What the fuck was I doing, seriously? What the fuck was I doing to him? I should have told him, I thought. I really, really should have told him. Ages ago, before I started to have feelings for Bree. He shouldn't have to hear about this from a complete stranger.
While my laptop was booting up, I took out my phone.
I should do it as soon as possible, shouldn't I?
I mulled over the idea, trying to decide whether or not I thought Cecilia would say anything to him. In the end, I decided that even if she didn't tell him about my gender stuff, I should. The way his shoulders had slumped before he'd rejected my call downstairs... god. Poor Henry, I was a fucking monster. I still didn't know how I was going to handle breaking up with him, because there was so much shit attached to that I didn't even know where to start. But my gender stuff, I should really tell him about it right now.
I opened messaging and just stared at it for a second. I had no idea how to start this. I spent a minute or two typing a few things, but nothing seemed appropriate so I deleted the whole lot.
This was really the type of stuff I should do in person. “Henry, I need to talk to you asap.”
He didn't reply immediately, leaving me to languish over the slides I was supposed to be laying out. When he did, it was just, “Sorry I missed your call before, Diane and a Whitman's Sampler of all the scariest managers at Frost were surrounding me. Is something wrong? Are you okay? Do you need me to call you back now?”
It was a bit worrying that Henry's first impression of why I needed to talk to him was that I was freaking out and needed someone to calm me down. That was very telling. I felt a knot form in my stomach. “I'm fine, but there's something really important I need to discuss with you as soon as possible. Today, if we can. Lunch? Dinner?”
This time, he replied much faster. “Oh, I'm glad you're fine, I've been worried about you. Today is no good for me, unfortunately. I'm booked out for the next couple of days, and if it's very important, wouldn't you like to sleep on it and think about it before we discuss it? Perhaps I could come around on Thursday night. Your project is finished by then, isn't it?”
I sighed, hoping that would be soon enough. “Okay, Thursday night is good. See you then.”
After I'd taken a few deep breaths and tried to refocus, I opened up the Sasha Burov slides and started to lay out the data and text that Ian and Carlos were emailing me.
While I was trying to decide how to politely tell Ian that he'd sent me way too much text for a single slide without sounding like I was trying to get back at him for our argument, there was a knock on the door. Sarah had been working solidly on charts beside me, and we looked at each other. She got up to answer it and had a brief, quiet conversation with someone on the other side before turning back to me. “Phone for you.”
That was weird. “Are you sure?”
She shrugged, and went to sit back down as I stood up and went over. The guy who'd come to get me was just a regular clerk from Marketing, not the floor admin or Diane's assistant or anyone who I'd normally expect to be transferring calls to me. I followed him over to his desk on the other side of the floor. “Who is it?”
He was giving me a really strange expression. It made me nervous. “Alan someone. Paton, I think?”
I shook my head, I'd never heard of him. “Can you double-check it's definitely for me?”
He tried to give the handset to me, but I refused it so he just stuck the phone on speaker so we could bother hear. “Hi, what was your name again?”
“Alan Pattern,” the voice said, and it sounded vaguely familiar. “Look, he won't know me, I didn't introduce myself. I'm no good at this email thing, I'd just like to have a quick conversation with him, that's all. Can you convince him to speak to me? I'll explain.”
The second I heard 'him', all the blood drained out of my face. The clerk looked to me to answer so I did, but too quietly for the phone mic to pick it up. “Obviously there's some mistake.”
At my expression, another clerk whose desk was nearby swung around to listen. I felt sick.
“Are you definitely sure it's 'Min Lee' you're looking for?” the clerk asked, leaning towards the phone as he spoke.
“Well,” the speaker said, and there was the sound of rustling. “His email address is M-i-n-l-e-e, and I'm pretty sure I heard his colleague call him 'Min', so that's probably it? Why, is there no Min Lee there? Has Frost got another Marketing department by any chance? Perhaps I've called the wrong one.”
