It wasn’t long before my bedroom door slowly opened and Bree let herself in. She looked deeply troubled. “Um,” she wrung her hands nervously. “I did something. You’re going to be really angry with me.” That was nothing new, so I sighed at her and waited for her to explain. “So,” she said, her eyebrows knit together in the centre of her forehead. “I was worried about Sarah. Like, really worried. And Rob is worried, too yeah? I was like, he wants to move to Sydney to take care of her, that’s serious right?”
I watched her suspiciously.
“I thought that, like, maybe if the doctor gave her some medication or something that I could google it and figure out what she had, you know? And since I was in the bathroom, and that’s where she keeps all her other pills, I opened the cabinet to have a look if there were any new pills in there. And there weren’t, but there was one of those pregnancy test kits. They come in packs of two, and one was missing.” She scrunched up her face, bracing for my reaction. “And so I kind of checked in the bin…”
I groaned. “Bree, you didn’t.”
“I did. And there was one in there, and it’s positive.” She paused, her face still scrunched up. “And I touched it.” She came and sat on the bed next to me. “She hasn’t got some horrible disease after all. She’s pregnant, Min. That’s why she’s so sick, and that’s why Rob wants to move to Sydney permanently.” She turned to look expectantly at me, waiting for my reaction to the news. When it didn’t come, she frowned, confused. “Why aren’t you surprised? Did you know already?”
I made a face. There was no use in pretending I didn’t know, was there? “Sarah asked me not to tell anyone. She found out last night, I was here when it happened.”
“Oh, right…” Bree said, disappointed. I think she’d been excited about sharing the news with me, despite the inappropriate way she’d found out. “But why wouldn’t she want to tell anyone? I’d want to tell everyone!” Then, she answered her own question. “Although, I guess she has been drinking a lot. Maybe she wants to make sure she’s not going to miscarry it, and then when it’s safe she can tell everyone the great news? That’s probably a smarter idea. I can kind of understand why she’d want to do that.” She finally smiled, leaning towards me enthusiastically. “But how exciting is this! Sarah’s going to have a baby! I bet Rob will be a great dad. Sarah will be a great mum, too. She’s heaps of fun. I bet she’s—”
“Bree.” I could hardly bare to listen to Bree chatter on excitedly about this, so I cut her off. “Sarah didn’t tell anyone because she’s going to get an abortion on Monday.”
The smile fell off her face. “Oh,” she said, and then sat back. She was silent for a second. “But I thought Sarah wanted kids?”
I shrugged. “Now isn’t a good time for them.”
“Oh,” she repeated. Then, she made a face. “Okay, their arguing makes much more sense now.”
“Yeah,” I said, holding out an arm for her. “Don’t say anything. Really, Sarah’s a bit fragile right now. She doesn’t want people to try and talk her out of it now that she’s made her decision.”
Bree nodded, crawling under my arm and spending some time digesting what she’d just learnt. “I thought you’d be a lot angrier that I went snooping. You hate it when I do this stuff.”
I’d also reached this place of peaceful surrender where I accepted Bree was a force of nature, and there was no way to stop her doing this kind of stuff. Plus, I’d snooped on her recently, so it would have been pretty hypocritical for me to go off at her. I did give her a bit of a disapproving look, though. “People are allowed to have secrets. You of all people should know that.”
She scrunched up her nose and nodded again. We sat there for a few minutes, listening to their muffled voices arguing in the living room. “In case you were wondering why I can’t concentrate on stuff at home: this is just like my place,” she observed darkly. “Except Mum and Dad yell a lot more. How long do you think they’ll fight for?”
I shrugged. “They haven’t done it before.”
We lay back in bed and listened for a few more minutes, and then Bree exhaled. “You know, Sarah’s arguing an awful lot for someone who’s already made a decision,” she observed, and then burrowed under my arm so she couldn’t hear them anymore.
