Unnecessary Drama Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  From the author of the much-loved It Sounded Better In My Head comes a deliciously entertaining new rom-com, set in a run-down student share house in Melbourne.

  Eighteen-year-old Brooke is the kind of friend who not only remembers everyone’s birthdays, but also organises the group present, pays for it, and politely chases others for their share. She’s the helper, the doer, the guarder-of-drinks, the minder-of-bags, the maker-of-spreadsheets. She’s the responsible one who always follows the rules—and she plans to keep it that way during her first year of university.

  Her new share house is rules-lite. But ‘no unnecessary drama’ means no fights, tension, or romance between housemates. When one of her housemates turns out to be Jesse, her high-school nemesis, Brooke is nervously confident she can handle it. They’ll simply silently endure living together and stay out of each other’s way. But it turns out Jesse isn’t so easy to ignore…

  Channelling the screwball comedy of New Girl with an enemies-to-lovers twist, Unnecessary Drama is a joyful story about leaving home, dealing with the unexpected complications of life, and somehow finding exactly what you need.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  For Abby

  1

  There is a mouse in the corner of my room. A mouse. In my bedroom. Where I sleep. It’s sitting on its little haunches, frozen in fear. I’m in bed, also frozen in fear.

  We are making direct and intimate eye contact.

  It’s funny because seconds ago I was so cosy and comfortable in my bed, feeling safe and wrapped up and pleased with myself—here I am, in my new house, an adult at last, independent, free, worldly, some might even say sophisticated—and now, my shaking hand is reaching for my phone, ready to call Mum and say come back and get me right this second.

  I don’t know how to end this stand-off. Should I lie back in surrender, showing my belly like a dog? Or stand my ground, slowly wave my arms so it recognises me as a human and backs off? That’s what you do if you encounter a bear, along with blowing a whistle. I memorised how to survive an encounter with a bear when I was ten, for no reason other than that I suddenly woke up one day with a pit of anxiety deep in my stomach about encountering a bear. I was also very worried about quicksand and the fact that I didn’t know how to tie an unbreakable knot or start a fire using nothing but two sticks. My ten-year-old self was earnestly imagining a future in which I would need these skills, even though I was a strictly indoors child who once cried because I was almost stung by a bee.

  The thing is, I am a person who prepares. The very essence of who I am is my preparedness, my to-do lists, my thorough research, my above-and-beyond reading, my colour-coded spreadsheets, my first-hand-in-the-air-I-know-the-answer energy. Before I moved out, I had a typed, itemised list of things I needed to buy, grouped by store, and then each item assigned to a person, so Mum and my older sister Lauren and I could get through the Boxing Day sales with the most efficiency. (Lauren looked at the list when I handed it to her and said, ‘No. Absolutely not. Brooke, why do you do this? I’m not coming anymore.’) And yet I didn’t research what to do when a mouse appears in the bedroom of your share house in the middle of the night. I should have screamed. But I didn’t scream when I first saw it, and it really feels like the appropriate window of time in which to scream has now passed.

  This is my first night living away from Mum, Lauren and Nanna. The first night of my shiny new university-student life in a shiny new city. Is turning on a lamp and seeing a diseasecarrying rodent a bad omen? Not necessarily. This can still be a good sign. Maybe the mouse and I will become friends, have little adventures together. He’ll travel around in my pocket, I’ll call him Cornelius, it could be a charming period of my life that I will write about when I’m older.

  I shift my arm ever so slightly and the spell is broken. The mouse races off, and even though it’s going away from me, I finally scream. Louder than I thought I could scream. I jump up into a defensive standing position, legs slightly bent, hands in a ready-to-strike pose I vaguely remember from year-seven self-defence class. The mouse has very quickly gone from my friend Cornelius back to foul creature again.

  ‘Brooke?’ There’s a knock on my door and Harper pokes her head in. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘There’s a mouse. It was in the corner and then it ran out the door,’ I say, trying not to sound like I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t have any pants on, just an oversize T-shirt and underwear, and I think the T-shirt is long enough to provide me with a tiny bit of dignity, but I still hope we can both pretend in the morning that Harper never saw the uppermost parts of my thighs.

  Harper is a year older than me and her family owns the house. She has a small, lovely flower tattoo on her shoulder, she wears lots of delicate gold rings layered on her fingers, her dark, curly hair perfectly frames her face, her eyeliner skills far exceed anything I will ever be capable of, and she mentioned two bands I’d never heard of in our first conversation this afternoon. I’m hoping this mouse incident doesn’t ruin my already slim chance of becoming her friend.

  ‘Oh. God. Sorry. I’ve never seen one in the bedroom before.’ She frowns, runs a hand through her curls.

  Which raises the question: where has she seen them? She can see my face, clocking her words, thinking about the possible number of mice she has seen in the house, and she shakes her head.

  ‘No, no, don’t worry. We don’t have a mouse infestation or anything. I saw one in the backyard last week, that’s all. The house is pretty old. Tomorrow we can put foil and steel wool in the floorboard cracks,’ she says.

