Kipp The Kid Read Free

or run a hand over
his head to see if his hair really was as wiry as everyone said.
But Jane, for all her flaws, the biggest being she was a girl, was
the best of a bad bunch. She was two grades lower than him and
still in primary school. He’d seen her around at school and had
unsuccessfully pretended not to know her. He had observed she
didn’t have many friends and had, deep down, secretly, felt sorry
for her.
    If he had thought about it more, he would have
decided she was not the worst person to join him at his camp. She
was certainly better than his cousin Jack, who thankfully only
visited rarely and she was better than the Skinner sisters a couple
of properties up the road from where he lived. They used to walk
their Dobermans past his gran and grumps house every afternoon in
summer and during holidays, stopping to call out to him from the
gate. They were twins and the loudest, screechiest, most annoying
creatures on the planet. Even his pet cocky Sam was not a patch on
them for the noise they made.
     
    “Kipp? K-I-P-P?” They would call out to him, but he
hid inside until they gave up or their dogs got restless. Nip would
run out to the gate, stopping half way, barking bravely. But the
stupid black things would bark back and he would run back to the
porch and half hide under the deck.
    But Jane, she was quiet, at least for a girl. He
didn’t really know a heck of a lot about her, even though they had
been neighbors for as long as he could remember. But two things he
did know. She spent a lot of time inside and she had flaming red
hair that flowed low over her back, almost to the hips.
     
    He’d spied her more times than he would admit, in her
back yard, playing with her toys or in the cubby house, or with her
cats. He had rarely seen visitors come to the house and had only
known her to have one friend over, another girl her age, but he
didn’t know for certain if she was related or just a friend. She
certainly hadn’t come from their school.
     
    And here she was, standing, rubbing
her hands fiercely over the fire. Such a delicate and slender
little thing. She looks like she would snap in a sharp breeze. Kipp
had never compared girls to girls, but now that he had time to
observe, he subconsciously graded her according to the scale of
Kipp. Everything was graded that way, his grandparents love for
him, his absent father’s…absence, his love for his dog Nip. His
gran and grumps scored a reasonable six out of ten. His father, who
he had not seen since he was four, got a half a point, just for
being his dad, but that’s it. His mum, if she were still here,
would have scored a nine. Nip was a certain ten and Jane? She fell
neatly at a very respectable seven. If he had been honest with
himself he would have scored her higher, but he was too embarrassed
to admit it even to himself.
     

 
    Chapter 3: The kipper way
     
    Jane had not brought anything with her, except a
hastily packed bag of not very warm looking clothes, some snacks
and her toothbrush. She had no bedding and apart from his swag,
Kipp only had a coat he always brought in case the weather turned
nasty. If it had been the middle of winter and not late spring, he
would have to have marched her straight back home. As it was she
had begged him to let her stay even on pain of freezing to
death.
     
    So she stayed. Kipp did his best to keep her warm and
comfortable. If he had been a gentlemen, or even knew what one was,
he would have offered her his swag and rolled up next to the fire
in his coat. But he didn’t. He felt that if he made it too
comfortable for her, she would want to come back again. It was a
fine line he was treading, way up on the tightrope of relationships
and the rope was wobbling like jelly.
     
    Kipp reasoned that he had already made too many
concessions. To make up for it, he gave her some canned soup, which
she scoffed down like a poor child in a Charles Dickens novel. When
she was finished, Kipp made up some hot chocolate and the