‘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 it does 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 spiralling’ 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 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, first-born son. He has a hot ex-girlfriend, a seemingly endless supply of grey 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’ favourite 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 and 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 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 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.