Working Girl

I want to be a model or a writer. I am neither of these things. What I am is fifteen and five foot eight, with collarbones deep enough to drink my black coffee out of, a head full of dreams, and a job with Western Australia's largest and only Sunday newspaper. The job is my first job. The job is a high-paying job, which earns me four times as much as my friends' jobs and will allow me to buy spaghetti-strap singlets from KOOKAÏ, three-inch stilettos from ZU, a pastel polo with a Hilfiger flag on the breast, a black French Connection t-shirt that alludes to fucking but in a clever and expensive way. It isn't the job of my dreams, but it does let me skip dinner and leaves me smelling of ink.

I tell my mum, when she drops me off, that I will eat at Dad's. I tell my dad that I already ate at Mum's, and then smugly spend the hour while my stepmother gets ready nursing my Nescafé and watching FashionTV and prodding my little sisters' fat until they whine or giggle. My stepmother gets ready loudly. She talks on the phone and calls my dad Mas! and if she sneezes, she makes a heart-stopping sound. At a quarter past five, she jangles into the kitchen with her red lips and Jakarta Vuitton and slaps the pizza money on the counter, and I am already homesick.

"Ready Luluuuuu?" she drawls.

It is still light when we leave the yellow brick house. If it is summer, the light is thirsty and gold; if it is winter, blue and sad like piano music. My stepmother's blue-black hair flashes ahead of me, the vaccine scar on her bare arm, the thin bar of flesh above her low-slung tracky dacks. She is five feet tall and as glamorous as it's possible to be in stretchy gray polyester, like an actress snapped on her way to Starbucks.

Someday, I will live in a city with Starbucks.

The drive is ugly, warrens of pale brick and gas stacks and dam-like expanses of freeway. I clench my stomach to keep it from grumbling too loudly and also because I'm anxious for the drive not to end. It is always better to be going someplace than it is to be in the actual place; I understand this, and that stopping is to be feared the same as death. This is why I sometimes ride the bus after school a few stops too long.

"You remember Jamie?" my stepmother asks me one afternoon, both of us squinting through oversized sunglasses past the windshield's glare. I know the boy she means, or think I do, and my heart skips because he is pretty, so pretty I have no clue how I could've forgotten his existence for so long. It was many months ago that I sat in a dark room with him and watched the Occupational Health and Safety video, and afterward took a test about the video, and covertly took in his beautiful green eyes and chestnut hair and imagined having him as a boyfriend, and never exchanged a word. We were supposed to start work at the same time. There must be an exciting reason for the holdup. I tell my stepmother I remember and matter-of-factly she says, "He died."

"Oh," I say. "Like . . . actually died?"

"Car crash. So sad, lah. He was cute."

My stepmother and I don't often talk of deep things, and don't talk as easily as when I was seven. When we do talk, it's of the things money can buy, the songs on the radio, the people at work, my older sister. "Lazyyyy," my stepmother likes to say about my older sister, who is seventeen and mortal in ways I'm not: has a boyfriend and ex-boyfriends, makes average grades, stresses over her exams, has been to parties with alcohol. I'm good at school without trying too hard, work every Saturday night instead of going...