He She It

seven: severe heart palpitations

"I am going to puke."

"That's the fifth time you've said that since we got on the bus, Ra," Lilly said, inching away from her friend and pulling her bag into her lap. The old woman sitting across from them did the same. "We're like two minutes away from town, now. Just breathe slowly and shut up."

For once, though, the reason behind Amara's biliousness wasn't the decade-old bus and its barely qualified, possibly suicidal driver. This time, the person responsible for her breakfast threatening to make a grand reappearance was significantly hotter, but still just as capable of giving her severe heart palpitations.

That person happened to be less than two minutes away.

That person also happened to be the person Amara was supposed to spend a solid six hours with.

That person was, of course, Natalie Harper - and she was now quite clearly in view, even through the impressively dusty bus window.

"Crap," Amara muttered, shouldering her bag. "Crap, crap, crap."

"You'll be fine," Lilly said, standing up as the bus lurched to a halt about ten metres away from Natalie and Grace, both of whom were now waving. Amara attempted a feeble one back. "Just don't mention any vaginal diseases and she'll think you're perfectly normal."

The old woman tutted into her book. Amara spotted the cross around her neck and hoped she went straight to Church to pray for her, because God, did she need all the help she could get.

***

If there was a higher power, they were most definitely not on Amara's side.

Lilly and Grace had disappeared into the throng of January sale shoppers as soon as they'd stepped past the doors of their favourite clothes shop, leaving Natalie and Amara stood in the middle of the underwear section, the former a little confused, the latter very, very nervous.

There was silence for a few minutes. Amara stared at bras that were three sizes too big for her and Natalie tried to call Grace to beg her to rescue her from this socially-inept, Asian lesbian.

(Or at least, that's what Amara had convinced herself she was doing).

Eventually, she slid her phone back into her bag and sighed. "I can't get hold of her," she said, and Amara averted her attention from a hideous beige push-up bra back to Natalie, who was admittedly easier on the eyes despite the fact that Amara couldn't actually meet her eyes. "It's probably a good thing. Shopping with Grace is worse than medieval torture."

Amara laughed. "Is she really that bad?"

"Trust me," Natalie said, eyes widening as she spotted her best friend in the crowd, a pair of bright pink heels dangling from her left hand. "Shit, she's got shoes. I say we escape while we still can."

Before Amara could agree to anything, Natalie had grabbed her by the wrist and run from the shop, not stopping until they came to the town's bowling alley, a derelict building squeezed in between a boarded-up phone shop and a drycleaners. The last time Amara had been inside, it had been to use the loo, and during those three minutes she'd had cigarette ash flung in her face by a drunken teenage boy and met a whole family of toilet-dwelling spiders.

The place was a dump.

A dump, apparently, that Natalie wanted to visit. While Amara bent over to recover from being dragged on an impromptu sprint by a girl whose legs were about a foot longer than her own, Natalie pressed her nose against one of the windows and confirmed that the said dump was open.

"I haven't been bowling in forever," she said, pouting. "Will you have a game with me?"

Amara bit her lip and glanced inside. Three men were playing a shaky game of snooker, eight beer bottles lined up on the side of the table. A teenage couple had claimed some seats as their own personal bedroom and both looked one kiss away from stripping off right there and then, in front of a three year old who was sliding down the bowling alley on her stomach.

She looked back at Natalie, whose bottom lip was jutting out so far it could probably serve as a shelf, and then she caved.

"Fine," she said, "one game."

Two hours later, and Amara's last few shreds of dignity had been taken from her by Natalie 'I-haven't-bowled-in-like-a-decade-but-I'm-somehow-a-fucking-professional' Harper, which was what she had taken to calling her in her head. It wasn't exactly a catchy nickname, but it was at least better than the previous one, which had alluded both to Natalie's boobs and Amara's borderline unhealthy obsession with marrying her.

(The kind of nickname, Amara had realised, that tends to come up in stalking investigations).

(She made a mental note to erase 'Mrs Natalie Nicetits Khan' from her notebook the moment she got back home).

Natalie had just scored yet another strike when her phone rung. She dug it out of her bag, still dancing her signature 'I-beat-your-sorry-arse' jig, and then held it up to her ear.

"Hey, Grace," she said, sitting down now as Amara tried her very best to mimic Natalie's technique. She swung her arm twice, stepped forward, swung again, and then let the ball go. It rolled straight into the gutter. "Nice one, loser!"

Amara stuck her tongue out.

"Yeah, yeah, sorry," Natalie said into the phone. "We're at the bowling alley. Tell Lilly her best friend can't bowl for shit."

"I'm letting you win," Amara called over her shoulder as her second ball knocked down a grand total of three pins. She swore under her breath and spun back around to face Natalie. "You could show a bit more gratitude."

"Keep telling yourself that, Amara," Natalie said, grinning as she shoved her phone back into her bag. "Oh, look at that. I beat you by over one hundred."

"Bitch," Amara muttered, swallowing the last of her lukewarm, suspiciously cheap Coke and grimacing. "Ew, this is almost as gross as you."

Natalie jabbed her elbow into Amara's side. "Oh, shut up. You're practically in love with me."

And so Amara shut up, because she couldn't exactly argue with that.