I took a shaky breath. “They won’t if you and Lilly don’t tell them.”
“Lilly will tell everyone,” she murmured, lost in thought for a second. I started to apologise, but she shushed me again. “Stop,” she interrupted. “Stop. Don’t give this to Lilly, please. You can’t work here. You have to leave, you have to leave now, before—”
What? No! “—I can’t leave!” I told her. “I can’t. I’ve got no petrol in my car, and I—” My phone started to buzz in my jacket. I ignored it. “—and I can’t support Bree if I don’t have a job!”
She glanced at the pocket the noise was coming from. “You will just have to find a different job.”
I threw my hands up. “You don’t know how much I need money right now,” I told her. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have come out to you at such a terrible time if I didn’t. I’m doing this because I need to tell someone here so I can get paid today.” At least my pocket had stopped buzzing. “Not tomorrow, not next week. Today.”
Her eyes narrowed again. “Why? Why do you keep talking about getting paid? Why do you need money right now?” Her brow lowered. “Are you like Andrej, is that why you two were fighting with each other? Are you and he both—”
“No!” I told her. “No, no, I’m not like Andrej at all. I don’t gamble, I just have bills that really need to be—”
“Bills can wait!” she told me. “You call the company and tell them to wait! You can’t work here!”
I opened my mouth to reply, and a loud, traditional phone ring interrupted me. It was coming from Mrs Dejanovic’s pocket. She frowned at me and, despite the poor timing, took it out just to check it, double-taking when she saw the display and frantically putting it to her ear. “Briana?”
Bree?
The phone cut out immediately, and Mrs Dejanovic swore in Serbian, and then said, “Of course she has no credit,” and called her straight back. Through the receiver, I could hear Bree’s frantic voice, but she was speaking in Serbian and I couldn’t understand her. Mrs Dejanovic could, and she went white as a fucking sheet. “Here?” she said in English, and then pushed the birth certificate back at me and rushed down the corridor to the window that overlooked the carpark.
I followed her, and through the window I could see why she’d gone white.
There was a big unmarked tow truck parked halfway up the car park and two big men moving around it. My heart in my throat, I spotted a mop of familiar blonde curls by the gate—she’d picked today to wait for me outside work again?—but she was quite far away from the men and the truck, and they weren’t paying any attention to her. They were too busy attaching a hook to my car.
Oh my god. I put a hand on the window. Mrs Dejanovic looked up me, jaw open. “That’s your car?” I nodded, and for a second I could see the deliberation on her face. She came to a decision. “I’m coming there,” she told Bree in English, and then went to go and jog down the stairs.
I followed her down them and out the fire escape—a sign said it was alarmed, but nothing went off—as she ran out into the car park.
Bree rushed up to us. She was panicking, and there were tears running down her face. “I’m sorry!” she told me, gripping my arms. “I wanted to help but I don’t have any credit, like not a single cent, so I came here so I could call you down and we could talk in person but they must have followed me,” she said in a single breath. “They must have followed me and now they won’t stop and I don’t know what to do, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I fucking hate Andrej and I hate how collectors are always following us fucking everywhere because of him, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
I hugged her, the blood draining from my face: she thought the collectors were here because of Andrej’s debts. “Don’t do anything,” I told her, turning to look towards the—
—Mrs Dejanovic was sprinting towards the men. Beside me, Bree shrieked.
“No!” I shouted, and let Bree go so I could follow her. She was surprisingly fast for being so short and plump, and I couldn’t catch up to stop her. “No, leave it! Let them have it!”
She didn’t listen, and by the time I got there, she’d swung one of the men away from my car and pushed him into another. “You leave him out of this!” she told the man harshly, and then winced and corrected herself, “Her! You leave her out of this!”
The guy stood up, giving the tiny woman a strange look. She obviously hadn’t hurt him at all. “Fucking hell, lady!” he told her as the other guy came running over from the truck. “I’m just doing a job, Jesus Christ!”
