Standing in the darkened hallway beside your parents' bedroom, you concentrate all your powers on listening.
Through the door you hear your dad whisper: baby, be gentle. I've never done this before.
The sound of a girl's chuckle.
You imagine you can hear intense eye contact and blood moving at haste around their bodies. In the wine dark night, you
lean your head against the plasterboard and imagine the terrible things occurring on the other side of the wall:
wet, white, wonderful - your dream girl is defiling your dad.
As a novelty during school soccer practice a few months ago, they let you play against the girls' team. She marked you near her team's goal and said she was going to wear you like a glove which, at the time, you thought was insanely sexy but later learned was standard fare for sporting shit talk when your uncle said it to you during a game of footy over Christmas. Anyway, for most of the game her forearm was pressed up against your chest and when her ponytail whipped you in the face you smelt the artificial tropical paradise of her conditioner. It's the closest you'd ever been to a woman besides that time your mum gave birth to you. At the end of the game she bent over to pull up her socks and smiled as she looked back at you between her legs.
During homeroom the following morning, you looked up her name in the school email directory and composed a strong opener, a message whose beauty and profundity will echo through time, an email which will one day be studied by English undergrads for the clarity and sensitivity of its prose. This is the stuff of teenaged girls' dreams, the kind of swooning romance young women crave, something they'll commit to memory and scrawl in their diaries in loopy, dreamy script. It read:
Yo Esther
What's up?
Regards,
Josh
You tortured yourself over whether to sign off with 'warm regards' or 'kind regards' but decided to play it cool and leave it as just 'regards.'
She took three days to reply. If sitcoms had taught you anything, it's that anyone who goes to the effort of waiting three days to reply to an email is probably very interested in you. You screenshot the notification on your phone's lock screen so, at your engagment party in seven years' time, you can project the image on the wall behind you while you give a speech about how you knew, right from the start, that she was the girl for you. Her response read:
hey faggot i dont date 15 year olds
Not ideal but while you've got her hot, you respond right away:
Fine, bitch - kick rocks.
The following day you skipped soccer practice and went to the crusty old pitch where the girls practice. Ponytails swish, socks slump, sweat gathers under boobs and trickles down torsos. As you unfolded your deckcahir, the girls stopped to watch. You kicked back, drained a can of grape Fanta and lit a cigarette. You were a vision of coolness. One final touch: you pulled out a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. The girls gasped. You could feel their pupils expand, hear their hearts beat faster. You ashed your cigarette on their oval and cracked the book's spine. Page one: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how..."
For the next 50 minutes it killed you, but you kept reading that terrible book. Balls were kicked with wild imprecision. Sports bras strained. Puberty progressed. As the session ended, you glanced up from behind your Aviators to see what they were doing. Girls were extracting shinguards from their socks and pulling off their boots. Esther, the only girl worth caring about, scratched a mosquito bite on her elbow as she regarded you with powerful indifference.
The field emptied as girls filtered back through the campus, producing the kind of racket that teenaged girls specialise in, heading home to hot showers and fresh underwear in their dorm rooms. Eventually it was just you and Esther. She took a slug of water from her bottle and shot it in your direction with impressive force.
Deliberately, you turned the page.
She said: So, when do you turn 16?
I'm already 16.
Are you?
I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.
She tilted her head in confusion like a spaniel, as though moving the hair from her ear would help her hear better. What?
Never mind.
Okay.
Want a cigarette?
She took a menthol from the packet you offered her and tucked it in her bra. For half a second, you saw the grey strap of a once-white sports bra.
Want me to help you with your headers?
Excuse you?
I've watched you hitting the ball with the crown of your head - it really needs to be more on your forehead so you -
I don't want to get shit on my face.
You're getting it in your hair anyway.
She reached for her hair self-consciously.
Don't worry. You look good.
That night you got dinner in the dining hall together. You both ate messily and quickly. She still stank of sweat - and not in some kind of musky, mysterious way where biology pulled your crotches together like magnets. She just stank in the normal, unsexy way.
During free time on Saturday, you met her on the oval and tried to teach her the stop turn. Cheeks flushed. Shoelaces undid themselves. Puberty progressed. She was fit and fast but technically poor and very impatient. Eventually, she flopped onto the grass and groaned whenever you tried to talk to her. You stood near her and looked helplessly over the green of the oval back towards your dorm.
You were very aware of being totally naked under your clothes. You thought of your chair, the fern from your mother you kept on your desk, your Brazzers membership, the warmth of your laptop on your crotch, the half-finished history assignment saved to your desktop. From across the oval, you saw a boy leaning from the third floor window to empty a jar of piss onto the desiccated ground below. At your feet, Esther looked away quickly when you glanced down. You sat down beside her and she rolled onto her stomach and began to braid a nearby patch of grass.
You chewed on a blade of grass like a cowboy and said, I guess we don't have much to talk about.
Mhmm.
But isn't there something intimate about feeling comfortable enough to not need to talk?
I think you're meant to reach that stage once you've known someone a while.
Right, otherwise you're just strangers on the bus.
Right. She stopped braiding the grass but still looked across the oval away from you.
You ever give a stranger on the bus a handy?
Your heart beat very fast. She looked at you and tilted her head.
The blood drained from your dick and rushed to your cheeks. You lost your nerve and looked away.
If this were Brazzers she would put her hand on your thigh. Or rip her t-shirt open to reveal two spectacular sacks of subcutaneous silicon.
But instead she snorted. I don't have the wrist strength.