The day after the Christmas bombshell, I go to Zach’s house and walk in through the back door without knocking. I’ve been friends with Zach for a few years now, and I still get a secret thrill out of being allowed to walk into his house unannounced. It feels like I’ve unlocked the highest friendship level.
“Hello,” I call out.
“Natalie.” Lucy appears at the end of the hall. Lucy and Zach have been officially together for nine months, which is a very long time at our age, practically a marriage, but it’s a situation I am still adjusting to. We were once a friendship group of three individuals—three equals, three devoted but platonic points of a triangle—and now we’re a breathlessly in love couple (them) and a person who spends her Saturday night taking photos of the back of her head in a mirror so she can understand what it’s like to see herself from behind (me).
I am forced to second-guess everything. Is it movie night like always, or am I crashing their date? If I tell one of them a secret, will they automatically tell the other? If they have a fight, do I have to pick a side straightaway, and can I change my side halfway through? How often, exactly, do they talk about me when I’m not there? (I hate the thought that they might, but I also hate the thought that they might not. I would like to be one of their top three conversation topics, but only if they are spending a significant amount of time reflecting on my sparkling personality.)
Zach appears behind Lucy, sliding in his socks. Zach is the yardstick that I measure every other guy against. Zach’s mannerisms, Zach’s way of doing things, Zach’s voice, Zach’s tallness, Zach’s lankiness—he’s just how boys should be, because he’s the only boy I’ve ever really been friends with, and the best one I’ve met.
Lucy hurries down the hall to hug me.
“It sucks,” she says. I told her about my parents last night.
Lucy is a good hugger. She’s my favorite person in the world, so even just seeing her face makes me feel better.
“I’m sorry,” Zach says.
“Thanks,” I say. I would like to say I don’t want anyone’s sympathy, but I generally quite enjoy my friends feeling sorry for me, especially about this. Firstly, it means I actually have friends who care about me, which, when you know what it’s like not to have any friends at all, means a lot. Secondly, “my parents are splitting up” is a refreshingly normal and acceptable problem to have, and it’s far less embarrassing than an I-have-an-infected-pimple-that’s-so-huge-and-disfiguring-that-it-has-sent-me-into-a-spiral-of-depression-so-I-won’t-be-getting-out-of-bed-today kind of issue.
I follow Zach and Lucy farther into the house, and Zach’s mother, Mariella, rushes out of the kitchen to hug me.
“Darling, how are you? Zach told me about your parents. Don’t you worry for a second. Everything’s going to be fine. And don’t go blaming anyone. Relationships are hard. Sal and I have almost separated at least four times over the years. It’s actually a miracle we’re still together.”
Mariella is an oversharer.
“Mum! Please.” Zach puts his arm between us, as if this can stop his mother’s words.
“Run, Natalie,” Zach’s younger brother Anthony says as he walks past, stirring an almost overflowing glass of Milo. Zach has three brothers, and I only truly understood the necessity of jumbo tins of Milo after my first visit to his house.
I laugh, and push Zach aside for another hug from Mariella. I suspect I’m her favorite (out of Lucy and me), and that thought pleases me more than I care to admit. I’m not Zach’s number one, but I can be Mariella’s first pick.
Adult approval has long been my drug of choice.
Zach’s house is much bigger and fancier than mine. He’s richer than Lucy and me, although that’s not something we would ever talk about. It’s obvious, though. It kind of seeps out everywhere, from his house to the fact that his parents send all four kids to a private school to the way he always suggests we see movies at IMAX in 3-D, even bad movies that we’re only seeing for a bit of fun.
In his house, they have a room they call the den, which is a word I had only ever previously encountered in American books and movies and never heard said out loud in this context before. The den has a huge TV, various game consoles, two big old leather couches, and not much else. It’s the designated hangout space for all the kids, because Mariella doesn’t like the boys in the good lounge room.
“Too many teenage boys in one room for too long and it gets a smell, and that smell never leaves,” Mariella says. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds true, and if anyone would know, it’s the mother of four sons. And the den does have a sort-of smell to it—a musk of deodorant, sweat, and food.
