Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood Read Free Book Online

book he’d been reading, traversed the oeuvres of our favourite writers and circled back to land on the subject of our names.
    ‘Julian,’ he said, and the hand he offered felt warm and clean.
    My nose was level with his sternum and, since his ribbed jumper smelled of the kind of washing powder only a mother would use, I felt quite safe.
    ‘Rosie,’ I said.
    On the riverbank, we continued to talk. And then we adjourned to the darkened interior of a small pub that I did not confess to being eleven and a half months too young to enter. Nothing on tap behind the sturdy oaken bar was familiar, and none of the names on the cans in the fridge meant anything to me either (except XXXX, which I knew that no real Australians drank anyway).
    ‘I’ve got no idea,’ I said. ‘What would you be having if you weren’t driving?’
    ‘Snakebite and black,’ he said.
    ‘Which is?’
    ‘Cider, lager and blackcurrant juice.’
    Remembering Rene Pogel, I did a quick cocktail-safety check, but could discern no particular threat in Kcalb dna Etibekans.
    ‘One of those then,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
    I sipped so slowly that my pint of snakebite and black lasted for all the time that it took for us to tell each other our whole lives. And just before I was going to be late getting back, Julian drove me home in his tinny little car. Outside Larry and Judy’s house, he settled a hand protectively on top of mine.
    ‘I have two little sisters, you know, and I would hate to think that either of them would ever get into a car with a strange man like you’ve just done. I want you to promise me that you won’t ever do it again.’
    It was funny to hear this sweet boy refer to himself as a strange man, but his face was so serious that I resisted the temptation to giggle. Instead, I risked a quick kiss on his cheek, and dashed up the path to the front door, wondering how, exactly, I was going to describe to Larry and Judy my gran’s childhood home.
    Over the next few weeks, I determined that my mother’s hair-pulling advice did not apply in this case. Larry most definitely did not like me. On some days he treated me in the same indifferent manner he treated Judy, and on other days he flustered himself up into a performance of patriarchal zeal, all curfews and rules and telling me to tidy my room. I did feel sorry for him that he had no children of his own to discipline (well, okay, not that sorry), but at seventeen I felt too old to be told which train to catch and what time to be home. And was it my imagination, or was his behaviour becoming increasingly erratic at roughly the same rate that I was getting to know Julian?
    I always think of getting to know Julian as like being let loose in a confectioner’s workshop. He had the kind of caramel skin that it is unfair for English people of Caucasian origin to own, given the climate they live in, and his honey-coloured hair flopped down over his eyebrows into rum and raisin eyes. I spent hours nibbling at his lips, which were large and impossibly plush, pale-pink and soft, like pillows of Turkish delight. Remembering my classmate Geoffrey Smethurst’s dichotomy of penis dimensions, I assumed that Julian’s was on the long and thin side of things. But it wasn’t revolting. At all. When you first touched it, it was mushroom-coloured and pliable as marzipan. And then, quite rapidly, not like that at all. One afternoon in Julian’s bedroom, when I had been playing with this marvellously changeable sweetmeat for quite some time, it alarmed me by making a warm puddle in the palm of my hand. The contents of the puddle were kind of gelatinous, and kind of creamy, but not even a bit like toothpaste. I wondered if there were any other major surprises still to come.
    There were.
    In a bordello-like cinema that had beanbags and couches in the place of seating banks, with my legs and tongue twisted around Julian’s matching parts, I began to shiver. But not the kind of shiver that puckers your skin