My heart was pounding, and my legs were starting to feel weak. There were three people watching me, now. One of them I'd worked extensively with on the last project and he knew me quite well. We didn't really like each other.
While I was gaping, unsure what to say, I heard a familiar voice behind me. “Hey, Jason is looking for you.” It was Sarah, and she put a hand on my arm before frowning at us standing around the phone. “What's going on?” she asked. “Who's calling?”
“I think it's the wrong number,” I rasped, still too quiet for the phone to hear. Sarah didn't look like she believed me.
The clerk did, though and he leant towards the phone again. “No, there's only one Marketing department,” he said. “Are you definitely sure the person you're looking for is a man, though? Can you describe him? Maybe you're thinking of someone else in here.”
There was a silence. “That's a really weird question,” was the response. He answered anyway, if hesitantly. “Of course I'm sure he was a man. Very tall, I guess. Asian guy, fantastic artist. Really fantastic, he showed me a self-portrait that was Archibald Prize material, I'm telling you. Came into my café in Broome on Good Friday with a smaller brunette who apparently also works there. Look, why are you asking me these questions? Is he there or not?”
As it dawned on me who the guy was, three Marketing clerks looked between me and Sarah, and their jaws all dropped.
I felt Sarah's hand on my arm as I stared at them, my ears ringing like I was about to faint.
Before the man could say anything else, I stepped forward and said hurriedly, “Sorry, you've got the wrong number,” and just pushed two fingers on the cradle so the call dropped. I stood there for a moment, frozen, while three pairs of eyes bored into me.
The clerk who'd taken the call cracked a smile, and then laughed. It was more confused than malicious, however. “Mini, what the fuck was that?” he asked me. “What the fuck? Why did he think you were a guy?”
“Mind your own business, Ryan,” Sarah said shortly, and then took my arm to lead me away. “Come on, Min, we've got heaps of work to do...”
'Ryan' didn't stop there though. “Because that's obviously you, Mini. Tall, Asian, great artist...”
I didn't let Sarah drag me away just yet, though. I stopped for a moment, willing myself to speak. “Please don't say anything to anyone,” I asked him quietly. “Please.”
I think on some level when I looked him in the eye and said that, he understood that it was important to me. He still seemed a mixture of interested and confused, but at least he nodded. Unfortunately, his colleague behind him had already stood up and bent double over the divider to talk to another clerk on the other side. The third guy was just smirking at me like he'd just learnt something really, really juicy. He picked up his phone to start texting someone.
No.
Fuck, no, this couldn't be happening. No. No, no. I wanted to stop them, but I couldn't. It was too late. My chest felt tight as if I was still wearing the binder, and there wasn't enough air in here. I couldn't just stand here gasping for breath while Ryan stared at us, so I shook Sarah free and ran—ironically—into the women's and just shut myself in one of the stalls.
It was over.
It was only a matter of time before the whole Marketing department knew about that phone conversation, and with them, Jason. The clerks were bad enough themselves with stuff like this, but Jason? God, I didn't want to think about what he could do. I just didn't want to think about it.
But I didn't need t
o just think about it, did I? Pretty soon it would be happening.
And I couldn't get away from it. I couldn't take any sick leave or any time off work because of the pitch on Thursday, not unless I wanted to be fired on the spot and be homeless with no employment prospects.
I leant against the cubicle wall and put my head in my hands. It was over. I knew how this stuff spread, I remembered it in HD 1080 detail from living it as a teenager and from all the nightmares where I was trapped back at high school. It was happening again.
The door burst open and heels clicked around the tiles. “Min!” It was Sarah. The footsteps stopped, and then there was a tentative knock on the cubicle door. “Min, are you okay?” She sounded worried. “I mean, obviously not, but, yeah. Open up!”
I sighed, and turned the lock. After I'd actually opened the door, though, I didn't know what to say, and she didn't either. She just leant a shoulder against the door frame and watched me.
