She was born with an outie bellybutton, rightly so. It is very chic to have an outie bellybutton. That was her first sign that she was born different to everyone else, or at least in an echelon of society whose stomachs indicated that they could achieve something that others could never. I’d lean in her doorway while she stroked the bump in the middle of her stomach through her lace camisole, contemplating the signs handed down to her. With my distinctly innie bellybutton that folded like a frowning mouth, I was no threat. Not like the heroines of books or Instagram models or celebrity It Girls who she despised for trying to snatch up her future before she could even decide she wanted it. Those were certainly enemies, and I was more like an adopted sibling brought home so she had someone to talk to.

Kind people said she looked like Anne Hathaway. Unkind people said she looked like Gollum. Most people agreed that she wasn’t often looking at you. Rather her sticky gaze was flung over your shoulder or groped around the room. If a more outrageously fun person than her was found, she clung like mucus and climbed with the same athleticism. If I was with her, you couldn’t consider me to be of help, missing most all softballs thrown my way. But my ineptitude never impeded her golden move: if the situation required her to, she could always get drunk and tell everyone that her sex life is lacking and she needs to break up with her long-term boyfriend. It is very chic to get drunk and tell strangers that your sex life is lacking and you need to break up with your long-term boyfriend. 

I was with her on the tram down High Street when she first felt the change. While stroking the bump, she noticed the skin a little thinner, the bump now more of a bulge the size a small marble. She was reminded of when one of the ponies had a hernia in her childhood. Yes, her family owned a pony – not horses mind you, never horses – but they were the cheap kind, the povo kind of pony. She took povo horse riding lessons while growing up in a major city. Her family went on povo international holidays and swam in her povo pool and she attended her povo private Anglican School. When it comes to private education, it is very chic to go to an Anglican private school. And while she was born with a single greatness, marked in her skin as her now slightly rounded outie bellybutton, her family’s upper or middle or upper middle classness had nothing to do with any of that. In fact, her greatness was in spite of the mundanity of a comfortable childhood and financial security – she told me that was the making of deeply boring people.

The bulge’s outer skin layer began thinning as it grew, with a vein appearing down the centre. Stroking inevitably turned to probing. I recall her routine was as follows: start from one side and flatten it, pushing all the mush that fills it to the other side. The vein waves and the skin tightens, pushing until there’s no more space for the mush to fill. Then a release when she finally removes her fingers, a moment when one side is empty before the mush flows back to re-establish equilibrium. Then she’d start again from the other side. I imagined her pushing me back and forth across our loungeroom rug with such care and precision but the fantasy was hard to hold onto when all my bones would get in the way. Instead, I watched her sprawled out on the bed from my spot in her doorway, pushing back and forth across her stomach’s little sign from above. Cautiously, I’d let my hand meander around my own belly button, but I didn’t like the feeling of pushing my finger into the fleshy cave. It always sent electric sparks from my abdomen to my vagina that made me need to pee.

Whether it was her probing routine, or the fact that the bulge had soon grown to the size of a small apricot, she began to worry about the possibility of it bursting. What would they do if she had to have surgery? Scoop everything out? Give her an innie? She journeyed to Chemist Warehouse, dark glasses on, three quarter length pinstripe skirt, and Tabi ballet flats that made clip-clopping noises on the linoleum like her childhood pony. She went via the supplements aisle on the way to the pharmacist, swiping top-shelf magnesium into her small leather handbag without even needing to check the security camera placement. While she waited in line, she expertly peeled off the security tag, pretending to look for her lip balm, which had also been lifted from this very Chemist Warehouse only a week before. She knows it is very chic to shoplift from Chemist Warehouse, but she also knows it’s less chic to steal from the locally owned organic grocer, and the Preston markets, and the small clothing boutiques, and the cafes near her work. She makes New Year’s and birthdays and end of financial year resolutions to stop stealing from the smaller places - just Coles, Woolies, Bunnings, and Chemist Warehouse from now on. I know not to say anything when I see her wearing a local designers’ new season culottes.

The pharmacist couldn’t help her. He had never seen anything like it breathless when she reported it back to me. Of course she was a first in something, rightly so. The pharmacist sent her to her doctor. She prepared the bulge for her GP by swabbing all around it with The Ordinary toner and covering it with an overnight face mask she found in our housemate’s toiletry draw. It’s very special, her little bulging belly button, and she imagines when she sips on her morning bone broth that the liquid is going straight from her mouth and filling the bulge with strength and energy. She rubs a little of the gelatinous bone broth from the jar directly onto its peak and thinks this must be how motherhood feels. I ask her if I can touch it but she says that I would likely give her an infection, which of course is not chic unless it’s a UTI. But I haven’t had a UTI since I got my first period. I knew I wouldn’t hurt her. I spit in her bone broth the next morning when she’s busy rubbing her belly button and I watch her thin lips close around the rim of the cup. I imagine the bulge filling with my spit. 

