Jamie was a keen witness as he sat at the bench and, with much amusement, watched Julia as she grew more and more distracted by the conversation. First she just botched a section here and there, which was impossible to miss because he was timing his playing based on hers. She seemed so distracted that, at a certain point, he very subtly picked up the melody, playing it down in key, and she didn't even seem to notice. The piece was pretty boring without the counterpoints he'd been playing, but it was keeping his hands busy and he wanted to see how long it would take Julia to notice that she'd dropped the ball completely. “Why does the lad always have to do the chasing anyway?” he asked her, genuinely curious. “Fairer sex and all that, I know, I know, but I say we'd all be better off chasing each other. At least then we wouldn't have to guess at who fancies us back.” It was time to turn the page in the music and Julia still didn't appear to have noticed she wasn't playing, so he just started in on playing Jingle Bells, thinking it might wake her up. 

”I don’t think she knows what she’s talking about. I think boys just naturally love her, so she thinks it’s like that for everybody.”

“It's true,” he told her, feeling quite ridiculous,  a combination of spontaneously playing Christmas music and finding himself quite clever. “We talked about it at the last boy meeting. We all love her. It's a fact,” he chuckled, taking his hands off of the keys at last and giving up on his jaunty but seasonally inappropriate tune. “It's funny, but you never came up.” He knew that he was being fresh, but he hadn't realized that such a comment might strike a chord in his friend. He might have been just one of the girls, but he was still a bloke – and therefore, occasionally an idiot. 

”Is there something weird about me, Jamie? How come I’m always invisible?”

“You are not!” he spat defensively. “Don't be like that, Jules. That's my best girl you're talking about, huh?” he spoke, throwing an arm around her. “You aren't scandalous is all. That makes you normal... unless you want people gossiping about you. That's for you to decide, but I'll warn ya – it can be nice for a minute, but you'll feel like dirt in an hour... and it still might not bag you a lad.” 


a simple rule that every good man knows by heart: its smarter to be lucky than its lucky to be smart