She was not intimidated in the slightest as the other man arrived and took her by the arm, I think intending to threaten her. She roughly pulled away from him. “If you have a problem with my family, you take it up with me or my husband,” she hissed. “You don’t bring other people into it!”
Oh god. “Don’t,” I told her, almost scared to step into the scrum. “Don’t, please, just leave it…”
The guy put up his hands in a ‘don’t shoot’ position. He was also completely unintimidated by Mrs Dejanovic; maybe he got this all the time. “Lady, if I ever have a problem with your family, I’ll definitely do that,” he told her casually, “but I’m pretty sure you’re not related to that chick.” He looked past her, and pointed directly at me.
I took a sharp breath.
The ‘chick’ reference to me was enough to make Mrs Dejanovic turn and stare. It was clear they knew who I was, but just to hammer the point home, the guy’s eyes lingered on my crotch, and then he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and held it up so he could consider it. It was a photocopy of my driver’s licence. “Right…” he said at length about it.
“Why does it matter if I’m related to her or not?” Mrs Dejanovic asked them, but she was faltering. There was something uncertain in the way she spoke.
The guy looked at us like we were both crazy. “Because it’s her unpaid debt I’m collecting on, that’s why.”
Mrs Dejanovic turned, and I watched her face harden. Beside me, Bree stopped whimpering, her jaw open, and the look on her face…
Shit.
THIRTY-ONE
“What does he mean your debt, Min?” Bree asked in her tiniest voice. “Aren’t these guys here because of Andrej?”
I was about to answer her, but while everyone was staring at me, the two men who’d been towing my car took the opportunity to get back to it. I had to say something at least, this was crazy! I’d told Seung I was going to pay him! “Hey,” I said very tentatively—I didn’t want to make them angry—as I stepped forward beside the one who was crouched by my car. “Seung knows I’m going to pay him tomorrow when I—”
The guy gave me a tired look. “Are we going to have a problem?”
I inhaled sharply. “There’s no problem, Seung knows—”
“Good, because if we’re going to have a problem, I’m going to need to call the boss,” he said, and then stood up, brushing the dust off his hands. “Unless you’ve got $1,500, that is. Because $1,500 would solve all your problems.”
They were charging me more than… “But my repayments are $320!” I protested, only to be met with a flat stare. Fuckers, I thought, and shook my head in answer to his question.
He shrugged. “Towing it is, then,” he said, and then crouched back down in front of my car. I watched helplessly as he fit the chain from the back tray to it. This was nuts, my car was worth way more than the loan and it was under finance!
I could feel the two others staring at me. Bree’s brow was low. “But I thought you said you were up to date with your car repayments,” she persisted. “Why are they taking it, Min?”
“Hang on,” I said a bit shortly to her, and then addressed the guy again. “Seriously, I’m only two days overdue, I don’t understand why—”
He groaned. “Take it up with the pawnshop. I’m just here to tow your car.”
Both Mrs Dejanovic and Bree baulked. “Pawnshop?” Bree repeated, her voice in the stratosphere. She took my arm and spun me ar
ound to face her. “How can you pawn your car if it’s under finance? That’s not legal!” From her expression, I think she already knew the answer.
Shit. I stood there floundering.
Her face crumpled and she shook my arm, her voice raw with emotion. “Oh my god, do you have an illegal loan? Do you have illegal loans just like my fucking brother? Tell me you’re not that stupid!”
I bristled. “No, not just like your brother has, I didn’t do anything like what he—”
She shoved me and gestured at the guys. “Then why are they taking your car even though they legally can’t? Why are you just letting them? What are you worried they’re going to do if you don’t give it to them, Min?” She shoved me again.
“It is gambling.” Mrs Dejanovic said tightly from behind me. “It is gambling, isn’t it?”
