could text them and say I’m staying at your house, Ells,’ Max suggested.
‘Yeah!’ said Fallon. ‘And we could get a takeaway too. I think the pizza place delivers out here, though I’ve never tried it. We get the leaflet though. We could have a picnic in the lounge and play Monopoly like we used to, what do you say?’ Then she turned to me, all serious-faced for a moment. ‘I’m always the boot though.’
‘Very Famous Five,’ I said. ‘Apart from the booze.’
‘Yeah! Do you remember Jessica reading the stories to us? She gave me all her books the last… time I saw her.’
Max smiled. ‘She knew how much you loved them.’
‘I always thought we were just like them,’ she said with more than a note of sadness in her voice, ‘the five of us. Max was like Julian, the eldest and wisest.’
I snorted. ‘I didn’t know Julian was a pot head.’
‘Ella was George, the tomboy. Zane was Timmy the dog, strong and reliable. I was probably Anne.’
Max laughed. ‘Yeah, and Corey must be Dick.’
If Corey was offended by Max’s remark, he didn’t say. ‘Jessica called us the Fearless Five. That was our name.’
‘Hey, he’s right!’ said Max. ‘I’d forgotten that. Christ, that’s a blast from the past.’
‘Yeah well,’ I said, ‘we’ve all grown up a lot since then.’ I almost felt insulted by it. We weren’t little kids any more – we couldn’t play those kinds of games now. She was dangling memories before my eyes like gold stars I couldn’t reach.
‘We could be the Fearless Five again, now,’ said Fallon. ‘Only we’re four. We don’t have Zane.’ We looked at each other and smiled secretly, not knowing if she was joking.
‘I know!’ she cried. ‘The baby can be Timmy! Then there’s five of us again! Yay!’
‘What baby?’ said Corey.
‘My baby,’ she said. And that was the moment Fallon lifted up her vest to reveal a small, but definite, bump.
‘So that’s when you found out about Fallon being pregnant?’
‘What?’ we all cried. It was like in Scooby Doo when they see the monster for the first time; only we didn’t yell Zoinks! and drop our sandwiches.
Fallon looked around at all of us. ‘What?’ The stretchy band of her denim shorts was holding her in at the waist, hiding much of her neat belly like the sea hides an iceberg. But, even in the dimming light, we could see she was well pregnant. She even had silvery stretch marks across her belly to prove it.
‘Holy shit!’ cried Corey.
‘You’re pregnant?’ I said.
‘Yeah. That’s why I’ve got such a big tummy. I thought you all knew.’
‘We just thought you were fat,’ Max laughed.
I felt a rush of something weird – disgust? Jealousy? I didn’t know. ‘You’re our age!’
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