Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  I looked at Bree cooing over a gold bracelet with the clerk. Well, it was her 18th birthday yesterday, wasn't it?

  I made a gesture to get the clerks attention, and then indicated the bracelet. The clerk smiled ear to ear like she was absolutely delighted and nodded at me.

  When the clerk started to take the bracelet away from Bree, Bree stood up straight and looked really confused. “Why are you—?” The clerk glanced at me and Bree turned back towards me. I was just smiling, and Bree's jaw dropped. “Are you...?” I nodded. She just stared at me for a second. “But it's real gold,” she said. I pretended to be very impressed and she pointed her finger at me. “Stop that,” she ordered. “This is serious. You're buying real gold for me?”

  “Would you prefer fake gold?”

  The clerk snickered as she finished polishing the bracelet. “Would you like it gift-wrapped?” she asked us.

  I looked at Bree. She just looked stunned. “I don't know,” she said.

  The clerk seemed to be finding Bree's whole surprise very sweet. “Would you like to wear it now, instead?”

  Bree looked back at her and just stared for a second. “Okay,” she said, and presented her wrist.

  The clerk helped her put it on, and then I handed my card over while Bree just stared mutely at her new bracelet.

  When we were done and had made it out of the store, Bree kind of just stopped beside the wall. “Did that just happen?” she asked me with no trace of humour in her voice.

  I smiled and ruffled her curls. “Happy Birthday.”

  She was still looking at her wrist. “When I told you to buy me something, I just thought you'd just get me something cheap and silly,” she said, and there was something about her voice. “I never thought you'd actually buy something really awesome for me.”

  When she looked up at me, I realised why she sounded so strange. Her eyes were swimming in tears.

  Fuck, had I done something wrong? “Bree...?”

  Without waiting another second, she threw her arms around my middle. There were people everywhere and I felt a bit uncomfortable about it, but given the circumstances I couldn't push her away. I put a hand on the back of her head, not really sure what to do. That certainly hadn't been the reaction I was expecting, and I worried about it.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her quietly after a minute or two. She was still hugging me just as tightly. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled, warming my stomach. “I'm sorry about crying, it's really dumb,” she began. “It's just, like... I thought you might really like a coffee before work so I got up really early so I could get into the city on time to get you one. And then I thought you might like some flowers because I upset you that night and I wanted to say sorry, and flowers are a nice way to say that, right? And I thought maybe you'd like to have some of my birthday cake because it's really pretty, so I had to wait until Mum went to take the rubbish out so I could sneak it into my bag and show you.” She took a short breath. “It's just that, you know, I always try to do all these nice things for people...” She looked up at me with those big eyes of hers. “I always try and do nice things for people. But you did something nice back.”

  I stroked her hair. So that's what it was about. “Happy Birthday,” I said again, quietly.

  After a minute or so she released me, standing back and gently touching the bracelet. “I'm going to help you,” she announced eventually, after spending some time deep in thought. When it was clear I didn't know what she meant, she looked around us to make sure no one could hear, and then elaborated. “Like, you want to be a guy? Well, I'll help.”

  I winced. I still wasn't comfortable hearing her say that, and especially not suddenly with no warning. “I'm not actually sure what I want, and you help already,” I said. “You don't need to do anything. Just be your crazy self.”

  She didn't look convinced. “But I'm sure I can do more than that,” she said. “There must be something else.”

  I laughed bleakly as we started walking again. “If you could spontaneously develop some magical powers, that would be great.”

  It was getting to that time of night: the lights around us in some of the stores were beginning to switch off, and here and there roller-doors were being shut.

  “I guess you have to go do work,” Bree said in that desolate tone of hers she reserved for when she needed to leave. “And I have to go home.”

  “You're not going to Courtney's tonight?”

  She shook her head as we walked out of the entrance. “My brother's there. It's too weird.” She didn't say anything else. It was dark outside already, and there was a bit of a chill in the air as we headed back home.

