Ten Things I Hate About You

by Asynca

I asked Tumblr what they want me to write, and surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of answers was gen/canon fic. Back to subtext, it is!

The person who this is for knows who she is.

1.

One thing I used to hate about Sam when we first roomed together in boarding school was the fact that I never seemed to get a full night's sleep.

If it wasn't music blaring so loudly through her iPod headphones that I could hear the tinny beats all the way over in my bed, it was her typing on her laptop to God knows who on the Internet at two in the morning. One night I got woken up by the fake shutter sound her iPhone under the covers... I don't even want to know what that was about.

On several occasions she'd climb in the window, completely sloshed, and collapse in a fit of giggles on her mattress. She'd then proceed to tell me all the 'wild' stuff she'd just done while I held the pillow over my head and hoped it would be over soon.

The worst time was when I heard her tip-toe into through the door. She said something to me and I made a point of not opening my eyes and not replying. I could smell the alcohol even though most of my face was under my duvet.

A male voice whispered, "Wait, she's still here?"

Sam giggled. I could hear the sound of them kissing. "Don't worry about her, she won't mind."

I wouldn't mind?

I think Sam often confused the fact that I didn't throw things at her and scream with tacit acceptance of whatever she was doing.

I'm really quite amazed I did as well in my exams as I did, considering.

2.

Oh, my God, Lara, where do I start...

Lara has all this money, you see. Like, a lot of it. I'm not even exaggerating. After her parents died they left her this property somewhere out of London and a trust fund that must be worth like several million pounds or something. I don't know the exact amount right now because Lara redirects the mail from her accountant to some postbox in Surrey that she pays once a month.

This one time, I was going to Surrey to second camera on some amateur film production and I happened to be driving past the post office there. It was this tiny little place that looked like a family run business.

Okay, I'm totally not proud of what I did, but walked right in there and told them I was Lara's best friend and that I was there to collect her mail.

Probably under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have let me actually do it, but apparently Lara had been sending the mail there for years and it didn't fit in the box anymore. They didn't really know what to do with it since Lara always paid her bills on time. Instead of actually double-checking to make sure I wasn't some identify thief they just handed it all over to me in a canvas bag.

So then I had this shoe box full of letters from Lara's accountant in my closet.

I felt really bad about what I'd done for, like, weeks so I didn't even open any of them. One night when Lara was at work, it all got too much for me so I took out the box and stared at all the letters.

It couldn't really hurt to open one, could it?

I took the envelope sitting on top of the pile and threaded my finger through the lip of it, tearing it open. Inside were two sheets of paper. One was a statement, and the other was a letter from 'Robertson & Robertson' asking Lara to please make a decision about the title on the property, since it was supposed to have been transferred to her on her eighteenth. The accompanying statement was like something I'd pull out of dad's drawer in the office while I was looking for something to write on. There were so many commas and digits and the numbers kept getting bigger as my eyes tracked down the page.

What the hell was she doing working two jobs in crappy little bars for? She'd never need to work a day in her life with all this money. I mean, I knew she had some money in her trust, but this was unbelievable. I didn't even think my trust had that much money.

Then I was at this crossroads, because I really wanted to discuss it with her but I didn't want to tell her that I'd stolen all her mail.

So, I put it back in my closet.

When Lara came home that night it was well after midnight and her hand was bandaged. She didn't even say anything about it until I asked her, and then it was pretty much, "I broke up a fight," and then she took off her boots, went and lay in her bed with all her clothes on and started to doze off.

"What is with you and torturing yourself?" I asked her.

"Hmm?" she said, and then fell asleep.

It fucking sucks watching her do this to herself when she doesn't have to. It still does.

3.

Sam knows I can't stand it when there's rubbish all over the kitchen, and yet she leaves wrappers everywhere and never rinses the cereal off her plates. It solidifies there like bloody concrete and I practically need a jackhammer to get it off.

When I mentioned this to her, shoulder deep in the amount of detergent I needed to scrub the gunk off, she just grinned at me. "I thought you said you liked to be challenged?"

Instead of helping she just walked over to the fridge, took swig of milk straight from the carton, and then wandered back into the living room.

I nearly lopped the slippery, cereal-encrusted bowl straight at her head.

4.

My dad fucking loves her. That's a big one for me. Like, I know he loves me, too, but whenever I've had her over he's always like, "Why can't you be more like Lara?"

