Girls in Boys' Cars Read online

  Asheeka came up behind me with our bag of goods slung over her arm. She laid it down on the sand and grabbed an empty plastic cup she found lying there. Without asking my permission she poured sea water over my hair, gently, letting it run down from the top of my head to my shoulders. She took a miniature lavender shampoo bottle from her bag and rubbed it into my scalp where it foamed up into a cap of white bubbles and dripped down over my ears. The yellow of the sun spread itself on the water and set behind us. All I could hear was the sound of the waves and a couple of people calling out to each other down the furthest end of the beach and all I could think was that maybe this was why we left in the first place, for this moment in time – this patch of water and sand and light.

  A CHAPTER ON SEX

  I know, I know, I think you have to put some sex in all books these days, or, at least, people have to fall in love. Or there is some kind of love interest that is probably unrequited until the end and when the book is almost over, the people who are meant to get together finally do get together, or sometimes one of them dies just before everyone is meant to live happily ever after like in the 1001 redoes of Romeo and Juliet, so probably I’m writing this whole thing wrong because there’s just two chicks in it most of the time and the only living boyfriend got his car stolen pretty early on, and he only returns for a brief moment sometime way further on in this story. But I promise you, they are never getting back together.

  So, there should be sex or talk of sex at least because that’s the only thing teenagers are meant to be interested in these days. Am I right? Or maybe some more references to Snapchat or mobile phones or texting or TikTok.

  The thing is, I’ve had sex a few times. It was after I’d lost all that weight and I wanted to know, like really know, what it meant to be in this new flesh, and I guess I thought I needed to do that with sex. There was Jake and a couple of guys before him who I almost got to that point with. I wanted to see what it could do to my body, how it could make me feel. It was more of a research project, you might say, than anything really sexy.

  That’s what sex was for me – more of an entry into a whole new world where I was feeling and doing things and suddenly I had a bit more power, like I’d suddenly woken up in my own body. That research project didn’t turn out so well but I’m not sure if I want to talk about all that right now, how it turned me into someone who had finally become more visible and how I struggled to be invisible again.

  Anyway, there is a sex scene in this book but it’s kind of a letdown. To be fair, though, and to make sure you read on, there’s lots of talk of sex and, a lot of the time, that’s much more interesting anyway.

  In the meantime, what happened next on our road trip was that I felt pretty good and full of nervous energy when we finished up at the beach so I stole a credit card on a whim from a wallet that a woman had left in her handbag outside the shower stall in the beach changerooms when she took a shower.

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite you,’ Asheeka said when I showed it to her, and I started to feel a hot shame rise up from my gut. ‘I mean it’s useful now, but you know not really who you are.’

  But I wanted to be something different. I couldn’t say that out loud because I don’t think I was ever really able to recognise that at the heart of it that’s all I wanted, just to be something else. Or maybe I didn’t know what was me in the first place.

  Anyway, we kept on driving after that, taking turns. I was sitting in the passenger seat staring at my phone when it lit up with a call from someone and then shut itself off as the battery ran out in the middle of the first ring. I picked it up and instinctively tapped at the screen as though I could open up my email or scroll through Insta even when the screen was a total blank. Here’s the thing, though, it felt distressing and good at the same time: maybe I could grow into another person if I had enough blank space.

  I think we were both getting better at owning that car, of making it ours. Asheeka kept angling the rear-view mirror towards her own head so she could put on lip gloss or fix her hair and I’d have to grab it and angle it back in the right direction and she’d lean over and put her hand on the steering wheel again and then she’d stare out the window like nothing outside that car meant much at all. Driving was a two-person job.

  It was late in the day when we found ourselves hungry and parked outside the mall in Wollongong. We sat for a while watching everyone just walking up and down the main street. These beachside places were a different kind of earth where everything seemed to move in a calm blue-green whirl – not like the locked-in-ness of the suburbs with their acres and acres of same-same houses and people watching the telly with the blinds drawn. Here, it was like people didn’t know places that were brown and brown and brick.

  We forgot we had stopped for food and ended up walking the rows and rows of shops. Asheeka picked a dress off a rack at David Jones that I never would have thought was for me but it sat perfectly in all the right places. It was the kind of navy blue that made me feel really sophisticated but it hung on my body like something I wanted to dance in. Asheeka didn’t have any more opinions on that stolen credit card as we bought eight shades of Rimmel lipstick and matching glittery sandals and we sat in the food court and tried wheatgrass shots from the healthy juice place and bubble tea and all the flavours of dumplings at the Taiwanese place and talked about the pros and cons of underwire bras like there was no more pressing issue in our lives.

  Asheeka looked down and admired her new acrylic nails and then stared at my head, like really hard for a while, before saying, ‘You know what? You know what you really need?’

  And I waited for her to say ‘a fake tan’ like she always did but instead she said, ‘A new haircut.’

  I twirled the ends of my hair around my finger. I’d cut it short a while ago, not in any purposeful way but with a blunt pair of scissors one night because someone had whispered slut as I walked down the hallway at school. It had grown back in a quick and uneven way.