We set ourselves up in the den. Lucy sits next to me and Zach sits on the other couch. I sense this is a deliberate move on their behalf, to deemphasize their coupleness in the face of my parents’ separation. The thing is, Lucy and I used to be the inseparable twosome, and Zach was the one slightly on the outside. He could never quite crack the closeness we had. Until, well, I guess he found a way.
Lucy rests her head on my shoulder. Her hair tickles my cheek.
“What’s going to happen with your parents?”
“Dad is moving out.”
“Wow. That’s fast,” Zach says.
“Well, not considering they’ve been broken up for almost a year. It’s actually very slow.”
“Where’s he going to live?” Lucy asks.
“He’s renting an apartment. In Port Melbourne.”
I can’t picture him in an apartment. It seems like something for young people. Not forty-seven-year-olds who like playing chess, cooking paella, and singing in a choir. Or maybe apartments are for exactly these kinds of people. Dad is single now. He will start online dating and I will have to sit through painful introductions to polite women who have as little interest in me as I have in them. I will have to take a photograph of Dad that he can use on the site, one that doesn’t make him look like a serial killer (this is tough, because he doesn’t smile in photos), and then check his dating profile for spelling mistakes, because he has no one else in his life to do these things. I can see my future unfolding before my eyes—hours spent editing the dating profiles of my parents and then consoling them when they are ghosted or, worse, scammed out of huge sums of money.
“Say what you like about my mum, but at least I know she can’t keep a secret that big from me,” Zach said, his mouth full of Tim Tam.
It’s true. Mariella tells you more than you ever want to know about anything. Over the years, she has told us about the man she lived with before meeting Sal (“He left his toenail clippings in the sink, and if that’s not a sign of a sociopath, I don’t know what is”), the time she was caught shoplifting (“I was twelve and my cousin said she’d distract the salesperson for me, but she didn’t, and that’s why we don’t go to their house at Easter to this day”), and the time she saw a ghost (“An older woman with white hair, standing at the end of our bed, but I wasn’t scared because I knew her rage was toward men, so only Sal was in danger”).
“My mum would never leave Dad. Or let him leave her,” Lucy says. That’s true too. Lucy’s mother would push through fifty years of deep unhappiness before she got divorced, because divorce might be misconstrued as failure, and that word isn’t in her vocabulary. That’s literally her phrasing, not mine. Lucy’s mother runs ten kilometers every morning before breakfast, wearing a singlet that says “Don’t Stop When You’re Tired, Stop When You’re Done” in a very aggressive font. She works sixty hours a week managing her own business, and she started introducing Lucy to people as “my little champion debater and future lawyer” from when Lucy was about twelve, before Lucy had even joined the school debating team.
Lucy’s mother is … a lot.
But now that my parents have dropped this breakup bombshell and performed an elaborate charade for the better part of a year, I can no longer be soothed by the idea that my mother is less damaging than Lucy’s or Zach’s. My one life advantage is gone. I have family issues now, along with everything else.
“I can’t believe we never noticed,” Lucy continues.
“I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”
I can’t dwell on this too much because it makes my stomach feel squirmy in the same way as when I think too hard about my existence and what will happen after I die. It was my Wizard of Oz moment—my parents pulled back the curtain, and what I saw there makes me feel sick.
“But do you notice now, in hindsight?” Zach asks.
“No. I always thought they were perfect, which means my entire idea of what constitutes a happy relationship is irreparably damaged. I need to be in some kind of pre–couple’s therapy right now, heading off my own future marital problems before they start.”
Zach and Lucy exchange a she’s-spiraling glance that I pretend not to see.
Zach’s older brother Alex walks into the room then, followed by his friend Owen Sinclair.
