Darkness Be My Friend Read Free

of us hadn't improved much.

    That's when we dumped it.
    But I did meet Adam at the last school, Mt. Burns High School in Wellington, just off Adelaide Road. We were in the Year 12 (Sixth Form they call it) common room after the talks and this guy handed me the Mallowpuffs and started chatting me up. He was a prefect and he was wearing a school blazer that had so many badges I'm surprised he could stand up straight. Seems like he was the local hero. Swimming, rugby, debating, he'd done it all. Lots of boys in New Zealand wear shorts to school. They have a Seventh Form too and even some of the Seventh Formers wear shorts. It looks kind of silly, because they seem too old for it, but it gives you a good chance to perv on their legs. And Adam did have swimmer's legs. Someone told me later that he could swim a fifty-metre pool in sixty-five seconds without using his arms. I was impressed.'
    He used his arms on me, though. He invited me to a party that same night, and I went. It was a big mistake. It was so long since I'd been to a party that I'd forgotten how to act. I hadn't bothered to eat before I went, because I figured they'd have food there. And there was food all right: a packet of chips, a bowl of jellybeans and half-a-dozen over-ripe bananas. That's the kind of party it was. Then, to make matters worse, I had three BLS's in the first half-hour. Another big mistake. By eleven o'clock, after a few more BLS's, and more than a few slurps from Adam's beer glass, I was gone. I'd had it.
    And he changed really suddenly. One minute we were just joking around like old buddies, the next he had his
tongue in my mouth and was walking me backwards down the corridor to the bedrooms. I was trying to say, "Hey, what happened to beautiful old-fashioned romance? What happened to foreplay even?" but it's hard to talk with a tongue in your mouth. Sure I was kissing him back at first, but it wasn't working at all for me, I was just doing it, I don't know, because I was expected to, I suppose, he expected me to. Sort of automatically. I've never been less turned on in my life.

    When we got in the bedroom he fell backwards on the bed, taking me with him. It wasn't very graceful. I felt dizzy and sick. He was tonguing my ear and all I could think was, "God, when was the last time I cleaned the wax out?" but I felt too sick and drunk to stop him, to even try to stop him. Next thing he's undoing my zip. I'm not saying I was too drunk to do anything about it, it wasn't like that, I mean that'd be rape', no, it was just that I couldn't be bothered. Oh, I tried for a minute, tried to pull my jeans back up, but in the end I thought, "Who cares,'what does it matter, just get it over with and then I can go home."
    I don't understand what guys get out of sex like that; not very much, I would have thought, but they obviously get something out of it or they wouldn't do it. The only good thing I can say about him was that at least he used a condom. But only because he thought he might catch something from me. I'm sure it wasn't because he wanted to protect me.
    All I got out of it was a terrible feeling that I was a disgusting human being. It was so against everything I stood for, everything I believed in. The next day I felt awful. I had a terrible headache anyway, and my stomach felt like it was still doing slow spins, but worse, far worse, was the way I felt such a slut. I felt sick at myself. I couldn't talk to the others about it, couldn't talk to anyone, except about three o'clock I got the bright idea of calling Andrea, the psychologist.

    She was good, like always. It took me about an hour to get it out but in the end I told her everything. I started crying as I got to the end of the story, and then I couldn't stop. I felt so ashamed. Not of crying, but of being so cheap. I was bawling into this mustard-coloured cushion in Andrea's biggest armchair and using her tissues like they were five cents a box. And they're not, of course—everything in