Listening to her, I felt ill. I hadn’t considered that at all.
It didn’t end there. “And, like, you did everything you could to make that even worse. You know what Andrej did to my family. You know about all the debt collectors, but you got involved with them anyway. So it’s like my feelings matter so little that not only did you not ask me what I wanted, you didn’t even care how doing any of that other stuff would make me feel. Well, let me tell you, Min: it makes me feel like the one person in the world who I love with all my heart doesn’t respect me at all. That he thinks I’m just this stupid fragile kid who can’t be trusted with decisions about her future.”
My face was burning, but I forced myself to listen to every single little detail of what she said.
“So now I’m stuck here,” she finished. “I’m stuck in this expensive school where like maybe one single teacher respects me, and everyone else now thinks I’m a dumb blonde with a sugar daddy who probably does her homework and bails her out of everything. And since the holidays, the Principal obviously told the teachers about your deal with her, because they’re all having a great time telling me everything I’m doing wrong. Especially Mr Preston. He reminds me every class when he thinks I’m not paying enough attention, and now my friends are starting to ask what’s going on. It’s so fucking humiliating. It’s so humiliating I can hardly breathe. But it’s not like I can just leave or hide in the library like I used to. I’m stuck there listening to them because I can’t just leave when you paid all of that money for me to stay.”
I stood there, digesting that. Everything she said made perfect sense, and, god, I felt so sick. I was so sure that keeping her in Cloverfield was the best thing I could do for her, even if I knew some of the teachers didn’t like her. On reflection, I don’t really know what I’d been thinking. I felt stupid. I felt particularly stupid about thinking that maybe she’d be a bit angry at first, but that she’d ultimately forgive me because I’d helped her get good marks; that she’d ‘thank me in the long run’. Where had I heard that before…?
And as much as I suddenly realised exactly what I needed to do, accepting it was taking that knife buried in my chest and twisting it with my own hands.
I already knew her answer before I’d asked. “You would have transferred, wouldn’t you? If I’d asked you what you wanted?”
She nodded.
I mirrored it, feeling sick to my stomach. Of course she would have. “Then you should do it. You should transfer.”
She froze for a moment. I don’t think she expected that. “What?”
“You don’t have to stay here. You can transfer to the public school if you want. It’s okay.”
For a moment, she was breathless in disbelief. “But you paid so much money!”
My ears were ringing. “I don’t want to force you to do anything that makes you miserable—I’ve been through enough of that myself with Mum. Do what you need to do. I’ll manage, and we’ll be okay.”
She gaped up at me. I think she was waiting for me to retract it, or change my mind, or something. When I didn’t, she closed her jaw.
Tentatively—I wasn’t sure if she’d let me touch her—I reached behind her head and carefully eased her thick curls out of that tight ponytail. She let me, and she let me gently loosen her tie and undo her top button as well. When I was done, I was looking down at the Bree I recognised, and she was looking up at me with those beautiful big blue eyes.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “I just want to get away from everything here.”
And that was it. That was the conversation I’d been desperately struggling to avoid having with her.
I closed my eyes for a moment. I’d wasted $21,000—more, really, since Seung had made me pay $18,000—and so much time and effort and stress trying to avoid the inevitable. And the inevitable was okay, in the end.
All of it. It was all okay. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for four months and I was finally able to exhale.
Her fingertips found mine. “What’s wrong?”
God, what a question. “So much had happened,” I told her, opening my eyes again. “The last two weeks… the last 24 hours even, I don’t know where to start…”
She watched me for a moment. “Well, I’m on my way to the station,” she said, lacing our fingers together. “Walk me?”
Hand in hand, we set a slow, leisurely pace past the stately houses and neatly trimmed hedges, and I finally told her the truth about what had happened. All of it, right from when I’d snuck down to Cloverfield to speak with the Principal, right up until my last phone call to Sarah. It was such a relief to just say it all. To not have to hide, or lie, or conceal anything from her. With every word I said, weight lifted clear of my shoulders, and by the end of it I felt completely purged. She listened like she always did—stopping me only once to clarify that yes, I’d definitely said my mother was here. After I’d finished, we walked for a bit in silence.
While we were waiting for the lights to turn so we could cross the highway to the station, she gave me a thoughtful look. “You seem okay,” she observed.
I considered that. “Every time I think about it, I get this jolt in my chest, like, ‘oh, that’s right, I broke off contact with my mother’, and it hurts, but…” I shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I’m better than I thought I’d be.”
Bree’s eyebrows went up. “’Than you thought you’d be’? You thought this might happen?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me until she asked, but now that she had, I knew the answer. “Yeah, I think part of me always knew it would come to this,” I realised aloud. “I think I always knew.”
Bree spent a few seconds in reflection. “I think she did, too,” she decided. “People ruin their lives holding onto things they can’t really have. Just look at my parents.” Her eyes were veiled for a moment. “Anyway, what’s on the cards for you now that’s all over?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I told her, my eyebrows high. “I’ll do my master’s, I guess, and in between assignments I’ll do contracts for Frost. Other than that, I’m not sure.”