Alex is nineteen and has just finished his first year as an apprentice chef. He and Zach are almost eighteen months apart in age, but they were only a year apart in school, because Zach was bumped up a grade in primary school when they moved from Perth to Melbourne. That’s Zach’s role in his family: the Smart One, the High Achiever, the Smug Grade-Skipper. I might be an only child, but I’ve figured out that siblings tend to occupy roles in their family. Alex is the Irresponsible One Who Kisses All the Girls and Can Make Delicious Gnocchi from Scratch. Their two younger brothers are the Shy One with the Face You Can’t Say No To (Anthony, age fifteen) and the Dinosaur-Obsessed Attention-Seeker (Glenn, age twelve).
Alex moves through the world with the effortlessness of a well-liked firstborn son. He has a hot ex-girlfriend, a seemingly endless supply of gray V-necked T-shirts, and hundreds of people he could classify as friends. He’s the kind of generically popular male that I instinctively avoid.
I don’t like Alex. No, that’s not true. Alex has never done anything mean to me. In fact, he once offered me the last slice of pizza, and another time he was walking through the room when Zach and I were arguing about something and he said, “Natalie’s right,” as he breezed past. But I still don’t trust Alex, because he’s the kind of guy a girl like me is naturally wary of. My default assumption is that he’s probably thinking something negative about me.
Alex’s friend Owen Sinclair is a slightly safer kind of popular guy, because he’s so openly preoccupied with himself. He’s not thinking bad things about you because he’s thinking good things about himself. He’s tall, baby-faced, and surfer blond, uncomplicated, and he seems to be clueless about anything that’s not happening directly in front of his eyes. Girls love him, and he loves them back. He once did something obscene—I’m not sure exactly what—with a girl on a park bench in broad daylight. He can play the guitar and almost dunk a basketball. He sometimes wears his hair in a man bun. And his middle name is Macaulay, because his parents’ favorite movie is Home Alone. That’s everything I know, have overheard, or somehow gleaned about Owen Sinclair.
“Hey,” Owen says, sitting down next to me. I’m pretty sure he’s never spoken directly to Lucy or me before. I’m pretty sure I’ve never made eye contact with him before. Owen Sinclair is like the sun. I’ve never looked straight at him for more than one second.
“Hi,” Lucy says.
“Hi,” I say.
“What’s happening?” Owen says.
“Nothing much,” I say.
“Cool.” Owen leans back on the couch, running his arm over the back of it so it almost, kind of, could be construed as putting his arm around me. I mean, his arm is not around me, but if it slipped off the couch, it—momentarily—would be.
I drop my face a little, so Owen is seeing my best angle. After two rounds of Accutane, a range of topical lotions, and finding the right brand of the Pill, my skin is a thousand times better than it was. These days, I usually have no pimples at all, and at worst there are only one or two, plus the scarring I cover up with foundation. I have lots of deep, irreparable scarring on my back, where the acne was the very worst (I don’t wear backless tops, bikinis, or strapless dresses), but, all in all, my skin situation went from life-destroying to manageable to good. I forget that, though. I still think from the life-destroying perspective.
Years ago, when I was hiding in a toilet cubicle checking my face, I overheard Heather Hamilton, the girl in my year level with the most Instagram followers of anyone I know in real life, say offhandedly, “You know, if it wasn’t for her terrible skin and her big nose, Natalie could be pretty,” and a few girls said, “Oh yeah, you’re right!” as though she’d discovered something profound. I don’t care what Heather Hamilton thinks about anything, but I did care what she thought about me in that moment, because it confirmed everything I’d thought about myself. If it wasn’t for my skin … everything might have been so different. I could have been someone who was confident, taking perfect selfies, going to parties, auditioning for plays, maybe even a minor YouTube celebrity … I could have been so much better. I was fourteen when Heather said that, and I still think about it. I wonder if I will think about it for the rest of my life.
(The nose I can live with. Big noses are artistic. But the world has assured me only villains and losers have acne.)
“Let’s watch a movie,” Owen says.
“We were about to play a game,” Zach says, which is a lie, but only half a lie, because in truth playing board games is how we spend a lot of our time. Zach doesn’t like Owen. I’m not even sure he likes Alex that much.
“Cool. What game?” Owen seems genuinely interested in hanging out with us. Alex looks less interested, but he’s not protesting.
