Heads or Tails

“Guys,” I say to my three friends, sitting around a game of Monopoly. “I have a dilemma. Completely hypothetical.”

Jade, ever the sceptic, raises an eyebrow at me, pausing her silver dog’s trip around the board. “Hypothetical?”

“Yeah, totally,” I say, suppressing the heat rising in my cheeks. I shift in my seat and pull the blanket tighter around me. The rain lashing at the windows gives me a chill. “Say, for example, I wanted to buy a house on Leicester Square, but I’d have more spare change if I bought one on Euston Road, what would you do?”

“This is about Liam, isn’t it?” Chelsea asks, seeing right through my disguise.

“No…” I say, rolling the dice and moving my wheelbarrow across the board before handing over rent money to Holly, who grinned at me with Mr Burns hands. “I just wanna know you guys’ thoughts.”

“Well, I think you should go with Euston Road,” Holly says, organising the money I paid her into her separate piles, casting her eyes between the yellow squares and the light blue. “Then I don’t have to give you as much money.”

“But Leicester Square has a nice view of the park. Euston Road looks over a parking garage.” I pick up my phone from my lap and start scrolling discreetly through real estate listings. Only on the rent section. Saving for a deposit on a house is a long way off, even if Liam and I combine our wages.

“I knew this was about Liam!” Chelsea exclaims, clapping her hands together, partly at me, and partly at Holly landing on a fully hotelled Bond Street. “Deciding shouldn’t be that hard, Bee. It’s just a house. It’s just a game.”

“Yeah, but what if everything goes to shit because we make the wrong decision?” I click off my phone and place it face down on the table and my head in my hands, elbows on the table like a moody teenager who can’t get her own way.

“You’re really leaving this in our incapable hands? No offence,” Jade says, glancing at Chelsea and Holly apologetically before shoving some barbecue chips into her mouth. “Shouldn’t you and Liam be making this decision yourselves?”

“As I said,” I repeat. “This situation is completely hypothetical. It has everything to do with me wanting to finally win a game of Monopoly and nothing to do with moving in with my boyfriend of a year and a half.”

“Well, I’m going the fridge to get some more cider,” Chelsea says, her chair squeaking on the floorboards as she stands up. “Anyone else want one?”

Jade and Holly put their hands up, but I tell Chelsea I’m driving, which is true. There’s no way I’m risking another drink driving fine. Liam would be pissed. Sure, the only one I’ve gotten is from one tiny sip last Christmas, but I’m not risking it again. I can wait to drink until I’m on my opens. One cider wouldn’t inhibit me at all, let alone one sip of a G and T that Mum offered me, which I promptly gave back to her because who the hell actually enjoys gin or tonic water? Seriously, I’d fare better eating chalk and cheese on a sandwich. At least the cheese would taste nice. And I wouldn’t get booked for it. The most I’d get would be weird looks, and chalk powder caught in my teeth.

Chelsea comes back with the ciders and passes around the bottle opener so everyone can enjoy some nice, refreshing, apple flavoured alcohol. I drop the topic of apparent hypothesis, and we go back to playing Monopoly. I buy houses on all my properties, sell them all to pay off rent, rebuy ones I can, sell those, and rinse and repeat until I am out of money. I don’t do it on purpose. Maybe it’s the dice’s fault, or maybe I’m a terrible strategist.

In any case, Holly goes on to win, again. We don’t have a leader board going for how many wins we all get of Monopoly, but Holly would definitely be at the top, and I’d be dead last. The whole ordeal takes hours, so it’s lucky it’s raining outside and we can’t go to the park for a picnic, like we’d planned. After the game’s packed up, we collapse on the couches in front of the TV and switch it on, only for background noise, really. There’s something about the Australian housing bubble on the news, but I don’t pay much attention to it. I’ve been doing my research about it for weeks now, so no news story is going to tell me anything I don’t already know.

Liam wants to move into a place he found in Chermside, which is cheap as chips, but looks over a multi-storey carpark, which is super nice if you want to breathe in exhaust fumes every day, but I don’t. I want to move into a place in Fairfield which, yes, is more expensive, but we can afford it, and it has a glorious view of a park, and a lot fewer exhaust fumes on a daily basis.

I don’t text Liam to tell him that Holly agrees with him, because why the hell would I give him more proof for the place he found? It already isn’t that spacious. There’s not even a balcony to drink morning coffee on or read books on the weekends. The place I found has ‘loads of space for all your shit,’ as Liam put it, which I scoffed at; and ‘a nice balcony overlooking trees and a pond, and is a good place to spend the day,’ as I put it, to which I received an ungrateful eye roll.

“Hey, guys,” I start, flicking through the channels on Holly’s TV, keen to get away from the housing market news. “Not to bring up an old subject, but I still don’t know which Monopoly house to buy.”

“Didn’t we settle that?” Jade asks. “You bought both, then sold both, then bought both, then went bankrupt and Holly won again.”

Chelsea gives Jade a meaningful look and turns to me. “Cut the crap with all these hypotheticals. Which apartment do you want?”

I roll my eyes and sigh dramatically, putting my head in my hands again, letting the remote fall in my lap. “I don’t know. I want the one in Fairfield, but the Chermside one is far cheaper, even if it doesn’t have a great location. It is closer to my job though.”

“So maybe Liam’s just looking out for your best interests, choosing a cheap place near your work,” Holly says, typing furiously on her phone. She’s working from home today, which basically means she has to send a bunch of emails and reply to other ones and stuff like that, but she can still hang out with us because she’s nice like that. I don’t know how her boss would feel about her drinking cider while “at work”, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

“I never thought about it that way,” I say absently, thinking to text Liam and apologise. I don’t. “I don’t think it’s right, but thanks anyway.”

“Well, I don’t know, then,” Chelsea says, throwing her hands up in the air in defeat like she did when Holly bankrupted her. “Maybe we should flip a coin?”

Jade scoops up her bag and starts rummaging. She pulls out fifty cents and lines it up on her fingers. “We’re clear on the rules? Heads is your pick; Tails is Liam’s. No take-backsies.”

Her use of the term ‘take-backsies’ makes me doubt her law degree for a moment. Then she flicks her thumb up, propelling the shiny piece of metal that will seal my fate. The coin flies through the air and I catch it, keeping my fingers over it until I slap it into my other hand, where I reveal the coin to have landed on…

Tails.

“Best of three?” I ask hopefully. A chorus of mocking laughter tells me no one’s keen on that.

Holly speaks up. “Jade said no take-backsies, and she’s nearly a lawyer, so that’s kind of like you’re breaking the law.”

I raise an eyebrow at Holly, and she grins at me, giving me a thumbs up. My fingers fly over the keyboard as I text Liam the news.

You flipped a coin? was his reply. Seriously?

When I texted him back that, yeah, we did seriously flip a coin to decide, he sent me some smiley faces that his decision won the Very Serious Coin Flipping With No Take-Backsies Ceremony.

“If there’s anything we can all agree on,” Chelsea says, looking over at me with a lazy smile on her face. “I think it’s that we’d all make terrible jurors.”