Countdown to Yesterday by Shirley Marr

Author:Shirley Marr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd

Mum and Dad had tried to make it sound easy. These are the days I’ll be staying at the House on the Hill. These are the days I’ll be at the Flat on the Flats. But second week in and already it’s messed up ’cos I’m at Mum’s on a Dad Night. I wonder if I have to stay the night or if Dad will come and get me. Ugh.

In case Yan asks any awkward questions, I tell her straightaway that this is Mum’s place as opposed to Dad’s place as my parents are divorcing. Although she nods like she understands, I know that she truly can’t. When she looks at our temporary dining table and asks how many square centimetres it is, I wonder if she’s calculating in her head if it would fit her family. I imagine them all sitting down for dinner together and, on the inside, I feel like a displaced person.

Yan looks with similar interest at the rest of the apartment, the view from the balcony and the inside of my bedroom from the doorway, even though there is not much to see.

“This is my first time to a friend’s house,” she says. “So, I’m really trying to store it in my long-term memory. Although…”

She turns to me.

“…do you know that memories don’t actually exist? The brain doesn’t remember anything, not like a computer does. It just creates a fantasy of what it thinks happened. How many times have you watched a movie, swearing something looked or happened a certain way, and you ended up being wrong?”

Yan reaches into her jacket pocket. “For example!” She pulls out the card with White Rabbit cake written on it and holds it up with the back facing me. “Tell me what’s on the border of this.”

Of course, I know the answer. I was there when Mrs Tagliatelle put in the special stationery order for it.

“Cupcakes with sprinkles.”

“Are you sure?” Yan says, with raised eyebrows.

She’s trying to psych me out. “Cupcakes with sprinkles,” I repeat.

Yan flips it over and holds it up to my face.

The border is…

Slices of cake with sprinkles.

Oh.

How do you know someone hasn’t travelled back into the past and changed it? my brain shouts at me.

Well, Occam’s Razor. The simplest answer is often the best. That I remembered it wrong. And it makes more sense for the border to be cakes rather than cupcakes. It’s a cake baking contest after all. I go to the kitchen where stuck to the overhead cupboard is the card that reads Rocket cake.

The border is slices of cake with sprinkles.

Mum brings us two hot Milos. They are the frothiest, tastiest, most chocolaty hot drinks ever. You can’t tell she makes them in the microwave.

Yan looks at the teal sofa in my room and asks me where my bed is.

I unfold the sofa.

“But of course,” she says. Like it’s to be expected.

I fold the bed back into a sofa and we sit there with our hot Milos.

“What makes this thing so comfortable?” she asks me.

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