Unexpectedly, that made me laugh. “That actually sounds fantastic,” I told her, meaning it. “I've always found there's nothing more therapeutic than drinking myself into a coma.”
She grinned. “You'll love it: I'm a cheap drunk, too,” she said. “Rob always tells me how much money he's saving by dating me instead of his last girlfriend.”
“Oh, I'm taking you out, am I?” I asked her as we walked through the revolving door. “Doesn't the inviter normally pay?”
She grinned. “Yes, but you're my boss now,” she pointed out. “That's generally how it goes.”
I was about to joke about that, but as we walked out onto the street, I heard a familiar voice shout, “Min!”
Bree.
Despite having promised me she wouldn't, she was waiting for me outside work again. She came rushing toward me in her school uniform. Unfortunately, she got halfway to us and realised she'd left her schoolbag on the corner. She stopped, made a face, and then ran back to get it.
I was torn between being pleased to see her and angry at her for breaking her promise again. And, fuck, Sarah was with me!
Rather than disapproving of Bree, Sarah could not have looked more amused. “That's who you were texting, isn't it?” I nodded.
The look she gave me made me cringe. “She's actually very nice.”
Sarah looked back at Bree dragging her full schoolbag toward us and snorted. “Yeah, I bet she's a lot of things.”
Bree caught up to me and looked like she wanted to hug me around the middle. She didn't, though. “I'm not sure if I can hug you in those clothes,” she explained, gesturing distastefully at them. “I'd probably ruin them. Although that wouldn't be such a bad thing. You look weird.”
I took a sharp breath. Sarah was standing right next to me, and that was far more than I ever wanted her to hear. I looked at Sarah a little panicked, but I don't think it was until she'd seen my expression that she thought twice about what Bree was saying. After she'd seen it she began listening very closely.
I wanted to yell at Bree for being so indiscreet, but that would have been even more obvious. So rather than replying to her, I indicated Sarah with a wave of my hand. “Bree, this is Sarah, a friend from work. Sarah, this is Bree...” a friend from hell, I thought, and winced as I remembered her 'you look weird' line and Sarah's expression.
Bree looked up at Sarah. “Hi,” she said, offering her hand to shake. “You're Min's friend, too? You're really pretty. I like your hair.”
Sarah looked from Bree to me and then burst out laughing. “Thank you!” she said, shaking Bree's hand. “Cloverfield Ladies' College, right? I hear that's a great school, I have a couple of friends who went there.” She paused, looking sideways at me with that same amusement. “A really, really long time ago.” I half glared at her. “Anyway, I'd better head off. I'll leave you two to it. See you tomorrow, Min.” She shot me another puzzled glance, and then turned and walked towards the train station, still chuckling to herself.
We watched her go. Shit, I thought, I hope she didn't figure anything out. God fucking damnit. “Jesus, Bree,” I said to her when Sarah was out of earshot, watching who was walking past us to make sure no one else was listening, either. “I swear to god if you say anything about what you know about me in front of anyone again, I will fucking kill you. This stuff is really private. And you showed up here after saying you wouldn't, again.”
She pouted. “I didn't say anything about you wanting to be a guy,” she said, at least making the effort to speak quietly. “And you do look weird.”
“Don't you think I fucking know that?” I said to her. “But just don't, okay?”
Bree did at least finally start to look a bit remorseful. “Okay, I get it. I'm sorry I showed up here again,” she said. “I just thought we could go shopping together so you didn't feel, like, pressured to do it later when you had work to do. And then I just wanted to hug you, and then I realised I couldn't. It just all came out.” She was giving me those big soulful eyes again.
I sighed at her. “You're unbelievable.”
“I know,” she said. “But I don't think your friend knows. She just thinks I'm weird, and I don't mind what she thinks about me.” She paused. “Also she has really nice hair kind of like Courtney's. I always wanted hair like that.”
