Under My Skin Read online

  “Anyway, I’ve been here for ages and I’m really hungry,” she just said. “I was thinking we could go grab some dinner. There’s this great restaurant in Darling Harbour, you’ll love it.”

  Hang on a second, what? “Slow down,” I told her, holding my hands up. “You’re in the city at 7 pm by yourself, your parents don’t know where you are, and you think it’s a good idea to stay out even later? You need to go home right now.”

  She didn’t look deterred at all. “I’m not by myself now,” she pointed out. “Trains run until midnight, anyway, so I can just get one later. One of your earrings is falling out.”

  My eyebrows went up and automatically I reached up to my ears. She was right, so I fixed it.

  As I was doing that, she slung her Cloverfield bag over her shoulder. “Come on,” she said, as if I’d never told her to go home. “The restaurant is like ten minutes this way and believe me, the food is awesome.”

  I didn’t budge. How the hell did she expect this to turn out? “Bree,” I said, feeling weird about using her name, but wanting to get her attention. “What on earth are you doing, exactly?”

  She turned back towards me with a blank expression. “Darling Harbour is this way and that’s where—”

  “Waiting here, I mean,” I said, interrupting her. “The coffee, the messages, the lying to your parents. All of this—why are you doing it? What’s the point?”

  She looked at me earnestly. “I’m making friends with you,” she said. “I decided last week. And it’s not like I can just hang out with you at school, can I? So here I am now.” She held her palms out to present herself.

  I didn’t even know which part of what she just said to be more alarmed by. “At 7 pm on a school night.” Then the rest of what she’d said hit me. “Wait a minute, you’re just making friends with me? Just like that?”

  She pointed a finger at me as if she was telling me off. “It’s not my fault you work long hours. I’ve been waiting here since 4:30. You took so long to leave work even my iPod went flat. If you worked the hours of a normal person I’d be home by now.”

  The expression on my face said it all. “So the fact you’re out late is my fault now?” I didn’t even know what to say anymore. Was she completely insane? “And you’ve just decided that’s how it’s going to be? That we’re going to be friends and that’s that?”

  She just nodded. She just nodded?

  I didn’t even know where to start. I’d only just met this girl and already I wanted to wrap my hands around her neck and shake some sense into her. She drove me nuts. Who the hell stalks someone to their house just to leave coffee for them? And Henry had just drank it, too, like it was nothing. If he’d have known what sort of nutcase she was, he’d probably have left it. No, wait. No; if he was here, he’d have said very calmly that some people are difficult, but that doesn’t mean they are crazy. He wouldn’t get angry; he’d just rebut what was said by focusing on key details.

  But, fuck, I was no Henry. I tried anyway. “Bree,” I said, trying to be calm and not strangle her. “I’m 25. I don’t know how old you are, but—”

  “18,” she said, interrupting me. She paused for a second. “Okay, not really. But my birthday’s in a couple of weeks, so...”

  I had been about to explain that the age gap was too big for a friendship to ever work, but before I said anything I counted in my head and realised the age gap was seven years. Seven years, that was the same age gap between Henry and I, and we got along really well. Shit. I’d pinned her at maybe 14 or 15, and what I had been about to say was based on that. Now I didn’t really know what I could say. If she was that close to being an adult, I also wondered if it was such a huge drama that she was out at 7 pm on a school night, too.

  Sensing a moment of weakness, she went in for the kill. “Come on,” she said, a big grin on her face and huge, puppy-dog eyes aimed right at me. “It’s just dinner. What have you got to lose?”

  I could feel myself wavering on that decision and I didn’t like it. Not at all. This wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t, it was stupid. She was a schoolkid. “What makes you so sure you want to be friends with me?”

  Leaning a hand on one of her hips, she smiled up at me like she already knew what was going to happen. “Uh, because you’re awesome?”