This one time, I said to him, "Because I've got you and mom as my parents!"

Yeah, I had to move back to England after that.

Part of me still hates her for it, even though it's not her fault.

5.

I know Sam has this odd relationship with her parents.

I've only met her mum once when she invited Sam and I to LA. She's a retired lingerie and swimsuit model and there are pictures of her modeling hung all over the house. I can't tell you how incredibly uncomfortable it feels to see those sorts of photos of your friend's mother. She's also had a lot of surgery and spends a great deal of her time looking into reflective surfaces and scrutinizing her appearance. The weird thing is, I don't actually think it's vanity.

She's not that bad looking for her age, or she wouldn't be if she would stop getting her face all chopped up. Even though she's still very thin, while we were there she kept making comments about how having Sam wrecked her body and before Sam she was doing this or before Sam she was doing that.

We were actually going to stay a couple of weeks, but in the middle of the first night Sam woke me up and said, "Come on, let's go stay in a hotel." She'd been crying.

We went and did Vegas instead. I hate to say it about somewhere as completely commercial as that but I really had a lot of fun with her, despite her constant attempts to hook me up with various cute guys we'd come across.

So I understand why she gets upset at her mother.

She whinges a lot about her father, too. He's actually a rather nice man, we get along well. I think mainly he's just chuffed his daughter's best friend learnt Japanese for the sole purpose of studying the family's ancestors. He even told me once that he wished Sam had the same interest in Yamatai as I did.

I never had any of those same problems with my parents.

I loved them. I wanted to be them. I still catch myself wishing I could tell Dad about something I've discovered or tell Mum about something I read. And back then, every time I noticed that debit from my bank account for the post box it reminded me that there was no one there to collect the letters anymore except me.

So when Sam complains about her parents I understand it, I really do. I just wish I had the luxury of being able to still complain about my parents, too.

I hate her a little bit for being able to do it.

6.

So Lara's not really a big fan of clubs. Usually I'll be able to drag her along and if I get enough alcohol into her I might be able to get her out onto the dance floor with me. If she's really drunk she'll even dance a bit.

But I swear to God no man on earth is good enough for her.

We could be in a club with a hundred gorgeous guys and she'll be like, "Yeah, there's no one I'm interested in." I mean, what the hell? What does she want, exactly? Prince fucking Charming with a PhD in Archeology?

I remember this time when we were in Bulgaria when this, like, amazingly hot guy just came and sat down next to her. He was Italian, and, like, whoa. He had that whole dark and dangerous think going for him and I think every woman in that place would have left with him in a heartbeat.

Every woman except Lara, that is. She did look him up and down, but she didn't look even half as impressed as I was. They said a few things to each other that I couldn't hear because of the music, and then she actually stood up and walked away.

She was crazy. I threw my arms up in the air as she approached me while I was waiting at the bar. "What are you doing?" I told her frantically, and tried to turn her around and push her back towards the guy. "He's like Zorro or something!"

"He's Italian," she said.

I didn't understand. "What? You have something against Italians?"

She shook her head. "No, Zorro is a Spanish character. He's Italian."

There are not enough forehead slaps in the world sometimes to cater for some of the stuff she says. "Oh, my God, whatever. Just go get some of that!"

She looked over at him and he made eye contact and winked at her. She turned back toward me, looking disgusted. "No, thank you." She tried to put some money in my hand. "Can you get me another Illusion?"

Seriously, I should just start buying her dozens of cats right now, because that's where she's heading.

7.

I bet one of Sam's is how much she hates the fact I don't share her hobby of sleeping with total strangers on a weekly basis. I would be willing to put quite a lot of money on it, actually.

Well, the feeling's mutual. I want to nail those revolving bedroom doors of hers completely shut.

I have this distant fantasy of being able to walk into our living room on Saturday morning without coming face-to-face with someone I've never met before in various states of undress. Sam used to actually bother to introduce me to them, now sometimes she just tells them where the food is and goes back to sleep. That results in me coming out to find George or Jack or whoever eating my cereal and drinking our tea.

At least they're usually courteous enough to offer me a cuppa.

I can't really tell Sam who she should and shouldn't be sleeping with. If I were given the option, I'd rather prefer if she didn't sleep with any of them, especially if she insists on parading them through our flat on a victory lap afterward. The alternative, though, is me insisting she go back to their flats, but I don't really want Sam going back home with some complete stranger.

