Free Demons by Bill Nagelkerke Page B

suggested Roxy who, flicking through The Bacchae , had come
across a picture of a cool looking Greek god.
    ‘ Priapus of course,’ Becs
cackled.
    ‘ Who ?’ said Sarah.
    ‘ You know .’
    ‘ No. Does
anyone?’
    We shook our heads as I’m sure Becs
expected
    us to.
    ‘ Priapus. God of fertility.
The one with the great big dick.’
    Predictably, everyone cracked up. Becs had
been all the way to Greece with her parents during the summer
holidays. That was why she had mentioned the Acropolis as if no one
else would ever have heard of it. Apparently she’d also bought
herself a souvenir statuette of this Priapus without letting on to
her parents.
    ‘ I’ll bring it to school
tomorrow,’ she said.
    Clearly she’d been hoping for just this
opportunity. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d enrolled in
classical studies just to savour the moment. She was as bad as the
boys.
     
    And the next day she did bring it. She
showed us ahead of Ms Shapiro and the boys arriving. Knowing Becs,
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d decided to wait for them.
It was a small statue of Priapus, hands aggressively on his hips
with, as Becs had so slangily said, a dick out of all proportion to
the rest of him.
    ‘ Gross!’ said
Di.
    ‘ Imagine !’ shuddered Roxy, without
feeling the need to elaborate.
    ‘ Is that what all the
tourists buy these days?’ asked Sarah.
    ‘ Not just today,’ said
Becs. ‘They sold them way back when. I saw one in a museum. I
reckon . . .’ she started to say when sharp-eyed Ms Shapiro walked
in unexpectedly and spotted it. She wasn’t easily shocked. ‘Mass
produced,’ she commented. ‘I
    thought you would have had better taste,
Rebecca, and perhaps bought one in marble.’
    Becs sneered at Ms Shapiro behind her back.
‘Lesso,’ she mouthed at us.

    ‘Yeah, like how big do you reckon he is?’ Becs asked,
continuing the conversation after class. ‘Our Greek
god.’
    ‘ You’ll have to find that
out,’ said Liz, ‘and tell us later on.’ They all shrieked
again.
    ‘ What
do you think of
Chris?’ Becs asked me. Maybe she was more perceptive than she let
on.
    ‘ Can’t say I really noticed
him particularly,’ I lied.
    She shook her head. What else should I have
expected, was what her look seemed to say.
    Maybe she, and the others,
had decided to put me into the same camp as Ms Shapiro. I could
have been lesbian for all they knew, except I wasn’t. My one and
only experience with Robbie hadn’t put me off
    boys in general, just delayed my interest in
them. I was certainly never going to admit to them that I’d started
fretting about Chris the moment I’d laid eyes on him. Was it my
turn at last?
     
    Getting to know Chris
    I wanted it to happen. I wouldn’t have
minded initiating things to make it happen if I’d known how to go
about it but I was unexpectedly shy, and inexperienced.
    However, it seemed to happen quite
naturally, if that’s the right word. Maybe the sort of hints that
the other girls threw at Chris frightened him so much that he
defaulted to talking to me. That was my first thought. Afterwards,
of course, I knew that hadn’t
    been the case at all.
    The seating arrangements in Ms Shapiro’s
class continued pretty fluidly. With the numbers being so small it
didn’t matter much where anyone sat. The boys moved up from the
back row mixing and matching it with the girls, trying us out for
size, just as Becs, Liz, Sarah and Roxy weighed them up. It was all
a game really.
    Chris showed he wasn’t
interested in trying. He came to sit beside me on day two and
refused to give up his place to anyone. Mind you, neither of the
other two boys tried very hard to displace him. They sensed I
didn’t want to know them and kept their distance. Chris didn’t say
much to his friends either. I soon clicked that they weren’t really
his friends .
    We were sitting together before class on day
three, unsure of where to go from here, when he came out with the
sentence,