I Think I Love You Read Free

his jeans. This was the hard part. Once she’d gotten them in position she flipped the shiny pages over and I handed her the strip of Sellotape, ever the dutiful nurse to her surgeon. We both stood up to get a better view of our handiwork. It wasn’t a typical David pose. Among the thirty or so posters on Sha’s walls there wasn’t another quite like it. His thumbs were tucked into his waistband, the top button of his fly was undone and the jeans wrenched apart so you glimpsed that inverted V of hair that the zipper normally hid. I tried to think of something funny to say, but my mouth felt dry and oatmealy. The absence of his head was definitely a problem. We urgently needed David’s smiling face to reassure us about what was going on down below. I felt a flicker as a tiny pilot light ignited in my insides and a warmth like liquid spread across my stomach and trickled down into my thighs.
    Sharon had seen a penis, but it was her brother’s so it didn’t count. Carol was the only girl in our group who had touched a real one—Chris Morgan’s, in the tree house down the Rec where the boys went to look at dirty mags. Carol said the penis felt like eyelid skin. Could that be right? For weeks after she told us, I would brush a finger over the skin above my eye and I would marvel that something that was made of boy could be so silky and fine, like tissue paper.
    When we went through the mags, Sharon and I always flicked past the bad boys. Mick Jagger and that David Bowie, he was a strange one. We sensed instinctively that those stars were not for us. They mightwant to come down off the posters on the wall and do something. Exactly what they would do we didn’t know, but our mothers would not have it.
    “It’s really weird,” Sharon said, contemplating the headless, semi-naked David.
    “Weird,” I agreed.
    It was our new favorite word, and we used it as often as we could, but it really bothered me that we weren’t saying it right. When David said it on
The Partridge Family
, it had one syllable. Whirred. Our accent put the stress in the wrong place somehow. However hard I tried, it still came out as “whee yad.” On the cello, I could play any note I liked. I knew if it was wrong the same way I knew if I was cold or hungry, but controlling the sound that came from my own mouth was different. Funny thing is I didn’t even realize I had a Welsh accent. Not until our year went on a school trip to Bristol Zoo and some English girls in the motorway services mimicked the way I asked for food.
    “Veg-e-tab-ils.”
    I pronounced the
e
in the middle, but English people didn’t.
    They said “vedge-tibuls.”
    Why did they bother putting an
e
in there, then, if you weren’t supposed to say it? So people like me could sound
twp
and they could have a laugh.
    Sharon and me were doing our top rainy-Sunday-afternoon thing to do, listening to David’s
Cherish
album and flicking through magazines for any mention of him. After Sunday school, which lasted for two long hours, there wasn’t much else to do in our town on the Sabbath, to be honest with you. Everyone abided by some unwritten law that people should stay indoors and keep quiet. Even if you didn’t go to chapel, which we always did because my father was the organist, it felt as though chapel had come to you. My Auntie Mair never used scissors on a Sunday, because God could see everything, even the wax in your ears and the dirt under your nails. You could grow potatoes under there.
Achafi!
Disgusting. And you didn’t hang your washing out on the line because of what the neighbors would think. The judgment of the neighbors might not be as bad as that of the Lord Thy God, Dad said, but you knew about it sooner.
    Sundays lowered the temperature in the rows of gray-stone terraced houses clinging to the mountain that rose steeply above our bay, and even the sea became a bit subdued. It always made me think it was a good day for Jesus to walk on the water. People shivered