At least if she's here, I know she's safe. I do need to buy some better earplugs, though.

8.

Okay, this one going to sound really awful because Roth is pretty much the closest thing Lara has to family. I know she spends a lot of time with me and we share an apartment, but I just really hate the way he's always the first one to know about everything important.

Lara gets a new job, she calls Roth. Lara gets good marks on an exam, she calls Roth. When she won the Scoresby Young Discovery award she actually went out to dinner with him, came home, showered, slept and woke up before she told me.

I'm like, Lara, you could have woken me up with that news. I would have been so happy for you, we could have celebrated together.

I know tells him things that she doesn't tell me. That kind of hurts, you know? I'm supposed to be her best friend. I am her best friend.

So why won't she talk to me about this stuff?

9.

I don't understand Sam, sometimes.

She may not always come across that way, but she's actually quite bright.

At uni all the lecturers used to laugh about her and the fact you never saw her anywhere without a camera in her hands. She always filmed the classes instead of taking notes and it became a running joke that perhaps they hadn't taught her to read and write in America. I think it bothered her a little, but not enough for her to make the effort to prove that she was anything more than a pretty girl with a trust fund and a media mogul for a father.

I know what she looks like. She watches the world through an LCD screen and always has assorted shopping bangs hanging off her arms. She also drinks like a fish and chats up anything with a pulse.

Sometimes people laugh at her behind her back – I can't stand it. They don't know what she's really like. If they'd only get her talking about lighting and composition they'd see that she knows what she's doing and she's incredibly well-versed in the topics she's passionate about.

She doesn't do herself any favours, either. She's happy to just let people assume she operates on a really superficial level. She even encourages it, sometimes.

When I came home from work one night, she was playing Ministry of Sound's latest house compilation on full blast. I could hear it in the shared corridor and as I jingled my keys, one of our neighbours stuck his head out and gave me a dirty look.

I winced. "Sorry, I'll tell her," I promised him.

Once I was inside, I followed the thumping bass up the short hallway and into her room. There was no point in knocking because she wouldn't be able to hear me, so I just opened the door.

She was sitting on her bed with her back to me, going through something. There were clothes absolutely everywhere.

"Playing dress-ups?" I asked her as I approached her to see what she was up to.

She startled, spinning around and looking at me with what I can only describe as abject horror. "What are you doing in here?" she asked me, sounding angry.

I stopped dead in my tracks. She never yelled at me and hearing it felt like a knife in my chest. "I actually came to tell you to turn the music down because it's after ten," I said. "But I suppose I'll just leave you alone, then."

I turned to leave, dazed. The music stopped abruptly. I'd made it halfway down the hallway when I heard brisk footsteps and the sound of her closet door shut. Then, she came after me. "Lara, I'm sorry, that was really awful of me," she said, taking my arm and preventing me from shutting myself in my own bedroom. "I was just, you know..." she shrugged. "Trying stuff on like I always do and you surprised me."

I watched her for a moment. She was lying to me. "What were you really doing?"

She winced. "Okay, Sweetie, don't kill me," she said. "I borrowed one of your sweaters and I pulled a thread in it."

I made a face. I'm not sure who she thought she was living with, because I was sure none of my 'sweaters' had any unpulled threads left in them. Especially not after the expeditions Roth insisted on taking me on every six months. "Why would I care about that?" I asked her. "Which one, anyway? I just washed a load of them."

She looked panicked. I could see her eyes sweeping around the hallway, looking for an answer. That's when I realised she was lying again. I squinted at her, and then brushed her aside and marched back into her room and right up to the closet.

I wanted to find out what had her yelling at me and lying to me.

As I pulled the doors open, she came rushing up behind me and tried to push them closed by leaning on them. "No, Lara, please don't!"

I continued trying to wrench the closet open. "What's really in here, Sam?"

Eventually, she gave up. She went and sat on the bed, as if she were waiting for a jury to deliver a verdict. From the slump of her shoulders, it was obvious what she thought that was going to be.

I looked back inside her wardrobe, searching for whatever she'd quickly thrown in there and my eyes fell on a shoebox shoved underneath her winter coats. It had been stashed in there so quickly the lid wasn't even completely on.

I took it out, discarding the lid. Inside, there were a good hundred envelopes. All of them had my name on them, and they were addressed to my dad's postbox in Surrey.