  When we got upstairs, Bree looked hesitantly at her schoolbag by the door, and then up at me. “Can I just stay for a bit longer? I'll be really quiet. I have homework to do, anyway.”

  I had been ready to refuse, but there was a note of something in her voice. It made me wonder. “Bree, do your parents know where you are?”

  She shrugged. “I'll seriously be really quiet.”

  I watched her for a second. There was obviously a reason she didn't want to answer, and I didn't want to push her, so I left it. She was 18 now anyway, and all the evidence pointed to her having had a crap birthday. She enjoyed herself when she was here. “Okay,” I said. “But literally, you will need to be dead quiet. I'll need to be able to concentrate.”

  She brightened. “Really? I can stay?”

  I took the bags into my bedroom and went in there to change. “Really. I'm using the table, though. Or I will after I have a quick shower.”

  I had my shower and threw on the hoodie and the jeans, and by the time I came out of the bathroom, the doona was missing from my bed. I followed the trail of discarded bedding and found it draped over the spine of my couch and hanging over the front of it. I lifted the end of the make-shift doona-tent near the arm. Bree was lying on her stomach inside it reading something on her phone.

  She looked up at me when I peeked in.

  “Okay...” I said slowly.

  “If I can't see you I'll be less tempted to talk to you,” she said very matter-of-factly, and then went back to reading whatever she had been. “Also, it's really warm in here.”

  I had to laugh. “If you suffocate, I'm feeding you to the flowers,” I told her, and then set myself up at the table to do some research on the leads Jason had sent me.

  Most of them were just contacts in large mining or construction companies in Russia. I couldn't find any connections to more consumer-oriented products at all. Leads were leads, though, so I wrote somewhat cryptic emails to a few of them and then stopped short of actually sending them. If I was going to send communication that had anything to do with Pink externally, I'd probably have to clear it with Jason first, and, fuck, that young guy John had sent me a link to a webpage about Argyle Diamonds unencrypted again. I put my face in my hands; I wasn't sure how much clearer I could have made the message about the importance of information security. Well, I couldn't do anything now, but I'd need to jump right on it tomorrow. Fuck. Why couldn't people follow simple instructions? I saved the emails onto the USB, shut my laptop and then leant back in my chair and stretched. That was probably enough for today; it was bedtime.

  That reminded me that Bree was still here. I flopped my arms back down and looked over at the couch; she'd been dead quiet. I decided I should probably thank her for that because it was a bit of a feat of self-discipline for her, so I wandered over and lifted the edge of the doona.

  I had opened my mouth to say something, but I stopped when I saw that she'd face-planted on her phone. It was half-buried between her cheek and the cushion and she was fast asleep. I laughed soundlessly; that explained why she'd been so quiet. I should have known 'self-discipline' and 'Bree' weren't two words that belonged in the same sentence.

  Carefully excavating her phone, I rolled the doona back to her shoulders so she didn't actually suffocate, and then I
stood back up.

  Well, I couldn't kick her out now, could I? I looked at the clock 11:30. It was probably better if she did stay over rather than going home at this hour. I wondered about her family, though. How the fuck did they not worry about where she was all the time? Unless she was lying to them, that is. Still, my mum would never have let me out so much in my last year of school, regardless of what I'd told her. I knew Aussie parents were a little less hardcore, but I didn't think they were this lax about where their teenage daughters were.

  Kind of hating myself for it, I unlocked her phone to just check she hadn't received a hundred phone calls from scared family wondering where their daughter was. She hadn't, there wasn't a single one. And in fact, the last thing she'd been reading wasn't actually even homework, it was a blog that called itself The Queer (A)Gender. I sighed at that, and then put the phone down on the coffee table and just looked down at her.

  What's the deal with you, Bree? I thought, bending down so I could tuck her in a little better. That delicate little bracelet was still on her tiny wrist, and it reminded me how small she was, which made me worry even more. I hadn't seen bruises or anything on her torso when she'd had her top off, and I didn't think it would be something like that, but I still worried. I worried about what was going on for her. Fuck, it was just so easy to worry about this girl.

