“So what brings you into the city?” I asked her since she'd stopped laughing at me. “Did you have something to do, or is it just really comfortable sitting against my door?”
She made a face. “It's actually kind of a long story.”
I looked pointedly at my plate. I still had three slices and some garlic bread to go. “Well, I have rations. I can go the distance.”
Her nose was still scrunched up. “Nah. I just had a really shit day and the end of the story was that I wanted to see you.”
Well, I wasn’t going to push her to tell me, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her why she was here. Instead, I held my arms out and looked down at myself. “And now that you can look upon me, is it everything you'd hoped for?”
She giggled again. “Oh my god, you crack me up! I still can't really believe you let me come over. Like, I know you said you'd be friends with me and stuff but you're so, like, I don't know, 'how dare you talk to me', that I thought maybe you'd just said it to be nice.” She took another bite of pizza, looking very content. “You know when you imagine something really great and then it actually happens? Yeah.”
I snorted. “All I did was open the door and give you pizza,” I said. “If that’s what you were imagining, you're really easy to please.”
Something passed over her face for a second. “Yeah, I am.” She actually waited until she'd swallowed before changing the subject. “Anyway, it's my birthday tomorrow.”
Her birthday tomorr— oh, that's right. When I'd first met her she had mentioned it was soon. “Happy Birthday for tomorrow,” I said automatically. “If you'd told me earlier I would have put candles on the pizza. You going to do anything special?”
She laughed bleakly, and in the process slopped cheese topping all over her t-shirt. Instead of looking distressed about it, though, she just peered down her front and casually scratched at it. “Some of my family is coming over,” she said, and then put the cheese she'd picked off her top in her mouth. She saw my expression. “What? I'm not wasting good cheese, and it's not like this tee is gross or anything.”
I opted not to say anything about the cheese. “You're not going to have a big party for your 18th?”
She shook her head. “My parents don't like me having friends over.”
Something about the way she said that didn't invite further questions, so I left it. I found it kind of weird that she apparently had strict parents when she went running around Sydney in little more than her underwear.
Illustrating that point exactly, while I was watching her, she looked down her front and pulled her t-shirt out so she could inspect it for any remaining cheese. In the process of doing so, she showed me her stomach and the bottom of her bra, and the rest of Sydney far too much cleavage.
Jesus, did that girl have no concept of how she looked? “I can see what you're spending today doing,” I said neutrally. “Celebrating your last day of childhood dressed in clothes you should have retired when you were five.”
She smirked. “I’m so not a child,” she said, glancing down at her breasts and grinning as she examined the grease stain from the cheese across the front of them. “And these are adult clothes.”
“You can say that again.” I watched her try and blot the stain with some serviettes. “Bree, are you sure that's the impression you want to give people?”
Bree gave up on her grease stain. “I don't care what impression people get,” she said easily. “You only live once, and I really like this top, it's really cute and soft and it lets the air in.”
When she went to take another bite of pizza, I sighed. “You're going to ruin your 'cute' top if you don't get that grease stain out now,” I said, standing. “Cheese stains are terrible. Come on, I'll lend you a top and we can soak that one.”
She put her pizza down. “You just want to dress me like a nun,” she accused me, but she followed me inside anyway.
I had only walked into the bedroom to find her a new top, but when I turned to ask her if she'd mind sleeveless, she'd already whipped her top off and was holding it scrunched in one hand.
Her bra was too small, too, and her big breasts were spilling out of it. “Jesus, Bree!” I said, turning my head sharply away from her. “You could have at least waited until you had something to put on instead!”
She sounded indignant. “It's not like it's nothing you haven't seen before, you're a girl too!” she said, but as she said that, something occurred to her. In the reflection of the wardrobe, I could see her giving me a really weird look. I chose to ignore it.
I was busy sorting through my tops for something small enough to fit her and yet something she couldn't accidentally ruin when she spotted something in one of my shelves and finally stopped staring at me. “Cool!” she announced and went for it.
Before I could stop her, she'd pulled out my men's jeans and was holding them out to admire them. She was so short that the hips of my jeans came up under that pornographic bra of hers. The colour drained out of my face. Even if those jeans had had a big Mars symbol painted across them, they couldn't have more obviously been from the men's department.
She didn’t seem to care about that. “Wow, these are way cool. This is more like the stuff I kind of imagined you'd wear. They're yours, right?” She looked up at me for confirmation.
On the tip of my lips I was about to say, 'No, they're my boyfriend's', but then I remembered how angry I'd been at her for lying to me. I considered doing it anyway, but I found myself at an impasse. I didn't say anything, I just felt sick.
“Put them on!” she said, and I could hear the excitement in her voice. “They are so much cooler than that skirt. I don't know why you dressed up for me, anyway. It's stupid. I don't want you to feel like you have to be super formal around me or anything. You can be comfortable, I don’t mind!”
She walked up to me to give me the jeans. I didn't take them from her. “Actually, I'm pretty comfortable now,” I managed to say. I wasn't sure how convincing I was, though.
