Page 57

‘No it won’t be, you’ll get a ticket—’

‘Are you okay?’ Lauren says, looking at me.

The thing is, Lauren knows me. She knows me, knows me. She knows the difference between grumpy me, regular me, sad me and something-is-really-wrong me.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I say, avoiding her eyes.

‘You’re giving off a very dark energy.’

‘I’m fine. Just a bad day at uni.’

‘Okay,’ she says, looking like she doesn’t believe me. She gets up and walks back out.

‘We’re all going out, by the way,’ she yells from the lounge room. ‘Jesse and I have decided.’

I sit on my bed and push my face into my hands. Of course they did. She knows Jesse, a little, from our town, but I’m not sure she’s ever spoken to him before now. She used to dislike him in support of me, not that she ever actually knew why I didn’t like him, until I told her earlier this year we didn’t need to do that anymore. Now she’s been here for fifteen minutes and she will have charmed him and made him feel like they’re best friends. That’s one of Lauren’s superpowers. She can get you to skip levels, to make you feel like you’re better friends than you are. People have said to me, ‘I’m friends with Lauren,’ and when I mention their name to her, she will say, ‘Who?’ with genuine puzzlement.

I decide I am going to force myself into a more positive frame of mind. This is good, this is going to be fun. Forget rewriting my story, forget Jesse, put on a happy face.

‘We’re going on a pub crawl,’ Lauren says, appearing in my doorway.

‘Great!’ I say, in my most upbeat voice. She opens her bag and starts pulling clothes out and throwing them on the floor. I pick up each thing she tosses and fold it neatly in a pile, almost without noticing.

‘You don’t want to go, I can tell,’ she says, putting her hands on her hips.

‘I do. Sort of. I just wish you’d told me you were coming, because I have so much uni work to do over the next few days,’ I say.

‘For which subject?’ Lauren asks.

‘All of them.’

‘Come on Brooke. Just do what I used to do when writing essays.’

Lauren used to google phrases she could use instead of a single word, to pad out her word count, and she would write ‘as noted in my previous paragraph’ in every paragraph. I would then go through and cut it all when I proofread her essays and she would yell, ‘If you’re deleting things, you better think of some new words to add,’ and then we would argue and I would stop helping her until she cried and Mum told me if I helped her write the essay just this one time, then Lauren would clean up the kitchen the next day when it was my turn, but she never did.

‘I need to rewrite my entire short story,’ I say.

Lauren does not gasp or look at all concerned by this momentous news. To be fair, she’s studying nursing, so the plight of a short story is hard to empathise with. I shouldn’t have said ‘short’, for a start. That gives the wrong impression. The shorter the story, the harder it is to write, I want to explain (which is something someone in class said, and it sounded smart and impressive, so I’m going to pretend it’s something I know to be true). I’m making art, I want to tell her, I’m trying to create something from nothing, I’m trying to make people feel something, I’m doing the hardest thing of all, I’m trying to make them chuckle to themselves and then feel a little bit sad, all in the space of 3000 words. None of these arguments will mean anything to Lauren, who goes to uni to learn things like how to save someone who is choking, administer life-saving medications and insert a catheter. I sag in defeat.

‘What about this top?’ she says, holding up something sheer and black.

‘It’s see-through,’ I say before I can stop myself. God, I sound so prim and proper. Let her be as naked as she wants. ‘But you’ll look hot,’ I say.

‘Thank you, I will,’ Lauren says, smiling at me.

I watch her shake out her toiletry bag and start doing her make-up in front of my dresser mirror. I have watched Lauren do her make-up so many times. I find the process incredibly soothing. I sit cross-legged and tell myself, Do not lecture Lauren. Do not give her rules. Do not give her ideas. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

But I can’t help myself.

‘You know you can’t bring anyone back here, right?’ I say. I’m light, I’m breezy, I’m relaxed, I just refuse to sleep on the couch while she has sex with some random in my clean, white sheets. Sheets that I just washed and dried and put on the bed this morning. That’s all. I am not a prude. I care about my sheets.

‘I won’t.’ She makes circles with her make-up sponge, blending the foundation and not really listening to me.

‘I’m serious.’ My voice is at least an octave higher than I would like. I clear my throat, try and get back down to relaxed levels.

‘I know, Brooke. Calm down.’ She walks over and smooshes my face with her hands as she says it, and I close my eyes. ‘Let me do your make-up,’ she says.

The thing is, Lauren won’t plan to meet someone or to go clubbing or run screaming through a dodgy park with bare feet or sit in a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel as a drunk guy she’s just met pushes her at high speed down a busy street, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. We’ll go out for a quiet drink, and somehow she’ll end up at a club with four people she didn’t know two hours earlier, texting me something like: Whats your address again and is there a spare mattress in case I bring people with me xxxxxx. She once brought a random home from a party and they peed all over our air mattress. Another time, we found two girls asleep, entwined, in the bathtub, using a loofah as a headrest.