Later, when Gemma had finished checking Bree’s Maths assignment and gone into the kitchen to refill our teas, I snuck in behind her and shut the door. She looked up at me as I latched it. “Come to see what else is in the fridge?” she managed, sounding passably cheerful.
“No,” I said, leaning on the bench beside her while she waited for the jug to boil.
She deflated. She knew what I meant. “It’s fine, Min.” She wasn’t looking at me. “Do you want ginger again? Because there’s a whole box of other weird concoctions on the shelf.”
“I’m not here for that,” I told her, taking a step towards her and going to put a gentle hand on her back. “I want to make sure you’re—”
She immediately shrugged me off and moved away, holding her hands up. “Don’t,” she said, probably a bit louder than she needed to. “Don’t. Please. I can’t—” She didn’t finish that sentence, instead dropping her arms and shaking her head. She looked up at me, but she didn’t speak straight away. When she did, her voice cracked on the words. “She used to tell me everything.”
Oh god. “Honestly. I walked in on her. That’s all it is.”
She shook her head slowly, still looking at me. Her voice was quieter this time. “No, it’s not, Min.” The jug finished boiling. She poured water one-by-one into all of our mugs and then refused to let me help her as she carried them out.
“Thanks!” Bree said indulgently, accepting hers when Gemma passed it to her. “Oh my god, I’m so over this assignment, I can’t wait for the holidays. I’ve done this equation like a hundred times and I still can’t get it right. Help! What am I doing wrong?” Without looking at me, Gemma sat down next to Bree and went through it.
Sarah glanced up at us. “Did you two have fun in the kitchen together?” she asked oh-so-innocently.
“Let’s just say she’s definitely pregnant now,” I said flatly, and then sat down at my own laptop.
Later, Bree fell asleep with her tablet again, and while I was tucking her in, Gemma escaped through the back door so I couldn’t privately show her out like I usually did. After she’d gone, Sarah yawned and stretched, closing her laptop screen. “I’m so glad I don’t have to pretend I don’t feel weird and gross. Look,” she said, wobbling the skin on her upper arm. “I’m enormous! My whole body feels like one big amniotic sac.”
There was literally no difference. She looked the same. “Yup, you’re basically a whale,” I told her, disappearing into my room to get into bed with Bree.
I sat down on the edge of the bed as I kicked off my shoes, and then spent a few minutes gently stroking Bree as she slept, and thinking about what had just happened with Gemma. She’d been so excited about that trip. I wondered how long she’d been planning it for; ages, by the sound of it. Fuck. I hoped she hadn’t booked everything; my gut told me that she probably had. She’d done everything except figure out the perfect way to surprise Sarah, and I think she’d been about to ask for my help in that. God, I felt guilty. Why did I feel guilty?
I was stripping off my clothes to get into my pyjamas, and I’d taken my phone out of my pocket and put it on the bedside table when I noticed the LED flashing. I picked it up because I thought it might be Gemma.
It wasn’t Gemma. It was in Korean. “I sent you a heavy package in the post, you’ll need to sign for it, and don’t get it wet! I’ve been collecting wedding inspiration from magazines since you were a little girl; any time I saw something pretty or clever, I cut it out and put it in a box. I sat down and went through all my boxes today and put the ideas I think Henry might like into the package for you. Some of them are so beautiful, Min, and I’ve had to wait so long for you to actually get married that there’s plenty of choice. Make sure you consult me before you make any silly, impulsive decisions, though. You’re no good at these things, but I’ll help you. I’ll make sure nothing stops you from having the perfect wedding. It will be so special, so beautiful - something you and Henry will remember for the rest of your lives. You’ll be glad I did this for you.”
I stared down at my screen, feeling a knot form in the pit of my stomach. How did I even respond to something like this? It made me so angry. So angry, and so tired, and even thinking about how I was going to reply was paralysing. I wished that she would just never text me again.
I’ve given you what you want, I thought bitterly. Why can’t you just leave me alone?
