Page 11 of Change My Mind
I was looking at shipping times on new suitcases. All of them promised three to five working days, which would have been fine if I wasn’t leaving in four working days. So I was going to have to brave a shop and hope that the two additional suitcases I would be able to drag back were going to be enough for the alarmingly large pile of clothes still sitting on the floor of my room.
As I closed my laptop in defeat, my phone rang. A photo of me and Clara at Becky’s wedding (yellow dresses, different styles, smiles so wide it made my cheeks hurt just looking at it) appeared on my screen. I double-checked the time and did some quick maths.
It was gone one a.m. in London.
“What is wrong with you? Why are you calling at this time?” I said as I answered the phone, automatically in French. I really did need to get back in the habit of speaking in English first, even if I was on the phone to my sister.
“We need to talk about the way you answer phone calls.” Clara scoffed. Of course, she would be the one to remind me that I needed to remember to do that now.
I cleared my throat and switched to English.
“It’s past one a.m. in London. How do you have the headspace to make a phone call at that time?”
“I’m buzzed off the zone that I found myself in this evening. Also, I was supposed to call you earlier, but forgot.”
“Right, because of the zone.”
“Exactly. I need to talk to you about your birthday.”
I fell back onto my mattress. She wasn’t talking about just any birthday. It was mythirtiethbirthday.
“Am I supposed to know about whatever plans you’re cooking up?”
“Well, no. It’s a surprise, technically. But I figured you would appreciate a heads up so that you can prepare well in advance for the joys of a Henry family party. I know I would have liked one for mine. If only because with a little bit of warning, I could have done more with my outfit than just being a cheerleader.”
Clara was a Halloween baby. She usually got away with focusing solely on the Halloween aspect of the day. Although some years were more birthday-forward than others. Like her thirtieth.
I would rather the day pass just like any other. Just with a bit more cake. But I knew I wasn’t going to get away with that. So, the heads up was nice.
“I do appreciate that. Now I have two months to prepare for random family members telling me how good I look. Or how tall I am, like that wasn’t always the case.”
“Or asking if you’ll walk down the aisle any time soon,” Clara added.
“If you have it your way, Clo, you will be walking down the aisle sooner rather than later,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s nobody’s business. It’s not like those people would even get an invite to a hypothetical wedding anyway.”
It would be an absurdly large wedding if they did.
“You any closer to figuring out how you’re gonna do it?”
“Make a lasagne and hope he doesn’t wander in and be all like, ‘What is this, Clara?’” she joked. I still couldn’t believe that was how her relationship with her ex-boyfriend ended, or that it had been two years since it happened.
“But seriously?”
She let out a low, whining sound. “No, I am no closer. He does all the cooking these days, so it would be suspicious if Iofferedto cook out of nowhere. I can’t do it in public because I would rather claw my own eyes out. At this rate, I might need to remove the privacy screen from my laptop and just write the words clearly on the page so he can ‘stumble’ across it. It could be like a modern-day note passed surreptitiously in class, leave him two check boxes, ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”
“He would probably leave a whole paragraph, explaining all the reasons he is saying yes to marrying you. Not just check a box.”
“He really would. Oh fuck, we are going to write our own vows, and he is going to out-write me, isn’t he? Maybe I don’t need to propose to him. We’re happy, we don’t need that added stress.”
“You know you can do private vows, right? Let him out-write you, cry about it, and then have a separate declaration in front of everyone that is way less exposing.”
Clara hummed. “That’s a good point. Guess I’ve gotta keep thinking about this bloody proposal then.”
“You’ll figure it out. Now, please go to bed.”
“I am going to bed because I was always going to bed after I finished talking to you, not because you told me to,” she said sternly.
