Free The Fish Kisser by James Hawkins Page A

PEOPLE.”
    â€œLIKE—SOMEONE’S GOT TO GET BONKED,” added the only other contributor, a man with the unlikely name of CyberBob, who’d added sexual innuendo all afternoon.
    â€œTHANK YOU CYBERBOB AND GOODNIGHT,” flashed onto Trudy’s screen as Roger gave him a hint.
    CyberBob didn’t give up and, after a few more exchanges, Roger and Trudy crept out of the chat room to communicate through a private chat client. One-to-one private messages supposedly inaccessible by anyone else.
    â€œI’ve met this really super guy, Marg,” she stage-whispered to Margery, her best, best friend, in socialscience class the following day. “He’s gorgeous and he’s twenty-seven.”
    â€œBit old for you, Trude. More my age.”
    â€œYeah, but I told him I was nineteen, so he reckons that’s O.K.”
    â€œAnd … when he finds out?”
    â€œI ain’t going to tell him am I? And it’s not like we’re going to meet or anything.”
    â€œWell what’s he like? You know: How tall is he? What’s his hair like? His eyes? Hey, what’s his star sign? My mum reckons you can always tell what a bloke’s like from his star sign. She says Sagittarius is best. My dad’s a Pisces, that’s why she reckons he’s so wet.”
    Trudy had no answers, but anticipated each evening’s “meeting” with Roger with the heart stopping palpitations of a waif dragged out of a screaming pack of groupies to have dinner with a teen-star. Dashing home from school, frequently brushing off Margery in her haste so that by six o’clock, or a quarter after at the latest, she was made-up and ready for her date. But Roger never came on-line before seven-thirty, even eight-thirty—she’d wait. Her e-mail message, “HI ROGER—GIVE ME A CALL,” would sit, unopened, in his inbox until he could escape to his room, switch on his computer, and wait for the three most important words of the day: “You’ve got mail.”
    A crease in the filthy sheet on Roger’s bed irritated her aching left shoulder but, as she manoeuvred into a more comfortable position, pressure on her blistered hand made her cry out in pain. Once settled, she went back to her thoughts and recalled the evening, just a week after their original meeting, when “love” first appeared.
    Coming home from school, she’d surrounded herself with a tide of cookies, crunchies and chocolate, which flooded the table and swept over the cereal bowl, still containing a few soggy cornflakes, which she’d abandoned in order to check her messages before school that morning. A sheet of writing paper, wrenched from an exercise book, had been brushed off the bowl by a pack of pretzels and now lay on the floor. The lipstick message, a random mix of upper and lower case letters, looked more like a suicide or ransom note than a mother’s message to her daughter. “I’n NOT clearing up AGAIN—I’ve WARNED you. You left the MILK out again. the cat got it. I’ll be back at ten—MAYBE.”
    Their messages flew back and forth that evening. “At lightning speed,” according to Roger.
    â€œHOW FAST IS THAT?” she enquired, but found little interest in the possibility of her written thoughts zipping round the world six times a second.
    â€œWOW,” she wrote—who cares, she thought.
    â€œI DID MY HAIR RED,” she wrote
    â€œWOW,” he replied—who cares, he thought.
    Hard-drives, soft movies; gigabytes, teen-TV; RAMs and ROMs, music and make-up. Their words crossed though never met.
    â€œI GOT A NEW Z360,” he wrote.
    â€œWOW,” she wrote.
    â€œI’M GETTING A WATCH FOR MY BIRTHDAY,” she typed.
    â€œWOW,” he replied.
    The stilted conversation continued, the cut and thrust of debate, perfected by Senators before Christ, nowblunted by the lightning speed of twentieth century