Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  At first she thought I was serious, and she might actually have made me that coffee until I mentioned the dry-cleaning. She burst out laughing. “You are hilarious,” she said, as she closed the door. “I swear to god I’m going to get you out of the office one of these days. My friends will love you.”

  Somehow I sincerely doubted that, but I was glad she found me funny.

  I finally met my employees, and aside from Sarah they were a quiet bunch who didn’t seem to have any particular problems with the fact that I was their manager. One of them was fresh out of an internship and blushed fiercely whenever I spoke to him. Apparently he was one hell of an analyst, though, so I forgave him for how uncomfortable I felt speaking to him and watching his face go bright red. The other two were just your garden variety marketing reps, and one of them had been working for Frost for 15 years.

  I ended up needing to cancel lunch with Henry so the five of us could figure out what on earth we were going to do with the brief. Eventually we put our heads together and assigned each other tasks. I drew up a project timeline, photocopied it and gave it to them.

  By the end of the day I felt productive, like I actually might not screw everything up, and that, actually, despite my personal issues, life was pretty fucking great. Jason even said goodbye to me as I was leaving—he’d hardly acknowledged I existed before. God, could today get any better?

  As it turned out it could, because EB Games was having a stocktake sale and was open later than usual. Not only did I get the two titles I wanted, but I got them for half-price and grabbed a third for free. The third one had co-op, too, so I figured when Henry got off work he could swing past and play a few rounds with me in celebration before he went home.

  On my way up to my apartment in the lift I was so busy reading the jackets and wondering which one of them I should play first that I didn’t notice what was outside the door of my apartment. In fact I’d almost made it there and was feeling around in my handbag for my keycard when movement on the floor caught my eye.

  There was a person sitting cross-legged against my door, and the shock of that nearly gave me a heart attack. I took a step back and gasped embarrassingly loudly, putting a hand over my chest where I could feel my heart pounding.

  No one would have given me prize for knowing immediately who it was going to be.

  It was Bree, and she had a huge smile and an even bigger bouquet of flowers.

  SIX

  “You're here!” Bree said from where she was seated against my door, as if my showing up at my own apartment was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. “Hi!”

  My heart was still going. “What the hell are you doing at my home?” I paused, remembering the coffee. “Again!”

  She stood up a little awkwardly from the floor. “My legs went to sleep,” she told me, because obviously that was the most appropriate answer. “You took ages. It's nearly 7:30.”

  I didn't even know where to start. Where could I, with this girl? I tried to think of what Henry would do. “Bree. You promised you wouldn't do this again if I went to dinner with you. I had dinner with you. What are you doing here?”

  “Technically, I promised I wouldn't wait for you outside work,” she casually pointed out. “And I didn't want to break my promise, especially after I kind of put my foot in it with the whole...” she gestured at my work clothes with her free hand. She still didn't look very impressed by them.

  I just stared at her. Before I could even figure out what I should do or say, I lost my train of thought because she held up the huge bouquet. “Anyway, I had some money left from the taxi and since it's your money I figured I should spend it on you, you know? So I bought you some flowers to thank you for forgiving me for being completely hopeless and to apologise to you for—”

  “Bree, wait just one—” I said, but it wasn't any use, because she had already taken a step towards me and dumped the whole thing in my arms.

  I had been about to tell her that it was absolutely unacceptable for her to show up at my house like this, but then I saw the flowers and double-took. I had been expecting lilies, or roses, or some other generic pretty flowers, but that wasn't what was wrapped up in the colourful tissue paper at all. Instead of a nice delicate arrangement, it was a native Australian bouquet and all the flowers were huge, twisted and really, really ugly. So ugly they were actually monstrous. I couldn't look away. Who in their right fucking mind buys flowers that look like they want to eat you in order to apologise to someone? Stupid question, I supposed: this girl.

  While I was staring in horror at them, she kept talking. “They reminded me of you.”