Lucy makes quick eye contact with me. I can tell by her face that we’re both thinking the same thing: Since when have Alex and his friends ever shown any interest in spending time with us? Maybe now that we’ve finished high school we’re automatically cooler. We’re giving off the sophisticated, worldly vibe of adults. Or maybe they’re just really bored.
“We’re playing Resistance,” Zach says.
“Can you teach us?” Owen asks, looking at Lucy and me.
“It’ll take too long,” Zach says.
“No, it won’t. It’s easy to learn,” Lucy says. A series of looks have been passing between her and Zach as they argue with their eyes.
“I’ll show you,” I say.
Owen and Alex listen as I run through the rules, holding my hand up to silence Zach when he tries to interrupt me. Zach is a stickler for following a game’s exact rules and explaining every detail.
“Okay, we’ve got it,” says Alex, who is lying on his stomach on the couch, resting his head on a cushion. I try to look at his eyes without being obvious. Is he stoned? Maybe. He’s certainly eating a lot of our Tim Tams.
“We have too many people. It’s better if you have three or four,” Zach says.
“You sit out, then,” Alex says.
“Fuck off.”
Zach and his brothers regularly swear and yell at each other with affection. I think it’s affection, anyway. Siblings, especially brothers, confuse me. They can go from talking to wrestling in two seconds flat. I come from a family that has excitedly sat around and listened to the Hamilton musical soundtrack after dinner on a Friday night. We enjoy nature documentaries. We get excited about buying stationery. We keep our phones on silent, all of the time. I don’t know what to do with all the noise, the energy, the physicality of Zach’s family.
“Lucy and I will be on one team, and you three on the other,” I say.
“You seem very confident,” Alex says.
“You’ll see,” Lucy says.
They do see. Lucy and I win easily. Zach is grumpy, because Owen doesn’t understand the rules and Alex doesn’t care enough to try. Zach doesn’t like losing, but he especially doesn’t like losing through the incompetence of his fellow team members.
“Okay, another round, but we change up the teams this time,” Zach says.
Zach and Lucy team up, and I join Owen and Alex. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and look at my skin, check my teeth for food, my nose for anything that might be there. I look okay. It’s hard for me to trust that this will still be the case once I’m away from the mirror, though.
“Okay, let me make the strategy decisions and we’ll win,” I whisper when I get back into the room and I’m sitting crosslegged on the floor.
“So what do we do?” Owen says.
“Watch and learn.” I can be just a little bit bossy when I get caught up in a game.
“I understand it now. I’ll be better. Let me help,” Alex says, reaching for another Tim Tam.
“Okay. You tell me what move you think we should make, and I’ll tell you if it’s right or wrong.”
“When did you get so competitive?” Alex says, shaking his head and grinning, before biting into the biscuit.
“Natalie is the most competitive person I know,” Zach says, overhearing us.
“Says the guy who once told me to leave his house when I beat him at Monopoly,” I say.
“Well, that’s different. That’s Monopoly. The worst game in the world,” Zach says.
Alex laughs. “Zach once cried when I put a hotel on Park Lane,” he says.
“I was six at the time,” Zach says.
“You were at least ten,” Alex replies.
In truth, Zach and I are probably equally competitive. When I lost motivation for studying, I would sometimes imagine him up late, still working, and I would feel renewed energy. We enjoyed pushing each other to do better. Lucy, less so. I’m pretty sure she hated every moment of our last school year.
We’re currently in that strange limbo month between mid-December and mid-January when we know our final results but we don’t yet know which course or university we’ve gotten into, which is stressful for all of us, but especially for Lucy. She changes the subject anytime we talk about it.
We all got good marks. We had to. Zach and Lucy have very concrete career aspirations; he wants to be a doctor, and she wants to be a lawyer. Extremely cliché, if you ask me (all the type-A high achievers at my school said doctor, lawyer, or engineer when asked what they want to be), but at least they have goals. They want to be something. They’ll have real jobs. And money. I don’t know what I want to be. I mostly trained myself to do well at school as an antidote to all the dark thoughts, the ones that said, No one likes you very much, and You have nothing to show for your life except schoolwork, and You have the face of a monster. As if each A+ could somehow offset each pimple.