  Nice try. I wasn’t ‘awesome’, that was for sure. I didn’t like the smug edge on her smile, either. “I don’t know why you‘d think that or why you’d think it’s going to work—”

  “I don’t think it’s going to work,” she told me as if she was delivering a universal truth, “I know it’s going to work. My grandmother cured her cancer like that. It’s all in the mind.” She tapped her head and her curls bounced.

  She was missing the point and I wasn’t sure how I felt about being compared to a terminal illness. “But I’m not awesome, and I don’t know who you think I am. A couple of weeks ago you thought I was a guy, so, no disrespect, but you don’t know anything about me. I’m not just whatever you’ve decided I am.”

  She actually laughed at me; it was a really unexpected reaction and for just one second, I felt really humiliated. “Min, you are so uptight,” she said, walking toward me. “Come on, let’s just go have dinner!”

  I put my hands up to stop her from coming any closer. I just… did this girl have no boundaries? This was absolutely and completely ridiculous and it was not going any further. But she wasn’t even listening to me anymore. “Look, just stop.” I said. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to have dinner with you. After work I just want to go home, put on something comfortable and relax. I’m going home.”

  “You can relax in this restaurant, it’s really comfy,” she said, again ignoring my dismissal.

  Yeah, no. “Bree,” I said firmly. “I’m going home.” I even went as far as to attempt to keep walking up the road past her, but one of those little arms shot out and grabbed mine.

  I looked down at my trapped wrist, and then up at those rosy cheeks. Bree beamed at me. “Trust me, you’d rather be in this restaurant with me.”

  That was the last place I would rather be and just as I opened my mouth to say as much, she released my wrist. Before I realised what she was doing and what was going on, she wrenched my handbag off my shoulder and ran a few paces away with it.

  I couldn’t say anything. I just gaped at her; did she really just do that?

  She had a wide grin on her face. “Now you have to come,” she said, holding up my handbag under her chin, and then glancing back down at it. “Wow, is this Coach? It’s really nice.”

  “Bree!” I said, listening to the ragged edge in my voice. “What the fuck are you doing? This is not okay, give that back!”

  She looked like she was really enjoying herself. “Come and get it!”

  I still had my phone, and I held it up. “I swear to god I will call the police if you don’t give it back.”

  “Or,” she said mischievously, “You could just come and have dinner with me.”

  She waggled my handbag.

  I literally dialled triple-0 and had the phone to my ear, rehearsing what I was going to say in my head when I realised how stupid it sounded. How stupid it made me sound. I put my phone down again. She was tiny, what the hell were they going to say if they did come? I sighed.

  Bree lit up. “You’re going to come? Really?” she asked, and the genuine excitement in her voice just gave me a stronger desire to beat her to death. It was cute, and that made it harder to focus on the part where she was a crazy fucking stalker-criminal.

  “Give my bag back to me right now,” I said. “And I might consider it.”

  Obediently, she trotted over and delivered my handbag. My original plan had been to get my bag back, lecture her on her appalling behaviour and then just storm off. But she was looking right up at me with those adoring eyes and, actually, I just felt bad. She wasn’t 25, she was a teenager. She was just being young and stupid, and she just wanted to have dinner with her favourite a
rtist at any cost. And what was her favourite artist doing? Being a grump.

  Fuck.

  “Okay,” I said, regretting it even as I was saying it. “Just dinner, and just once. But you have to promise not to ever do anything like this again.”

  She stared at me for a second like she couldn’t believe it, and then jumped up and down. “Oh my god, really?” she said, practically squealing. “Really? Yes, okay! I promise!” And just in case there was any way in which I wasn’t extremely uncomfortable with everything that was happening, she reached across between us and took my hand to lead me. It was like being dragged along the footpath by the human version of a small fluffy terrier.

  Bree talked the whole way. The whole way. By the time we were seated at the table on the balcony of an ugly modern restaurant that clearly took itself far too seriously, I think I knew everything about all of her classmates and could also draw some of their family trees. Slumped in my chair, I stared across the table at her as she babbled away. I had never met anyone who talked as much as she did; she filled every second of airspace. I actually wasn’t sure I’d said as many words in my life as she’d said in half an hour.

