The Unknown Road

52 - Tessa

We turn our heads in sync and stand. Our first lesson back, his arrival was met with gasps of horror. Now, people are barely batting an eyelid at the sight of his bruised face.

Archie waves awkwardly to the class and I have to hide my smile with my hand. For someone who hates presenting, he's good at it.

"So our project," he gestures to the easel which is covered with a sheet in a stupid reveal that he had organised, "was based on a table top card game idea."

"Not like a casino," I quickly add. "We've gone for Solitaire."

Mrs Doctor nods and marks it down in her book. "What theme did you go for?"

"Well the theme was something important to us, so we've gone with family, friends and hobbies. We've used different cards to show different things. And we split the deck, so to speak. I went with spades and clubs, whilst Tessa did hearts and diamonds, each of us having about seven or eight cards to draw before we came together."

"I remember you guys saying you had an interesting idea for your backboard. Can you explain the logic behind it?"

Archie hands over to me. "Tess?"

I take a step forward, fiddling with my jumper. "Erm, yeah, so I actually got the inspiration for this from a film. Have any of you guys seen The Princess Diaries?"

A couple of girls raise their hands, but the boys all shake their heads emphatically. I'm fairly certain they probably had, but I don't dwell on it.

"Okay, well, there's a scene where Mia and her mum are throwing darts at balloons on a blank canvas, and I wanted to do that. So Archie and I filled hundreds of balloons with various paints; glitter paint, metallic paint, Pantone paint, primary paint... and we blew them up enough to cause the paint to splatter when it popped."

The two girls smile and giggle as they remember the scene.

"It took us a couple of days, and we got completely covered in paint, but I think we did it pretty well, as you'll see in a minute. The paint splatters mixed together and ran off, and it's almost a kind of less fluorescent version of Tye-Dye."

I finish up and smile at Mrs Doctor.

"Great. I can't wait to see the finished product," she smiles as she notes something else down.

"Yeah, we're pretty proud of it actually. Nice idea, Tess." He nudges me playfully and smiles widely as Mrs Doctor looks back up.

"Did you guys work together on any cards? Or are each other's cards just as much a surprise as to us?" She asks.

"We knew about each other's cards. We're around each other so much that we needed to make sure none of them were the same," he laughs and everyone joins in.

"You guys are joined at the hip!" I don't know who it was but it looks like Rob's friend Nick. He doesn't hang out with us much, but he's a sub on the football team with Archie so probably knows him quite well.

Archie smiles but looks back at Mrs Doctor and then at me. His cheeks then redden and I curse in my head. He's planning something, and it's going to be embarrassing for me. I just knew it.

"So you didn't amalgamate on any?" She asks and he looks harder at me.

He sighs, not moving his eyes from mine. "We did... on one. Kind of."

The last time I saw our project, we hadn't amalgamated on any of them, and the pick-up card we kept as neutral, going for a landscape of a Scottish holiday we went on when we were nine. Now what had he added?