t e n
“Where the fuck have you been?”
Mikaela greets me politely as I walk in to the apartment.
“The beach,” I say, chucking my keys into the bowl next to the door. Still haven’t cleaned it.
“Whose clothes are those?”
She’s still in her pyjamas and the living room smells like cigarettes (the smell must be getting in her clothes. She needs to unpack). She’s standing at the kitchen counter holding a large glass of water with both hands and looking me over.
“No one’s. Listen, you need to drive me to Dr. Lemaiy’s.”
She runs a hand through her hair and leans on the countertop for a few seconds. I can see her jaw clenching. Finally she puffs out a breath and raises her head.
“Yeah. I know. Let me go change.”
I wait. She walks to her bedroom. She walks with her feet pointed slightly inward, and she looks stunted because of her bow legs and her thigh gap. I think she’s proud of it. It looks disgusting.
I touch my thighs as I walk over to the kitchen. They’re bigger than Mikaela’s. Much bigger. They stick together when I stand with my feet together and when I sit too. They’re soft in a way that she would hate if it was herself but she’s told me on countless times in trial rooms that I have curves, but it just looks like fat to me. You don’t call love handles curves. You call Marilyn Monroe curves.
Look at me, thinking about my thighs. I should stop. Just as I’m done drinking out of the same glass of water as Mikaela she walks out of her bedroom in shorts and a white t-shirt that says THRASHER in green capital letters across her almost-flat chest. She puts her hair up in a bun and picks up her car keys from the ceramic bowl.
“Let’s go.”
She puts on the radio in the car. There’s some mainstream pop playing, some song about sex and open your legs and I wanna get in that. People are obsessed with sex. It’s like a mania. I’ve had it before so I’m not even saying it from the point of view of a sour virgin. It’s good and all but I can’t understand why it’s literally a part of everything we see and do. The average orgasm lasts, what, four seconds? Five? Cosmo is all lies – there’s no such thing as an hour-long orgasm. Their writers must be fucked in the head. But that would be something to make a song about. An hour-long orgasm. Jesus.
Dr. Lemaiy’s clinic is attached to the public preschool, St. Agnes’. It’s a low exposed-concrete building with light blue Portuguese window shutters, a pitch-filled driveway in front and a couple of palm trees thrown in so it doesn’t look too institutional. There’s a side entrance for the clinic, though. Dr. Lemaiy is also the child psychologist for the school here because apparently they get kids who need help a lot. Every time I go, the waiting room almost always has a few kids doing weird stuff like chewing on the edge of a book or staring into space or something. I love those kids. I feel like I could just sit and watch them for ages. Sometimes they look at me too. Once I played tic-tac-toe with this autistic kid for forty minutes before his mother noticed – she was reading a Men’s Health with a chiseled six-pack and dazzling white smile on the cover. Then their name was called and it took a while to get him to go. Dr. Lemaiy himself had to come out. Fifteen minutes later I could only hear him crying through the doors.
The kids have all gone home so it’s quiet – the only sounds are the palm trees and their leaves rubbing against each other and someone reversing their car out of the spot next to which we park. Mikaela slams her door louder than necessary and we cross the driveway to the clinic entry. The sun is hot; I can feel the baked paving under my feet, through the soles of my shoes. I pretend that we’re in one of those badly animated 90s video games and we’re crossing a pool of lava on a raft and the timer in the corner of the screen is running out faster than it should and we should hurry up, hurry up – finally, shade.