  She already warned me that the gap in the back door means the lounge room can get cold but you can plug it with a towel and it’s mostly fine. And that the tap in the bathroom drips unless you turn it so tight you can almost not turn it on again. Also, the back gate lock sticks because the gate is warped, there might be just a touch of mould in winter, the oven rattles and shakes and sometimes turns itself off, the towel rack and the toilet-roll holder fall off the walls constantly and we just need to ignore the weird smell in the hall cupboard that you can never fully get rid of.

  All that but she never said anything about mice.

  I ignore my pounding heart and smile at her, dropping my hands back to my sides, and say, ‘Sounds good. See you in the morning.’ I lower myself back into my bed, as if I might sleep again tonight, rather than immediately googling ‘diseases you can catch from a mouse’.

  2

  It’s 7 am, and the house is silent. I miraculously managed to fall asleep after learning through extensive research that the mouse probably wasn’t carrying any diseases and also that mice can’t see very well, so the meaningful eye contact between us that was haunting me might not have been as intense as I imagined.
r />   Today is the day our other housemate will arrive. His name is Jeremy and I know nothing else, not even his last name, because Harper wasn’t forthcoming and I’m trying to masquerade as a very relaxed, easy-to-live-with person who doesn’t anxiously ask too many questions. Oh Jeremy, no last name, no other identifying details? No worries, not a single worry here, no follow-up questions at all. As if it’s normal to agree to live with a guy—in close quarters, sharing a bathroom—and not have at the very least a short dossier on him, just a brief little overview of his family history, his friends, his past relationships, his school marks, his medical history, his politics, his problematic social media posts. And yet, here I am.

  I am debating whether to quickly switch bedrooms before he arrives.

  Being the grandchild of the owners and the first one to move in, Harper naturally has the biggest room. It has an ornamental fireplace and a built-in robe and space for a queen-size bed and a desk and two bookcases, plus an enormous number of plants, and a few other random items that don’t actually fit but she’s squished them in anyway, like an ugly hat rack that is not currently holding any hats and a heavy mirror propped against a wall. Her room is messy and overflowing with clothes, trinkets, furniture, Polaroid photos, vinyl records, jewellery, a bowl of crystals, books. There were four glasses of half-drunk water, two mugs of half-drunk tea and an open bottle of Powerade on her desk, all dangerously close to her open laptop. It makes me itch to tidy it up. Just a really quick spruce here, a little neatenup there, and a total and complete reorganisation of her closets, that’s all. And I can’t even think about where she’s put things in the kitchen. Mugs and glasses in a bottom drawer, plates and bowls on the very top shelf—it all feels wrong to me, but I am trying my best not to take over.

  Harper gave me the choice of the other two rooms when I arrived. I picked the room with better light and fewer ceiling cracks, but it also apparently harbours a mouse. Mystery guy Jeremy has the room next to mine, which is slightly bigger, but it’s a weird shape and has a big, faded stain on the wall that made me immediately think of blood splatter. I started thinking of it as the Murder Room as soon as I saw it, and that kind of name doesn’t just go away once your brain attaches it to a place.

  Murder or mouse, it’s a conundrum.

  I’m thinking it over in the shower when there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

  ‘Hello?’ I call out, my voice high and stressed like I’m answering the phone to an unknown number.

  Harper yells something but it’s too muffled to hear. Is she telling me to get out of the shower, to stop wasting hot water, to hurry up? Have I done something wrong, broken a rule? I don’t even know the house rules yet. Surely not. I’ve only been in the bathroom for five minutes. I feel resentful of her possible bossiness, even though I have spent most of my life banging on bathroom doors and yelling at Lauren to hurry up. But that’s different. That’s sister stuff. That’s justified, because Lauren will spend forty minutes in a shower if you let her, using up every single drop of hot water while she treats her hair with fancy products and exfoliates every inch of her body with a skin scrub she paid way too much money for.

  Harper being the default leader of the house is disconcerting for me. Lauren might be my older sister, but I was always the one in charge of things at home. I was my school’s arts captain, co-director of our year-ten play (alongside the drama teacher, so I had equal authority with an adult, an unprecedented situation. I even bought a black beret to wear, which, in hindsight, I will concede was the wrong choice), founder of our school’s Jane Austen book club, secretary of the social-justice committee, leader of our Model UN team. I am very comfortable in leadership roles.

  But fine. Harper is in charge here. I’ll settle for being vicecaptain of the house, maybe. I won’t say it to anyone out loud, but I’ll definitely be thinking it in my head.

  I crack the door and peer out of the bathroom. I left my dressing-gown in my room by mistake, because I’ve never had to think about covering up as I go from bathroom to bedroom before, and now I have to dash through the house in a too-small towel.

  I hurry down the hall, almost running as I get to the kitchen, but I skid to a halt when I see a man and a woman standing there holding boxes, as well as a pre-teen boy sitting on the floor in everyone’s way, playing a Nintendo Switch, and a younger girl wailing, ‘I’m thirsty, Mum!’ and a red-headed toddler holding a Barbie doll that is missing its head.