NINE
For the rest of the evening, Bree and I made a unanimous decision that it was too dangerous to venture back out into the rest of the house. Bree couldn’t get to her homework, though, so we spent a couple of hours trawling through YouTube tutorials on my phone until we found a really good channel that did a lot of the theory and formulas step-by-step. The teacher was interesting, too.
“She’s better than the one at school,” Bree observed as we lay on our stomachs watching my phone and she took notes in 2B pencil on my enormous old half-full sketch book. By the time we fell asleep, I’d watched so many lectures I felt like I might actually be ready for Bree’s test tomorrow.
Despite being reasonably comfortable Bree wouldn’t fail her test, I didn’t sleep that well because of what was going on with Sarah and Rob. Bree didn’t either, and ordinarily it was nice having her soft body all cuddled up against me, especially in the cold. When she was tossing and turning all night, though, all it did was constantly wake me up. My ribs were still sore from my binder and she kept accidentally elbowing me in them, and with the tense day I’d had, I ended up having these fitful stress dreams where I was giving a company-wide presentation at Frost with everyone laughing at me, and then I realised with incredible horror that I was on stage completely topless.
I was in the middle of one of them when Bree shook me awake. “Min?”
I struggled back to consciousness. “What? What’s wrong?”
She was leaning over me. “I want to have kids,” she told me urgently, sounding really worried. “At least four.”
I stared at her. It must have been like two in the morning. “Okay…?”
“It’s just that you never said you wanted kids,” she told me, doing that thing where she spoke really quickly and anxiously. “I’ve been lying here thinking about it, and I realised that when I met you, you said Henry wanted kids, but you never said you wanted them. And, like, I’ve been imagining our future and stuff, and it just suddenly occurred to me that you might not even want children, and, like, what if we get married and I’m really happy and then it turns out you don’t want kids? What if we end up fighting like Sarah and Rob?”
I rubbed her back. “I know you want kids, Bree,” I told her, carefully sidestepping the question because I was honestly sick of it. Why was everyone so obsessed with me having kids?
She noticed, and unlike Henry always had, she didn’t leave it. “Yeah, but do you want them?” she pressed.
I pulled her back down against me. “God, it’s way too early for this, can we talk about this tomorrow? You sound like my mother.”
Her voice was muffled by my pyjamas. “No, I don’t. Your mother just says, ‘You’re a bad daughter, marry Henry and have his children right now!’” She paused “Or at least that’s what I think she’d be saying if I could understand Korean.”
I snorted. “No, you nailed it, that’s definitely what she says,” I told her, and then sobered. “Kids are like…” I shook my head. “Can I not have that anvil hanging over my head for a while? Everyone’s been trying to force all that stuff on me for years. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to finish my master’s, relax, and focus on myself for a bit.”
“Well, I don’t want to hold an anvil over your head or force it on you or anything,” she told me, still face-down in my PJs. “I just want to know if you want children. Not now; no way, I’m still in school. Just, like, ever. It’s okay to ask that, right? I think I’m allowed to know if you want kids or not.”
She had a point. It was just the whole concept of using my body to produce children felt really alien to me, and I just didn’t want to think about it now. I wanted the topic somewhere else, far, far away from me. “You don�
��t mean have them-have them, do you?” I clarified. “Because if you want them to come out of me, then that’s never ever—”
“—I know,” she said. “I’d carry them. You’d be the dad.”
Oh. I lay back for a moment, processing that. “The dad?” I said, trying it out. I hadn’t even thought of that. It did make me wonder... “Would you use a Korean donor, or…?”
She took a little breath, lifting her face up from my PJs. “Well,” she said, clearly well-prepared for this question, “I was thinking that before you go on testosterone and, you know, before you get your uterus and stuff all scooped out—” My eyebrows went up. “—we should harvest and freeze some of your eggs. When it’s time, we can use some random sperm donor and I can have your children. That way they’ll be both of ours.” Bree glanced up to gauge my reaction, saw my alarm, and then looked a bit guilty. “Um, so, I may have thought a little bit about this…”
“You think?”