  “These reminded you of me?” I said looking down at their furry leaves. They were fucking hideous. These were the sort of flowers you buy your much-hated mother-in-law to deliver a very clear message.

  “Not because they’re really hairy,” she said. “I mean, you're Asian, so obviously not. But, you know, they were really different from all of the other flowers.”

  Wow, and there it was. My stomach knotted. Now I had a bunch of ugly flowers to remind me that I didn’t fit in. And after my fantastic day at work, as well.

  God, it was so awful, they were so awful, and yet the absurdity of the whole situation almost made me want to laugh. I was torn between feeling hurt by what she’d said, uncomfortable about her being here, angry that she’d shown up again and just, well, entertained by how spectacularly she was able to fuck up something as simple as giving someone flowers. I didn’t even know what to think.

  Bree looked alarmed at my reaction, and put her hands on my arms. “Oh, no!” she said. “No! I didn't mean it like that, obviously you are, like, surprisingly tall and then you wear heels for some reason on top of that, but I meant it more—”

  God, she was still going? “Bree, really, I think you've said enough!”

  “—special-different! I meant special-different, not anything else, no matter what it sounds like!” she finished. She looked actually upset, like she was about to launch into a really tragic story. “I just walked into the shop because I wanted to do something nice for you, and there were all these flowers and then these strange native ones here, and like, I thought to myself, 'I could buy her all of those ones that look the same or I could buy these' and then I picked them up and like, see?” She reached up and stroked the top of one of them gently with her fingertips. “It's really soft but I bet everyone just ignores them because they're not traditional. I bet they just sit there for days and days watching all the other pretty flowers get bought as they slowly wilt and die. Can you imagine what that would be like? It's so sad. I had to buy them for you, I couldn't just leave them there to rot.”

  I did not have the slightest idea how to respond to that. At all. Had this girl formed an emotional attachment to a bunch of flowers? I wasn't sure if that was tragic or terrifying, and I couldn't stand here gaping at her while I tried to figure that out. She was still affectionately stroking the monstrous furry flower.

  “Bree, the flowers are a… nice gesture, but they don't make up for the fact you showed up at my home,” I told her as calmly as I could.

  And there were those big blue eyes again. “You don't like them?”

  There wasn't enough air in my lungs for how much I wanted to sigh at that moment. “They're...” Ugly, hideous, probably evil, and definitely a waste of my money, “interesting. What I don't like is people just coming over uninvited. I don't even like it when people I know really well do that.” She was still giving me those eyes, and for some reason I felt like I needed to keep justifying my feelings about her being here. “Look, Bree, I've had a really great day at work and I'd really like to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening.”

  She stopped touching the scary flower and nodded somewhat forlornly. “I just thought it would be a really nice surprise to bring you some flowers...”

  Why did I feel guilty about that? She shouldn't even be here! “Don't you see how this looks, though? You Google me and then show up at my house and w
ork to give me things? If you want to meet people, you ask them and let them decide if they want to, as well.”

  She was still looking at me. “Yeah, but what would happen if I asked?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her the honest truth, but then couldn't. The truth was that never in a million years would I have given anyone who asked on Deviant Art my home address or information about my work. And I wouldn't have agreed to meet them, either, no matter how long we'd been talking. Actually, that reminded me that I needed to change my username to something less obvious.

  I couldn't think of a tactful way to answer her, either. I didn't want to be cruel. She was just trying to be nice.

  She knew what I was going to say, anyway, and swallowed. “See? That's why I’m here.”

  In a creepy, intrusive way—she kind of had a point. There weren’t many options for her because she’d idolised completely the wrong artist. God, I was being a grump again, wasn’t I?

  She gave the flower one more cursory pat like she was saying goodbye to a kitten. “Make sure you put them in water. They've been out of it for hours now and they're probably thirsty.”