“I like your hair the way it is,” I told her, pulling one of her curls and releasing it. “But if you show up here again and ever fucking talk about what I told you in front of anyone, I swear to god, Bree...”
“Okay, okay,” she said, looking chastised. “I'm hopeless, I get it. Can we just go and eat the cake now? It's really heavy.”
The cake actually turned out to be almost the whole cake, with only a couple of slices cut out already. She'd been carrying the whole cake inside a Tupperware cake container in her schoolbag. It was clearly homemade, and someone had actually put a lot of effort into delicately icing and decorating it. There were even little marzipan flowers all over the top of it.
“Are you sure your mum is okay with you taking this?” I asked, gently touching one of the pretty little flowers.
“It's my birthday cake. I'll eat it with whoever I want,” she said with surprising conviction, but didn't elaborate. We dropped it off at my place so I could put it in the fridge, sitting down at the table and sharing a slice before we went out again. It was actually a really great cake, but I wasn't sure how much I could really say about it because Bree was shovelling at it like she hated it.
She'd perked up again by the time we left the house, though. “You're not going to put on your other clothes?” she asked as I slipped my heels back on. I gave her a look and she scrunched up her nose. “Now that I know what you really look like, I'm never going to get used to you wearing all of this other stuff.”
I ruffled her hair as I passed her. Just very occasionally, she did actually say the right thing. “You and me both,” I said as I grabbed my handbag.
We went to a shopping centre off George Street. Bree was one of those people who always wanted to walk arm-in-arm, and that, coupled with the fact my blisters were killing me and I hadn't put the bandaids on them, made the walk there rather uncomfortable.
“You shouldn't have worn heels,” Bree told me when I mentioned it. “I never wear heels.”
“Maybe when you're a big girl mummy will buy you some,” I said, and she shoved me. I laughed. “It's not the heels that are the problem, I'm used to them. In the last few weeks I've just been walking a lot further than I usually do.”
As we passed a skate store, Bree stopped suddenly by the window. She had my arm, too, so I nearly fell over. “Look,” she said as I glanced around to see if anyone had noticed me being so ungraceful. “Those look more comfortable than heels.”
She was pointing at a pair of men's high-top sneakers. The tongue hanging out of them was so puffy it looked like it might need a shot of antibiotics to get the swelling down. “Yes, I'm sure they'd go particularly well with these tailored suit pants,” I said dryly, but Bree had already released my arm and rushed inside.
To my horror, I heard her call out, “Hi!” to the clerk as he looked up at her. “Do you have those men's ones,” she pointed at the high-tops, “in her size?” she pointed at me like what she was asking was perfectly normal. I couldn't believe it. Way to fucking out me, Bree, I thought, feeling all the colour drain from my face. If I wasn’t so fucking embarrassed I may actually have killed her on the spot.
Fortunately, the clerk clearly wasn't making assumptions about me at all. In fact, the expression he gave me was much the same one Sarah had. He was assuming Bree was the head case. “Do you know what her size is?” he asked Bree as I walked up to them. “I'll have a look.”
“Eleven in women's,” I told him, and he nodded and went out the back of the store. I looked down at Bree, who was trying her best to give me a really sweet smile. “Bree. Are you actually trying to get me to brutally murder you? Because it's working.”
She bounced up and
down in front of me and grabbed a handful of the fabric at the front of my blouse. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry! They're just really cool and they'd look great on you! Anyway, no one's going to know everything just because you're buying men's sneakers. They'll just think you have really big feet and can't find your size in women's.”
I ended up walking out of that store with a pair of men's sneakers and a very sheepish little schoolgirl who was about ten times more excited about them than I was. When she pulled me into another men's clothes shop, I stopped her. “Aren't we supposed to be buying you a birthday present?”
She shrugged. “I'm having fun!” she said, and then loaded me up with more button-up shirts than I'd ever seen in my life and pushed me into a change room. I would have been embarrassed about that, too, except the clerks were all giving me secret smiles like they thought I was just patiently putting up with a crazy teenager. Bree saw and didn't seem to care. “Tell me when I can come in!” she called over the change room door as she pushed it closed.