While I was standing there with my phone, Bree stirred and turned slowly over in bed, yawning and looking up at me. She froze when she saw my expression. Before I could stop her, she sat up and plucked my phone from my fingers, lying back down and cramming it under her pillow. “Goodnight,” she said with a little smile, and then closed her eyes.
SIXTEEN
I don’t know what I expected I’d achieve by telling Mum I was marrying Henry. Three years with him mediating between Mum and me had obviously lulled me into a false sense of security because that illusion was shattered now, that was for sure.
“You should get pregnant,” was what I woke up to at the crack of dawn on Friday morning after I’d surreptitiously fished the phone out from under Bree’s pillow. I squinted at the screen while my eyes adjusted to the light. “Henry is the type of man who would do the right thing and bring the wedding forward so the child isn’t born out of wedlock.”
She was going to fill up my SD card with the amount of ‘helpful’ advice she was giving me, seriously. I quickly shoved my phone back under the pillow before Bree could catch me with it, but I think I woke her up with my heavy sighing anyway. She made a noise. “Min,” she said, her eyes still closed and her voice thick with sleep.
“I know.” Chastised, I put my head back on the pillow. “I just keep worrying it’s going to be a message that says, ‘I know you’re lying and I’m getting on a plane right now!’”
“There’s nothing you can do if it is,” Bree mumbled. “So, like, losing sleep over it isn't going to help.”
“Yeah, I know,” I repeated. “But I can only face that blinking LED for so long before I need to know what she’s saying.”
“Maybe just disable it?”
I exhaled. “I can’t. And even if I could, I’d be checking my phone anyway.” I turned to lie against her back. She was warm. “Logically I know worrying about it doesn’t help...”
Bree chuckled at that, taking my arm from on top of me and cuddling it to her chest. “Before I met you, I used to think I worried about things a lot.”
We both dozed a bit more until her alarm went off and she needed to go off to school. Mum had sent me another message by the time Bree left, as well.
Constant text messages weren’t the end of it, either: she sent me an email with a suggested wedding guest list around midday and then checked hourly to ask if I’d read it, and her messages got increasingly more passive-aggressive as the sun started to set. So, in the evening while Bree was finalising her mid-year assignments and we were waiting for Sarah and Gemma to get home, I caved and ended up hunched over my laptop with Outlook open.
I was straining to read all the Korean names and didn’t notice the door open. When a delivery slip suddenly appeared in front of my face, I jumped. A hand placed it on my keyboard, and Sarah then rounded the table and grinned at me. “I found this wedged in the front door. Apparently you have a package waiting at the post office. Anything interesting?”
I picked the card up to have a quick look at it before sighing deeply and putting it aside. “The opposite. It’s from my Mum.”
She laughed once. “What a surprise. That's from her too, right?” She stepped stiffly out of her heels and leant over my shoulder, taking a peek at the email as she massaged one of her swollen ankles. “God, my feet are killing me. Is that a list?”
I sighed at it. “Yeah, of people who should come to Henry’s and my wedding, apparently.”
“Wow,” she said as I scrolled up and down. “I don’t think I even know that many people.”
“Coming from you, that’s quite a
statement,” I observed with a grin, and sat back. Sarah had so many friends. Actually… Thinking about them made me realise there was a notable absence from this conversation. “Where’s Gemma?”
Sarah shrugged, sitting across from me and examining her foot. There was a clear line in her skin where her heels ended. “She said she needed to work late, and since Maths isn’t on the timeline for today, I told her that was okay.”
Bree looked up from her assignment sheets. “What?” she sounded really disappointed. “But I wanted her to be here after I submit them so we can celebrate all our hard work together!”
While I was worrying about my last conversation with Gemma, Sarah gave up on her feet and bent sideways in the chair and patted Bree on the head. “I’m sure she knows you appreciate her. Are they already submitted?”
Bree drew a tentative breath. “No,” she said, “but they’re about to be! I’m just trying to decide if I should spend more time fixing them or not. I want them to be good enough so that the school doesn’t kick me out after all this work you guys have done.”
