Free The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell

and shuffled off his lap to take her seat at the head of the table.
    ‘So,’ said Jan, her father’s sister, ‘how does it feel to be an adult?’
    Robyn smiled. She’d felt like an adult for years. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I’m going to start voting in elections, every day. And having anal sex.’
    Jan laughed out loud. Robyn’s family was the kind that didn’t feel uncomfortable talking about anal sex. ‘Ha-ha,’ she guffawed, ‘yes, do it now, love, before you’ve had kids. Because you won’t want to do it after!’
    Robyn wrinkled her nose and tried not to think what she might mean.
    She looked around at her family; her mum, her dad, cousins and aunt, and thought, not for the first time, I’m different from you . And not just that but: I’m better than you . It wasn’t a good thing to think. It was a hideous, sick thing to think. But she couldn’t help it. All her life she’d been different. Prettier than everyone else. Cleverer than everyone else. 11 GCSEs. 4 AS levels. 4 A levels. About to start studying medicine at University College London. Following in her donor father’s mysterious and glamorous footsteps.
    She stood in line at the carvery and smiled at Steve, the chef, who was sweating lightly under the hot lights in a white paper hat, brandishing a large sharp knife.
    ‘Happy Birthday, Robyn,’ he said with a shy smile.
    ‘Thank you!’ She smiled back.
    Steve was in love with Robyn. They’d been in the same class at primary school and he’d been in love with her then too. Everyone knew that Steve was in love with Robyn. He’d probably asked to be at work today especially because he knew that she would be in celebrating her eighteenth.
    ‘I got you a card,’ he said, wiping the shine from his forehead with the back of his hand and then slicing her off some turkey. ‘I’ll give it to you later, when I’ve cleaned up.’
    She smiled and nodded. She could tell he wanted to kiss her. ‘Thanks, Steve,’ she said, ‘that’s really sweet.’
    ‘Do you want some stuffing with that?’
    ‘No, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Just a bit of bacon.’
    ‘You look lovely,’ he said.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Will you have a drink with us? After you get off? We’re going to be here for the long haul, I reckon.’
    His face went soft as beaten butter and he nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’d be good.’
    Robyn piled roast potatoes on to her plate and soggy florets of broccoli and a ton of sprouts and then drowned the lot in the thick winey gravy that the Hog’s Head was renowned for. Then she carried the over-piled plate back to the table and everyone oohed and aahed at her man-sized appetite and said, ‘Ooh, where do you put it all? You must have hollow feet,’ and Robyn looked at her well-upholstered parents and her slightly more than curvy aunty who was prone to saying things like ‘All I have to do is look at a slice of cheesecake and I’ve gone up a size’, and her small-mouthed cousins with their doughy faces and their wide feet, and thought: I am not one of you. I come from my own tribe, once-removed on the ladder of evolution . It didn’t mean she didn’t love them. She loved her family with a ferocious passion. But then people loved their dogs with a ferocious passion; didn’t mean they were the same thing.
    ‘Did you have fun with your friends last night?’ asked Aunty Jan.
    ‘Amazing,’ replied Robyn. ‘Best night ever .’
    ‘I remember my eighteenth,’ she said, ‘I wore a boiler suit and had a perm. Thought I was It – looked like Brian May,’ she laughed. ‘It was tough being young in the eighties. You girls get to dress so pretty these days. So many lovely things in the shops for you.’
    Robyn’s phone buzzed with a text message. It was Christian: Hey babe, what you up to ?
    She groaned: Hey babe . Didn’t matter how good someone smelled if they sent you text messages that began Hey babe . She shuddered slightly and sent a reply, thumb working