The Girl Below(40)

Jo was so relaxed that she often spent the entire day in the common room with a hot water bottle on her lap to ease menstrual cramps. She was in the bottom class for French and math, her brain muddled by all that sex and whatever this hash thing was. “Okay,” I said.

We found Adam and Leon reclined on their school bags in a circle of grass, fiddling with scraps of paper and something brown and crumbly in a shoe polish tin.

“I love this place,” said Jo. “It reminds me of a fairy circle.”

When Jo said things like that, it was best not to reply. She went over to Adam and nibbled his lip. “Sweetheart, I missed you so much today.”

Adam ruffled her hair and continued with his paper work while I sat on the grass and watched Leon. His fingers were short and stubby, like raw chipolatas, and from the way he smiled at me but said nothing, I gathered he knew this was a setup.

On the first puff nothing happened except that I coughed after trying to smoke it like a cigarette. Jo let the smoke curl out of her mouth in wisps and reclined on the grass, opening her eyes to gaze at the sky. The next time it was my turn, I copied her. Was the sky a more intense shade of blue than it had been five minutes ago? Or was it just that I was looking at it from directly below, and the shift in perspective had made me dizzy?

I tried to concentrate, to note every nuance of the experience so I could write it down later and cross it off my list of things to do that were grown up and deviant, but my senses were unusually dulled. If anything had changed it was that I felt boxed in, paralyzed by a second-by-second sense of déjà vu. Lying there on the grass, I got the strangest idea in my head that I had moved without actually moving. Leon was suddenly in a patch of grass to my right and when he asked me a question, my reply was so muffled I couldn’t be sure if he’d heard me.

He tried again, speaking slowly, as though I didn’t understand English. “I said, ‘How are you feeling?’ ”

I blinked at him and tried to form a sentence, a simple one that expressed my displeasure that he was lying so close, but my tongue had expanded until it was a tennis ball, jammed into my mouth and glued there with peanut butter. My contact lenses had also dried up and were coming unstuck from my eyeballs, which made me think they were about to pop out. I shut my eyelids against their escape. “Go away,” I mouthed, but heard nothing.

Leon’s hand landed softly on my thigh, the chipolatas searching for the hem of my gray wool skirt. I tried to roll away from him but must have rolled in the wrong direction because soon, his lips were on mine, his tongue forging ahead, slimy with saliva, past teeth and gums, toward the tennis ball and the peanut butter. Someone was kissing him back, and for a second I felt sorry for her, until I realized it was me.

I tried to clamp my mouth shut.

“I’ve liked you for ages,” Leon said, clawing at my striped school shirt, only to be foiled by a white Cure T-shirt underneath.

“Hmuh,” I said, as discouragingly as I could, but not really doing anything to stop him. The part of me that wasn’t repulsed was curious to see what he’d do next.

Leon climbed on top of me. He didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t kissing back, and several times kissed the side of my face as passionately as if it were my mouth. With one hand under my Cure T-shirt and another on the grass for balance, he floundered away on top of my skirt, pushing his hips backward and forward in a rhythmical motion as if I were a pencil mark he was trying to rub out.

After a long sigh, he fell on me. For a minute or two I stared at the greasy hair near his part and then he abruptly stood up and walked off into the bushes. He had his back to me, but I watched him grab a handful of hydrangea leaves and unzip his pants. When he turned around to see if I was watching, I pretended to be asleep.

The next day at school, Jo rushed up after assembly and congratulated me for giving Leon the best hand job he’d ever had.

“The best what?”

She needled me in the ribs. “You’re a dark horse, aren’t you?”

Whatever a hand job was, Leon must have wanted another one, because the next night he rang me after getting my phone number from Jo. He made me do all the talking, as though he’d already done the hard work by dialing my number. For the next two weeks, he rang me every night at the same time, until one night I accidentally invited him over.

We smoked hash on the tiny balcony off the kitchen, leaning back against the wall and burying the roach in one of Mum’s plants. In my bedroom, I played Leon the new Cure record, even though he said he had already heard it on the radio. We listened to the first side lying on the carpet between the two speakers, the volume turned up so loud it made the windows rattle.