She had a specific question in mind. “Maybe you’ll discover you’re a regular trans guy after all, now that you don’t need to worry what’ll happen if your mum finds out you got surgery or started taking testosterone?”
I blinked. I hadn’t even gotten that far yet. “Maybe,” I told her, “But I don’t really know how I feel about those things anyway.” There were so many ‘I don’t knows’. “Mum always told me what to do, what to wear, where to go… all of that. Now that I’m not going to let her do that anymore, I just feel…” I shook my head. “Not free, really. Kind of like an animal that was raised in captivity, and then you take it to the forest and release it, and it just stands there with no idea what to do.”
“But you definitely want to be an artist,” she pointed out.
I grinned down at her. I knew the answer to that one. “Yeah, I definitely do.”
She smiled at that. “Well, that’s a start. You know some things.”
I nodded slowly, looking back out towards the station. “I suppose I can do whatever I want,” I realised. “It’s just such an unfamiliar feeling, not having to always worry about what Mum will think or how I’m going to hide it from her. I can’t even imagine the kinds of things I’m allowed to want for myself now.” I smiled faintly, thinking about them. “Anything in the world, I guess.”
Bree mirrored my smile, watching me wistfully for a minute or so. Then she sighed deeply.
I squeezed her hand. “Is everything okay?”
She exhaled again. “I want that,” she said simply. “I want to be able to want anything in the world without always knowing in the back of my mind what’s going on back home. They’ve been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for so long, part of me is always counting down to it. I want to be free of it, too. I don’t want it to be my worry anymore.” She sighed again. “I can’t wait until we’re renting a little flat of our
own somewhere.”
I frowned at her. “That’ll help?”
She shrugged. “I just want to get my stuff out of my parents’ place for good so I can put all of this crap behind me.”
“How much stuff is still there that you want to keep? I thought you’d taken most of it.”
She shrugged. “A few bags, maybe. Some important things.”
A few bags? I considered that. If it was that little, it would probably fit in the corner of my room at Sarah’s…
The pedestrian crossing buzzed, and the light went green. I took a deep breath. “Let’s get it now.”
She gave me a sceptical look. “You don’t have a car anymore,” she reminded me as we crossed the road.
“Yeah, but I have arms,” I said, and flexed one of them.
That got a cute little smile out of her. “I kind of know a lot about those,” she told me wryly, and then sobered as we came up to the entrance to the eastbound platform. “You really want to go now?”
I nodded. “I’d get your things myself, but I don’t know what you want,” I told her, and then tugged her gently towards the ramp.
She deliberated for a moment looking worried, and then let me lead her.
We took the eastbound train together—a trip she must have done a thousand times during her time at Cloverfield—alighting at Bondi Junction to make the climb uphill towards her street. There were no cars parked outside her house, but Bree paused by the door for a moment to listen anyway before she let us in.
Inside, dim winter light filtered through the windows beside the door and fell on all the dusty display cases in the hallway. There was a musty smell in the air, and through the door to the living room, I could see stacks of dirty plates and wine glasses that had accumulated beside the chair Mr Dejanovic sat in to watch TV. It was completely silent except for the grandfather clock ticking at the end of the hallway.
Bree’s room was exactly how we’d left it; with printouts all over the wall, her bed perfectly made, and her possessions neatly arranged in their rightful places. It was dusty, though. Dusty, and dark.
She automatically reached over beside us to turn on the light, but when she flicked the switch, nothing happened. She flicked it uselessly again. Her lips parted for a moment. “They’ve had the power cut off,” she realised aloud. Taking a deep breath, she went over to her sticker-covered wardrobe anyway, took a rucksack from inside, and began to select things to put into it.
I watched her packing, picking a couple of fantasy books from her shelves, some summer clothes from her drawers, and little box decorated with magazine cut-outs and diamantes that looked like it had been done by a child.
She paused when she got to her framed photos, lifting one from the shelf to look at; it was the same laughing summer photo of the four of them that Mrs Dejanovic had on her desk. Bree spent a moment looking down at it with her back to me, the rucksack in one hand and the photo in the other. Dim light from her slatted windows spilt across the floor, and the shadows fell over her like the rungs of a prison cell. It was both awful and beautiful. It would have made a beautiful, melancholy painting. I tried to hold the image in my mind.
We shared the bags between us, but before we left, she stood back and surveyed her room one last time. The deceptively neat desk, the books in alphabetical order and the perfectly positioned photo frames. The room she’d spent her whole childhood in.
It all seemed so normal, like the bedroom of any teenage girl. No one would ever guess what went on in this house and what Bree had been living with. Looking at her face, though, I could see it.
“I made it,” she murmured. “I made it after all. I survived, and now I’m finally leaving.”
Something about how she’d phrased that touched me; striking through the deafening numbness I’d felt since this morning. That was it, that was exactly the feeling. I couldn’t feel happy or sad about leaving Mum, because it was what I needed to do to survive. And now, like a soldier who was somehow still standing at the end of a bitter war, I wasn’t cheering. There was no sense of victory. I was falling to my knees and touching the scorched earth, unable to believe I was still here to walk on it. I got through it, I thought. I’m still here.
