The Truth About Love

chapter seven

I guess you could say that Fliss is the only female friend that I have, but that makes it seem like she's my only female friend out of a large pool of friends otherwise comprised of males when the reality is that I quite simply just have two friends in total. And she happens to be the only girl out of the pair. If that makes any sense. Anyway, the important thing you must have gauged by now is that I don't have many friends.

I don't get to see Fliss a lot: she goes to another school on the other side of town. We see each other every Wednesday when we both volunteer at Clairemont Grove, a residential home. The first time I saw her was in year eleven when we both started volunteering at the same time and had to do our induction together. I thought she was cool and confident; the good kind of confident- not the in-your-face kind. She thought it was funny that I went to a private school. First impressions aside, we ended up getting along extremely well.

Today, we're helping the residents decorate cupcakes with colourful buttercream icing and it's not going too well for me. Aileen, the lady I'm supposed to be helping asked me to do a floral design on hers but it's turning out to look more like a unicorn had an accident all over the vanilla sponge base.

"I'm sorry that it's turned out this way, " I say half grimacing, half smiling.

Aileen squints at it for a good ten seconds, pulling her spectacles closer before giving me a genuine smile. "I like it a lot dear. It's very vibrant!"

I beam with pride. Maybe I'm not as unartistic as I thought I was.

"That's certainly one way to describe Asha's masterpiece," Fliss peers over my shoulder practically bursting with laughter as she pats me on the back like a father patting his athletically-inept son after their first football session together in the park: well-intentioned, but extremely unhelpful.

I look over at her cupcakes. Any sense of confidence built up by Aileen's polite remark deflates like air being released from a balloon. Her cupcakes are a literal work of art; she's drawn intricate butterfly designs on the cupcakes using melted white chocolate.

"Fair play," I say turning to her and giving her a nod of approval.

As she chuckles, her turquoise box braids bounce up and down on her small frame. "Sis, you're many things but an artist ain't one of them," she takes her phone out of her pocket to snap a quick photo of my failure of an attempt at cupcake decorating, most likely so that she can whip it out and make fun of me again at a later date. Just as she turns her phone off, the dinner bell rings, indicating that all the residents should be taken to the dining room.

I start wheeling Aileen into the dining room and the smell of liver pate, the Wednesday special, hits me. They're given food that's frankly Michelin-star standard here, yet the majority of the residents still seem to happily opt for cheesy beans on toast instead. I guess there's nothing cheesy beans on toast can beat.

Fliss hands me a red apron, which I slip over my head. We start distributing meals to all the tables as efficiently as we can before the residents get tired of waiting and retreat to their bedrooms. After I hand over the eighth plate of beans on toast of the evening, someone calls "Christie!"