  Harper widens her eyes at me, and I realise she had been knocking to warn me that there were people in the house.

  ‘This is Brooke,’ Harper says.

  They smile and nod and say hello, busying themselves with bags and boxes and crying children, politely averting their eyes from my almost-nakedness. I assume they are new housemate Jeremy’s family. Both of the adults look very familiar: I’ve seen them before, but I can’t place them.

  I manoeuvre past them in the kitchen, fake-smiling, acutely aware of the towel sitting barely a centimetre below my butt cheek and also dangerously low across my boobs. This is the second time Harper has seen my upper thighs in the space of twelve hours. I am all for body positivity—when you’re the lessattractive sister in a family you really need to be across that from a young age—but my upper thighs are the body part I’d rather not lead with when getting to know people. They’re just not opening-act material.

  The toddler runs over to me, grabs a handful of towel and yanks, which makes the almost-naked situation even more precarious. I bend down awkwardly to remove his chubby little fingers, which have locked onto the towel with some kind of powerful death grip. I did not know children were so strong.

  ‘Bottom, bottom! It’s a bot!’ the toddler yells, pointing under the towel. Oh my god, where is this child’s mother? I look around in desperation.

  ‘Oh, here he is,’ Harper says, as someone else walks into the house, a teetering pile of boxes obscuring their face. ‘Brooke, this is Jeremy. Jeremy, Brooke.’

  I am too distracted by the toddler’s attempts to humiliate and dominate me to be really paying attention.

  ‘Oh, no one calls me Jeremy,’ he says.

  My head jerks up. Wait. I know that voice.

  The box lowers and a pair of eyes appear.

  Those eyes.

  Then his whole face. Long nose, broad shoulders, shaggy brown hair tucked behind his ears.

  It’s Jesse.

  3

  My heart is pounding and I’m trying to keep my face calm. My jaw suddenly feels locked and frozen. I’m trying to move it and I can’t, but no, I’m not going to panic. It’s fine. It’s fine! Yes, Jesse is moving into my house, but I will process this information calmly and rationally, and my jaw will unlock itself any minute now, my heart will slow down eventually and everything is fine.

  ‘Jesse,’ I say, my voice strained.

  ‘You two know each other?’ Harper asks. ‘I guess that makes sense: my grandmother found you both.’ She laughs, but emphasises the word grandmother just a little too hard, and I sense lingering resentment that she was not given the choice to find her own housemates. Harper’s grandparents live in my town, and they know my mother. And, apparently, Jesse’s father.

  ‘We went to the same school,’ I say, managing finally to get the towel out of the toddler’s tight little fist, but he immediately reattaches himself with both hands and yanks on it even harder. I look around helplessly for someone to intervene. If there was a checklist for the ideal babysitter, I would tick every single box for even the most overprotective parent, but despite this I have no practical experience and I really do not know what to do with small children. Are you allowed to pick them up if they’re not yours? Will they obey you if you speak in a firm authoritative voice, like a dog might?

  ‘Brooke, of course, you’re Michelle’s daughter,’ Jesse’s dad says, seemingly unconcerned about the battle I am engaged in with his child. His tone sounds disapproving, but it’s hard to tell if that is his voice’s natural cadence or a pron
ouncement on my mother, or both.

  ‘Yes. Michelle’s daughter. Hello.’ I’m dripping water onto the floor, and I try to casually wipe it with my bare foot and continue edging towards my room, toddler in tow.

  Jesse still hasn’t said anything. He’s just holding the boxes, watching me floundering, an inscrutable look on his face.

  ‘Jesse, for god’s sake, you haven’t even said hello,’ Jesse’s father snaps. ‘How ’bout you set a good example for your brothers and sister once in a while, huh?’ That heavy disapproving tone again. I have a sudden memory of Nanna describing Jesse’s father as an unpleasant man. Admittedly, she has said this about at least half of the men in our town (including the lovely local GP who bulk-bills even though he doesn’t have to, the smiling brothers who run the butcher shop and give us extra meat for her Siamese cat Minty, and a widower who lives on our street who politely asked her out to lunch), but I think her assessment in this case was accurate. There’s a moment of silent awkwardness.

  ‘Sorry. Yeah. Hi Brooke,’ Jesse says, clearing his throat.

  I last saw him maybe three months ago, on graduation night, but he somehow seems taller now.

  ‘Hi Jesse,’ I say, trying to look nonchalant and dignified while semi-naked and battling a toddler.

  Jesse puts his boxes down and walks over to me. I’m worried about what he’s planning to do, but he leans down, says ‘Come here you’, and scoops up his brother, throwing him over his shoulder in a way that makes the boy scream with delight.

  Jesse glances back at me, and our eyes meet. I narrow mine the slightest, slightest bit, a message to him, that…what? That I don’t want us to be housemates any more than he does, but I got here first and if one of us is going to leave then it should be him, that what he did to me five years ago remains the greatest betrayal and humiliation I have ever endured, that I still haven’t forgiven him and I never will. That’s a lot for a momentary, barely noticeable narrowing of eyes to communicate, but I feel like he got the general vibe.