She wasn't fazed. “Okay, well, do it for me? I want to see how they look. My brother would be so totally jealous, they’re such an awesome brand.”
For just a second I was tempted; what she'd said earlier, the 'you only live once, and I really like this top' was fresh in my mind. But then I thought about what I'd Googled, and remembered all the surgery and doctors and psychologists and I... couldn't. I just couldn't. I didn't want anyone to think I was like that, even if maybe I was. I felt like if I put them on it would be like opening a floodgate and just by looking at me she would know. But I couldn't say anything, I just kind of stood there like a fucking idiot with this topless 17 year old pushing men's jeans into my stomach.
After a few moments, she gave up and stood back. She was directing me that really strange stare again, and I didn't know what to make of it. She probably thought I was a fucking head case, and she was right. Fuck. Why did I think it was a good idea for me to be around people, again? I needed to go be a hermit in a cave somewhere.
“Min,” she said carefully. Her eyes were dipping between mine and my chest. “I want to say something but I'm scared I'll say the wrong thing and you'll be really upset again.”
I felt numb. “Just say it.”
Her brow was actually shaking. “Are you, like, actually a guy? Like, is that your secret?”
I didn't think I'd heard her right. “What?”
She looked uncomfortable. “You know, like, are you just pretending to be a girl?”
I just stared at her for a second. I didn’t know if she’d guessed or not, but I panicked anyway. “What makes you think that?”
She looked upset as she counted off reasons on her fingers. “Like, okay, on Monday I swear you had boobs. Like not big ones or anything, but definitely boobs, and today...” She looked at my chest; I was still wearing that crop top and it flattened them out. “So maybe you were wearing those chicken-fillet-type things flat girls wear. And you won't hug me, and it's like, what are you afraid o
f me feeling? And then you needed to go and spend like twenty minutes putting on a drag-queen-level makeup before you'd let me in and then I find these boys' jeans in your cupboard, and you're totally uncomfortable with me showing any skin and you won't change in front of me...” She ran out of fingers. “And you're really tall for girl, and you look so ultra-super girly like those pretty Thai ladyboys who are, like, way more beautiful than female women are...” She looked distressed for a second. “Was that a really awful word to use? 'Ladyboy'? I never know the right way to say anything. Just pretend I said all of that but I used the right words, okay?”
I didn't even know where to start. She thought I was physically a boy? Fuck, that would have made life a hell of a lot fucking easier. Female woman? 'Drag queen' makeup? God, it all hurt so much that it got to the point where it didn't.
She took a step back, like she was afraid I was about to yell at her or hit her. “Because it's okay if you are secretly a guy. I'm not, like, hardcore religious or anything, I don't mind, I won't tell anyone!”
It was just so fucking ironic that the only thing I could do was laugh, and that made her look even more scared. Fuck, all I could do was laugh!
“You're scaring me,” she said, looking tiny. She was still just wearing that bra and those shorts.
I tried to stop laughing. “I'm sorry,” I said, sitting back down on the bed so at least I didn't tower over her. “No, I'm not 'actually' a guy.” After I’d said that I decided it didn’t ring true to me, so I tried to think of a different way to describe it. “I mean, yeah, my body's the same as yours.” She didn’t look like she believed me, though, because her eyes kept going back to my chest. “I’m not showing you, Bree,” I told her firmly.
“If it’s not true, then why are you being so weird?”
I closed my eyes. “I can't even begin to tell you. Fuck,” I said, shaking my head. It eventually ended up in my hands.
I felt the bed give as she sat down beside me, and I could see us in the reflection of my wardrobe door. The only other person who'd been on this bed was Henry, and compared to him she was so little. Compared to me she was little. She didn't give me much time to think about that at all, though, because she had already come up with another theory. “Well, did you, like, used to be a guy?”
I threw my hands up. “Oh my god,” I said, and then I started laughing again. “No. Bree...” What do you even say to that? The truth actually seemed far less dramatic than everything she was coming up with. Even still, I couldn’t say it straight away. I was surprised I could even say it at all, since I hadn’t managed to say it to Henry. Henry didn’t often look so close to tears as Bree did now, though. She was hanging on my every word.
“It's just that I think I’m supposed to be a guy,” I told her. I sounded far more definitive than I felt, though, so I added, “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s difficult to think about.”
There was a long silence. I didn't look at her, and I didn't look at the reflection in the wardrobe. I didn't even know what was going to happen until I felt a pair of arms around my shoulders. “Oh.”
“’Oh’?” I asked her, looking across at her. She had her head on my shoulder and all I could see was a mop of blonde curls that smelt like vanilla shampoo.
She looked up. “Well, I wanted to say something nice because I can see you’re really worried about it, but I couldn’t because I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “If you want to be a guy, just go for it?”
If only it were that simple. “But how do I 'just go for it'? My life’s already set up. I can’t just, I don’t know, get some injections and then tell everyone I’m a guy and expect nothing except my voice to change.” And I wasn’t even sure I wanted injections, anyway, because then I’d get hairy and I didn’t like the idea of that at all. Fuck, maybe that meant I didn’t want to be a guy? Or was I just scared of making changes that would mean I wouldn’t be able to put on a skirt and keep pretending to everyone that everything was fine? There were just too many questions to even start to answer them all. Where did you start with this stuff?