I chose Australian history, literature, Australian politics, psychology, and English as my subjects to study. All areas I knew I could do well in, where I could read and write and analyze. I was boringly sensible in my choices. I avoided math and science because they’re not my strengths. I dreamed of doing drama and theater, but I never had the confidence to perform—there’s too much focus on your face. You have to be comfortable with someone looking at you in order to stand on a stage. So I did everything the Right Way in order to get the Right Score and now I am waiting to find out if I got into the Right University. But none of this has helped me figure out who I am or what I want to do. Do you just wake up one morning after a really good sleep and know? (I’m relying on this happening.)
I may not have a plan for my life, but I do have a plan for winning at Resistance. Under my guidance, Alex, Owen, and I are victorious—just—and Zach sulks, which makes it even sweeter. Alex insists we keep playing, because he’s remembered how much he enjoys beating his brother. We play again, although Owen has clearly lost interest, and this time we lose.
“Okay, that’s it, you can go now,” Zach says, looking smug and packing up the pieces.
“We have to go anyway,” Alex says, yawning and stretching. He’s not tall, but there’s something about him that seems to take up a lot of space.
“That was fun. Hey, Natalie, you should come to Benny’s party with us on Friday night,” Owen suddenly says to me.
Before I can react, Zach and Lucy both speak at the same time.
“Yes,” Lucy says.
“No,” Zach says.
Alex looks at them both. “Are you guys Natalie’s friends or her parents?”
“A bit of both,” I say.
I know why Zach is saying no—he thinks his brother and especially his brother’s friends are not Good People, and that I will be in way over my head at their party. Both of which are probably true. Lucy is thinking that Owen is hot and he’s inviting me somewhere, so I should go, and also—possibly—that she and Zach can have a guilt-free night alone. All of this is true too.
I look at Owen.
“Who’s Benny?”
“Our friend. He’s cool. You’ll like him.”
“Okay. I’ll go.” I say it before I can chicken out. I can’t actually believe I’ve said these words. I don’t go to things. I hate going to things. Most especially parties.
“Give me your number and I’ll text you the details,” Owen says, pulling out his phone. I can practically feel Lucy vibrating with excitement from the other couch.
I say my number out loud, twice, because I can’t stand the thought that this opportunity might be lost because he mistyped a number. He sends me a text straightaway, the smiling emoji with sunglasses. That self-assured little emoji face has never looked so beautiful.
“Now you’ve got my number,” Owen says, unnecessarily.
I am trying to ignore the fact that I find his personality a tiny bit dull. “Awesome,” I say. I hate the word awesome. It slips out when I’m nervous.
After Alex and Owen leave, Lucy grabs me and shakes me. “You’re going to a party with Owen Sinclair!”
“I know,” I say.
We hold each other’s arms and squeal and jump up and down, and when Zach looks disgusted, we do it again and collapse with laughter.
Mariella pokes her head into the room. “Everything all right in here?”
“Natalie is going to a party with Owen.”
“Owen Sinclair?”
“Yes.”
“Oh goodness.” Mariella looks surprised, pleased, and worried all at once.
“See? Mum thinks it’s a bad idea.” Zach looks triumphant, even though normally agreeing with his mother about something like this would automatically make him change his mind.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to fall in love with him or anything,” I say, even though I am already running multiple fantasies of our romance through my head. (Scene: Owen and me holding hands, walking into a cool café filled with everyone I disliked from school, who all turn their heads and stare at us. I’m wearing an amazing leather jacket and my hair is falling in gentle waves, and someone takes a perfectly lit photo of us laughing together over coffee that somehow ends up all over social media because in this scenario we’re also low-level famous.)
Later that night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, I decide the best thing about agreeing to go to the party is that I am so stressed and worried about it that I have hardly any space left in my head to think about my parents.