“Sorry,” she said, and cuddled into me.
I took a deep breath. I was still stuck on the scooping and the harvesting. “Honestly, Bree…” I exhaled through pursed lips. “We’ve been dating for a month. Can we just… park the kid stuff for a while? Please?”
She’d turned those big puppy eyes on me. “It’s just I really don’t want it to be like it was with Henry and how he assumed you guys wanted the same thing but you didn’t.”
I hugged her against me and kissed the top of her head. “It’s not like it was with Henry.”
She wasn’t completely satisfied with that answer, but she relaxed a little. “Promise?”
“Yes. I just—give me time on this one, Bree. I need some space from the last relationship I was in where everyone wanted at my eggs.”
“Okay,” she said, but she felt a bit stiff. She was only quiet for another minute or so before she said, “That’s a yes, right? Like, a very distant in the future yes?”
I had to laugh at her. “You are hopeless,” I told her, bear-hugging her and squishing her face into me again.
“I know,” she said desolately into my shoulder, and it was so sweet that I had to half-roll over so I could kiss her. It was only supposed to comfort her for a moment, but she wouldn’t let me go and we ended up lying side by side on my pillow, limbs intertwined as we kissed. I hadn’t planned on starting anything, but when her tongue dipped against mine between our open mouths, I felt it. I wanted her to keep doing it. She did, and she was making noises deep in her throat and drawing right up against me. I could feel her socks brushing against my knees, and I… wanted to hitch her knees up around my waist and settle between them.
The trouble was, after our conversation about eggs and babies, I was acutely aware that my body couldn’t do the things I wanted to do with her. It made me feel disconnected and wrong and a bit gross and I… yeah, I didn’t want to start anything right now.
I stopped kissing her. “Do you want to try and get some sleep now? You’ve got that test tomorrow.”
She made a face. “Okay…”
“Okay?” My stomach tightened; I hoped she wasn’t angry at me for subtly turning her down.
She scrunched up her nose. “I mean, yes, sort of not okay, but… well, it’s just we didn’t have any dinner and I’m, like, dying of hunger.”
I laughed. It was such a relief to hear that.
We each put on one of my big hoodies and went creeping out to the kitchen. I was zapping some leftover rice in the microwave with my teeth chattering and freezing the fuck to death, when Bree disappeared and returned wrapped in the entire doona. She swallowed me into it, and then we sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor spooning rice out of a microwave safe container, enveloped completely in fabric. Only the flashlight app on my phone prevented us from eating in total darkness.
I was mulling over what Bree had said about how she wanted to approach kids with me, and got stuck on one point. “Tell me something,” I asked Bree, and she looked up from the rice. “Why do you guys all assume I’m going to end up on testosterone and having surgery?”
Bree shrugged. “You don’t like your boobs, you want a more masculine-shaped body, and, like, just two or three months ago you were saying to me, ‘No! I’ll never set foot outside my home in men’s clothes! Never!’ And, like, now…” She gestured at me with my short haircut in my men’s pyjamas. “Why, do you think you won’t do all that stuff?”
I thought about it while I chewed a mouthful. “I don’t know,” I said after I’d swallowed. “It’s just weird to have people being able to clearly see what’s going on with me and speculating about it, you know?” I made a face. “Sarah’s lucky,” I said. “At least with her pregnancy, it’s something she can decide to tell people or not.”
“Not forever,” Bree pointed out.
“Yes, forever,” I corrected her. “After she’s gotten the abortion, there’s no way anyone can find out, is there?”
Bree scrunched up her nose. “I suppose…” she said, and then looked thoughtful while she had a few more mouthfuls of rice. Eventually, she put down her spoon, brow knit. “Min,” she said, sounding uncomfortable. “I think she wants to keep it.”
I considered that. “Probably part of her does,” I conceded. “Not enough of her to actually keep it, though. You have to be really ready to do this.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Bree said, sighing. “I mean, it would suck to grow up and find out you were an accident.” She reconsidered that, jaw a bit tight. “Or maybe it wouldn’t? I guess if your parents actually loved you and everything, it would be okay.”
