Drop Dead.

“Oy, Char, come bring me that doo-hickey,” called Melanie, my new roommate and best friend of five years. I met her in the café, go figure, when she stopped my boss from going ape-shit on my ass for missing a speck of coffee ground in the coffee pot. Her vocabulary when referring to specific things was a little off and words like “doo-hickey, whatchamacallit, and whodawhatsit” were a common occurrence.

Originally, I wasn’t so keen on the idea of her moving in because I often got sick of seeing the same person all the time, but that wasn’t the case with Melanie. In fact, I often missed her presence dearly when she was gone at work. We hardly fought and if we did, it was over something petty and was let go almost an hour later. I never got sick of her blasting her heavy metal music or her obnoxiously loud and off-key singing in the shower or her random dirty socks lying across the couch. When she and her habits weren’t around, the apartment didn’t quite feel like home. She gave it that feeling, especially when she was cooking dinner and we weren’t calling for take-out.

“Which one?” My American accent had begun fading slightly after two years of living in Sheffield, but my English accent was nowhere near as thick as Melanie’s was, having been born and raised here. I never knew what exactly she was talking about when she used her vague vocabulary.

“The one wiff the little snippet on the end!” she responded. There were about three objects in front of me with little “snippets” on the ends of them.

“They’ve all got snippets on the end, yeh loon!” At least I pronounced ‘you’ the same way that she did; I didn’t feel completely out-of-place. I heard her sigh and get up from the kitchen table, where she was attempting to cut vegetables for our dinner tonight. She entered the dining room and lightly shoved me out of the way, her eyes scanning the drawer in front of me.

“This one, yeh loon,” she sneered jokingly, holding up a potato masher. She grinned lopsidedly at me when I stuck my tongue out childishly.

“Yeh coulda said the potato masher,” I grumbled, crossing my arms, and followed her into the kitchen. I could practically see her eye roll as she took a new place at the counter to begin mashing the potatoes.

“I didn’t know wha’ it were called!” she argued. I smiled wryly and rolled my eyes as I sat at the table and finished chopping her vegetables. “Wanna frow them in the pot when yeh done?” I nodded even though she couldn’t see me, but she was telekinetic like that. I didn’t need to respond for her to know that I heard her.

So we sat in silence for a while, me chopping the vegetables and tossing them in a bowl, her mashing her potatoes. The best thing about being roommates with my best friend was that we didn’t always need to be speaking to be comfortable because we knew that any forced conversation would lead to awkwardness. Melanie and I avoided awkwardness like the plague. If we were out at a bar and someone ruined the comfortable silence with an awkward statement, we took a shot. Of course, we got drunk a lot faster after that, but that was our rule, and neither of us seemed to ever oppose the idea of being completely pissed.

“Oh, I invited that lad and ‘is friends round for dinner,” she informed me just as the doorbell rang and my eyebrows pulled together. “I’ll get it!”

“What lad?” I asked her just as I heard the door swing open. About six sets of footsteps echoed on the wood floors of the foyer, one of them being Melanie’s. As I set the bowl of mashed potatoes down on the dining room table, Melanie entered with five very colorful boys.

“Char,” Mel said as my eyebrows shot to the Arctic Circle at the sight of the boy with the tattooed knuckles and the too-tight jeans. He’d cleaned up a little and didn’t look as tired as he always did in the café. His face looked freshly-shaven and his hair was actually combed and looked neat atop his head. The outfit was the same as it always was – a loose, black t-shirt and his form-fitting jeans. “This is Oliver, Matt Kean, Matt Nicholls, Lee Malia, and Olleh’s brother, Tom. Boys, this is Charlotte.”

“But please, call me Charlie,” I interjected with a smile, holding up a hand before any of them could say my full name. They all sent some kind of smile in return before taking the extra five seats at the table. Melanie took her place at the head of the table and I took mine at the opposite end, Lee and Tom on my right and left sides respectively. Oliver was on Charlotte’s left and Matt Kean on her right. Matt Nicholls was sandwiched between Lee and Matt Kean.

As food was dispersed and ingested, conversation flew easily and constantly around the table. These boys were easy to get along with, told amusing stories that made Melanie choke and me snort embarrassingly. Melanie and I learned that the boys, minus Tom, were in a band with one other member, Jona, who unfortunately couldn’t make it but sent his apologies. Unfortunately, for me, they played the kind of music Melanie was into, the heavy stuff with the screaming vocals I couldn’t understand.

“Do yeh like that stuff, Charlie?” Lee asked me, wiping his hands on the napkin on his lap. All eyes turned to me and I met Melanie’s gaze across the table. It was pleading with me that I say yes and I wondered why it mattered so much. Instead of questioning it, which I would do later when the boys were gone, I simply nodded slowly and Melanie let the smallest hint of a smile grace her features. I nodded again, more surely this time, to say ‘you’re welcome’. “Realleh? Yeh don’t strike me as the type o’girl to listen to it.”

“Really? And what type of girl do I strike you as, musically?” I asked him sharply, smiling to let him know I was simply pulling his chain. He smirked right back.

“I dunno, like Jack Johnson and Billy Joel type o’stuff.” He shrugged, unsure of himself. On the contrary, he couldn’t have been more right. I had grown up listening to all the classic rockers, including Joel and Jackson, along with Queen and Led Zeppelin. I fought back a smile, though, and shook my head instead.

“Nah. Give me something with heavy drum beats and epic guitar solos,” I lied easily. I almost felt Melanie’s sigh of relief across the table. When I glanced down her end, Oliver was smirking knowingly, as if he knew I was lying, but I looked away before I could keep eye contact for too long and end up looking creepy.

“So ‘ave yeh ‘eard of us, then?” Matt Kean asked me next. I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion; they never told me the name of their band. “Bring Me the ‘Orizon?” Without thinking, I shook my head and Oliver choked on his water at the end of the table.

The guys helped us clean up the dinner table – and by ‘clean up’ I mean they stacked the dishes in the sink instead of placing them in the dishwasher – and then they left. After placing the dishes properly inside, Melanie and I lounged in the living room, watching some weird show on BBC.

“So,” I said, idly staring at my cuticles, “what made yeh decide to invite our neighbor over?” I tried not to show too much interest in her answer, but I was dying to know. Not only was it last minute, it was very, very random – not completely unlike Melanie, but she didn’t make a habit of inviting strangers into our apartment.

“I dunno,” she replied, shrugging one shoulder casually. “I jus’ thought it’d be nice to dine with someone else for a change. No offense, love. But Olleh and I bumped into each other in the garage – and I mean, literally bumped into one another – and we jus’ got to talkin’, yeh know? So I jus’ kinda asked ‘im and ‘is friends if they wanted to join us.” The dreamy look in her eye and the fact that she didn’t apologize for the late notice clued me in on her crush on Oliver.

“Yeh like him,” I stated without a second thought. A blush tinted Melanie’s cheeks as she curled her legs underneath her.

“Don’t be daft. I barely know ‘im.” I rolled my eyes. Then she said, “But ‘e is proper fit, yeah?”