Hey, Zoey by Sarah Crossan

Author:Sarah Crossan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526619853
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

5

Ethan Hawke was willing to leave his girlfriend but it was complicated, as these things can be. We kissed shyly after meeting by chance in a café near Manor House tube station where he was visiting a cousin. After that we called one another regularly, cried about the complexity of our long-distance relationship, the age gap and his being so busy with filming, not that his career mattered as much as my upset. Things came to a head when I got pregnant. I thought he’d be angry, but he loved me – unequivocally and compulsively – and that was when we decided to get married. I spent weeks planning the wedding: choosing a venue and a dress, picking bridesmaids and writing up a guest list.

I replayed scenes to get them right. I obsessed about the moment we went from friends to lovers and the ways in which my ordinariness was spectacular to him. I hated when anyone mentioned him in passing as though we weren’t actually intimately connected.

I cannot overstate how important that imaginary relationship was to me and my understanding of my own value as a teenager.

º

I was having tea with Esther Rose, the head of maths. She was furious that she’d been passed up yet again for a senior management position and wanted to chronicle for me the ways in which Jeremy Ashworth was an arsehole. I added nothing to her list but listened sympathetically. She had a new haircut that aged her by about ten years, but apparently her husband loved the way she looked. ‘Even so, I sometimes wish I’d married a medic.’

‘Why?’

‘Like you did.’

‘It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

She told me that her husband was a structural engineer and although he made good money, it didn’t inspire her. I asked what she meant, and she explained that her father had been a judge, presided over several very high-profile cases and sometimes, as a child, she’d been guarded by armed police because the criminals on trial were so dangerous.

‘If they were on trial, they were defendants,’ I said.

She told me that her father had once been shot while out at dinner with his brother-in-law. ‘It was like a gangster movie,’ she said. ‘You know those guys eating pizza and having a beer in some Staten Island restaurant and suddenly pow-pow, shots through the window, glass shattering, everyone screaming. It was like that, only it was at the Wolseley and he was having crab.’

‘They aren’t criminals until they’ve been proven guilty. And even then, who knows what’s behind anyone’s bad behaviour?’

Esther finally acknowledged me. ‘Oh, yes. Sorry. I know. But I wish my husband had gravitas. Do you know what I mean?’

The day had turned brighter than it had been on my drive in that morning. I thought about how my garden would look once the sun and rain really took hold. The bell rang for lessons. ‘Don’t you have a class now?’ I asked. We had a policy of no one being late for lessons.

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