“Mum says no children are accidents, that we’re all part of God’s plan, or whatever.”
Bree laughed once. “Yeah, my mum’s the same, actually. She’s one of those ‘everything happens for a reason’ people.” She tapped her spoon thoughtfully on her chin. “I wonder what the reason Sarah got pregnant is. You know, if the world is like that.”
I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure the world isn’t like that.”
Bree made a face. “I hope it is,” she said quietly. “It’s nice to think that when things really suck, there’s something amazing waiting just over the horizon for you.”
That was a very comforting thought. “I wonder what’s waiting there for you?”
Her eyes glistened for a moment. “I know what I want to be there waiting for me,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.
We finished the food and then slunk back to bed, wrapped in the doona. Under different circumstances, we probably might have messed around some more, but we were full of rice and I was feeling off about my body, so we left it. Bree took my arms, wriggled right up against me, and I cuddled her to sleep.
I took a while to go to sleep myself, and I felt like as soon as I’d finally drifted off, Bree was shaking me awake. “Min, can I have some money? There’s no bread.”
I wasn’t conscious enough to connect those two concepts. “In my wallet on the table,” I mumbled, and then I heard her bounce over there. I turned over. “Why are you up?”
“It’s half past seven and I’ll be late otherwise?” she said, and then held my wallet up. “How much can I take?”
“Whatever you need,” I told her. She pursed her lips and then took out a few big notes; she probably wanted to do some grocery shopping. As she kissed me goodbye, I did say to her, “If you come back home with a Lamborghini, I’m going to be really upset.”
“Will you buy me one if I ace my test?”
I felt like I was pretty safe on this one. “Yes,” I said in complete seriousness.
She threw something at me. I think it was a sock. “I’m going to ace it just to spite you,” she threatened me, sounding completely unintimidating. Then she grabbed her bag, kissed me again and headed off.
As expected, I didn’t end up needing to buy Bree a Lamborghini. She didn’t get her results until Friday, when she came bursting through Sarah’s back door in the late afternoon, announcing, “I got 73!” at the top of her lungs and
then launching into my arms to squeeze the life out of me. “Thank you!”
“Thank YouTube,” I wheezed, and then took a few deep breaths as she released me from her vice-like hug.
“73 isn’t exactly a Lamborghini score, but it’s good for a beat-up Toyota, right?” Bree wondered, still bouncing on her toes. “Or, like, a Hyundai or something?”
I touched her nose. “It’s good for the amount of money you took out of my wallet on Tuesday,” I told her as she giggled nervously. “And there’s still no bread, by the way.”
“Yeah…” She said dismissively, and the changed the subject. “It’s Maths night tonight!” she announced like it was an event, and she then went and spread out all her stuff on the table so she could do the exercises in preparation for Gemma’s arrival.
When Sarah got home, she didn’t seem quite as impressed with Bree’s score, but she still congratulated her. Later, when I was in the kitchen with her, she sighed and leant heavily on the bench, examining Bree’s marked test paper. She looked drawn. “It’s my fault,” she said stiffly, surveying all the red pen. “If I’d done what I’d committed to do, she would have gotten a much better score than this.”
I rubbed her back. “Bree normally scores in the low 50s,” I told her, “73 is a huge improvement for her.”
Sarah pursed her lips. “Okay,” she said, and seemed to accept that. She then ran a hand over her face, turning to lean her hips on the counter. “I can’t wait to get this stupid thing out of me,” she confessed, looking down her body. “Look at me: I am so sick, I bet I look like I’ve just been through my sixth round of chemo, seriously. I just want to lie down and pass out. At least it’s Gem’s turn with Schoolgirl tonight. I don’t know if I could face homework, you might actually have seen me cry again.”
I hugged her like she always told me to. “Why don’t you go and have a lie-down?”
Sarah sighed deeply. “Who do I work for again?”
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