Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  I chuckled and shook my head at her. “Fine.”

  “Yes!” she shrieked, reminding me that my painkillers weren't completely working just yet. She bounded off into my living room. “I'm going to pack your laptop and your tablet!” she told me, poking her head over the kitchen bench. “You're going to want to paint this. Trust me!” She then went zooming off around my house to look for my laptop bag.

  I wandered over to the wall and leant against it, still feeling kind of sluggish and tired while she was buzzing all around me. She emerged from my bedroom with my laptop bag, and, by the looks of things, she'd also been digging around in my wardrobe. She'd found the button-up shirt we'd bought together as well as an old baseball cap I used to wear aeons ago when I actually had the energy to go jogging.

  “Here,” she said, coming up to me and handing me the shirt. “Put this on. Also I found this so you can hide your hair.” She gave me the baseball cap and double-took, putting her hands on her hips. “Whoa, you seriously look terrible. How much did you drink?”

  “No comment,” I said dismissively. “Why do I have to wear the shirt with the buttons? What's wrong with this?” I gestured down to my old t-shirt. “If no one's going to be there, does it even matter?”

  “I'm going to be there,” she said primly. “And I like you in the shirt with buttons.” I couldn't really argue with that.

  Once I'd changed and she was happy with how I looked, she only let me grab my handbag before I was bustled out the door. Sniggering at me as we stepped into the lift, she pointed at it. “That kind of ruins the whole tough guy image.”

  “Good,” I said, slinging it over my shoulder. “I'm not a tough guy, I'm a nice guy who's obviously carrying his—”'—girlfriend's handbag', I'd been about to say. I managed to not finish that sentence just in time. I just kind of stood there staring at my reflection, horrified by what had been about to come out of my mouth.

  Bree raised her eyebrows, suggesting, “...his 'girly Coach handbag'?” as a closer for my sentence. She thought about that and shrugged, watching the numbers scroll down on the lift. “Well, I guess technically if you end up a guy you'll end up as a gay guy. So maybe it's not so weird after all.”

  That reminded me of Henry, and by extension Gemma, and then everything that I had been thinking about this morning. Fuck, I needed to just not be so worried about all of that because it didn't mean anything and it wasn't important. Besides, weren't Bree and I running away for the sole purpose of taking a day off from everything stressful? I could worry about this tomorrow when Henry was actually here.

  I was still stuck trying not to think those thoughts when Bree and I exited the lift and I was rummaging around in the bottom of my handbag for my keys.

  “Is it a nice car?” she asked me, holding onto one of my arms and making it more difficult for me to search for the keys to it. “Like, an expensive one? Or just like a regular old bomb?”

  I narrowed my eyes a little, finally locating my keys and pointing them at my car.

  It chirped and the blinkers flashed. Bree turned towards it with a big smile, but as she looked back at me, it had disappeared completely. “Min. It's a Lexus.”

  “Congratulations,” I told her neutrally. “You read at the first grade level.”

  She ignored me, shaking my arm. “You drive a Lexus? Are you fucking serious?”

  I shrugged as we walked up to it together. “My mum chose this car and I shouldn't have let her because I don't even need a car. So it just kind of sits down here while the repayments get debited from my account every month. I haven't even turned it on for a few weeks.”

  She looked at me like I was absolutely crazy, and then quickly disappeared into the passenger seat. After I'd climbed in and started the engine—it took a while to turn over, and I was worried I'd let another battery run flat—she discovered the stereo and was treating the entire hotel to some cheesy pop music as we pulled out of the car park.

  As happy as I was to have my thoughts drowned out, the bass was killing my head, so I reached over to turn down the volume. I happened to glance at her as I did it; she was dancing to it in her seatbelt with a big open smile. When she saw me looking she did a little flourish and then kept going. “This sound system is fucking amazing!” she shouted to me.

  Well, at least she’s having fun, I thought as I took my hand off the volume dial and put it back on the steering wheel. It was her day off, too, and my head would be okay.