“Of course not!” I told her over my shoulder. As I did that, I noticed the tow truck guys were listening. Glancing uncomfortably at them, I tried to lead Bree a bit away, but she wrenched her arm roughly free and glared at me.
“You know,” she said loudly enough for them to hear, “If someone had asked me a couple of weeks ago, ‘Does Min gamble?’, I would have said, ‘Of course not!’ But then again, I would have said ‘of course not!’ to you getting loan shark loans, too. I don’t know what’s going on with you anymore, you’ve stopped talking to me like you used to! What are you hiding from me?” Her voice echoed around the car park.
“Bree, I’m not going to fight with you here! Can we please go somewhere else to—”
She shook me. “No!” she said. “No, we can’t go somewhere else! I’m sick of everyone fucking hiding everything from people, and hiding everything from me, and having to pretend everything’s okay when it’s not! Why won’t you just tell me what’s going on, Min?”
Her face was contorted with emotion; she was on the cusp of bursting into a flood of hot, angry tears. I took a careful breath. “I just wanted you to focus on your HSC, Bree. I didn’t want to distract—”
“Well I’m distracted!” she interrupted, trembling. “Do you think I didn’t notice you were hiding something? You think I wouldn’t notice you’ve started pushing me away and stopped telling me everything? I can’t stop thinking about it—”
“—I was just trying to do the right thing, Bree!” I told her, gesturing roughly at the men towing my car. “It’s not like I invited debt collectors to come and—”
“—they’re fucking loan sharks, Min, this is what they do! They stalk you and do awful things, what did you expect to—?”
“—I expected to be able to pay them back!”
“For what, Min?” she asked, grabbing a fistful of my shirt. “Tell me! Tell me what was so critically important that you thought, ‘hey, I don’t care about my safety or how this is going to make Bree feel after she’s spent years being chased by’—”
Was she serious? “—Bree! After everything I’ve done for you, how can you say I don’t care about you? You’re the reason I—”
“—I’m the reason you what? Got a loan shark loan? Bullshit! How could you be thinking of me at all when you took out loan shark loans knowing I’ve been chased by them, and stalked by them, and harassed by them for the last two and a half—”
The words just spilt out of my mouth. “I paid your school fees, okay?”
There was total silence for a moment, except for the sound of the car being winched beside us. Over my shoulder, Mrs Dejanovic’s hand was over her mouth.
Bree’s hands dropped from my arm. “What?”
I exhaled. Well, it was out now. “I maxed out my credit card and pawned Henry’s ring so I could.”
Another silence stretched between the three of us. It took Bree a few horrified seconds to catch up. She was still completely stunned. “But I thought they were letting me stay because my marks were so good now…”
I winced. “Well, they are better, but—”
Her jaw tightened. “—but not good enough for that. I get it,” she said bitterly. After another breathless pause, her expression sharpened and she shoved me. “You fucking idiot,” she hissed. “You idiot! Why did you do that?”
This was not what I expected. In fact, this was the polar opposite of the reaction I’d imagined she’d have when I told her; guilty, maybe, but angry? Angry that I volunteered my own resources to help her stay at the school she loved? “Sorry,” I said a bit sarcastically, “I guess I wanted you to get a good education, just like—”
She wasn’t listening to my reply, because something else had occurred to her. “Oh my god, so this is why you’re giving up art school!”
She was making such a big deal out of this! “’Deferring’ is not that same as—”
She talked over me. “You said, ‘Maybe I’ll do it in a year’,” she imitated my deeper voice. “That means never! Oh my god,” she repeated, shaking her head, looking aghast. “Oh my god. Well, I’m not okay with it. It’s not okay, I won’t accept it. We’ll just have to go to the registrar and ask them to pay it all back so you can pay the debt collectors and—”
I stopped her. “There’s no point, they won’t,” I said shortly. “It’s last year’s fees, not this year’s. I made an agreement with the Principal that they wouldn’t transfer you to a public school for not paying this year’s if you keep an average of 75, behave yourself and wear your uniform correctly—”
“What?” she interrupted me, her jaw dropping in disbelief. “You’ve had, like, this whole conversation with them without me?” She couldn’t have looked more betrayed. “Without giving me the choice? Without making me part of a decision that’s about me?” It took her a moment to get her head around that, and she gaped at me, running a hand through her curls. “Do you realise how fucking stupid this makes me look to them? Well, fuck that. Just fuck that. I’ll go to the public school.”