I stared at myself in the mirror of the door. Well, well, well, I thought at my reflection, we meet again. I tried to ignore it while I tried on the clothes.
I did actually quite like the style of the shirts. That was, until I'd put them on. Bree had insisted I try a medium size instead of the XLs I usually preferred, and they buttoned up perfectly all the way to my chest where they pulled tight across my breasts. Despite the fact my breasts were quite small, they still managed to very effectively ruin the way the shirt looked. I looked ridiculous, and I just had this wave of self-hatred, like who the fuck was I kidding trying to look like a guy? I was a fucking girl.
“Can I see?” Bree called when she heard me stop making changing noises.
“No,” I said, and went to take the top off.
“Why not?” she asked through the door. “Is the medium too small?”
She ended up convincing me to let her in, and I showed her, expecting her to immediately see my dilemma. She shrugged. “If you, like, hunch they'll probably just look like pecs?”
The top was short-sleeved and I held out my arms. “With these scrawny things?” I asked, and then groaned. They didn't look at all like Jason or Sean's arms at all. “I'm too skinny for people to think I have pecs.”
“You know you can get surgery to remove your boobs, right?” Bree asked, looking at my breasts in the reflection. I wondered how she knew about that. “Maybe you could get that, and then use those chicken-fillet-like things you can put in your bra to pretend you have them at work.”
I laughed once. “Yeah, Henry wouldn't notice at all.” I reached for the door to let her out. “Okay, I'm taking the shirt off.”
She didn't go anywhere. “You've seen me in a bra,” she reminded me.
I took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and pushed her out the door. “You actually like how yours look, though.”
She giggled. “Well, they're DDs,” she said as I closed the door and locked it. “What's not to like? They're great.”
I could only see her feet under the change room door, and right then she jumped experimentally up and down. I laughed to myself while I took the shirt off, knowing what she was looking at. I hoped her bra was more supportive than the one she was wearing on the weekend, because I could just imagine how she'd have looked if she'd jumped up and down in that and wow I really shouldn't have been imagining that. Bree did have a great body and she clearly enjoyed showing most of it to people, but there was just this sweet sort of naivety about her which stopped her looking like she was inviting people to touch it. I wondered if anyone had touched it, and then mentally hand-smacked myself. That was none of my business.
I'd gone to put that shirt neatly on the floor to try a bigger one, when I noticed my handbag in the corner and I had a thought. Those compression bandages. I wondered if they'd make the shirt fit. I took the package out of my bag and looked at it again. Well, there was no harm in trying, right?
I slipped off my bra and undid the wrapping.
“What's that noise?” Bree asked through the door.
“I'm hungry,” I said flatly. “I felt like a packet of chips.” She giggled.
The bandages were actually really good; they were made out of some strange fabric that stuck to itself so I only needed to press them down and they were secure. I had to try a couple of times, though, because the first time I did it I wrapped my chest too tightly and it hurt.
When I was done, I looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn't sure how I felt about myself from the front because of my hips, but from the side, I was completely flat. Completely. There was no sign at all that I had breasts. Just to check I wasn't imagining things, I put on the shirt that hadn't quite fit before.
It worked, they were completely gone. That made me smile, so I opened the door to Bree and let her squeeze in. “What do you think?” I said, and presented myself.
Her eyebrows went up. “Wow,” she said, and reached out to touch my newly flat chest, curious about it. Fortunately, she realised at the last minute that it probably wasn’t appropriate and didn’t actually put her hand there. “How did you do that?”
I bent down and handed her the empty bandage wrapper. She took it from me, but didn't really understand until she saw the diagram. “Oh, that's a good idea,” she said. “And probably a whole lot easier than just getting a surgeon to hack them off.”
I winced at her choice of wording. “What do you think of the shirt?” I asked. “Should I get it?”
