (which was okay because, apart from a leg, he’s also missing all of his teeth), and threw himself off me, before hopping out of the room and disappearing down the hallway surprisingly fast for a cat with only three legs.
Everyone kind of stood back to let him pass, but nobody spoke until Teddy’s mum looked at Teddy and went: “Why on earth are you wearing my blouse?”
I caught the shortest glimpse of Katherine Cooper-Bunting, who may or may not have been smirking, but who left the scene quickly with Teddy’s mum, and less than a minute later, we heard her limbering up her fingers with a bunch of featherlight-sounding scales.
Teddy still hadn’t moved.
His eyes looked enormous.
He didn’t blink.
“I feel like this could have gone better,” I said quietly, so as not to startle him.
He cradled his violin like a doll and slowly slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor.
“Why me?” he asked, and then looked up. “What if there’s literally only that one person out there for us? And what if it was Grace? I’m too young to know I’m going to die alone.”
“Teddy—”
“I actually think about that a lot.”
“I don’t believe that. And not all is lost,” I said. “Maybe catch her after her lesson, hey?”
“Or maybe I’ll just go to my room and never come out again.”
“I don’t think you should do that,” I said, and got off the green chair. “I’m sorry I ruined it.”
“You didn’t. I’m stupid. I’ve completely forgotten how to behave in real life. I mean, it’s not TikTok, is it? You can’t kind of just do it again and post it when it’s perfect. Real life really sucks … You look nice, by the way.”
“Thanks. And you should at least say hello to her. I mean, if your love is still fierce.”
“I’m such a joke.”
“Blame the hormones, I always do. I better go. Dad and I are doing up Grandad’s room.”
“Oh shit, I knew that. Sorry for dragging you away. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I lied. “See you, Teds.”
“She’s beautiful, though, isn’t she?” he whispered, and looked up at me as I stepped over him.
Copyright © 2024 by Wibke Brueggemann