Settling Slowly

Chapter 27 - You did what, Daniel Sidney Jones?!

"Hey," a guy said as he walked through the doors as I was packing the last of my things away. He was obviously a student here. "You just had an interview?"

"Yeah." I put the last sketchbook away. "Glad it's over."

The guy chuckled. "I remember. Amandeep," he said and extended his hand to me.

"Zoey." My phone rang. "That's probably my dad outside."

"Let me give you a hand with those," he said and picked up two of the boxes boxes. "There should be a label on this."

I laughed, wedged my phone between my ear and shoulder, picked up the other box. It only had a couple of light weight things in it and my broken arm could easily handle it. "Hey, Dad. I'll be right out."

"Ok," Dad said and hung up.

I dropped the phone onto the box and walked out with Amandeep. There were a few sets of stairs to negotiate on the way down.

"So you think it went ok?" he asked.

"Yeah. You know how it is."

Ok, that was a total lie, but it was beginning to hit me and Mum and Dad were going to be the first to know, not some guy I'd met in the classroom.

He made a sound of agreement. "You've got a point there. I'm sure you did just fine. I've been following you on twitter for a while now."

Well that just went into super creepy territory. I mean, I knew that anyone could follow you on twitter, there was no privacy setting, but still. Weird. Creepy. He laughed.

"I meant that in the most complimentary way possible. Gah, you should see your face!"

I had a pretty good idea that my eyes were wide in shock, my mouth was hanging open and my skin had gone paler than normal. It was my face after all. A huge part of me wanted to take a step away from the guy, like a huge, ginormous step that would take me to America, but that was just stupid and childish. I had over a hundred thousand followers. I was bound to meet one of them eventually.

"What brought you over to the dark side?" I asked. God, I sounded like my brother.

Amandeep chuckled. "The video of your dad."

I laughed remembering the prank Dan played on first me then Dad. He'd got an old doll of mine, make it look like something out of a horror film and then put it in the freezer. Dad swore until he was bluer in the face than if he'd been in the freezer. I'd put the Vanilla Ice track Ice Ice Baby in the video and then put it on twitter. It had taken a month to go viral but when it did... Man it was awesome. Apparently people had hummed the tune to him when they saw him at the shops. Fortunately Dad thought it was all hilarious.

At the time Grigory thought there was someone in the house murdering us all and had run out of his house in pyjamas and trainers. Needless to say when we told him it was just a prank, he hadn't been impressed.

"It got tweeted back to me the other day," I said.

"Really?"

I nodded. We were on the ground floor and I could see Dad's car through the door window. He got out and opened the door for us.

"Managed to coerce some muscle to help you?" Dad asked.

"He follows me on twitter and loved the Ice Ice Baby video," I retorted. "No coercion needed."

Dad laughed and opened the boot of the car. To Amandeep he said, "That one sort of fits in there" and then opened one of the rear doors so that I could put my box in there. Mum was sat in the front trying to get a tangled tie out of her hair.