  She continued to dance to that garbage as I merged onto the highway.

  Even though I'd sworn I'd never do it again about a hundred times, we had McDonalds for breakfast. As we pulled up to the Drive-Thru, Bree kept changing her mind so often about what she wanted that I ended up just ordering her porridge as penance.

  “I hate porridge!” she told me and then leant across my lap when we got to the window and begged the clerk to exchange it for something that contained actual flavour. Because she was upside down, in the process of watching her beg for 'real' food, I'm pretty sure the poor guy got to see a lot more cleavage than he'd expected to see at 10:30 in the morning. I certainly did.

  Probably as a direct result of it, though, she ended up scoring some free pancakes and as she was laying them triumphantly across her half-naked thighs, I shook my head. “I worry about you,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said, lifting up her pancake box to show me her pleated denim skirt. “That's why I wore my longest skirt today.” I couldn't tell if she was joking or not because she looked completely serious, but that skirt did not look a single inch longer than any of her others.

  After she was done with the pancakes, she spent fifteen or twenty minutes silently typing away on her phone. I figured she was chatting to someone so I just relaxed back in my seat, watching the road and trying not to fall asleep. Bree couldn't remember exactly where the park she wanted was or even what it was called, but she gave me some vague directions anyway and we'd ended up on this road winding up a mountain.

  Without Bree's incessant chatter to distract me, though, my mind had drifted back to Gemma and Henry. It was so goddamn frustrating that I kept thinking about it when I was trying to relax and enjoy myself, especially when I didn't even need to worry about it because it didn't have to mean anything. I had been lecturing myself on that when the road came to an abrupt end.

  I slowed down, and that made Bree look up from her phone. “Are we here?” she asked hopefully.

  I looked around us. We were in the middle of nowhere. “I don't know, I've never been 'here'. Are we?”

  We got out of the car to check. There was a National Parks and Wildlife sign with an arrow pointing down a track, but Bree didn't look very heartened by it. She walked up to me with a very sheepish expression. “Um, Min,” she said thoughtfully. “I think we're lost.”

  I sighed at her. “Well, where do we go now?”

  “I don't know…” she said, looking back down the road we'd come from. “We should probably just keep looking?”

  We belted ourselves into the car again, and as I drove off she took her phone out and continued to tap away at it.

  “Pretty intense conversation you're having there,” I commented eventually when I was trying to decide whether I should turn left or right at a T-junction without her help. Leaning towards the windscreen, I tried to figure out which way looked prettier.

  “I'd be kind of tragic if I tried to have an intense conversation with Google,” she told me, giggling. “I'm trying to find this place that I want to take you, so I Googled, like, 'beautiful national parks with streams near Sydney', and then I seriously went through all of Parks and Wildlife’s recommended rivers, and then I got desperate and opened Google maps,” she said. “And I'm dragging the little orange man around hoping I find, like, anything pretty, but the data reception out here is crap and it takes about five minutes for anything to load.”

  Since I was stopped, I turned to look at her and she showed me her phone. She wasn't kidding. She was actually skipp
ing through Street View, block by block, looking for nice parks.

  I had to laugh at us both. “I think we're the type of people who get lost in the bush and need to be rescued,” I told her. “Are you sure you want to go hiking about in the wilderness looking for this childhood creek of yours? It might be the last thing we ever do.”

  She shrugged. “I just thought it would be really great to take you somewhere nice so you had something pretty to look at while you painted.”

  I've had you for a few weeks now, I thought, glancing across at Bree in the passenger seat. “That's a nice idea, but when I paint I mainly look at my tablet,” I pointed out. “I don't tend to notice anything else. You'd be better off giving me something pretty to listen to, instead.”

  “Well, I think there were birds there, but whatever,” she said, leaning back in her seat and stretching out her legs. “What do we do now that we're all the way out here?”