  I looked around us to see who was listening. One of the waiters smiled at me, but it was a very professional smile. I wondered what he was really thinking about what was going on. A chatty schoolgirl eating dinner with, well, whatever I looked like. I’d had a long day at work so however I looked, it was probably terrible. My hair was probably all over the place, and it probably looked even worse next to Bree’s. There was no chance we’d be mistaken for relatives, either. Maybe they’d think I was her teacher?

  “My cousin had her wedding reception here,” Bree was saying, oblivious to my discomfort. “It was wild, there were like 200 people and we were so loud someone called the police on us and it wasn’t even midnight. Are you vegetarian?”

  I blinked. “Uh,” I said. “No.”

  “Neither am I,” she said, playing with the origami swan serviette. She put the serviette ring on its head like a crown while she kept talking. “I tried for, like, two weeks once but then this friend of mine had her birthday at Hard Rock and I was like, ‘I could just starve or I could enjoy myself’, you know? I only did it in the first place because there was this guy who was into me and he kept trying to make me eat at his family’s restaurant and I wanted to make him feel bad so he’d never asked me again. So I was, like, ‘Yeah, sorry, I can’t eat any of those sweet little baby lambs you’ve hacked up and shoved on a skewer’.”

  While I was shifting awkwardly in my seat and listening to her, the smiling waiter walked up to our table and placed menus in front of us. I was glad I had something else to do other than just sit there and try to look relaxed when I really wasn’t.

  The first thing I noticed when I opened the gold-leafed menu was the price of the food.

  I’m pretty sure I made some awful, strangled sound. It wasn’t like I’d have trouble affording anything, but the presumptuousness of this girl was unbelievable. Two hundred dollars for a steak? Was the cow educated in a Swiss finishing school and ritually blessed before being hand-carried to the restaurant by 12 virgins dressed in white? What the hell could make a steak be worth that much money?

  I was going to need some serious assistance to deal with all this. I held the wine list up at the waiter and pointed at one of them. “In a glass, please, but fill it to the lip.” The waiter nodded and left us to select our meals.

  Bree was giggling at me as I took a deep breath and braved the menu again. My opinion of the prices must have been obvious. “Now you know why I can’t come here by myself!” she said, and then flipped the pages of her own menu. “So how much do you get paid, anyway? You work at Frost, so it must be heaps.”

  I looked up sharply at her. “Why?” I asked flatly. “Are you planning on robbing me? Because I hate to tell you, but you missed a golden opportunity to do that before.”

  She looked delighted I was finally speaking in full sentences. “Yeah, totally! I’m going to steal all your money. That would go really well. I’m like half your size, you could just, like, breathe on me and I’d blow off into the distance.” She’d felt pretty strong when she was dragging me down the road. “You’re really tall, by the way. That must be so cool. I always wondered what it was like to be tall.”

  Hah, ‘cool’. Sure. I didn’t really want to talk about what it was like being my height. “Have you thought about what university you’re going to go to yet?”

  She didn’t look surprised by the fact I’d changed the subject at all. “Nah,” she said, rolling with the topic change. “I don’t even know if I’m going to go to uni. My cousin went to uni and now she doesn’t have a job and she has an enormous debt.” While she was talking, she’d stuck her knife into the prongs of her fork and was trying to balance them on the rim of her glass. “I guess it doesn’t matter now, since she’s pregnant. She’ll probably just stay at home. Do you have any kids?”

  She was giving me whiplash. “No.”

  “Do you want kids?”

  Henry wanted kids. “Do you?”

  Bree grinned. “Yeah,” she said. “I’d have heaps just in case any of them turned out like my brother. Then I could just focus on the other ones. Would you be, like, really disappointed if I just ordered Fish and Chips? I just kind of want something extremely deep fried right now.”

  Yeah, I didn’t know how I was going to cope with her ordering Fish and Chips because I’d pinned all my hopes on her ordering the Holy Steak. “Order whatever you like, I’m still going to be broke.”

