Page 3 of Unnecessary Drama

I hurry into my room, shutting the door with relief and then putting several heavy books in front of it in case the toddler tries to come in for round two.

I wonder if Jesse is going to back out. Will he turn to his parents and ask to leave? Well, good. I’m not going to leave. I can’t leave. I’ve already paid my bond and spent a night here and made peace with the idea of the mouse and made loose plans to go to the market with Harper and started setting up a vision board and bought a Myki and told everyone in my life that I’m living in an amazing share house in Melbourne while I study economics with the aim of working for the UN while also being a bestselling author on the side and maybe writing a Oscar-winning screenplay.

This is my dream. I’m not giving it up. I spent months searching for somewhere affordable and half-decent to live. I interviewed with an older guy in his mid-twenties who described himself online as a ‘philisopher, feminist, pacifist, entrepreneur, craftsman, communist, artist, lover, soul seeker’, and then he said, when we chatted over the phone, that he liked living with younger women because he felt he had so much to teach them. I talked with three girls who assured me that ‘the room is small and a bit unconventional but really nice’ which turned out to mean that the room was an area of carpet behind a couch, surrounded by a ‘privacy curtain’ (a sheet pegged to a clothes horse). Then Mum told me a couple in our town was looking for someone to live with their granddaughter. The relief was overwhelming.

I have nowhere else to go if this house doesn’t work out. I don’t want to live with a creepy guy or behind someone’s couch. And I can’t move home. I can’t fail within forty-eight hours of leaving. I am simply not the kind of person who fails.

I get dressed slowly, automatically thinking I’ll avoid Jesse until he leaves, until I remember he’s here because he’s moving in. There’s no avoiding. I read a book on my bed for a while, but I can’t concentrate on the words. I try playing on my phone, but it makes me hyper aware of the fact my hands are shaking a little. I start to worry that Jesse will bond with Harper while I’m hiding in here, and they’ll go to the market without me, and I’ll be the one on the outer.

I poke my head out of my room. Everything is quiet. Jesse’s family have gone. I heard them leave not long after I went into my bedroom. Because it’s a long drive back to our town and they needed to get one of the kids to karate and another one needed a nap and the third was crying, they hustled out the door in a flurry of stress and yelling and I don’t think they even said a proper goodbye to Jesse. I try not to compare that to yesterday, when Mum cried three times before leaving, Nanna solemnly gifted me her precious Saint Christopher medal and Lauren pretended she didn’t care but then made Mum stop the car so she could run back in and hug me one more time. My family is perhaps a touch too co-dependent.

I find Harper in the kitchen.

‘I bought bagels if you want one,’ she says.

‘Yum, yes please.’ My voice is oddly high pitched. Everything I say sounds just a little bit not right, not me. I need to calm down or at least give the appearance of being calm. A physiotherapist once told me that she had never seen someone as incapable of relaxing their shoulders as me, which I chose to take as a compliment.

‘So, do you and Jesse know each other well?’ Harper says, cutting the bagels in two on the table, no chopping board, letting the knife scrape the wood, which makes my eye twitch.

Do we know each other well? The simplest question and I have no idea how to answer.

‘Um, sort of. Not really. Well enough, I guess,’ I babble.

Harper lowers her voice a little, leans forward, ringlets falling across her forehead. Her earrings are gold, in the shape of beautiful tiny little skulls. I have the urge to run to my room and start googling ‘where to buy gold skull earrings’. As if I could pull off skull earrings.

‘So, what’s he like?’ Harper says in an almost-whisper.

My heart glows a little. The way she says it, inviting intimacy, like we’re already friends. But I need to be careful, I need to stop myself from immediately gossiping about him. Jesse lives here now. Harper doesn’t know either of us. I don’t want her first impression of me to be negative.

‘He’s. Um. He’s nice,’ I say, still flailing. ‘He’s fine, he’ll be good to live with, he’s really…nice.’ I am acutely aware I said ‘nice’ twice but my mind is suddenly empty of all other adjectives.

‘Okay. Yeah, I chatted to him a few times, he does seem nice,’ Harper says, looking disappointed at my dull reply. She was probably hoping for a sign that her grandmother hadn’t stuck her with two boring duds. She gave me an opening, and I gave her nothing.

Harper puts cream cheese on the bagel and hands it to me. I try not to worry that she licked cream cheese off her finger and then that finger touched my bagel, and I wonder if she’ll think it’s rude if I get up for a plate. I settle for holding my hand under it to catch the sesame seeds falling.

Jesse walks into the kitchen, looking much more relaxed and happy without his family, and Harper offers him the other half of my bagel. He seems unbothered about her hands or the lack of plates or spilling sesame seeds.

‘So I thought we’d go over the house rules,’ Harper says.

I sit up straighter. This is the conversation I have been waiting for. I imagine she’s typed them up, laminated them, or, if it were me, put them in a lovely, non-threatening binder. I’m ready for a deep discussion, possibly a friendly debate. I’m ready to make concessions, to compromise, to be flexible and very accommodating, but also to gently steer them in certain directions, towards a higher cleaning standard, a schedule, and to use the shared shopping list app I researched and have already downloaded onto my phone.

Harper starts talking, and I realise there’s no laminated list, nothing written, just verbal rules. That’s fine. I can take notes. Maybe I’ll make the binder later.

The house rules are: no pets; no romance between housemates; and no unnecessary drama, in general.

She stops, and I wait. Is there more? Surely there must be more? What about division of chores, sharing of food, late-night noise, having guests over, parties, TV usage, sleep schedules, paying bills, checking the mail, bin night, using the dryer, fridge space, communal food, internet usage, length of showers, preferred scent of handwash. And these are just my top-level questions. I have subcategories. And subsubcategories. Who is in charge of what? How does this household run, at a granular level? What are we each responsible for doing? There are already two drinking glasses and a knife covered in cream cheese in the kitchen sink and we have no established plan of when they will be cleaned or by who. I am sweating.

‘So that’s it. Pretty basic. We can figure everything else out as we go along. Any questions?’ Harper asks, smiling. She’s warm and friendly, which, for a person with natural charisma, she really doesn’t need to be, so I especially appreciate it.

‘What does “no unnecessary drama” mean?’ Jesse asks.

‘No arguments, no tension, that sort of thing,’ Harper says. ‘Everyone just being chill and getting along.’

‘Sounds easy enough,’ Jesse says, not looking at me.

My heart is racing. This is going to be a disaster. I am holding my bagel in a death grip. I will my fingers to relax. I am not going to be the uptight one, I am not, I am not, I am not.

‘Absolutely,’ I say, lowering my shoulders, wiggling my neck a little.