Page 5 of Power Moves
But it isn’t a message from Boss, it’s a marketing alert from Cue.Ooh. Pencil skirts are thirty per cent off!
‘Gotcha!’ cries Jessie, swiping the phone straight out of my hands.
‘Jessica!’ I shriek. ‘Thatis a human-rights violation!’
‘Why? Is it a dirty pic? Is all this work stuff a cover for you having a secret Latvian lover?’
‘Latvian?’
‘Peruvian? Guatemalan? Greco–Roman? Am I getting warmer? OH MY GOD, are you getting back together with Bryan? I literally saw him the other day!’
I glare at my sister. Jessie is way too obsessed with the fact that Bryan and I still text. She forgets that since he was always so lovely andIwas the breaker-upper, I’m basically legally obliged to be nice to him for the rest of my life. We dated years ago, for a paltry three months, and only because I was trying to be open-minded. (Jessie was the one who convinced me to try dating him. She said I needed toget back out there, though she used more graphic language.)
I point at my phone in Jessie’s hand. ‘I thought the text could be from my boss.’
‘So more work stuff?’
‘No, not really …’ I begin, before realising that it’s more embarrassing to explain that Boss and I text way too much on the weekends, even when we don’t need to. Jessie will see that as another blight on my seriously deprived social life. Better to keep it vague. ‘Kind of,’ I shrug.
‘Mill, we need an intervention.’ She grabs my personal phone. ‘I’m telling Dad.’ She’s holding the screen up to her face, hoping that the facial ID software won’t recognise the difference between us, which is ridiculous. We look nothing alike. Jessie is a megababe. Not in a try-hard way—more in a mermaid-hair, woodland-fairy-nymph-on-spring-break kind of way.
‘You’re dobbing on me?!’
‘Aha!’ she cries. ‘Your passcode is so easy to guess!’
‘Jessica!’ Before I can snatch my phone back, the FaceTime dial tone starts, and within seconds Dad’s forehead appears on the screen.
‘Mill!’ he exclaims, as though this is the loveliest surprise he could imagine. I feel a twinge of guilt. I should call Dad more—and not just to ask him about car insurance stuff.
‘It’s not Mill, it’s Jessie,’ she explains. ‘But Mill’s here too. Well, geographically speaking, she is here. Mentally she’s at Parliament House, hogging the photocopier or whatever it is she does up there.’
‘Hi Dad!’ I push Jessie’s arm down so the camera can see both of us. ‘I want you to know my job involves much more than photocopying. I haven’t wasted that education you worked so hard to give us.’
I poke my tongue out at Jessie. She grins back.
‘Dad, move the phone back a bit,’ commands Jessie.
Dad obeys and the frame zooms out to reveal his wonderful, crinkly face. He’s wearing the polo shirt I gave him for his birthday last year.
‘Dad, you need to tell Mill to stop working so hard. It’s not good for her.’
‘Now, Jessie. We’re all very proud of your sister; she’s very clever to be working in government.’
‘Dad, you’d be just as proud if she worked at Macca’s.’
‘Well, yes,’ Dad concedes. ‘But that’s not a bad thing, is it?’
‘She says she’ll be working for eight weeks straight.’
‘If Mill has decided to do that, then she must have a reason.’
‘This is stupid,’ declares Jessie. ‘I’m adding Maxy to the call.’
Seconds later my brother’s face appears on the screen. He’s the only one of us who got Mum’s auburn-red hair.
‘Sup fam,’ he says, grinning. He seems to be covered in charcoal dust, save for a goggle-shaped patch of skin around his eyes. Maxy works in the mines and I’m not really sure what that entails. I do know that he has an engineering degree and that he is always dirty, so my brain has concocted an image of him in an underground tunnel holding a measuring tape in one hand and a jackhammer in the other. The jackhammer is there to account for the dirt.
‘Sup bro,’ says Jessie. Maxy is two years older than me and two years younger than Jessie, so has historically been the perfect middleman in our sisterly disputes. Jessie comes around to my side of the table and sits on my lap so the camera has a better view of both our faces.