“I don’t know why I thought I could change anything,” she confessed. “But I did.”
“You tried,” I told her quietly. I knew how she felt.
“I did,” she said in a tiny voice. “I really, really did. I worked and worked but it didn’t make any difference in the end, because I don’t really have a family. I have these beautiful memories of a family I once loved with all my heart, but that family’s been gone for a long time. They’re not here anymore.”
We walked out of her bedroom for the last time, and down those grey steps with the printed roses. She’d rushed down the hallway every other time I’d followed her through it, but this time she walked down it in slow procession, her eyes touching all the porcelain figurines, the little silver bowls, and drinking in every inch of how the hallway looked so she could commit it to memory. When she closed the front door behind us, we walked down the stairs onto the street for one last look at the house.
The clouds had parted enough for the setting sun to light the red bricks, and the sky to reflect in the upstairs windows. It was still charming, even with its peeling awnings and unweeded garden.
“I wish you could have seen how it looks with the roses in bloom. That’s how I want to remember it,” Bree told me, and then looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. “I was supposed to grow old in that house.”
We looked up at the red bricks and slatted windows one more time, to get one last, final glimpse of her childhood home. Then, with tears spilling down her cheeks, she turned around and walked away from it.
Side by side and with her bags in our arms, we headed home.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Bree’s graduation was in the new spring, on the first clear and mild night in months. The air smelt like salt water, and if you stopped and listened, you could hear the distant roar of the waves crashing on the sand down the road.
Eastern Beaches High School didn’t have the grand assembly hall that Cloverfield did, and her graduation wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as her formal had been. The high school’s utilitarian yellow-brick gymnasium had been converted into a makeshift auditorium with rows and rows of classroom chairs instead, and a student-painted banner above the constructed stage read ‘Goodbye & Good Luck for your Exams!!’. Unfortunately, ‘Exams’ was in skinny, squashed letters because whoever was painting the banner had run out of room.
Despite the meagre furnishings, there was still a sense of occasion. Earlier today had been the last classroom day for all the year 12s before they broke for swatvac and their final exams, and everyone had gone home and gotten dressed up in their best clothes. Now they were all lined up beside the stage while the Principal—a stately man in his late 60s who was dressed in his full academic gown—got ready to invite them up one by one to collect their placeholder certificate in anticipation of receiving their real HSC at the end of the year. Bree was among them.
I watched her buzzing around the group in her beautiful new cornflower blue dress—if you can call something bought from an op shop new—chatting with her new friends. They looked like a nice bunch of kids, and Bree seemed much more cheerful than she had six weeks ago. It was such a relief to finally see a real smile on her face.
Beside me, Sarah, Gemma and Rob were watching her, too. Sarah leant over to me. “So, you all ready for later tonight?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to ask Henry to help when he gets here.” I then spent a second considering how animated Bree looked while she was deep in conversation with her colleagues. “Do you think I should have invited her new school friends, too?”
Sarah laughed once. “Not unless you were thinking of inviting all of year 12 over to my place. Look at her.” Bree had moved to talk to another group of people.
“Wow,” Gemma sounded unsettled, �
�she’s been at this school for like five minutes and already she knows her entire year.”
“That’s what happens when you actually talk to people,” Sarah told her with a smirk. “You get to know them.”
Gemma looked insulted. “I talk to people!”
Sarah scoffed. “Yeah, when you’re drunk.”
I was listening to Sarah and Gemma bickering and waiting for the presentations to start, when I noticed the far door to the gym subtly open and someone familiar slip inside. I sat forward. I’d been wondering if he’d get here in time. “Henry’s here,” I said to the other three, and then tried to wave. We were seated in darkness, though, and even with all four of us silently waving at him, all we were doing was annoying the people behind us.
In the end, as the Principal started his speech, I had to sneak over to the side of the hall to where Henry had entered. It was probably for the best, anyway, because there were no more empty chairs over with the others.
“There you are,” he whispered as I snuck over.
I gave him a brief hug. “Thanks for making it. I hope we didn’t get you in any trouble.”
He shook his head. “Operations needs to stop scheduling meetings when I have my calendar blacked out,” he said. “Speaking of which, can you tell Bree I was able to get the night before her Psych exam off? I should be back in Sydney on the 20th.”
Someone who was seated near us gave us a dirty look for speaking while the Principal was, and we had to move to the back of the gym so we wouldn’t bother anyone.
“You can tell her yourself tonight,” I whispered to him. “Sarah told you, right?”
He pursed his lips. “She did mention something about needing to get together to set Bree’s revision timetable, but no details.”
I shot him a deep grin. “That’s the official story,” I said, “but what I’m actually doing is having a surprise graduation party for Bree.”
His eyebrows went up, and he gave me a look of frank surprise like he wouldn’t have expected it of me. “That’s a nice idea.”
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