  Still, I had several more pressing issues also competing for brain-space, like not being sure if I definitely wanted to be a guy or not and the fact that when I gave my team instructions it all seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I sighed, turning off the living room light and heading into my bedroom. All of this could wait until tomorrow.

  ELEVEN

  I woke up to the sound of someone opening and closing the cupboards in my kitchen. Yawning, I felt around my bedside table for my phone and held it in front of my face, half-blinding myself. 6:02 am. Bree was very awake for this time of the morning. Weren't teenagers supposed to be impossible to wake up before midday?

  Just as I was trying to decide if it was too early to get out of bed, my bedroom door swung open and a silhouette with very fluffy hair appeared. “You have no food,” she announced, not telling me anything I didn't know. “I had this really nice idea where I was going to make you breakfast and have it ready for you when you woke up but the only thing you have in your pantry is this one single pickle and the most plastic-looking two minute noodles in the world. The cake is the only thing in your fridge. You don't even have milk anywhere, just, like, four hundred thousand bottles of red wine.”

  “Good morning, Bree,” I said pointedly in my croaky morning voice. “How did you sleep?”

  “Okay,” she said, still lecturing me, “and you sound like a guy, now, too. I've discovered the reason you look like some skinny teenage guy when you don't try to do the feminine thing is because you hardly ever eat. If you didn't have your hair, like, down around your face like that then no one would think you weren't a dude.” She paused, touching her own messy hair. “Also, can I have a shower? I look like a pom-pom.”

  It was too early to deal with her, so I washed my face quickly and then got dressed while she was having a shower. Since I couldn't wear my tailored pants two days in a row, I ended up needing to brave a skirt with stockings. 34 years, 364 days to retirement, I thought, sighing heavily. I toyed with the idea of pulling my hair back–especially after what Bree had said–but 'guy' really wasn't the impression I was trying to give people at work.

  When Bree finally emerged from the bathroom, she'd done a pretty good job of fixing her hair and smoothing her uniform and it wasn't at all obvious she'd crashed on someone's couch overnight. “Can I just leave my undies in your washing?” she asked. “It's a bit weird to carry them around.”

  Was she serious? Her skirt barely made it halfway down her thighs. “Bree, you can't go out like that without any!”

  She looked at me for a second and then laughed. “I have spares,” she said. “But oh my god!”

  She continued to laugh about that while she was watching me do my makeup, and then all the way downstairs. I had automatically started walking to work when I realised I couldn't send Bree to school without having fed her. It was really too late to sit down anywhere, though.

  “Would a muffin and a coffee be okay for breakfast?” I asked her, as we passed a café.

  “Sure!” she said, and ended up talking the barista into making her a ham-and-cheese toastie, instead. She ate it with an expression of total contentment as I walked her to Circular Quay to catch her train. We'd just missed one, so we sat and watched the ferries dump hordes of business people in suits onto the quay.

  “You should wear a suit to work,” Bree said, offering a wedge of her sandwich to me. “That would be so awesome.”

  Yeah, in my dreams. “Hah,” I said as I had a small bite and gave it back to her. “World peace would be awesome, too.” I half-heard an announcement over the speaker system. “Hey, isn't that your train?”

  She nodded, dusting her hands as she stood up. “Thanks.”

  Her hair was a bit damp, and if I ruffled it I'd probably make it frizzy for the rest of the day, so I didn't. “You're welcome,” I said. “Come on, you've only got a couple of minutes, you'd better go.”

  I walked her up to the barriers and she just stood there, glancing up at me and looking uneasy.

  “You've got to go to school,” I told her. When she didn't say anything to that, something occurred to me as I watched people hold their Opal cards next to the readers. “You do have enough money on your card, right?”