  I think it starts with figuring out which way to turn at this stupid intersection, I thought. The main problem was I didn't care which way we went. It didn't matter, did it? The point had always been to spend the day with her, which I was, and I really didn't want to go home yet.

  I opened my coin tray and put a twenty-cent piece in her palm. She looked quizzically at it, and then up at me. I winked at her. “Heads we go left, tails we go right,” I said. “Let's get lost.”

  Bree's eyes lit up as she looked at me. “I wish I had a passport right now,” she said cryptically, and then flipped. Heads it was.

  We kept flipping and turning for a good hour or two; I disabled the GPS in the Lexus and neither of us were allowed to use our phones. I did get a bit concerned when I saw a sign telling me how far away Canberra was, but we did have all day, so it didn't really matter.

  At lunch time, we pulled up in this tiny little town so I could fill up, and Bree had already gone into the little servo to see what food they had. I followed her inside when I was done with the petrol.

  The store itself was a bit of everything; I supposed when it was in a tiny town like this it needed to be. It also doubled as a Post Office and Bree was holding up a postcard. “Perthville,” she read. “Original. I'm going to start a town and call it Sydneyville.”

  “There's already one of those in Victoria,” I told her, walking past her towards the food.

  She came running after me. “Really?” she asked.

  I winked at her again. “Nope.” She muttered something and gave me a shove. I ignored her. “What are you going to eat?”

  She spent ages fussing over the sausage rolls and pies, but finally made a decision when I was already halfway through my Red Bull. The owner had been chuckling to himself at the register when she tapped the glass. “Can I have the mushroom one?” she asked him, pointing to a homemade pie. “With the gravy in it?”

  “You can,” he said, and then nodded over at me. “What's your boyfriend having?”

  I nearly choked on my Red Bull. He's having a coronary, that's what he's having, I thought, coughing and trying to get the burn of it out of the back of my throat. Bree, far from looking shocked or upset, just looked very entertained.

  When she turned back to the owner, I think the colour drained from my face. Don't you out me, Bree, I mentally willed her. Luckily, she was having far too much fun to do anything of the sort. “He should probably have a salad,” she said, paying me back for the porridge incident while I was coughing unable to defend myself. “He was just telling me how he doesn't eat enough greens. No dressing, though. Just the plain old veggies.”

  I glared at her, still trying not to cough. The only thing I was actually capable of doing was handing my card over to pay, but just as I was doing that, I spotted the words 'Miss Min Lee' and panicked, snatching it back. I didn't want to risk any trouble; I already probably looked like I was too young to be driving a Lexus and like I shouldn't be taking two fifties out of a very feminine ladies' purse. I didn't need to add a card with 'Miss' on the front of it to that equation.

  Bree caught me hurriedly shoving the card back into my purse, and the smile fell right off her face.

  “Actually, I'll just pay cash,” I rasped, giving him both the fifties and giving Bree a bit of an inquiring look.

  The owner looked a bit confused about all of it, but smiled at me just the same. “Have a nice trip, you two,” he said amicably, and then waved to us as we left.

  I stuffed the receipt in my pocket as we got back into my car. That was close, I thought. I was going to need to sign up for a bank that didn't put titles on cards.

  As I started the engine, I realised Bree was watching me with a really strange expression. “Why did you do that?” she asked, as if she’d caught me holding up a bank or something. “Why couldn't you pay with your card?”

  I nodded towards my handbag as I pulled out of the servo. “Look at it,” I told her. She watched me suspiciously for a moment, and then took out my purse and leafed through the cards until she found it.

  It took her a second to understand, and her relief was palpable. “Oh,” she said, a smile growing on her face. “'Miss'.” She laughed longer than she should have for that, and then relaxed back into the seat.

  I took my eyes off the road for a second to glance across at her. She didn't explain herself, though, she just smiled contentedly as she picked at her mushroom pie and snooped through the rest of my purse. It was at that moment while I was trying to figure out what was up with her that my eyes dipped to her wrist. She still wasn't wearing her bracelet.

