Just My Luck by Adele Parks (best interesting books to read TXT) 📕

asked twice. I hear them scampering above me, running to bagsy the bathroom. Jake comes back into the kitchen and beams. “Emily needs an opportunity to wear some of those new clothes, right?”

As is quite usual in our family, the teens are never simply compliant. After the initial excitement about the prospect of eating out at a cool restaurant, Logan is disgusted to hear he might have to wear school shoes because some of the places Jake is thinking of taking us to have a footwear policy that specifies no trainers. Then Emily has a mini confidence crisis because of her injured face and won’t believe us that her makeup covers the bruises. “You can hardly tell.” She’s right not to believe us. Her attempts at caking makeup over the wounds just draw the eye, but both Jake and I are well aware that to say so, whilst ticking the box of honesty, would backfire and escalate her panic.

“I think it makes you look edgy,” says Jake. “Kind of heroin chic.”

“Jake, that’s not a thing anymore and it’s hardly aspirational for our daughter, is it?” Jake winks at Emily and whether or not she understands that her dad is alluding to an anarchic vision of beauty, signaling drug addiction, she grins and dashes for the door.

We call an Uber and as we are driven into London, Jake makes some phone calls and secures a dinner reservation at a restaurant called @, not “At” or “Arobase,” just @. The name alone tells me the place will be so trendy it will be terrifying. Jake says that at the moment @ is reputed to be the most expensive restaurant in London. He beams. “It is fair to say that it is the sort of restaurant that only oligarchs and those with expense accounts visit. There’s a waiting list that’s three months long, but when I told them we were lottery winners they found us a table.”

“Cool!” comments Logan, although I wonder what he’ll find on the menu that he’ll like. He’s a burger and chips boy, steak and chips on special occasions.

It’s impossible not to be impressed. The ceiling towers metres above us, and the floor is vast, a place where people come to see and be seen. All the tables are round. And we are shown to a circular booth, which affords privacy. My guess is that this one table is always kept aside for the trail of pop stars, actors and VIPs that must want to drop by every night. The leather booth is dark blue, the round table is gold. It should be awful, garish and obvious, but I have to admit it’s stupendous, luxurious and startling. The room is swathed in various shades of shimmering fabrics that suggest a bygone era.

“It’s like being on the set of The Great Gatsby,” says Emily, giggling. She’s completely forgetting to be a teen and showing her enthusiasm in spades. I can’t help but be thrilled by this. Any parent of a teen knows that a child’s mood dictates the success of the evening and it’s a relief to see her happy. There’s a lot going on in her world and I need to spend some time unpacking it, but there’s a lot going on in my world, too, so I haven’t quite got to the bottom of it yet. The large cardboard menus are as thick as magazines. In each dish there is at least one ingredient I don’t recognize, but we manage to order anyway as we largely depend on the recommendation of the staff, who are incredibly friendly and thankfully not the breed of waiters who feel their job is to rudely intimidate.

Jake insists on ordering champagne. He hasn’t drunk anything else since the win.

“Let’s buy by the glass, then we can switch to wine if we want to,” I suggest. He shrugs, but doesn’t object. He just throws me an odd look that suggests I’m bonkers and then catches himself, tries to put his face back into neutral. I know, I know we can afford champagne, we can probably bathe in it, but I want wine. Once we have our drinks and whilst we wait for the main course, I turn to Jake. “So the children tell me you went to look at a school today. That was quick off the block.”

“Why hang about? I called Coopers and the Head there said she’d see me.” Coopers is the local private school; I’m relieved that at least he hasn’t been more ambitious and thought of sending them to boarding school without consulting me. “I thought it was worth striking while the iron is hot. I know you don’t like me just hanging around the house.”

This is true so I can hardly object to him showing initiative. “What’s it like?”

“Beautiful. Amazing. The facilities are out of this world. They have a theater, language labs, science labs, a music room.”

“Sign me up,” says Emily.

“We have all that stuff,” points out Logan, not willing to keep the reluctance out of his voice.

“Yeah, you do, but this is all just bigger and better and shinier.” Jake laughs and downs his glass of champagne, signals to the waiter for another one. He offers me another, but my glass is still full. “Their theater has dressing rooms and the light-and-sound kit is amazing. The language and science labs are state-of-the-art. I’ve never seen as many instruments as there were in the music rooms. The sports facilities are spectacular, son.”

“Really?”

Jake knows which buttons to press, I’ll give him that. “Honestly, they have everything. An Olympic-size swimming pool, full-size football and rugby pitches, 4g AstroTurf, cricket nets, squash courts, tennis courts, a gym. You should have seen it.”

Yeah, he should have. We all should have.

Our starters arrive and the conversation is put on pause as we all ooh and aah at the plates in front of us, which are basically works of art. The waiter asks if we need anything; Logan asks for ketchup. To give the