  She didn't say anything, so the answer was obviously no. And she wasn't going to tell me, I thought, looking around us at all the ticket inspectors making sure everyone was tapping on. How the hell was she planning on getting to school?

  I leafed through my purse for my Opal card which I hardly ever used, took her hand, and placed it in her palm. “Here. It's full-fare, but I don't think anyone will notice.” As I was closing my purse, I caught sight of the blue-green of a couple of ten dollar notes, as well. “Do you have lunch?” Again, no answer. I made a short noise and put one of the tens in her palm with the card.

  She was being uncharacteristically quiet again, and I led her aside from the barriers so we wouldn't get in anyone's way. “Bree, is everything okay?”

  She nodded, looking down at the note and the card in her palm.

  What was going on for her? It couldn't be that her parents had no money, because Cloverfield was a pretty expensive school and Bree, while being very sweet, did not seem like the type of person who'd be there on a scholarship. I wanted to ask her, and I suppose I probably would have been entitled to because I was spending heaps of money on her, but I also kind of wanted her to want to tell me on her own terms.

  “It's not fair,” she said quietly.

  I frowned a little. “What isn’t?” Putting a hand underneath hers, I closed her fingers around the card and the ten. “If you're worried about the money, don't be. It's not a problem.”

  “Yet,” she said. “It will be.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue: ‘what’s going on, Bree?' I couldn't say it, though. What if it was something awful and really private I was forcing her to tell me in public? I just put a gentle hand on her back and lead her up to the barricade. She tapped my card and went through.

  I raised my hand a bit hesitantly and waved at her, and she smiled for a second and waved back. There was something haunted about her, though. It seemed forced, but she'd turned and gone to climbing stairs before I was sure. I watched until she'd reached the platform, trying to imagine what the problem could possibly be.

  When people started to give me frustrated looks and push past me, I realised I couldn’t just stand there against the barriers because I was half-blocking them. I stepped aside, looking one last time up the stairs just to make absolutely certain Bree wasn’t coming back down them before I headed off to work.

  Something is seriously up with that girl, I thought, focusing
on the pavement in front of me to avoid catching sight of my reflection in shop windows as I passed them.

  The beautiful cake was evidence Bree hadn't been kicked out of home and that her parents still obviously loved her. She didn't have bruises or anything on her and she didn't seem to have any hang-ups about her body at all so it couldn't be... anything more serious than that, could it? I didn't feel like that made sense, but maybe I should ask Henry about it. Yes, I thought as I walked into the lobby of Frost and pressed the lift button, I’d have to ask Henry what he thought. He always knew this stuff.

  I was the first one in the office, again. Sitting down at my laptop, I fished around in my handbag for the USB and then flipped it between my fingers while I was waiting for my system to boot up. Bree had dragged me to that expensive restaurant and made me pay, and she hadn’t seemed to have any issues with that. I supposed she had been getting progressively more uncomfortable with the money I was spending since then, but I thought I had been making it perfectly clear it was fine? Actually, to be perfectly honest, part of me kind of enjoyed it. Spending money was a complete non-event to me, and I'd never had anyone to spend money on before. I liked that something so simple meant so much to her. It felt like I was cheating at friendship, somehow. Seeing that gratitude on her face when I'd bought her the bracelet was a great feeling.

  Why wasn’t it fair, then? Goddamnit, what was going on with her?

  This was driving me nuts. Was I overreacting? I had to text her. I took my phone out of my bag and spent at least five minutes trying to figure out what to say, in the end settling on, “Are you going to be okay? I’m worried.”

  She took longer to reply than usual. “thats because ur a stressball lol btw i hardly have any credit left”

  I groaned. “Avoid the fucking question, why don't you, Bree!” I said at the phone, and then put it away. She clearly didn't want to talk about it, and while I was dying to know, it wasn't my place. Unfortunately, the fact she hadn't answered whether she was going to be okay or not seemed very important and I ended up staring at Michelangelo underneath my monitor rather than the timeline actually on it.