  ‘Really?’ I replied. Asheeka’s hair always fell so perfectly around her face and down her shoulders.

  ‘The thing is, I don’t think you really look like yourself or at least the kind of person you want to be, and you know, if you don’t look like yourself you’ll end up getting the wrong boyfriend, the wrong friends, the wrong life. You could just end up being someone entirely different from you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was looking at the uber-bright neon pink colour she had chosen for her nails.

  ‘No, like, you do know. Your hair belongs to someone who reads too many books to be able to see the world in front of them. Do you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘No. Yes, sort of.’

  ‘Come on. Do you trust me?’

  ‘No. Yes, sort of.’

  She picked up all the bags that were on the ground between us and walked over to a hairdressing salon. I watched her walking so confidently in her new Levi’s. It was only hair. I could chop it again in the bathroom or shave my head or I could also let Asheeka point to some model in the magazine at the shop.

  At the hairdressers they looked like they were about to shut for the day but Asheeka walked me straight in and sat me down in a chair as though the hairdresser had already agreed I was an emergency worth staying late for. In the hairdresser’s chair, Asheeka began to point to things. She held bits of the front of my hair up and said, ‘This. Like this,’ and pointed to a magazine, and then grabbed the ends of my hair and declared, ‘Like this.’ I didn’t quite know what the instructions were. It took fifty minutes. I watched as wet clumps of hair that looked too dead and separate to be mine hit the floor.

  When it was finished, Asheeka whacked me on the elbow and yelled, ‘Yes!’ And there I was blinking into a neon light–framed mirror. My face. New Haircut. One of those ones where one side of your hair is longer and larger than the other side and the bigger bits fall seductively into your eyes. I looked, maybe, like something you might call beautiful. I saw for the first time that I ha
d those same particular brown doe eyes that my nan has. I had my mother’s plump pink lips.

  ‘You look amazing,’ Asheeka said. If this haircut was who I was supposed to be, I didn’t quite know how to sit in it. I liked it. I think. Because sometimes, at times like this, I lost track of where the me I wanted to be began and where it hit up against the me that Asheeka thought I should want to be.

  We took the haircut out.

  The sky was orange over the ocean as we walked towards it. In a restaurant at the end of the street there was a band singing covers. We sat in a booth in the corner and watched everyone being so easy with themselves. Asheeka requested ‘Diamonds’ and then sang along to it from our booth with the kind of intensity that made you feel like you were sitting with Rihanna herself. We danced. Hands up in the air. Lip-synching the words. Some guy bought us champagne and didn’t expect anything in return except for us to keep on dancing. I thought I might have finally reached the party after years of sitting on the lawn in a plastic chair with my nan.

  That night I didn’t have to work so hard to come back to earth. When the restaurant closed we walked into the black sky and then out to the beach. As those first bits of light started to appear I imagined that’s what I was at that moment – light – and I sat there with the ocean and sky and my body radiating somewhere in between.

  GIRLS IN HOTEL ROOMS

  We travelled down the highway towards Canberra. Asheeka was biting a small chunk off every piece in a box of assorted chocolates and throwing the ones that didn’t have the right insides at the cars driving past us and I was sipping on an enormous slushie through my newly painted bright red lips and driving one-handed and I don’t think I’d ever felt more glamorous in all my life.

  We hit the middle of town and there it was – Parliament House – like it had jumped out of the pages of one of the textbooks they forced you to read at school.

  ‘Ah, that’s the, the . . .’ Asheeka said, sucking a chocolate between her teeth.

  ‘Parliament.’

  ‘Parliament. Like where they run the country from.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The sun was fully up in the sky now over the triangular white building on its little hill.

  ‘Doesn’t look like much, does it?’ Asheeka said.

  ‘Nah.’

  We turned the corner and turned the corner again. Canberra’s roads went around and around in loops that we couldn’t seem to break out of for a while, and I was getting tired, like bone tired, because we hadn’t slept much in so long. I could see a sign for the Novotel and I drove towards it.

  We grabbed a random assortment of Kmart and 7-Eleven bags from our shopping spree, walked into the lobby and crashed down on the stiff grey and maroon striped couches in a corner. I was staring up at the way the light reflected off the bits of crystal in the giant chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling and thinking of how much it reminded me of the apartment block where I lived with my mum. The bang of a couple of cans from our bags falling to the floor jerked me out of my head. Asheeka looked at them rolling there on the ground. She looked too tired to move.

  I walked towards reception and asked for a room and the guy behind that counter asked for a credit card and an ID and I grabbed the stack of cards I had in my wallet. I pulled out my ID and put it on the counter and then I pulled out a credit card with someone else’s name on it. I put the credit card back and found that other one, the one with my name on it, the one I’d never used because dad gave it to me with the instruction that I was never to use it unless I had an emergency, like needing to get in a taxi instead of in a car with a drunk boy at a party. I looked back towards Asheeka and got prepared to run because I was sure the guy behind the counter was about to call the police but when I turned around he handed me a key card as though he couldn’t tell that anything in the world was wrong.

