Free Lingerie For Felons by Ros Baxter Page B

tiny in his arms. I watched his face carefully as I tried my best to chat like a normal person. It had only been a few months, but I felt like I knew him so well. He was mine — every warm, outrageous, vulnerable inch of him. I always knew instantly how his day had been, just from looking at his face. He was real and solid, an open book. I despise having to work for crumbs of information, scraps of intimacy. But Wayne was mine. I would watch his long eyelashes as he slept in the night and cry with the hurricane force of my possessiveness.
    Before we came, I wanted to see the place he had come from. Meet the people who had raised him. But now, standing here with them, watching this thing unfurl between them, I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it. I mean, I knew a lot about some things. Like math. I knew a lot about math. And about navigating my crazy family. But I’d never had a boyfriend before. Not a real one. Surely they would look at me and see right through me.
    I could smell disaster in the wind.
    The first night, I was standing outside, near the bar-bee-cue — ‘barby’, Trev insisted, trying to sound knowledgeable about deep-sea fishing. Thinking instead that the warm night and low mosquito buzz were soporific inside my jet lag bubble.
    Suddenly, Trev turned around and started yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘Nigger! Nigger!’
    I gasped and dropped the insect repellent, racing in to Wayne who was washing dishes and watching the news with his Mom. I laced my fingers into his and pulled him out of earshot. ‘Wayne, my God, your dad’s gone insane,’ I said. ‘I think he’s yelling at the neighbors or something. They’re gonna come over and kill us.’ I lowered my voice. ‘He’s calling them niggers.’
    â€˜What?’ Wayne frowned, starting for the door to the patio, then his brow smoothed. ‘Ah, Rocket, I should have mentioned...’
    It emerged that ‘Nigger’ was the name of Trev’s dog. Black dog, needless to say.
    And things were not so peachy with Ma either.
    I had felt her bristling at me, no matter how hard I tried. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. I would catch her watching me during meals, her mouth moving but no words coming out. Or taking a dish off me as I wiped it after she’d washed, clicking her tongue and doing it again, as though I hadn’t quite got it right.
    On day two, her simmering animosity dissolved into downright hostility.
    She took me to one of those vast, sprawling suburban shopping malls spawned by the outer suburbs in every city on earth. I had another raging hangover from anaesthetising myself against the horrors of the night before, with some of the baby vodka bottles I’d secreted from the plane. Wayne’s parents were teetotallers, and his home was a dry zone. But I’d sneaked into my room a couple of times to help dull my mounting anxiety. And that’s right, you heard me. My room.
    Wayne and I were consigned to separate quarters in the House of God.
    â€˜There’s a really nice dress shop I’ll show you,’ Suse said when we arrived at the whitest, brightest shopping centre in the universe. At least that’s how it felt to my pre-migraine eyes. Suse looked at my faded jeans and ‘Power to the People’ t-shirt and made a small noise in the back of her throat. I ran my hands down my t-shirt and pulled my pigtail a little tighter as she herded me towards a shop with the disturbing name ‘Glamma’ emblazoned across the front.
    I smiled, reminding myself how girlfriends behaved on TV. ‘Oh, that’s so sweet of you, thanks Suse.’
    After chatting a while and flicking through some racks, I decided to play the jet lag card. ‘Actually, Suse, I’m not feeling that great. The long trip and all, I think. Would you mind if we drop by a drug store? I need to pick up a couple of things.’
    â€˜Oh, I noticed you were stopping