I closed my eyes for a moment. “This is it, isn't it?”
She didn't say anything straight away. “Well,” she began when she finally did speak. “On the way in here that guy who had that irritating smile on his face throughout the whole phone call stopped me and asked me if you had 'junk' and if I'd seen it.”
“What did you say?”
She shrugged. “I didn't say anything. Because if I joked about it, it would be clear you didn't have any, and I don't know who you want to tell the truth to, so...” She laughed once, humourlessly. “You know, I was actually sure Schoolgirl was going to be the one to accidentally out you to everyone at work. At least for being... gay, or straight, or into women, or whatever your sexuality is that isn't Henry. Maybe for being a guy, too.”
I exhaled. “She did. Yesterday. And if that phone call hadn't happened, who knows? Maybe Cecilia would have said something anyway.” I thought more about that, and put my head in my hands again. “Fuck, what the fuck am I going to do? I can't get through this shit again.”
Something occurred Sarah. “Then don't.”
I looked up at her. “What?”
She shrugged. “Don't. Like, the way I see it you've really got two options. Rumours happen because people love talking about stuff they’re not supposed to. Secrets are interesting. If you just rocked up in a suit tomorrow and announced, 'Yeah, I'm a guy, whatever', and then got on with life... well, it would probably suck at first because people would ask you a lot of questions, but then it's over.”
In a million years, I could not imagine myself doing that at Frost, no matter how sound her logic was. This place was way too fucking conservative for me being a guy to ever be considered 'over'. They'd never leave me alone. Gay guys, they could handle. But someone who was transgender? “What was the other option?”
“Well, rumours always go away eventually, don't they? Just don't say anything, don't engage anyone at all on the issue and people will get sick of talking about it all the time.”
I made a face. “Yeah, but they'll still tease me about it forever.”
“Yeah, that's true,” Sarah acknowledged. “But you can't really escape that now no matter what you do.”
I deflated again. “Like I said, I'm fucked,” I told her. “Plus...” I didn't really know how to say it. “I'm not... one hundred per cent on being a guy, you know? I don't really want to come to work and announce I'm a guy and then later find out it's not true.”
“You reckon you're going to end up being a chick after all of this?” She didn't look like she thought that would be the case at all.
“No...” I said, and then exhaled at length. “But you see what I mean? I don't know what I am, and I just don't know why or how to explain why I don't know. So I guess this is it.” I felt sick. “I'm fucked. I'm so fucked. If one of those guys comes up to me and asks me any questions about it...”
“Just joke or something,” she told me. “You're, like, the master of deflection. Just do something like that.” Even if I forced myself, I didn't think I could joke about this. Sarah took a step forward and pulled me out of the cubicle. “Come on, let's just go up the road and have lunch like we did when I was pissed off at Jason for being a sexist bastard. You can chill out and we can figure out what you're going to say when people confront you about it.”
I let her drag me out of the cubicle, but I was still shaking. It was noticeable even to her. “If people confront me about it...? I can't do this again, Sarah,” I told her, my throat tight. “I can't go through all of this again. I can't do it. High school was...” I swallowed. It had been a nightmare, and even thinking about it now made my heart race. “I can’t, I just can’t.”
She rubbed my back and led me over to the door. “Well, you're here, aren't you? Which means you survived it, so you can do it again. Come on. Let's get out of this place for a bit,” she said, pulling the door open...
… to Jason, standing in the doorway with a very strange expression on his face and his arms crossed. I wasn't sure how he knew we were in here, but from the way he was looking at me, I knew he'd heard everything.
TWENTY-SIX
Jason didn't speak quietly. He didn't even close the door. He didn't do anything to protect my privacy in any way when he said at the top of his voice, “What the fuck did I just hear you two talking about?”
The Women's was over the other side of the floor to where most of Marketing sat, but a few of the clerks stood over the partitions anyway, frowning and trying to figure out what was going on. If it had been anyone other than Jason, they wouldn't have been able to hear what he was saying. The problem was that it was Jason, and he had this booming, thunderous voice like a coach who needed to shout across a football field.
