Chapter 1
I’m giving my brother Daryl a bubble bath and thinking of Byron, possibly smiling like a lovesick domkop too. I place the sponge on Daryl’s head and squeeze the warm, soapy water over his face. My baby brother loves it when I do this—it’s like a kiss from a llama to him—and titters, trying to look at me. I don’t want him to get soap in his eyes, so I cover his eyelids with my other hand.
“Good boy,” I say, smiling back.
An ache starting in the pit of my belly causes me to laugh out.
From the next room, my mother asks, ‘What’s funny, Marileen?’ and I go, Oops. Was I that loud?
“Nothing,” I say.
“Then why are you simpering?”
Simpering? Ok. I get it. She didn’t hear my driveshaft laugh. (People say I sound like a driveshaft when I laugh in bursts.) She saw me.
Stupid me. How could I forget? She can see Daryl and I from the bedroom. We have an indirect view of each other through the open bathroom door, thanks to the combined reflections of the dressing-table mirror and the bathroom wall mirror. I’ve been in her bedroom enough times to observe how both mirrors gang up and expose.
“Just something someone said at school yesterday,” I say.
“Tell me.”
“Ok.” I smile, feeling giggly again. “This guy at my school…”
“What guy? What’s his name?”
“Byron.”
“Mrs. Vanderwinteren’s kid?”
“Yeah. Well, he was calling somebody out.”
“What’s this ‘somebody’s’ name? And what was Byron upset about?”
“Mum, it doesn’t matter what he was upset about. It makes no difference to the point of my story. Neither do their names.”
“Ok. Go on.”
“While Byron is telling him off, the other kid yells, ‘Fuck off’, and Byron says, ‘You oughta say fuck along: it’s politer that way.’” I laugh.
My mother stares at me. “Is that it?”
“You should have seen the look on the other kid’s face. He was Elmer Fudd confused. He must have been thinking about what Byron said, and if it was true, when he should have been thinking, Hey, waitaminit, I’m not trying to be polite.”
“Bet you’re totally crushing on Byron.”
“Mum, no. Gahd, no.”
“You dwell on anything he says or does. And again, he’s hot.”
My mum reads meaning into everything. In conversations with her, I have to avoid ‘squabbleholes’. They’re loopholes that can lead to arguments.
“I saw Mrs. Stravinsky at the supermarket the other day,” my mum says. “How are you and Humphrietta getting along?”
“She isn’t back yet?”
“Her whole family is back.”
“She’ll be back a little later.”
“Did you ask her why?”
“I can’t tell you, Mum. She made me swear not to tell anyone.”
“Anyone in your school, she probably meant.”
“I don’t know. All I know is, if I leak her secret, I’ll be breaking our best friend’s code.”
“Suit yourself.”
“She has appointments to keep over there.”
“With a therapist?”
I nod. “You can’t tell anyone, Mum.”
“Poor girl, she’s been through a lot lately, even though she brought it on herself with all her lying.”
“Mum.”
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
Another squabblehole.
“Daryl, sit still,” I say to my six-year-old brother.
My brother looks at me with his small beady eyes and gives me his signature grin—he was born without a philtrum—and slaps at the bath water with both hands. I learned the word ‘philtrum’ because of him. I used to not know what the ridge between your upper lip and nose was called. Coincidentally, Prince didn’t have a philtrum too. He was my first boyfriend. My only boyfriend so far.
My phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Am I speaking with Marileen Khumar?” the caller says.
“Yes. This is her.”
“Marileen, this is Mrs. Stravinsky.”
“Oh hello, ma’am.”
“Could you come by the house today? We’d like you to have some of Humphrietta’s things.”
“Sure. When can I come?”
“Come straight away, if you can.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“Expecting you.”
I carry Daryl out of the bath and towel him. He’s grabby, so I smother his face against my chest so I can clothe him in peace.
“Mum, I have to go to the Stravinskys. Mrs. Stravinsky called. She said she wants me to have some of Humphrietta’s things.”
“Why?”
“Beats me.”
“Perhaps Humphrietta is back.”
“Perhaps.”
“Hurry on then, but be back as soon as you’re done. My Breakfast Book Club is starting in an hour. I need you home to babysit your brother.”
Be back in an hour? How will I get from Berea to Prospecton, without a car or an Uber, and be back in an hour? We’re car-challenged at the moment. Mum needs to save for a new kick-starter. She says I caused it: I turn the key way too much when I start the car. And having recently learned how to drive, I won’t argue.
I ring the bell at the gate, and the security man lets me in. I’m about to press the doorbell when Stacy, Humphrietta’s younger sister, a 10th-grader, swings the door open.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi. So where is she?” I ask gleefully.
“She’s in the kitchen.” She beams back, a little befuddled by my enthusiasm.
“Humphrietta?”
“No, my mum.”