I’d proofread her discourse analysis myself. “Your essay is fine, Bree, trust me.”
“Yeah,” Sarah chimed in. “I’m 100% certain that I can quote your lab report from start to finish, the amount of time I spent looking at it. It’s good.”
“I think you should submit them now,” I told Bree. “Go on, go for it.”
“Really?” she asked, inflating like a balloon. “Should I do it? Just like that?” It took us both nodding at her for her to start to believe it. She could hardly contain her smile. “Okay!” She spent a couple of seconds tapping away at her tablet, and then very theatrically gave the screen one final poke. “Done!” she declared, standing up throwing her hands up in a victory ‘V’. “I’ve just handed in all of my midyear assignments, and now it’s holidays! I have two whole weeks where I don’t have to do anything!”
Bree’s idea of a celebration was cooking us dinner and then turning over Sarah’s whole kitchen because she was sure she’d seen a bottle of gin somewhere. She eventually found it, but neither of us was that excited when she put it on the table in front of us.
“The only reason that bottle still has anything in it is because that brand is disgusting,” Sarah told us. “I think someone brought it to a party a year ago and it’s survived all of them since.”
Since it was the only alcohol in the house, Bree found a cocktail recipe for gin that included ginger tea, and then after we’d eaten her pasta, she presented us with a gin toddy. “Yours is a virgin one,” she told Sarah. A very hard stare over the top of that ‘virgin’ toddy warned me to stop snickering about it.
There wasn’t enough gin to make either of us actually drunk—not that Bree would have actually let me get drunk—but it was pretty nice feeling that buzz again, and it definitely made it easier to ignore Gemma’s absence, Mum's email, and my flashing LED which was probably a message asking about the email.
Sarah didn’t have any work to do because she was between projects—actually half the Marketing floor was, which was weird—so the three of us crowded around her computer and googled what a foetus looked like at 15 weeks and all the things that were happening in Sarah’s stomach. “You’re going to get a bump soon,” Bree observed and then looked down at Sarah’s front.
Sarah pressed her lips together and mutely took Bree’s hand, placing it just below her bellybutton. Bree brightened. “Oh my god!” she said, feeling around a bit. “You can already feel it!”
“Yeah,” Sarah said reluctantly. “At least you can’t really see it yet, but it won’t be long.”
Bree could hardly contain herself. “Min, come and feel this!”
I gave Sarah an apologetic look and put my hand beside Bree’s on her tummy. There was an unmistakable firmness there. “Is it uncomfortable?” I wondered.
She shook her head. “Not really. My boobs hurt more, but the nausea is the worst thing.”
“This is so amazing,” Bree gushed, and then stopped probing Sarah’s stomach for a few seconds to wrap her arms around Sarah herself. “I’m so happy for you! I mean, the morning sickness sucks, obviously, but it will be over soon and you’ll be a mum forever!” Sarah looked more haunted than comforted by that.
Rob chose that instant to arrive home and walk in on us. He gave us a bit of an odd look, but ended up laughing and heading off for a shower. I think Sarah had endured quite enough of us groping her, and declared that she was going to join him. After she’d gone, Bree drank another mouthful of gin from the bottle and giggled about the fact Rob and Sarah were probably fucking in the shower. She gave the last mouthful to me while we were trying to figure out how to celebrate.
Neither of us really felt like watching a movie, and it wasn’t even 10pm yet so it seemed a bit early for bed. While I was wondering if perhaps we should go out somewhere and have a drink to properly celebrate Bree’s hard work and the end of term, Bree wandered over towards the window and pulled the curtains aside, switching the living room light off so she could see the garden. “It looks nice out there, doesn’t it?” she decided, and before I answered, she opened the door and went to see for herself. I followed her.
