I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson Read Free Book Online

balance a paper cup on it. Not only had she started her periods when she was ten, her breasts had developed overnight as though she’d gotten fed up with waiting and used a bike pump. I wouldn’t put it past her, to be honest with you. Carol was on really friendly terms with her breasts. She handled them like they were hamsters, even getting them out occasionally andpetting them. Me, I would hardly dare glance at my own shy swellings in the bathroom mirror at home, not unless it was steamed up.
    My nipples were flat and soft and dusky pink like rose petals. Carol’s were closer to walnuts; brown and nubbly, you could see them clearly through her blouse.
    “Secondary sexual characteristics,” that’s what the Biology teacher called breasts. And with the blimmin’ boys right there in the same room with us. Thanks a lot, sir. They never let us forget it. SSCs. Secondary sexual characteristics.
    Carol’s breasts were hard to ignore because she knotted her white blouse tight under them, even though she was always getting told off by the teachers for showing her stomach, which was the color of gravy browning all year round. Carol’s eyebrows were apricot, so fine they were practically invisible. When the sun shone, the skin underneath looked like bacon, so she drew the arches in with a brown Rimmel pencil. It made her look hard. Harder than she was really. And she had this way of wearing our school tie with a long dangly end so it seemed less like a boring tie and more like a lizard tongue for licking up boys. Carol was sexy, before we even knew what sexy was, is what I’m trying to say.
    “Sexy butt! David’s got a sexy butt!” Sharon took up Carol’s chant, delighted by my mistake.
    “That’s not what I meant,” I said quickly. “It’s just the way he pauses in the song and leaves you hanging on for the
but …
”
    Too late. Even to my own ears I sounded stupidly earnest and pedantic. No-fun Petra. Learn to take a joke, why can’t you?
    The others were all falling about. Even Angela and Olga, who had gone to fetch the drinks and the Kit Kats from the machine, and had missed the “sexy but” conversation. Carol’s honking piggy laugh moved into its final snorting stage and hot chocolate shot out of her nose and spattered all down her blouse so she looked like she’d been machine-gunned. My mum would’ve killed me, but Carol couldn’t have cared less. There was something animal about Carol that scared me sometimes.
    “Petra wants a feel of David’s sexy butt,” she leered, puckering up her sink-plunger lips and grabbing at my skirt.
    I pushed her away. “No, I don’t.”
    God, don’t you hate blushing? Once a blush starts you can’t stop it; it goes everywhere, like a spilled glass of Ribena. Obviously, I had noticed David’s backside. You couldn’t very well not notice it, could you? It stuck out of all the photos of his concerts when he wore those slinky catsuits. But I didn’t want to hear David’s bum being joked about. Joking about ordinary boys was one thing, like having a laugh about Mark Tugwell, the double-bass player who sat behind me in county youth orchestra. Tuggy Tugwell. Carol said he kept a spare oboe down his pants, and I couldn’t stop myself looking whenever he uncrossed his legs. But this was different. I was in love. I loathed crude or disrespectful talk about David. I pictured myself riding to his defense in a long cream cheesecloth dress with a high collar, pin tucks on the bodice and frothy lace trim, like the one Karen Carpenter had. I’d be sitting on that palomino pony David is riding in my favorite poster on Sharon’s wall. But I’d be riding sidesaddle like the queen, so I didn’t spoil the dress.
    Smutty jokes about David really upset me. I suppose they were an unwelcome reminder that he was common property. Stupid, really. I don’t know how you can get the idea that someone who has the biggest fan club in history, bigger than Elvis’s or the Beatles’, is