My stomach dropped.

10.

Lara took out the opened envelope, completely silent. All of her previous determination was completely gone. She looked stunned.

I kept waiting for her to react, to hurl the whole box at me and started yelling what a crap friend I was, but she didn't. Lara wasn't really the yelling type, anyway, so I don't know why I expected her to do it. Maybe I just felt I deserved it or something. I probably deserved it a lot.

She didn't say anything. She put the opened envelope back on top of the pile of unopened ones and stood staring at them in her hands.

It was killing me.

After what felt like forever, she said, "There are just so many of them..."

That reminded me of what the post office staff had told me. "Actually they wouldn't all fit in the postbox," I said. "The post office didn't know what to do with them."

I saw her throat bob as she swallowed. "The accountant sends these once a month. There must be nearly a hundred here." She took a long breath, but it caught in her throat as she exhaled. "It feels almost like yesterday that dad and I would hop in the car and go to collect these together."

She walked over and sat beside me on my bed with the shoebox in her lap. She couldn't have looked further from angry. "What does it say?" she asked me, looking at the letter I'd opened.

She didn't want to look at it herself? "They want to put the house in your name," I said. "They've been trying to get you to sign something since you turned eighteen."

She nodded. It looked like she already knew what I was going to say. Seeing her look so haunted... well, I couldn't deal with it.

"Also, they want to know when you're going to respond to Time Magazine's request to put your name on their rich list."

She looked up at me, startled. "What? Honestly?"

I snorted. "No. I was joking."

Without warning, she put the shoebox aside and threw her arms around me. I hugged her back, relieved that she wasn't going to hate me forever and move out for stealing her mail. "Thank you," she said into my shoulder. IT was so sincere.

"What, for stealing your mail and hiding it?"

"That, too," she said and then pulled away, blotting her eyes on her sleeves. "I just don't know what I'd..." She looked like she had been about to say something serious, but then something occurred to her as she was looking at the shoebox. "What were you doing with them before if you weren't opening them?"

It sounded so stupid. "I was sorting them into date order, to make it easier if you ever wanted to open them."

She looked as if she was on the brink of actually bursting into tears, so I hugged her again before she could. She was shaking. "I never told you about the manor."

I pressed my lips together. I knew, anyway. Roth had accidentally told me once. "No, you didn't. You also didn't tell me you were so totally loaded. I mean, I knew you had money, but wow. Loaded."

She didn't breathe for a moment. "My family is," she corrected me.

I closed my eyes.

I just couldn't say it to her: Lara, they're all gone. You're the only one left. It's your money, now.

When we parted again, she checked the date on the opened letter. "There will already be another waiting for me," she said. "It's going to be so odd doing this trip by myself."

"Then don't?" When she looked up at me, I elaborated. "Come on, as if that old bomb of yours would make it all the way to Surrey. We can take my car."

It turned out that her bomb could make it all the way to Surrey, because she insisted on taking it and refused to let me drive.

She drove us past Croft Manor to show me on the way to the post office – I actually thought she was messing with me. It was enormous. I'd somehow been friends with, like, British royalty or something and never noticed. When I said as much, she scoffed. "It's practically falling apart," she said. "And it's impossible to get it bloody fixed because National Heritage won't let us make any changes to it without a million permits."

I think I just stared at her.

She cringed. "You must really hate me for not telling you," she said.

"Are you kidding? After everything I do all the time? You must totally hate me."

She smiled faintly. It didn't look like hate at all.

Looking back at the manor, she scratched at a broken piece of the steering wheel absently. "I never wanted to think about it," she said after a long silence, "what it would be like to live there without mum and dad. I suppose I'm going to have to do something with it eventually. It will cost a fortune to fix if I just leave it."

As we pulled away from the manor, I looked out toward the country side and the cute little farms and stone houses. The weather was getting colder, and some of the chimneys had quaint little puffs of smoke rising from them.

Well, it was no central London. I bet the club scene was non-existent and the closest shopping mall was probably in London, but I could live here. There was always eBay if I got desperate.

"Would you come and move out here?" I asked her.

She glanced at me. "Well, it's either here or my chateau in the south of France."

I double-took. "You've got another..." The words died on my lips at her open smile.

"Kidding," she said.

"I totally hate you," I told her, but leaned over the handbrake and hugged her, anyway.