  “I will,” I said, with growing guilt about how dismissive of her I was being. She just looked so disappointed. Was I being unfair? Clearly she meant well, and she was right, if she'd just asked to meet me, I’d have said ‘no’. Seriously, I'd known Sarah for... three years? Four years? And I'd never met up with her outside work, regardless of how often she tried to insist I did.

  Ugh, was I being anti-social and unreasonable about all of this? She did just buy me flowers. Weird, creepy flowers, but she could easily have taken off with my money and spent it on something for herself. Henry had found that coffee thing charming, too, and he tended to be pretty level-headed. I doubted he would've been as angry as I was with her.

  While I was second-guessing myself, Bree slung her schoolbag over her shoulder, looking like Christmas had been cancelled. “Well, I hope you like them anyway.”

  “Thanks, they're pretty.” I was actually just being polite because obviously they were hideous and not pretty at all, but she didn't interpret it like that. She just looked up at me and smiled. It was the kind of expression a puppy might have as it realised someone had just decided to adopt it from the pound and it wasn’t going to die cold and alone after all.

  The hope on her face was completely disarming. “Min, I'm sorry I made you angry,” she said, and she did actually sound sorry. “It's just that while I was buying them I was imagining how you'd react, and I wanted to be here to see your face when I gave them to you. I waited because I didn't want to miss it.”

  She'd waited here for three hours, in fact, and this was how I was reacting. Probably not what she'd hoped for, after all; my chest clenched.

  While I was standing there feeling terrible, she winced. “Um, so,” she began, “This is kind of embarrassing, but I've been here for three hours and it's another hour home. Would you mind if I used your toilet? The guys on the reception desk said I can't use the hotel ones unless I'm a guest, and I was worried if I left to look for some that I'd miss you.”

  I wasn't too keen on letting her in, but I was feeling bad already and, really, who would say no to that?

  I exhaled, awkwardly trying to fish out my keycard with the games in one hand and the flowers clutched against me with the other. In the end Bree needed to take the bouquet back off me so I could open the door.

  She dropped her bag at the door and I nearly fell over it as I was taking off my heels. I'd pushed it against the wall with an ankle, and when I looked up, Bree was already distracted on the way to the bathroom by one of my big paintings that I'd had printed and framed.

  I liked that one, actually. Henry and I had gone up to Queensland a couple of years ago and had visited Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef. I'd only been in the water for about five minutes before I'd needed to go straight back to the hotel room and paint the reef. The colours and the light were so beautiful, it was like a different planet down there. The painting had turned out really well, and it was the first one I'd had framed when I moved up to Sydney. I put it on the wall that got the most sunlight so the colours were really bright.

  “You don't have this one on Deviant Art,” Bree said as she considered it.

  It was the first time I really married up this crazy girl with the person online who I’d been discussing my art with. Multiple exclamation marks aside, we had talked a lot about it. I suddenly felt like a giant prick for completely dismissing her, even if she was way too full on.

  I realised that her comment was also kind of a question. “I don't put everything on there. People steal things from it and I don't want this one stolen.”

  She leant right up close to it, really admiring the detail. That actually made me feel good; I'd put a serious amount of work into the picture and it was always nice to have others appreciate it. “It's incredible,” she said eventually, standing back. “Like, this is better than most of the stuff in galleries. What do you do again?” She looked back at me. “At Frost?”

  “Marketing.” My heart fluttered as I remembered my promotion. “Well, project management, now.”

  Bree made a face, looking back at the painting. “I don't really know what that is,” she said, and pointed at the painting. “But you should do this for a living.”

  I laughed cynically. If only; I'd lost that fight with myself years ago. “Wouldn’t be much of a living. There's no money in art. I'd be on the street instead of in here.” Now I sounded like my mother. “Painting is just a hobby. I enjoy it.”

  Bree turned a little to cast her eyes around the apartment. “This place is nice,” she conceded. There was an unspoken 'but' as she looked back at the painting.