  This is all going to be something to do with your brother, isn't it? I thought, dying to ask her what was going on and what she'd done with it. Did she not want him to see it? I didn't say anything about the bracelet or the credit card, though, because she was happy and I didn't want to make her cry. She'd tell me when she was ready to, and in the meantime I would just have to find a way to be content with not knowing. Like I wasn't already perfecting that skill in my personal life, anyway...

  She was still watching me. “That shopkeeper person called you my boyfriend,” she said, reminding me of how uncomfortable that had been. “Should I do that, too?” I glanced across at her, and my eyes must have been pretty fucking wide because she burst out laughing and clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh, no, no!” she said through them. “Oh my god, that came out wrong! I meant, like, should I call you ‘he’ and all that?”

  I was still recovering from the ‘boyfriend’ comment. “If you want,” I said, trying to focus on the road.

  Her giggle fit made her turn bright red. Even her neck and cleavage were red, and even though she was fanning herself with her hands, it wasn’t helping. “Do you mean that like a really polite way of saying yes, please call me ‘he’, or do you actually mean if you want if you want?” she asked me. “Because isn’t it supposed to be about what you want?”

  What I really didn't want was to be asking myself that question right now, so I tried not to think about it. “When I figure out what that actually is, I’ll let you know,” I told her. “I don’t mind which pronouns you use, just don’t do anything that makes people look twice at me.”

  While we were looking for somewhere to pull over so I could eat, Bree spent some time thinking about my answer. “I’m going to use ‘she’,” she decided. “I think. I mean, like, because half the time I see you in dresses and I can totally see myself just accidentally making a mistake in a shop or something.” She paused, making a face. “But then I could accidentally call you ‘she’ when you’re dressed in your normal stuff, too, so like… okay, this is really hard.”

  I had to laugh at her. “Yeah. Now just imagine being in here,” I said, gesturing to myself. As I was saying that, I spotted a picnic table in a park on the side of the road. “Here we go,” I said as I pulled the car over beside it.

  I almost wished I’d given it a miss, though, because my garden salad definitely didn’t deserve its own rest stop. In fact, it was disgusting, and as I tried to choke back the world's driest c
arrot, Bree was busy giggling herself half to death as she watched me struggle with it.

  “I hate you a little bit right now,” I told her, holding a paper-dry piece of lettuce up to the light so I could inspect it and make sure it actually wasn't paper.

  She looked very pleased with herself. “That's Karma for you,” she said sweetly. “My porridge is still in the car somewhere if you'd rather eat that instead.” Her eyes twinkled. “Some guy who was actually nice gave me pancakes so I wasn't brutally forced to eat something I hate.”

  “I saw what you had to do to get those pancakes,” I said, waving my fork at her. “And I'd rather have the salad.”

  She looked down admiringly at her breasts, confirming they'd been part of her plan all along. “Your choice,” she said smugly. “If you'd been more patient at breakfast maybe you wouldn't be in this situation now. Or,” she said, shaking them a little, “maybe you could have used mine to get free stuff!”

  I felt uncomfortable and had to glance around us to make sure no one else had seen that.

  Bree's smile faded. “You're being really weird and uptight today,” she told me. “I mean, not as bad as you were when I first met you, but yeah.” She leant her elbows forward on the table. “It's a pity we couldn't find that place I used to like when I was little. It's really quiet there. You'd probably be way more relaxed, and you always chill out when you paint. Plus I was kind of looking forward to watching you do it...”

  I finished my salad as I wondered exactly how good her memory of this creek was. Let's find out, I thought. “Well, why don't I give it a shot anyway?” I asked her, standing up a little stiffly and going to grab my laptop and tablet out of the car.

  “Are you serious?” she asked me as I took the laptop from under the passenger seat and came back to the table. “You're going to paint it here?”