My heart sinks when she says this, but what if she’s messing with me? Humphrietta could be somewhere in the house, raring to surprise me. The Stravinsky home is my dream home. I love it more each time I visit. This morning, the living room feels like a shade house in a botanical garden. It’s airy like one too, thanks to the open top-row awning windows. Stacy ushers me to the kitchen, where her parents are having a late breakfast. Mrs. Stravinsky is at the small kitchen table, an open laptop in front of her. She’s sipping from a mug and tapping on the keyboard. Mr. Stravinsky is facing the stove and stoking something with a perforated spoon. He angles his neck, keeping his head away from fumes that rise to the awning windows. The kitchen gives me the same outdoorsy feeling I got in the living room. The entire front section of the house, including the kitchen, is a glass house. It’s like you’re outdoors when you’re inside. At the moment, the kitchen gives a screensaver view of a pre-noon sun, a garden, a red brick fence, and cars in a canopy car park: a silver Range Rover Velar and a white Mercedes-Benz sports car.
Mrs. Stravinsky grins at me. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, ma’am. Good morning, sir.”
“Morning, Marileen,” Mr. Stravinsky shouts over the pops and crackles of something frying.
“We didn’t see you drive in,” Mrs. Stravinsky says.
“We’re having car trouble. I took the bus.”
“I’ll need to Uber you back then.”
“I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
“No trouble at all. You’ll need a cab, considering all the stuff you might want to take with you.”
“Marileen, you care for sausages?” Mr. Stravinsky says, spooning two crackling sausages onto a plate.
“I’d love some.”
“Stacy?”
“No, thank you, Dad,” Stacy says. “I need to go get ready for the beach.” She leaves and the kitchen door swings shut.
Over breakfast, Mrs. Stravinsky says, “Humphrietta has a lot of clothes she hasn’t worn yet, like the gown she planned to wear for senior prom. Stacy isn’t her size. So, we’d like you to have them.”
“But why?” I ask. “Won’t Humphrietta be back?”
Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky exchange glances.
“She didn’t tell you?” Mrs. Stravinsky says.
“Tell me what?”
“You know what?” Mr. Stravinsky says. “We’ll let her tell you herself.”
He narrows his eyes at the laptop screen and taps on the keyboard.
“Good evening, South Africa,” a voice says. It sounds like Humphrietta.
“Good morning, Down Under,” Mr. Stravinsky says. “It’s a little after 11 am over here.”
“Hi Dad. Hi Mum. What’s up? Has Stacy left for the beach?”
“Not yet,” Mrs. Stravinsky says. “I invited your friend over. I want her to have your prom dress and some other things, but she has questions for you.”
“What friend?”
Mr. Stravinsky turns the laptop to face me.
A Skype video chat window of Humphrietta covered in a white hydrating lotion stares at me. “Hi Marileen.”
“Hi,” I say.
“What’s up?”
“You tell me.”
Humphrietta finger-rubs the white lotion on her face. “Do you like the prom dress? I’ll get another one here.”
“Haven’t seen it yet. But why are you giving it away?”
She takes a deep breath. “I’ll be starting school here.”
“Why?”
“We’ll give you kids some privacy,” Mrs. Stravinsky says, nudging her husband.
Humphrietta’s parents file out of the kitchen.
“The plan was for me to go to college in this country,” Humphrietta says. “So I figured, heck, I might as well graduate from a high school here. Again, I need a break. You understand.”
I do. She’s talking about getting catfished and becoming the laughingstock of the whole school after our classmates found out her legendary boyfriend, Rudder Archibald Fink, wasn’t an old neighbour who moved to America, like she said, but someone she met on a dating site (Twin Sparks). The cat exited the bag when Rudder started dating another girl at the school. Turns out, he’s a romance scammer. The matter is now in the hands of Crime-stop S.A. and, last I heard, they’re still trying to track him.
I can’t blame her for running from her old life. It’s not easy to go from a trendsetter to a pariah in one school term. We became friends after she lost all her friends. And if I recall correctly, she didn’t want to be seen in public with me until her parents intervened. I don’t have the foggiest idea what they said to her, but I imagine they pointed out her fixation with what people thought about her (how that was what got her into her mess, in the first place), and that she really ought to stop caring. I bet if she were still popular, she’d carry on walking past me in the school hallway.
“But what about our plan?” I ask. “Rudder—the fake Rudder—has sent in an entry. I told you I was going to spam him with our contest. Now he’s sent in an entry. Our plan is working,” I say with a lilt.
“Did you honestly think I would spend more money on him?”
“It’s to catch him.”
“It doesn’t matter what it’s for; I’ll still be spending money on the Rudder Fink project, bottom-line. Look, I know it means a lot to you, but think about it: the whole thing could blow up in our faces. What if we get the wrong guy? What if he doesn’t show, even after we pay for his flight ticket? My folks are grateful I didn’t lose more than I did to him. They’d lose their minds if I did now. Especially now: now I know he’s a scam artist.”
She had given her catfish a lot of money. Lucky for her, she hadn’t given him the nude photo he had requested.
It was my idea to bait her catfish with a joke contest. She told me he was big on stand-up comedy, so I thought, Why not create a fake joke contest, spam his email with it, and get him to enter? I did just that and it worked. The plan is to make him think he won 2,500 rand and an all-expenses-paid vacation in Durban, and invite him to our school so she can humiliate him at an event he’ll think is his award ceremony. She liked the idea and had even said she could get her grandma to cough out the money for his air ticket and hotel bill. What can I say? My months of planning have gone to waste, apparently. Fuck it. If only she had given my brilliant plan a chance. Everyone at school would’ve been talking about how she’s such a badass, how no one should ever mess with her. She would’ve been popular again.