She looked back up at me. Even though I had my breasts taped flat, it was actually really uncomfortable having Bree so openly staring at my chest. I'd have to get over that if I was going to pass as a guy, though, because guys didn't care about their chests. I caught myself thinking that and made a face. Pass as a guy to who, Min? Who else are you planning on showing this to?
“Yeah, get the shirt,” Bree said as an afterthought. She was looking down at her own breasts and tried to push them against her ribcage with her hands. The result was just a hell of a lot more cleavage around her collarbones. “I could never get mine that flat,” she said, releasing them again, which I was grateful for. Watching her so freely holding them in front of me was a bit awkward. “You're lucky you don't want to be a guy and have huge boobs. That would suck. You'd have to get them cut off.”
“Small mercies, I guess,” I said, and then kicked her out so I could change back again.
When I'd put my work clothes back on and opened the door, Bree was all the way up against the mirror at the far end of the fitting room, pulling at her hair. “How do you think I'd look with straight hair like Courtney and Sarah?” she asked me.
“Just as terrifying as you look now,” I said. “But straighter.”
She snorted. “Straighter?” She started to giggle.
That hadn't come out the way I'd intended it to. I pushed gently as I passed her. “You know what I mean.”
She did, but she found it hilarious anyway, and spent the whole time I was putting the clothes back trailing after me and giggling incessantly. She continued into another clothes shop, and came rushing over to me with a women's t-shirt which she held up across her front. It read, 'Looking 4 Prince Charming'. She was laughing too much to say whatever she'd wanted to say about it.
I rolled my eyes at her. “Yeah, yeah, I get it, very funny.”
The last set of shops in the centre were several jewellery stores and a supermarket. We passed by the window of one of them and there were a whole lot of engagement rings.
“Hey,” Bree said, on her tiptoes peering at the rings. “Doesn't your company sell diamonds? Are there any Frost diamonds here?”
I leant back to read the shop signage. “Nope.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “You didn't even look at them,” she accused.
I came up to the display window beside her. “I don't need to. Frost does prestige diamonds, and this isn't a prestige store.”
She groaned. “Well, sor-ry,” she said, clearly still
playing with me, but there was an element of something else in her voice. “Not all of us live in super awesome expensive apartments and can just buy awesome prestige diamonds whenever we feel like it.” She walked into the store. “Some of us regular people like regular things.”
I walked in after her while she looked around at all the stuff on display. “Actually, Frost diamonds are probably a bit out of my price range, too,” I corrected her. “The cheapest ones retail for about $20,000, but our most popular selection is in the $100-to-$150,000 price range.”
Not only did Bree gape at me, but the clerk behind the counter who'd overheard us did, too.
“That's enough for a house,” Bree said, sounding actually kind of distressed about it. “Like, a small house, but a house. You can't live in a diamond.”
The clerk's expression was quite funny as well. “Well,” she told us in her professional voice. “We have a lovely selection of jewellery in the 100-to-150 dollar range.” Both Bree and I laughed.
Bree turned her nose up at me. “Okay, you can show me that stuff,” she said to the clerk, and then they chatted about some of the items on display while I stood back and watched, holding my shopping bags.
It was odd talking about the price of Frost merchandise like it was worth actual money, I thought, reflecting on how we normally talked about contracts and units and profit. Discussing it with Bree reminded me that, actually, Frost was raking in enormous amounts of money just from the comparatively small diamond division. Money ‘regular’ people didn't usually have, and money Bree definitely didn't have.
I watched her talk animatedly with the clerk as she leant over the counter. The clerk was even older than me and she was enjoying chatting with Bree, too. Henry was right, the age difference wasn't actually a problem, but Bree did have a point about money. She wasn’t old enough to have a job that paid anything like mine did. And I didn't just have a ‘regular’ job, I worked for Frost International. And what was the fucking point of working for someone like Frost and having all this money if all I did was either buy cosmetics or send it back to Mum?
Under My Skin Page 21