It was a mild night; chilly, but thankfully not bitterly cold like it had been for the past few weeks. Bree was holding the railing of Sarah’s deck, leaning backwards on her heels with her face turned upward. I looked up, too. Above us there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and instead, there were a million stars stretching from one horizon to the other. Far on the distant skyline, the Southern Cross rose up over the city lights.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Bree murmured, an incredulous smile on her face.
“Yeah,” I said in perfect honesty. Living in central Sydney, I’d never seen the sky like this.
“Come on!” Bree said before I’d finished looking at it, and then bolted off down the stairs and out into the backyard.
I followed her down to find out what she was doing, and walked out onto the gumnut-covered lawn just as she stepped her school shoes off and climbed up onto Sarah’s old rusted trampoline. It creaked in protest, but that didn’t stop her from immediately standing upright and jumping on it. Leaves and twigs bounced on the surface, and she kicked them off, laughing.
Even in the dim moonlight, I could see what kind of state the springs were in. “It’s too old and rusty, Bree!” I called up to her. “Those springs are going to snap and you’re going to get hurt!”
“You’re worrying too much again!” Bree caught a gumnut that had bounced off the trampoline and lopped it at me. I ducked. “Come on, get up here!” From the rosy glow in her cheeks and her heavy-lidded grin, I guessed she was a bit tipsy.
I twisted and cast my eyes around: it was dark, and it seemed pretty clear that all the neighbours had turned in for the night, because none of their windows were lit.
Another gumnut bounced off my head. “Ouch!” I hissed, turning back to Bree and rubbing where it had hit. She grinned at me and bounced aside to make space so I could get up. The trampoline hadn’t collapsed in a tired heap after all.
I looked up at her giggling and bouncing around in her socks while I was standing here on the ground with my arms crossed, and realised she was right: I was worrying too much. I’d lied to Mum so I could actually enjoy my life, right?
“You know, what the hell…” I said with a grin, and hoisted a knee up on the rusted iron frame as Bree cheered at me.
The trampoline sagged under my weight and made a deep, concerning groan as I stood up. Bree started jumping before I was ready and I nearly fell over. She grabbed my arm and stopped me from pitching down onto the lawn, but in the process landed at the same time as I did and launched me upwards. The moment I spent airborne flooded me with adrenaline, and my stomach felt like it was flying up to my throat as I was falling through the air. In that second—that split second—I vividly remembered being seven years old and sneaking into the gymnasium at school at lunch to play on the trampoline while no on
e was there. It was exhilarating, and I found myself half-shrieking and half-laughing.
“I told you!” Bree said, trying not to do it again. “I told you it felt amazing!”
I was a bit breathless as I jumped myself, this time. “I haven’t done this for years!”
“Me neither!” Bree said, accidentally matching my landing again and sending us colliding together in the centre. We both laughed. “Me and Andrej used to have a trampoline when I was little, but Dad sold it a couple of years ago.”
She was lucky. “I never had one,” I told her, remembering mournfully into backyards where kids were playing on them as I walked past on the way home from school. “I always wanted one, though.”
Bree was seeing how high she could go. “We should get one!” she announced, as her skirt went up over her stomach and I got a peek at her polka dot knickers. “When we move out together, I mean!”
I almost didn’t want to say it. “I won’t be able to afford a house with a backyard, Bree. I’ll be lucky to be able to afford one with a roof.”
She didn’t look fazed. “We have the whole rest of our lives, Min,” she said. “One day we’ll be able to afford it, and then, when we can, let’s buy a brand new enormous trampoline!”
There was something magical about the idea of spending money on such a ridiculous purchase. Mum would never approve: a trampoline was a waste of money, she’d always said. But right now, high in the air, I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather waste my money on. I couldn’t stop laughing. “Yeah, let’s do it!”
I would have liked to keep going longer, but we had to stop bouncing eventually because jumping around in my tight binder was making me lightheaded. We lay down together on the mat, looking upward past the tall and shadowy gum trees in Sarah’s yard at the millions of stars. It was so quiet, all I could hear was the wind in the leaves.
Bree’s fingertips crept over and found mine. “Do you know any constellations?”
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