Free Rosie O'Dell by Bill Rowe

then.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m not going back in there with them. Shag it now.
     You’ll only be hanging around with her all the time anyway.”
    I made a half-hearted attempt to change his mind, but was secretly glad when I
     didn’t succeed. I wanted to spend the weeks with Rosie, uninterrupted. I was a
     bit surprised at the vehemence of Brent’s reaction, though, and felt bad over my
     perceived betrayal. It would be decades before I realized that the little prick
     had had a covert love going for Rosie all during that time too. It was a good
     thing, I would surmise, that we hadn’t in fact gone to the dump that morning. My
     last sight would have been Brent’s arse and rocketing heels disappearing in his
     dust as I was being gnawed to death.

    AFTER BREAKFAST EVERY DAY during my week at the
     O’Dells’ house Rosie and I went up to the girls’ bedroom and gabbed a couple of
     hours away. Then we’d go for long walks and bicycle rides before returning to
     the bedroom for more engrossing chats. Pagan mostly stayed downstairs in the
     kitchen with her mother. Sometimes she would come up and we would try to bring
     her into the conversation. But our talk would turn esoteric on her and she would
     leave, often without our noticing, so deep would we plunge into each other’s
     thoughts. Before the week was out, Pagan was complaining she had no privacy in
     her own bedroom. So, when my parents came back, Rosie started visiting my house
     where we could talk undisturbed upstairs in my room, lying side by side on my
     bed.
    Most days, with Dad at the office and Mom at the hospital, we would have the
     house to ourselves, except for the elderly housekeeper downstairs whose
     supervision entailed calling out to us during the commercials in her favourite
     game shows and soaps to ask if we wanted milk or hot chocolate and brownies or
     date crumbles.
    “I really like your name,” Rosie said one morning. “Tom Sharpe. I like the way
     it sounds.”
    “Even though you said last year my name suited me because my head was
     pointy.”
    “I was only teasing you because you were bugging me about something. I’ve
     always loved it. It sounds like the hero in a novel, like someone who won a
     medal—the Victoria Cross—in a war.”
    “That reminds me of something I was thinking on the way back from Twillingate.
     Every single time you ever said something mean to me it was because I had
     already started it by saying something mean to you first. I’m sorry about that,
     Rosie.”
    “I always tried not to say mean stuff to you, but something
     would happen and next thing you know I was saying it. I’m sorry too, Tom.” Our
     faces were inches apart on the bed and we kissed for the first time on the
     lips.
    Often after that Rosie would turn over and put her arms around me and we would
     press our closed lips together in a chaste kiss, hugging each other for minutes
     on end. Rosie would murmur, “I love the feeling of this.”
    “I do too.”
    Rosie dwelt on her father. She would always think of her memories of him, she
     said, as “exquisite.” She’d taken the word from one of his poems entitled
     “Paradoxes of Passion,” which, at her age—she rolled her eyes—she was
     not even supposed to have read yet. We laughed at how stupid adults were, trying
     to hide from kids what kids knew more about than adults did anyway, and she
     recited for me the lines containing her favourite word: “Today’s exquisite
     memory of/ Tonight’s forgotten gush of love.”
    “Beautiful,” I said. “What do you figure it’s all about?”
    “Oh, sexual intercourse,” said Rosie.
    I concealed my shock and nodded gravely: “That’s what I was thinking.”
    “How the desire for sexual intercourse,” she went on, “is a more powerful
     emotion than sexual satisfaction itself, how memory of the feeling is forgotten
     after satisfaction and is remembered again only when desire for the feelings
     arises again. I think