  She laughed and stood up in her chair. Before I could stop her, she was shouting out to the waiter across all the softly talking patrons on the balcony. “Hey! We’d like to order!”

  When she sat back down again, I think I’d shrunk as low in my chair as I could without actually sliding under the table. “You’re supposed to wait your turn.”

  She shrugged, not at all worried. “Yeah, but they might take ages and I’m really hungry,” she said. “What are you having?”

  No idea, I thought, since you haven’t given me the opportunity to decide. I’d probably just have a warm salad, anyway. I’d had a lot of bad food during the week, and as Mum said, I didn’t want to be fat as well as tall.

  After we’d ordered, I looked over the balcony and realised the sun was setting. Where we were seated had an unobstructed view of Darling Harbour, and with the sun disappearing behind the buildings, it was reflecting on the water. The scene was very beautiful, especially with all the neon lights and torches along the waterfront. It would make a good painting, actually, and this angle was just perfect.

  While I was trying to figure out how I’d frame it, I heard a fake shutter click.

  When I looked abruptly back at Bree, she had her mobile pointed at me. Tilting her head a little, she considered the picture. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” she said, glancing up at me over the screen and then raising her eyebrows when she saw my expression. “…And there it goes.” She held her phone out at me so I could see the photo. “Look? It’s nice.”

  If I was in it, it wasn’t a nice photo. I did her the courtesy of looking at it anyway, but I just snorted. That was not a nice photo.

  She made a face, snatching her phone back and examining it again. “Are you serious? It’s great!” She tapped at the screen to zoom in. “Look! You have a dimple.”

  I did not have anything of the sort. She was the one with dimples. I looked again, anyway, and saw how high my collar was sitting and wished I’d worn something else. Or just gone home and taken everything off. As I was scrutinizing myself, her phone locked automatically again. That painting I’d done was her lockscreen.

  A glass of red landed in front of me on the table and I thanked the waiter, glancing at Bree as she looked at her phone again and wincing. He gave me a secret smile back as he left. Bree was still looking at the photo, and I was worried if I just left it she might try to take more. “I don’
t really like being photographed.”

  “I’ll fix that,” she said immediately and with the same conviction she put behind everything she said. “Why, anyway? Do you have a thing about your nose or something?”

  My hand shot up to the bridge of my nose. I’d never even thought about it. Was there something wrong with it? “My nose…?”

  She looked surprised for a second and then laughed. “Oh, like, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with your nose! It’s just some people have weird issues with random body parts and don’t want to be in photos, that’s all!” She paused, watching me feel the shape of it. “Oh, my god, do you really have a thing about your nose? That’s stupid. You’re gorgeous.”

  Bree looked like the adult version of one of Bouguereau’s cherubs, so I didn’t think she’d understand what it was like to not resemble a classic masterpiece and therefore not want to be photographed. I certainly wasn’t going to try and explain it to her, either. Anyway, it wasn’t parts of me I had issues with, it was the whole thing. I took a sip of my wine as Bree took photos of her serviette swan with the serviette ring crown. Then again, was it actually the whole thing I hated? I’d really liked that painting I’d done of myself, and there weren’t many parts of me I’d changed dramatically for that. Just two, in fact. I looked down at them in my blouse.

  No sooner had I done that, my heart pounded. I put my wine glass back down on the table so I didn’t spill it.

  Dangerous fucking ground, Min, I told myself firmly as I closed my eyes for a moment. Just stop. You are who you are, learn to deal with it.

  “Hey, can I have a sip of your wine?”

  I opened my eyes again, still a bit dazed. “You’re underage,” I reminded her, “that’s against the law.”

  She scoffed. “We jay-walked on the way here and that’s against the law. It’s too late, you’re already a criminal. Just give me one little sip, okay?”

  Before I could stop her, she’d reached over and wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass. If I tried to struggle with it, red wine would probably spill all over the table and all over me. I couldn’t do anything else, so I just let her take it.