  We had a room upstairs overlooking the city and a balcony and a bathtub and there was a menu on the table with all these things you could order to your room. Asheeka sat on the couch looking a bit deflated and I ordered six different things just so there would be something she might feel like. As I waited for the food I went through the cupboards and there were all these super fluffy white robes like the ones we used to hang out in back at home and I found the matching pink pyjamas we’d bought and we sat out on the balcony watching the road. When the food came, we laid the plates all around us on the tiles of that balcony, chocolate cake and club sandwiches and fish and chips. We ate and stared at the road where things were quiet and there was smoke licking at the edges of buildings as it came in from bushfires happening somewhere else.

  ‘I think we should do it,’ Asheeka said after a while.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Plug them in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The phones.’

  I’d forgotten about the phones – they’d been dead for a while now, not bothering anyone. We’d been away for two days, almost three nights: it was a small amount of time and also a lifetime. Later, after I watched my mother at the police station cry and scream and then say sorry and break down again and hold me like she had to, to make sure that I was a part of herself that was real again, I could see it from her perspective. But at the time I wasn’t that sympathetic to being contacted.

  So Asheeka got the new phone chargers out of one of the shopping bags and I plugged our phones into the wall. I turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until I found something satisfyingly dumb enough to watch. I was only ten minutes into Married at First Sight when our phones started to blip, ping and hum endlessly. I looked over Asheeka’s shoulder as she scrolled through everything. Arnold had put up a glamour shot Asheeka had done for his birthday on Instagram. Underneath it said, My Sweet Sheeks, I forgive you. Come home. Underneath people had posted all these hysterically crying emojis. Same on his Facebook. A million love hearts. On her messages, a million texts from her brother, from everyone else. Come home. Be safe. We miss you.

  On my Facebook page – not much. Not anything really. One of our classmates had written on my wall: Have you seen Asheeka? She’s missing. She posted a link to an image of Asheeka with the words ‘Have You Seen This Girl?’ floating above her head and the words ‘Please Share!’ underneath it. I could see by looking at the social media feeds of our classmates that a lot of people had followed that direction. There were long texts from my father and many phone calls from both him and my mum. I hope you are safe. Please be safe. Please call. Please come home. We love you. My mother had called 75 times. I listened to her messages. She was angry, scared, pleading and then quiet, as though her gentleness might coax me into coming back home. I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. I tried to push it back. I tried to be here, enjoying the robes and the food and this place and this time. I hoped I could talk it through with my mum later. I hoped we could talk.

  On the TV there was a woman stuffed into a lacy wedding dress and all the guests at her wedding were looking at the guy she was about to marry and saying things like, ‘She’s going to die when she realises she’s getting married to someone that short.’ Asheeka lay on the bed and kept flicking, flicking through her phone. She showed me this so-sweet-it’s-disgusting message Arnold had sent her. ‘He’s being nice about it,’ she said, and looked over at the things popping up on my screen. ‘You should call your mum.’

  ‘Don’t think I want to.’

  Asheeka popped a gummy bear into her mouth and sat up so that she could look at me straight in the face. ‘Your mum’s cool. You know? She’s got balls. She basically chose to become a single parent and she’s got the apartment I’m going to live in one day. Plus she lets you do what you want.’

  ‘She doesn’t let me do what I want. She’s just not paying any attention.’

  ‘She let you get your eyebrow pierced.’

  ‘It got infected.’

  ‘Not the point.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You just have no idea, do you?’

  ‘What?’


  ‘No idea what it’s like to be me.’

  ‘Well, what is it like to be you then?’

  ‘No fucking clue,’ Asheeka said, and rolled over. That was it. No further discussion. It always infuriated me how she could be like this, accuse me of not understanding anything and then refuse to explain it to me.

  I’m thinking about all those times when I sat in the back of the car watching her and Arnold up the front. I didn’t want to always be the backseat passenger. Something sank in me because at that moment, I knew she might want to turn around. ‘Let’s eat cake in bed and watch the movie channel,’ I said, and we did until Asheeka fell asleep and I picked up her phone and flicked through her pictures and her messages and things. I took her phone outside and sat on the balcony with some leftover profiteroles and thought about all those things on Asheeka’s phone and I stuffed my face. And then I did something I’m not particularly proud of.

  I always disagreed with Asheeka when she used to say that all stories were about betrayal but maybe she was right. Maybe the story of me and Asheeka had always been one about betrayal.

  Maybe I’m just not telling the story right to myself.

  ON THE ROAD

  So all right, I didn’t get to put too much sex in the last chapter but I’m still trying to work out how to structure this book, what order to write things down in, but I’ll get to it soon. I promise. It’s hard managing the past and the present and putting them all into the same story.

  This afternoon I’ve got half an hour free to sit in the sun in the internal courtyard before my probation officer comes for a visit. It’s warm and it’s quiet and the other girls in this place lie around on the grass. It’s been too long a morning for everyone, with cleaning duties and all those classes (can’t escape school – even in here!) and so it’s kind of perfect in a way.