Page 220 of The Long Way Home

Her face pouted.

“Honestly, Parks—” I sniffed a laugh. “You should have seen yourself the morning you ordered Bircher Muesli. You’d have thought you’d just landed the Mars fucking Rover the way you went on about new taste explorations.”

Her mouth fell open, offended, and I remember wanting to kiss her then.

“I’m not predictable.” She shook her head. “Do you want me to list off all the ways I’m unpredictable?”

“I really don’t, no—” I yawned and shook my head.

“Number one,” we said at the exact same time.

“Hey!” we both said in unison. I pointed at her and she stomped her foot at me.

I shook my head at her a bit. “Honestly, Parks, just when I think you’re about to swing left, you swing… left.”

Got cross after that. Had a proper strop the whole time she brewed her cup of tea.

“Is it a head thing, then?” I asked her gently.

“I beg your pardon?” She glared over at me.

“You know—” I shrugged. Gesturing to my head in case she’d forgotten where hers was. “Your head thing.”

“My what?” Her cheeks started to go pink so I shrugged again, not wanting her to feel weird.

“Your obsessive compulsive thing?” I ducked my head so I could meet her eyes.

“Oh.” She went pink. “Know about that, do you?”

“Yeah.” I gave her a small smile.

“How do you know?” She frowned.

And I didn’t mean to, but I let out a single laugh.

“What?” She sulked.

“Magnolia, I’ve known you since you were four.” I gave her a shrug. “Of course I knew.”

She swallowed. “How?”

“The clothes thing, for one,” I started and she rolled her eyes. “You’ve kind of always had weird rules you live by, and if you don’t follow them you get weird and antsy.”

She cleared her throat. “Such as?”

I blew some air out of my mouth. “Like the shower thing. You can’t go to bed without a shower, but you can have naps without one, even if your nap is in the bed.” She squinted over at me.

“Or,” I continued, “you stir you tea in multiples of seven. You need the mint taste in your mouth to go to sleep. Or how your food can’t be touching. Or how once you get into bed at bed time, if you get out again, you need to wash your feet or you can’t sleep.” She just glared at me.

“Probably the one that really gave it away was — pretty early on, I guess — we were at school, we’d been together a bit by then, and you got a splinter in your wrist. Do you remember?”

I heard her breathing change. She nodded.

She brushed up against a wooden railing when she was sneaking into my dorm room and then she disappeared off into my bathroom for ages. Eventually I went to check on her and there she was, legs crossed, sitting on the edge of the bath with a safety pin in her hand and scratch marks all over her forearm. My eyes went wide. Worried she was doing something else for a second before she said in a quiet voice, “There’s something under my skin.” She tried not to cry as I knelt down in front of her. I nodded, brows creased, and dabbed the blood away from her arm with some toilet paper.

“I see it,” I told her. She offered me a tight-lipped smile and wordlessly handed me the pin.

I remember that I grimaced at the idea of hurting her — it was such a foreign concept at the time. Little did I know that in a few short years we’d be masters at hurting each other, that causing each other pain would be the lynchpin of our relationship, the only thing more consistent than each other.