There’s no one else here except for the receptionist, who is touch-typing furiously and chooses to ignore me. She is name-tagged Sheree. She looks like a Sheree. I can see my own reflection in her eyeball but she won’t look up because she’s busy and important. I’m now accustomed to being patient and polite and bottling up my resentments behind a cheerio smile, so I wait until she finally looks up at me.
“All right?” The utterly British greeting pops out of my mouth and I hear how ridiculous it sounds in my accent. “Um, hi. I’m Emma Carson. I have a meeting here.”
“Take a seat, I’ll let Greg know you’re here.” In her mind, Sheree adds, when I’m good and ready. Her typing resumes.
There’s a one-in-a-million chance that Claudia has arrived early and is in one of those closed meeting rooms.
“Has my sister arrived yet? Claudia Carson?”
Claudia’s name rings a bell with this woman. Her eyes spark and her mouth becomes a smile. She stops typing and rests her elbows on her desk. “No, she’s not here. She’s your sister? How lucky.”
“Oh, do you know her?”
“I feel like I do. Model Behavior was so addictive. My friends came over every week to watch it and we drank wine and gave ourselves manicures. We were Team Claudia, right from the start. We even had the pink T-shirts.”
I don’t have to work hard to imagine Sheree and her squad. Model Behavior was a reality TV show. Beautiful boys and girls locked in a compound filled with cameras, fruit platters, and sun loungers. Girls in bikinis fought endlessly over one smug prat named Jordan. It. Was. Dreck. Have I been ruined by BBC period dramas, Shakespeare, and West End shows? Yes.
“Yes, it was really good.” I have no conviction in my voice and I definitely don’t fool Sheree. She looks at me with narrowed eyes. She smells snob.
“Claudia won the entire competition. She’s incredible. If I were you, I’d be so proud.” With a sniff, she begins typing again, and I can see that her hands are shaking a little with new nerves. Her eyes begin flicking toward the door, over and over. She finally gives up on work and begins to check her appearance.
I drag my bag to a chair that is half-obscured by a huge potted plant and set up camp. My neck pillow is hanging from the strap of my bag, my clothes are creased, and my hair is unraveling. I’m dead to Sheree now, so she won’t care if I unbraid my hair and brush it. It’s a huge, thick, wavy nightmare. There are probably hikers lost in there. But I can’t cut it short, because without the weight it grows outward into a ball formation. I’ve seen pictures of my mom. She gifted me with this particular genetic burden: huge hair.
I create three ropes and begin rebraiding. Pip was one of my London flatmates and she once told me my hair looked like a braided peach strudel. She was very drunk at the time and meant it as a compliment. She picked it up in both hands, pretending to bite into it. “Delishusss,” she said over and over until we flagged down an adorable black cab home.
I study it critically now as it lays vertically down my chest and do have to admit that it just needs some sugar granules and some glimpses of hot fruit. My stomach growls loudly. Sheree coughs and I jerk in my seat. She’s not looking at me. She has no idea there’s someone in this room thinking about taking out a knife and cutting off a snack portion of her own braid. That’s the great thing about brains. It’s all a secret.
I recheck that Claudia’s present hasn’t gotten squashed, even though I know it was fine the last time I looked. I should have gone with hot-pink gift wrap. That’s her signature color, like Barbie. Glittery gold wrap; what was I thinking? A whirring sensation begins in the pit of my stomach and I have to tell myself forcefully, don’t be nervous. She’s not a kid anymore. You can’t ruin everything with the wrong gift-wrap choice. Probably not.
Please don’t be nervous. Please don’t be nervous. I say it to myself until my body begins to obey.
For me to describe Claudia, I first have to admit that I once made a wish—and it came true. Crazy, right? I know on an intellectual level that it wasn’t me who created this outcome. I don’t have special powers. I wasn’t an omniscient narrator, intoning what was soon to come while my widower father sat in the dark playing his dead wife’s favorite records. I was just a kid and I didn’t know what I was asking for.
But I wished so hard. That’s what always gets me. I was standing on a kitchen chair when I asked my mom for something special. My request streamed out of my chest like a sunbeam, from me to her, lighting up heaven, and that night I rode my bike under a sunset that was every shade of pink. One nod from Mom and the plan was in motion. That’s why my heart still believes I made it happen.
And like all big wishes, I paid a price.
To avoid following that particular train of thought, I start to think about my golden steaming braid again, just as the glass door to Centurion Security pushes open and a young woman steps in. Unlike my inelegant backward-pachyderm entrance, she looks like she’s slipping through red-velvet curtains onto a stage. A spotlight wobbles and then encircles her in full focus. She carries glossy cardboard shopping bags, strung around each wrist like bunches of rectangle helium balloons that strain heavily below her waist.
The bags have expensive logos: Chanel, Prada, Fendi, Tiffany & Co. The audience knows this is a girl of generous means. She’s wearing a dress that sparkles. Her hair is long and Old-Hollywood white-blonde. She lifts her face to the light and her audience thinks, holy shit. Ineloquent, but we’re all in the same boat there.
Here she is, Claudia Carson, my own personal wish come true, and this is how she enters every single room.
About the Author
SALLY THORNE lives in Canberra, Australia, and spends her days writing funding submissions and drafting contracts (yawn!), so it’s not surprising that after hours she climbs into colorful fictional worlds of her own creation. She lives with her husband in a house filled with vintage toys, too many cushions, a haunted dollhouse, and the world’s sweetest pug. The Hating Game is her first novel.
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