Free How To Be a Boy by Tony Bradman Page B

mess and looked suddenly like a small child’s room. Games posters pinned up all over the walls, cyber warriors, greasy muscles, and red cars. An Astro Boy made from a kit. The mattress and bedding on the floor, a PS3 console, a PSP on the covers, a poster for
The Godfather
. She wrenched off my hoodie top, chucked it. She pulled her dress up over her head, then tore her torn tights off and wriggled out of them. Faithless – I heard the lyrics in my head.
    “Take a good look, posh boy,” she said. “That’s all you’re getting tonight.”
    She stood then for a moment in front of me – hushed, close, naked, pale and perfect – in my room, with all my sad stuff. The air crackled as if she had let loose with a super power, was an electric X-Girl. Then she smiled her neon smile and it shone around my children’s room like an alien blaster, like a destructive ray. It devastated me and everything else in its path.
    Her dangerous electric nakedness was gifted to me.
    A VIXEN, out of the undergrowth.
    Then she lay down in my bed with the duvet pulled up and over her head.
    “Night,” she said.
    “Night, then,” I said, and there was nothing else I could say. I had seen her and she was burnt into me like an eclipse, like a sunburst.
    I stripped out of my clothes, got down to my pants in the semi-dark and lay across the beaten-up gaming sofa near the door. I pulled the patchwork crochet blanket over myself. Her pale nakedness was in my room, under my duvet, like a blinding white light, blazing and hidden under there, like a submerged nuclear device.
    I leaned forward and tugged my phone out of my rumpled trousers.
    A text from Meado: HOPE IT WAS GR8. HA HA. U Luv her.
    I deleted it.
    I scrolled down and found her number, as tapped in at the party with her pearl-pink-varnished thumbnail and saved by me.
    I saved her
.
    I saved her under FOX.
    Go on, just tap it out in real time-----------
    and---------send it, send LOVE
.
    Go on, send it, you want to, you do
.
    L- O- V- E
    She might smile the neon smile at you again, I thought. She might pull open the duvet cover, and lie there waiting. I looked down at the buttons against my thumb and waited.
    “Oi!” Faintly from outside the house. Meado, I knew it.
    “Oi!” And laughing now, “I love you-hoo.”
    “Thing is,” came the girl’s voice, muffled from under my duvet, “he probably does.”
    I clicked on her name FOX and pressed CALL .
    Her phone played out “Umbrella” from under the duvet. She answered it.
    “Yeah?”
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Hi,” she said. “Y’all right yeah?”
    “Bit cold.”
    “Yeah well, it’s winter innit?”
    “Innit though?” I said.
    “Whaddya want?”
    “I thought we might go…”
    “Go?”
    “Out – go out some time?”
    “We might. No Meado though, no Pimsa.”
    “No Meado, no Pimsa,” I said.
    If Mum had known downstairs, crying washing up, her dial turned all the way down, with the big sad glass of wine on the sink and the puffy eyes like always, she might have smiled for once. “No Meado,” the girl had said, “no Pimsa.”
    The fox jumped up with her long red legs, right up onto the top of the wall in one graceful leap, her back legs and tail hung there for a moment, and then her tail slipped between the privet leaves, between the rose leaves and the thorns. Her tail was the last to go; it vanished into the dark like a smile
.

ON THE FENCE
Flint Keller
     
    MURRAY ELEMENTARY—MR. JOHN FOREST’S ROOM—END OF THE DAY
    “YOU DON’T KNOW NOTHING. I live in two different worlds, two separate worlds. You don’t know. What you teach me is one world. You have any idea what it’s like in my house? You have any idea what it’s like on my street? No! Jeez. You know I
see
your white world, but it ain’t my world. It ain’t never gonna be my world. You know my brother, my thirteen-year-old brother, when I was seven, was shot in a convenience store.”
    “I’m so sorry, Ricky. What for?”
    “Ehh, eh,