‘Uh. Yeah. My family too,’ says Storm.
‘At least your mom looks super cool. Mine is all prissy and uptight. She always wears some variation of the same thing.’
‘Oh,’ he says. He’s going to need to up his game here and work on his conversational skills if he’s going to impress Madeleine. He follows her awkwardly into the kitchen where a younger kid is watching something on an iPad, but looks up to give them a quick wave.
‘Let’s hide out in here until it’s time to eat,’ says Madeleine, flashing him another one of her wide, brilliant smiles. ‘Want a drink?’
‘Sure.’
Madeleine opens the refrigerator and takes out two cans of Coke Zero. She pours them into wine glasses, expensive crystal ones similar to the ones Bianka kept locked away in a cabinet at home in Oslo. She clinks her glass softly against his and takes a sip.
‘You know, I was really psyched you were coming. Like, I knew who you were and everything, and my brother idolizes you. He’s really shy, that’s why he’s just hiding behind the screen. Right, Oscar?’ The boy’s face darkens into a deep red and Storm feels bad for him. He smiles and waves at the younger boy, who drops his gaze back to the screen. ‘What you did in St Anton was, like, beyond sick,’ she continues.
‘Uh. You heard about that?’ He feels stupid as soon as he speaks and his cheeks grow hot.
Madeleine laughs, not unkindly. ‘Storm, everyone heard about that. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks.’
Storm supposes this is true. He did, after all, get invited to the royal palace on his return to Norway, so the king could personally shake his hand at an event for extraordinary people in sports and culture.
‘Um, so, yeah. Thanks. It was, uh, pretty cool, I guess.’ Storm can feel himself blush even more as he speaks and realizes just how far out of his depth he is. He’s never taken much interest in girls up until now, except to perhaps notice who he finds remotely attractive, but he’s never felt this intense awkwardness around anyone before.
Madeleine’s mom, an energetic-looking angular woman with thick dark hair piled atop her head, comes to tell them that dinner is served. In the dining room, there are two tables, one for the adults and another for the kids. Storm is relieved to not have to sit anywhere near Bianka or his dad. Other guests have arrived too, a woman with a red-haired daughter who’s much younger than the other kids, and a couple with a son around Oscar’s age. Madeleine sits next to Storm, pulling her chair closer to his. Throughout the meal, the little red-haired girl peers down at an iPhone barely concealed beneath the tablecloth. The younger boys speak quietly but animatedly among themselves.
‘Geek fest,’ whispers Madeleine, though she doesn’t need to lower her voice – the adults are several bottles of wine in by now and laughing constantly and raucously, Bianka’s voice rising above all the others with her shrill, hollow laugh.
‘Watch my mom pretend to eat,’ whispers Madeleine, her eyes glinting conspiratorially. Storm looks over at the main table, and, sure enough, Madeleine’s mom really is pretending to eat – she’s squared up her duck breast into tiny little pieces she pushes around on her plate, in and out of the jus, then pretends to take a bite, but the piece of meat is still speared on the fork and brought back down to the plate. She repeats the charade again and again. ‘Fascinating, huh?’
Storm smiles and nods. ‘Why does she do that? The food is so good. Like, I never get food this good at home. Or at school.’
‘Because she’s an obsessive control freak who structures her entire life around being skinny.’
‘Woah. That’s, uh, not great.’
‘Nope.’
Bianka, on the other hand, is chewing merrily and taking big gulps of her wine. Whenever Madeleine’s mom speaks or turns toward her, Bianka smiles slowly, tilting her head, or laughs loudly at the most moderately funny little comment.
‘Total mutual fangirl vibes going on there,’ says Madeleine.
‘Mmm,’ he says.
‘Like, my mom hasn’t shut up about Bianka since they met. It’s Bianka this, Bianka that. She refers to her as Beautiful Bianka. How cringe is that?’
‘Yeah, that’s fucked up.’
‘My mom thinks she’s so interesting and different, apparently.’
‘Yeah, Bianka says the same about your mom. And my dad says she’s, like, stopped eating carbs or whatever.’ They both giggle.
Storm follows Madeleine’s gaze over to Bianka, who’s sitting facing them but hasn’t looked toward the kids’ table a single time that he’s noticed. Bianka’s eyes are locked on Madeleine’s mom. Beautiful Bianka. Storm tries to see her as others might, as interesting and different and beautiful, but no matter what, he can’t compute that someone would refer to Bianka as any of those things, especially beautiful. Or maybe he just can’t see past what she’s like inside to be a fair judge of the outside. But they go hand in hand, don’t they? Storm thinks they do, in any case, and what he likes about Madeleine is that her undeniable outer beauty is enhanced by the mischievous glint in her eyes and her frequent, unselfconscious laughter.
Madeleine’s mom, too, Storm recognizes as beautiful. She’s a petite woman and almost regal in the way she carries herself, the kind of person who holds the attention of a room without having to try. He knows who she is, because since he’s arrived in London, Bianka hasn’t shut up about her ‘NBF’. When he stared at her the first time she said it, she helpfully translated for him, explaining it means New Best Friend, in case he didn’t know. And every time she says NBF, Storm cringes all the way down into his core – do fortysomethings really have to adopt the slang abbreviations of Gen Z? Can’t she just refer to her as, Charlotte, a new friend of mine.
The plates are cleared from the table by a young woman and the adults stand up unsteadily and file outside onto the terrace. Through the windows, Storm can see the flash of several lighters, then the pinprick tips of skinny cigarettes moving around.
‘Urgh, seriously, she barely eats but has no problem lighting up. So gross,’ says Madeleine, walking out of the dining room and down a long hallway, motioning for Storm to follow. ‘Come,’ she says, ‘let’s fix ourselves dessert.’
*
In the attic, among carefully labelled and stacked cardboard boxes, Madeleine and Storm sit close together, leaning their backs on the cool stone chimney that runs up through the house. From a plastic bag hidden in one of the boxes, labelled ‘winter boots’, Madeleine retrieves a packet of gummy bears and a big tray of ultra-processed American cookies with rainbow-colored chunks of marshmallows embedded in them.
‘I have to hide these from my mom,’ she says, pinching a cookie from the tray after offering them to Storm.
‘Would she go crazy?’
‘Yeah, totally. You know, she’s the Keto Queen and, oh boy, do we all know it. No carbs allowed in this house.’
‘What, none at all?’
‘Nope.’
Storm picks up the bag of gummy bears and realizes they’re marijuana gummies.
‘Woah, where did you get these?’
‘Internet. Have one.’
‘My dad would go so crazy.’