The doctor recommends she gets an ultrasound but by the time the appointment rolls around, she doesn’t go. I even offer to drive her, pick her up, sit in the waiting room because I love waiting rooms. She begins to fixate on the dog she impulsively got in her early 20s that she abandoned to her parents when she moved here. She usually doesn’t talk much about the dog – she knows it’s not exactly chic, and when it slips out she assures everyone that both the dog and her parents are happier with each other. She spends time looking up outfits to buy the dog for Christmas and enrichment toys made from natural materials but always closes the tab without purchasing. I know despite her renewed interest that she’s glad the dog isn’t here. The feelings she had for it never stacked up to the feelings she has now for her outie bellybutton bulge. I wonder if she likes me more or less than the dog. I wonder if her parents know my last name after having been in their daughter’s life for as long as I have. I leave her doorway to spend an afternoon daydreaming that I’m the dog and in the waiting room at the vet with my new parents. I imagine pissing on the floor and watching them clean it up.

The skin tearing began so small that she noticed the scab more than the open wound. Right down the centre where the vein first appeared, now a small ridge of dark brown scab divided her belly button. She knew it was time to pick. I watched her from the doorway as she peeled back the scab, small piece by piece, surprised at the pain. Her pain threshold has always been low. I remembered that while she was groaning pathetically. I was often in her head. Some days I was more in her head than in my own, so I knew she loathed herself but not as much as she loved self-pity. I knew she had enough defences to protect herself but not so many that she couldn’t also be a victim. That day she let it overcome her, her discarded scab pile shifting out of its neat pyramid as it landslided into the crack between her body and the linen sheets.

That’s when she remembered her audience. Get out! The door slammed in my face, ripping my third wheel status away from me. She thought that she must embrace her single greatness alone, but I wanted to sit with her while she mined the bulge, their silent witness. I wonder if Joseph felt like a third wheel when Jesus was being born. I want to be a saint, or an angel, or a shepherd, someone in the background of a great painting who is eternally captured observing in oily strokes. I whine at the door, yipping every now and then so that she knows I’m displeased. I whine and whine and scratch and scratch. I think about peeing on the floor but it doesn’t feel immediate enough. 

Later I am to piece together what happened after she kicked me out. I remember it very clearly but the memories are duplicitous. My memories and her memories and the bulge’s memories are paintings layered on top of one another and separating them apart only leaves gaps. I remember it like this:

Once the scab came off, the small tear beaded with freckles of blood trying to clot but she didn’t let them. She used her nail to push deeper in. I know those nails are jagged from years of biting them after all her attempts to quit the habit failed. She would have noticed that to be in pain was the highest level of chic and embraced it. The bulge wouldn’t have held out long, it was just as fragile and plump as us, and with our serrated nail we could turn the tear into an open crack. White puss would ooze out and drip down the front of our ironic American flag g-string. That fucking dog would be crying and scratching at the door – fuck off you useless runt!

And it would feel like release! Like the insides of a fleshy dumpling, twisting our fingers around unidentifiable squishy bits until something smooth caught on our groping index finger. We hooked it around a tube of slippery rope and pulled up and up, aware that a warm wet pool is not just in our underwear but spilling over the side of our stomach and the pain is choking. How the fuck did you get back in! The dog’s hot breath is on our skin, panting, whining, pathetic, but its voice feels like it’s being sucked out of its mouth and into our belly button. It nudges us with its wet nose but we slap it away until it lays down onto its belly with thud and another whine. We pull, flopping out a section of our small intestine that lands between us and the dog. 

There’s laughter, or just the shaking shoulder movement of laughter because the hole is absorbing all the sound out of the room and pulling it deep within. The bulge has sunken into it, retreating from our hands that shake, shiver. I feel panic, desperate, where did her outie bellybutton go? Where did the dog the go? Can we get them back? I ask her but she’s limp, mouth agape, panting, whining. There’s a magnetic pull towards her stomach and I can’t help but lift my mouth to its entrance. The smell is bleak. It’s an endless rotting mixed with landfill and absence. I breathe deep but I resist its call that now echoes in the room: come in, come in, come in. 

Then the memories are just my own. I glimpse the waiting room on our way through to emergency and see a woman screaming at a nurse. The nurse looks unphased, arms tight across her chest, barely flinching as the lady’s spit flies onto her pink and blue scrubs. I try to remember all the details so I can tell her later. I would have pointed it out to her then, Can you imagine? Sooo embarrassing, but she’d passed out in the ambulance and hadn’t woken up yet. Passing out is so chic.