I was past the point where I thought my secret was salvageable, so I just stood there with my eyes glazed, shaking. This is it, I thought.
“Jesus,” Jason said after a few more seconds of stunned silence. “Jesus. Fuck, I don't even know where to start. You,” he said, presumably to Sarah, because he didn't prompt me when I wouldn't look up at him. “'Sexist prick'? Are you joking? If you've got a problem with me not going easy on you because you're a girl, Presti, take that shit to HR. And you,” he said, and this time I knew he was looking at me. I could feel him staring at the top of my head as I focused on his Italian leather shoes. “Jesus.”
He was talking so loudly that all of Australia could probably hear.
“Jesus. Okay, Mini, okay. Here's the 101: You work in marketing. This isn't some desk job where you lock yourself in an office forever, you need to be fucking presentable to clients and I'll be fucked if you're going to blow this fucking pitch by rocking up looking like anything other than that,” he gestured at my dress, “in front of a Russian. You know how conservative they are. And 'not one-hundred per cent on being a guy?' What the fuck? Look at you. You are zero per cent a guy, and trust me, I know about guys. Maybe you've got some weird Asian ladyboy shit going on under there but I don't want to know about it, and I don't want the clients to know about it. You're completely free to do whatever tranny make-believe dress-ups or crap you want at home, but you don't bring that to work. Especially not in marketing. Not on Frost time. Got that?”
I couldn't move. I couldn't even think. 'Tranny'? 'Make-believe dress-ups'?
“I said got that?” he yelled, and I could feel tiny drops of spit on my bowed forehead.
I forced myself to nod because I was worried what he would do if I didn't, but kept hearing all the things he'd said and I was so sick to my stomach that I shook with it. It must have been obvious, because I felt the back of Sarah's knuckles brush mine.
He didn't stop there, either. He kept shouting. “Fuck. I can't even deal with you two right now. Fucking unbelievable. Okay, so, here's how it's going to be, ladies. You're both going to arrive at that pitch looking immaculate, looking delighted to be there and acting like two women who are on a hundred-a-year-plus salaries. None of this wah wah woe is me bullshit, okay? You don’t even know half the fucked-up shit I have to do in this job t
o keep it, but I'm not carrying on like my life sucks because of that. And we all have a part to play here: I'm going to talk about Burov's teenage wife and sexy women and act like I give a fuck about either. It's going to take two hours tops and it's worth a shit tonne of money so suck it up, ladies.”
He let that sink in for a second while we both stood there.
“And Presti,” he said, turning a bit towards her. “You're going to come out with me and Burov tomorrow night to the casino. A couple of the Sales boys are coming, too, and Burov will probably want some eye-candy to go with his chit-chat. Wear something low cut, yeah? I'm getting one of the Sales guys to get us a pink diamond on loan from Oxford's, and it will sit right between those huge tits. And, Mini...” From his legs I could see him turning back to me. “Get back to work. Those slides and materials better be perfect, I swear to god. Both of you, just do your fucking jobs. Diane's already breathing down my neck at the moment because of you, and if I lose my job on top of the nineteen grand despite everything I had to do to get it...”
He stood there for a couple more seconds, as if he still couldn't believe what he'd heard us say. Then he made a really frustrated noise, threw his hands to the ceiling and marched off, swearing to himself.
Sarah and I just stood frozen there for a moment, silent.
The people who'd been watching us glanced at each other and sat back down at their desks. I wondered how much they'd heard; I guessed I wouldn't have to wait too long to find out.
“Fuck that prick,” Sarah murmured to me, breathless. It was still jarring to hear her swear. “Fuck him. What was he doing standing at the door and listening to us, anyway? I don't care if he's our boss, he can't do that and he can't talk to us like that. What the hell?”
Under My Skin Page 59