What? No! I gripped her shoulders. “Bree, I paid all that money so you could stay! I paid over twenty grand, you have to stay at Cloverfield and finish the year there!”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “’Have to’? So, like, that’s an order? You decided by yourself to pay all this money for me and now you’re allowed to tell me what to do?”
I saw red. “No, but I think you might actually respect the fact I paid a really big sum of money for you and went through a whole shit tonne of crap for you so that you can—”
She shrugged my hands off. “For me? For me, Min? How can it possibly be for me? You didn’t ask me! You didn’t ask me what I—”
“You said you wanted to stay at Cloverfield! That was the whole fucking point of everything me Sarah, Gemma and I—”
She threw her arms out. “Not like this!” she said. “Not like this! Not with debt collectors following me around, and you hiding things from me, and giving up everything that’s important—”
“You’re important to me, Bree! That’s the whole reason I did it: you! This was for you!”
The shoved me again. “Then you might have fucking asked me what I want! Go on, why don’t you ask me what I want?” She took a step away from me, looking me up and down and shaking her head. “I get that you spent all that money, I get it, but how can you not see how fucked this is? It’s not generosity, it’s fucking crazy! It’s like ransom! It’s like… how could you possibly spend that much money on someone without asking them if it’s okay? Without asking them what they want?” She grabbed my arms again, and shook me. “Why didn’t you ask? Why didn’t you say, ‘Hey, Bree, can I give you the enormous, generous gift of being followed around by debt collectors, of hiding shit from you, and watching me struggle, and suffer, and give up stuff I really want so you can keep pretending that you’re good enough to be at Cloverfield?’ because you know what I would have said?” She glared up at me, her lip quivering. “I would have said no, because I want to watch the person I love, the person I most look up to in all the world, live the life she’s dreamt—”
She was missing the point. “Can’t you see that I did thi
s so you could live your dream of graduating from—”
“Don’t you give up your life for me!” There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t you fucking do that! How do you think I’d feel ten, twenty years from now, looking at you all bitter and jaded because you never got to be an artist after all, knowing that you gave it up so I could graduate from some school where they think I’m the worst student on the—”
“Fucking hell, Bree, I get it, I should have asked, but you’re acting like I threw myself on a sword for you or something! All I did was make an adult decision to spend an enormous amount of my own money for you to try and help you, because you have no one else! You wouldn’t be able to do this without me shelling out—”
“No,” she told me. “That’s not what you did. This wasn’t an ‘adult decision’! An adult would consult the person they’re making the decision about! You made a decision about what you thought was best for me behind my back and then sacrificed everything for it, and now you’re, like, demanding I be grateful about it and do what you say!” She took a step towards me. “And you know who you fucking sound like? You know who you sound like, Min?”
I groaned. “I don’t know, someone who loves you and honestly thought they were doing the best for you?”
“No,” she said with gravity. “You sound like your mother.”
That hit me like a tonne of bricks.
You could have heard a pin drop; I guess the tow truck guys were already gone.
Like my mother? I stood there with my jaw open, reeling, looking down at that angry red face and that crumpled brow and trying to even draw a single, shallow breath.
No, I thought, no, I’m nothing like Mum. It was a fucking horrible thing for Bree to say! My mother had wrecked my life. She made me feel like shit about myself. I was just trying to do the best for…
…god, was I like her? ‘I was just trying to do the best for you’? That certainly sounded like something she’d say to me…
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