Free Affection by Krissy Kneen Page A

the toothy girl sat herself beside me.
    â€œSheep,” she whispered and I noticed her accent, a pinched New Zealand twang on the vowels. “Have you ever wondered what would happen if you got a group of kids to walk the wrong way when the bell rings? Everyone would just follow them. We could make them all walk out into the carpark, sit down next to the cars.”
    Oh dear. I grinned; of course she was going to be my friend. Cynical, witty, smart as a tack. She was perfect.
    â€œWe could herd them over to the Catholic school,” I told her. “Get them to sing morning hymns.”
    â€œThe pool,” she whispered, only with her accent it sounded like “pull,” and as a teacher climbed up onto the podium and the kids began to settle into silence she added, “Synchronized swimming,” which made me splutter into my hand. She was blushing terribly, a beacon, a flare to direct the attention of the unkind kids in our direction, but I resigned myself to it. I would never be with the cool kids but I would enjoy this odd New Zealand girl’s company so much more.

    Her name was Jenny; we met for recess and lunch and the other kids circled but no one actually threatened us, and I was surprised. There was no confrontation. We survived the first day intact and when we parted company at the front gate I knew that she was just as surprised as I was that we had escaped without the anticipated abuse.
    â€œI might get through the rest of high school without getting my head beaten in,” she said. “Imagine surviving till university without thug-inflicted brain damage.”

CRUSH

    I told Emily about John. I sat next to him; we both played clarinet in the band and there were his beautiful, delicate fingers on the keys. His clarinet case was always neat and perfectly ordered. I threw my reeds in, split and stained with chips knocked out of the finely shaved wood. He cleaned his metal keys until they shone. I hid the crusty verdigris under sweaty fingers. I was a mess.
    We sat in class and listened and I could see him following the rise and swell of the music with that intensity that still moves me in a lover. The kind of monofocus that obliterates the real world for the duration. There was also his shy humor, the delicate arrogance of youth. And then there was the weight of my virginity.
    I’m not sure when my daydreaming tripped over from the thought of him leaning across my shoulders to help me with my fingering, to the
thought of him naked, prizing my virgin panties down over my thighs. This was the pre-sex kind of sexual tension, ripe with possibilities that can never eventuate in any physical beginning. I stopped sleeping. Refused to eat. I lost four dress sizes in six months. Sex rumbled in my belly like a tapeworm and I knew myself, at sixteen, to be capable of obsession. By the time I asked him and he turned me down there was barely anything left of me at all.
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    In the meantime I told Emily about him and she told me about the roadhouse where she worked and the truckers who stopped there and how sometimes she met them after work and the things they did. She was younger than me. I counted back the years and realized that I would have been assembling the plastic model of the Millennium Falcon when she was climbing into trucks with people’s fathers. She talked about muscle and hair and, in the way she told it, these attributes became desirable. She talked about sweat and the smell of diesel and about men, real men, not the kind of clarinet-playing, Dungeons & Dragons boys that I liked.
    Every day when Emily climbed onto the bus I would shuffle over and we would lean into each other and there would be my stories of longing and her stories of consummation. She was brave and bold and adventurous. I was all dreaming. When she placed her hand on my knee the heat of her palm burned up and into my groin.
    I invited her to my house. I would never be allowed to visit hers.
She had