Bree’s eyes widened as she thought of something. “Are you going to get a dick?”
Those surgery photos, oh my god. My heart sped. “I actually don’t want to think about that now.” Or at all, ever. Instead of dwelling on the pictures I'd seen, I looked across at her next to me. She still had an arm around my shoulder, and she was deep in thought. “How are you okay with this?” I asked her. “It's so fucked up.”
She looked surprised. “Uh?” she said. “It’s actually kind of interesting, and I told you, I’m not some psycho religious nut or something. If you want to be a guy, then que sera sera? And anyway,” she gestured at the women's clothes I was wearing. “You looked better in the painting than in these. Not that you’re not a cute girl or anything,” she hurriedly added. “You’re totally cute. But, yeah. So are you going to put them on?” She placed the jeans in my lap.
This time I accepted them and sighed.
“And take off all that makeup, too,” she instructed me as she sat back. “It's weird. I don’t like it.”
Bree. “Okay,” I said, and stood with the jeans. I grabbed the big faded t-shirt from the wardrobe and then pointed at it. “Just look in there and see if you can find something that will fit you. Nothing that looks too expensive, please.”
I went into the bathroom and slid the door shut. My reflection stared at me from the mirror.
Well. That wasn’t at all what I imagined would happen when I thought about telling someone; there wasn’t even any hint of disgust or judgement in her. It was actually a bit of an anti-climax. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that everyone would be like she was—the world would be a pretty scary place if everyone was like Bree—but it was at least a little bit comforting. I changed into the jeans and t-shirt.
Once I was dressed, I filled the hand basin with water, tied my hair back, and just washed all my makeup off. Then, drying my face and neck, I looked up at the mirror again. I wondered what her reaction to this would be. I looked very different.
When I went back out into my bedroom, Bree had found my new comfy hoodie and put it on. Hilariously, on her it came down to her knees and the sleeves dangled almost as far. She was lying on my bed in it waiting for me, but she sat up as soon as I walked in. Her face lit up. “Yeah!” she said, leaping up and bouncing over to me, long sleeves flopping everywhere.
I felt a bit self-conscious. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said with conviction, and inspected me from all sides while I just stood there. “Wow, you really look like a guy, especially with your hair back. That’s fucking crazy, because like five minutes ago you were the girliest girl in Australia. Anyway, this is way better. I prefer you like this.”
Me too, I thought, and then stressed about Mum, Henry and work.
“So, like, you want to go for a test drive? We could go shopping or something.”
Fuck, no. “Not going to happen,” I said firmly. “I’m not leaving my home in these.”
She looked a bit disappointed. “Okay,” she said, and then shrugged. “I kind of want to finish my pizza anyway.”
After I’d put talcum powder on her stained t-shirt to soak out the grease, she lead me back out onto the balcony. We sat there and ate and chatted—about what I have no idea because I was running on autopilot—until I’d made my way through two slices and was attempting the third. Bree had barely managed two. “You might need to get that bucket after all,” she joked as she held up the third slice and looked apprehensively at it.
“You could just not eat it,” I pointed out.
She looked at me like I was crazy for suggesting such a thing. “I’m going to do it,” she said stoically. “I am.”
“Good luck, then,” I said and then laughed openly at her expression.
She didn't end up taking a bite because she put her pizza down to stare at me. “You look really great when you’re not so uptight,” she said, and then out came her phone.
However relaxed I had looked, I stopped looking that way immediately. I threw up my hands in front of my face and looked away from her. “No, Bree,” I told her as she pointed it at me. “No photos, not of this. Please.”
“But I want to show you how good you look now,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. “I think you'd really like it.”
I probably would, but I really didn't want anyone having any sort of photographic evidence of this. A painting was one thing, actual photos were another, and Bree seemed like the sort of person who’d make bad choices about who she’d showed them to and where she’d upload them. I couldn't risk anyone finding out. “Bree, no.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” she said a little forlornly. “I’m sorry.”
When I saw her expression, I winced; you'd think I'd just run over her new baby kitten. Listening to her sing had nothing on how painful it was to look at her when she was upset. I could hardly bear it. I leant across the table and did a 'gimme' motion towards her phone. Perhaps I could do something else for her, instead.
Looking surprised, she passed it over to me and I fiddled with it. She watched me. “What are you doing?”
I pressed a button, and then looked up at her and waited.
In the living room, my mobile rang. “Happy Birthday,” I said easily, cancelling the call and handing her phone back to her with a smug grin.
Her disappointment transformed into delight in the space of half a second. She stood up to accept the phone from me. “Did you just put your number in my phone?” she asked, in the same tone as she might ask if daddy just bought her a sports car or her team just won the Grand Final.
“Don't text me constantly,” I told her sternly, but there may have been a smile on the corner of my lips. “That's my work phone, too.”
Under My Skin Page 18