  I suddenly realised who I was talking to. “Wait, weren't you on your way to my bathroom?”

  She looked at me for a moment, a little disoriented, and then back at the flowers in her hand. “Oh, yeah,” she said, and then made a face and put the flowers on the kitchen bench before disappearing through my bedroom.

  I had to go past the painting to put the flowers in water, and I stopped to have another look at it, too. In the glass of the frame, I saw myself smiling at it. Yeah, I liked this one. The original file was so huge I'd even put individual scales on some of the fish, but this print wasn't quite big enough to see that level of detail. I would have needed to get a wall-to-floor for that, and I wasn’t sure spending thousands on a quality printout was a wise investment. Looking at it all again made me feel like painting, though. Maybe I'd give the games a miss tonight and get the tablet out.

  I'd put the evil flowers in a vase and was standing in the middle of the room trying to figure out where I could put them when Bree returned. “You have a lot of make-up,” she told me, which meant she’d opened the cupboards in my bathroom. “It's weird. Not even my mum has that much.”

  I wanted to comment on how inappropriate it was to snoop in people’s cupboards, but I had pads and stuff in there, too. I didn’t want to embarrass her in case that’s why she was looking.

  Bree had already moved on from that thought, anyway, and was pointing to the kitchen bench. “You should put the flowers there,” she said, reminding me I was holding the monstrous flowers. “The leaves kind of match the stainless steel.”

  She was right, and the flowers also would also be much closer to the stainless steel knives in the event that I'd need to defend myself against them. I was following her advice when she said behind me, “Oh! Should I have taken off my shoes?”

  I set the flowers on the bench and was turning the vase to a good angle. “It's up to you,” I told her, too distracted to realise what I was inadvertently saying. “It's just a habit. I'm not really fussed if people do or don't.” There were slippers somewhere, too, but I think I’d kicked them under the hall-stand.

  It was only when Bree went to take off her shoes by the door that I realised I'd just given her tacit permission to remain in my apartment. While I was trying t
o figure out how I'd managed to do something so absent-minded, she bounced back into the living area in her knee-high school socks and I just didn't have the heart to tell her to put her shoes back on again and leave. She didn't give me the opportunity to comment on it, either, because she was already at another one of my paintings.

  It was of Federation Square in Melbourne, and I'd done it at night. It had started off as practice with lighting and had ended up turning into a completed print. “That's in Melbourne, yeah?” she asked, glancing back towards me to see me nod. “So you go to places and paint them? That's actually a really cool idea. Way better than buying souvenirs.”

  I thought so. “Well, yes. But I'm actually from Melbourne.”

  She gave me a cheeky grin, and I knew she was going to drag out the old rivalry between Sydneysiders and Melbournians. “That explains a lot.”

  “Whatever you're going to say, I've heard it before,” I said, rolling my eyes as she moved on to the next one. This one was actually not a location shot; I'd had this dream where I was a character in a computer game and it was set in this beautiful phosphorescent forest teaming with tiny little glowing dragons. The print was darker than I'd have liked, but it still looked great.

  Bree spent a few minutes looking at it, and then turned back to me. “You are actually my hero,” she said. “I can't believe you did this all out of your head. It's like a superpower.”

  I tried to keep a perfectly straight face. “What are you talking about?” I asked her. “That's where I went the last time I took annual leave.” She spun around to take another look as I kept talking, obviously thinking she must have seen it wrong. “I'm pretty happy with how the glowing ferns turned out, but I'm not sure I captured the essence of those baby dragons.”

  She turned to blink at me for a second, and then laughed. When she stopped laughing, she was gazing at me with what I could only describe as total adoration. I didn't know what to do with it, but it was really confronting. Fortunately, I didn't have to figure it out, because she toured the rest of my paintings and proceeded to give them a really gratifying level of appreciation. I was really proud of some of them, and I didn't think anyone had ever paid so much attention to them before.