Free Candy by Kevin Brooks Page A

if I’d never been kissed before. I was noRomeo, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d had my moments. I’d been around the block once or twice…well, maybe not all the way around, but far enough to know what’s what, if you know what I mean.
    This, though…
    This simple kiss.
    This was something else.
    God…it felt so good. I thought I was going to explode. Something inside me seemed to rise up into the sky, up into the blue, rising higher and higher until the air was so thin I could hardly breathe and I thought for a moment I was dying.
    “You ready, then?” Candy said.
    “Uh?”
    She laughed and patted my arm. “Come on. If we get going now, we might catch the feeding times.”
    Once we’d gone through the turnstiles and moved away from the entrance, the zoo wasn’t as busy as it had seemed from outside. Although it was a bit smaller than I remembered—with fewer open spaces and a lot more buildings—it was still a pretty big place, and its myriad pathways and tunnels were enough to spread out the bused-in groups of schoolkids and tourists, leaving us plenty of room to wander around and take our time. Not that Candy was doing much wandering. As soon as we’d gone through the gates, her face had lit up and she’d started scampering around, flitting from cage to cage, jabbering away like an overexcited child—
    “Hey, Joe, look at this…God, look at the size of that lion! It’s e nor mous…have they got any hippos? Where’sthe hippos? What’s that? Looks like some kind of monkey…where’s the sign that tells you what it is? They used to have signs…”
    I hadn’t expected her to get so excited, so it was a bit of a surprise at first—in fact, it was a lot of a surprise. I suppose I’d assumed she’d be really cool about everything—strolling around, calm as you like, chatting quietly to me, casting occasional curious glances at the animals…
    I don’t know why I’d thought that.
    It was a pretty stupid assumption to make.
    But, even so, it was kind of odd that she wasn’t chatting away to me. Every time I tried to talk to her, she’d listen for a second and then suddenly shoot off in another direction to look at some more animals, or she’d start jabbering again—
    “…I came here once on a school trip and we had to fill in all these forms with questions about the animals, like where they lived and what they ate and everything, and everyone just copied it all down from the information signs on the cages…Where’s the penguins? Have they still got penguins? What’s that over there…?”
    It was unsettling, and also a bit disappointing. I didn’t just want her to be with me, I wanted her to be with me. I wanted us to walk together, talk together, be together…I wanted to be part of her excitement, not just a spectator. Not that I minded being a spectator. I mean, although I felt a bit detached from her excitement, there was still something exhilarating about it, something that gave me a strange little kick, as if it was me she was getting excited about, even though I knew that it wasn’t.
    And that was OK.
    It wasn’t perfect, but I could live with it.
    So after a while, that’s what I did. I gave up trying to make conversation and just wandered along behind her, watching her every move. At first I tried to be subtle about it—disguising my glances, pretending to look elsewhere—but, as far as I could tell, she wasn’t aware of my attention, so in the end I stopped trying to be subtle and just watched her quite openly instead. I knew in my heart that I shouldn’t be doing it, and my conscience kept nagging away at me— you ought to be ashamed of yourself, watching her without her knowing, ogling her like some kind of sicko —but I just couldn’t help it. My eyes had a life of their own, zapping back and forth between her face, her body, her legs, her breasts…and my thoughts were running wild— Where does she come from? What does she do? Is she really a