Free Now I Know by Aidan Chambers

loss.
    â€˜Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
    â€˜Gol’ Julie said, a fierceness returning. ‘Go! You mean run away from . . . [ nearly speechless ] . . . them! ’ She looked Nik accusingly in the eyes. ‘Run away yourself. I won’t.’
    Nik stared back. Then held out his lonely hands, cruciform, and asked, smiling, ‘Run from what?’
    By now they were an island in a lake of mud. What action there was scuttled about on the shore. No one marauded near them. The platform was a shambles of collapsed metal and torn posters, the party gone. The demo demolished, ended.
    Nik could watch Julie close up at last. She was smaller than he, and smaller than he expected. Slight even. Her clothes clung, soaked, to her frame, modelling her small breasts, and bulgy, too thick buttocks, and fleshy thighs. Her triangular face, and cap of bobbed black hair, close-gripping from wetness, set off her round strong skull, which shone, for him, as if in a halo, out of which her blue-grey eyes stared fiercely at him.
    She was to Nik, quite simply, beautiful. A being he wanted to take hold of and fit to him.
    His limbs began to tremble. He hoped that if she noticed she would only think he was cold from the wet.
    â€˜We might as well,’ he said. ‘Go, I mean.’
    Julie did not move, except to turn her head and look disgustedly at the scene around them, her dripping hands held comically out from her sides, as a penguin holds its flippers.
    â€˜There’s nothing to stay for,’ Nik said, unable to think of anything brighter. His intelligence wasn’t working, or rather had slipped from his mind to his body. All he could think of was wanting to touch her. She had pale skin, almost bleached in this rain-cloud light. His eyes fixed on a small round scar indented into her left cheek near the corner of her mouth. Shaped like an O, it made him think that the blunt end of a pencil had been jabbed there. But the blemish only made her more attractive. He wanted to finger the mark and ask how she got it.
    As he drank her in she blinked and sniffed and sucked at her lips. She might almost have been cosseting tears, but he knew she was only placating the rain coursing her eyes.
    He was so engrossed he did not notice a young policeman running towards them.
    (Tom coming between them.)
    â€˜Are you okay, miss?’ he asked, but he was sussing Nik.
    â€˜We’re all right. I was knocked down. He came to help.’ Julie smiled, showing her teeth. One of the two front ones was chipped to a guillotine angle. She tongued it as she smiled, a habit of hers, Nik soon learned. He longed to kiss her mouth, tongue and all.
    The policeman waited a moment, summing them up before saying, ‘If you’re sure you’re okay?’ He turned to run back to the van waiting for him. ‘You’d best be getting home,’ he said, and trotted off.
    Nik resented him. Not so much for giving orders as for his intrusion.
    Tom gone, Nik and Julie, statuesque in the rain, looked at one another, aware now of how wet and cold they felt, how darted in mud. But neither moved.
    Julie ended their silence. ‘He’s right. I ought to go home.’
    â€˜I’ll take you,’ Nik said. ‘If you like.’
    â€˜Don’t put yourself out. Only if you’re going my way.’
    â€˜I’m going your way.’
    â€˜But you don’t know which way is mine.’
    â€˜Yes I do. Whichever way you go is your way. And I’ll be with you, so I’m going your way.’
    Julie laughed at last, indulging him.
    NIK ’ S NOTEBOOK :   I mean—it’s grotesque. All that puppy-dog stuff. Can’t believe I behaved like that. As if I’d lost control of my mind, as well as of my body. All a-tremble and saying pukey things. She must have thought I was some kind of schoolboy idiot, drooling over her like that. Not drooling exactly. Blethering.
    I