Unexpected Rendezvous

Chapter 3

Leigh-Anne's POV

"It's orange," I tell Sairah when she puts the doughnut in front of me. 

"Well, duh." Sairah might be in her forties, but she can roll her eyes as aggressively as any teenager at Charlton High. "That's the Wotsits dust."

I poke uncertainly at one side of the doughnut. My fingertip comes back bright orange. "And this tastes good?"

"Honey, you know our motto at Crave." She puts one hand on her hip and cocks her head, inviting me to finish the sentence.

"The weirder the better," I say obediently.

"That's right." She pats me on the shoulder before turning back towards the kitchen. "Enjoy your Wotsit-dusted Bavarian cream."

I regard the orange lump on my plate with a mix of anticipation and fear. Crave Doughnuts is my favourite breakfast place in the greater London area, but I haven't been in a while. It's hard to find anyone willing to eat this particular style of doughnut unless they're being ironic. My ex-boyfriend, Jordan, is gluten-free and all about clean eating, so he refused to set foot in the place no matter how much I begged. Somehow, that makes it even worse that he ultimately broke up with me at Veggie Galaxy.

"I don't know what's happened to you. You don't even seem like yourself anymore," he told me over a plate of kale and caesar salad last week. "It's like aliens abducted the real Leigh and left this shell behind. 

"Um, okay. Wow. That's harsh," I muttered, feeling a stab of hurt even though I'd seen this coming. Not this exactly, but something. We'd barely seen each other all week, and then all of a sudden he texted "We should go to Veggie Galaxy tomorrow." I had a bad feeling, and not just because I hate kale. "I've been a little distracted, that's all."

"It doesn't feel like you're distracted. It feels..." Jordan scratched his head, thinking. He looked really cute, and it hit me with a pang how much I used to like him. Still did like him, except...it wasn't that simple anymore. "Like you stopped trying. You're doing stuff because you think you're supposed to, but it's not real. You're not real. I mean, look at you," he added, gesturing towards my plate. "You've eaten almost an entire plate full of kale, and you haven't complained once. You're a pod person."

"I didn't realise criticising your food choices was a condition for being a good girlfriend," I grumbled, stuffing another forkful of kale into my mouth. Then I almost gagged, because honest to God, only rabbits should eat that shit. A few minutes later, Jordan signaled for the bill and insisted on paying it, and I was single once again. Sort of. Truth is, Jordan was probably picking up on the fact I've been interested in someone else for a while, but he didn't have to pummel my self-esteem into the ground in realisation. 

"Take some time for yourself, Leigh," my Mum said when it happened. I was born via a surrogate as my mother couldn't conceive. It's pretty straightforward to understand that my mother is my biological mother, but a certain group of my classmates find it endlessly confusing. Jesy Nelson, in particular, used to ask me all the time in primary school, "But does the girl who gave birth to you not want you as her kid?"

No. The whole point in a surrogate is to not get attached. But that's not the kind of thing you can explain to a kid like Nelson, who has all the subtle communication skills of a brick. So I told her she's a family friend who I see a few times a year.

Anyway, my Mum is the one who I go to with personal stuff. "There's more to life than romantic relationships," she said when Jordan and I broke up. She's the Dean at Charlton University, and I'm pretty sure she spends half of her life worrying that I'm going to have a marriage certificate before an Bachelor's degree. "Focus on your friends for a change."