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

do you think I married her?’ he asked, carving into the voluminous breast of a bird.
    Nobody laughed or smiled. Maybe it wasn’t even meant to be a joke.
    It was on Christmas night, at Julian’s place, while his parents were safely turkey-and-red-wine replete in their part of the house and his younger sisters asleep, that I got the present I really wanted.
    ‘Have you done this before?’ Julian asked me after a couple of moist hours of petting, his naked and caramel-skinned body poised for entry.
    ‘Technically, yes. Effectively, no. What about you?’
    ‘Not even technically, I’m afraid,’ he said, trying to coordinate himself to hang onto the base of the condom and find the right spot at the same time.
    ‘Oh no,’ I said, catching sight of the time on his wristwatch. ‘It’s already midnight.’
    ‘Mmmm?’
    ‘I’m supposed to be back by now.’
    ‘Oh, you want to go?’ he asked, disappointed but polite as ever, as he pulled away.
    ‘No, no,’ I said, taking matters into my own hands.
    ‘You should go.’
    ‘Shhh,’ I said, kissing his Turkish delight lips.
    ‘What will you tell Larry?’
    ‘I will tell him the truth.’
    ‘You will not.’
    ‘I will. I will tell him the honest-to-goodness, absolute truth.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I will tell him,’ I said, ‘that I was out in the woods, picking flowers.’
    Three hours beyond my curfew, light in the head and sticky between the legs, I stood on the footpath outside Larry and Judy’s. Avoiding the dead giveaway of the white gravel path, I crossed over the grass and went quietly through the garage — past the place where the Christmas pheasants had bled onto the floor — and around to the French doors that led into the living room. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I pushed down on the handle and eased the door open into the muffling thickness of the drawn curtains within. Quietly, I slipped through the gap in the curtains to find Larry, sitting in his pyjamas, dressing-gown and slippers, waiting up for me. The lights in the room were dimmed. Someone like Carly Simon sang a smoky song through the speakers of the stereo.
    ‘I can just imagine what you’ve been up to,’ Larry said.
    As he came towards me, I backed away, and soon he was between me and the door I’d just come through. His owlish face, normally quite waxy and pallid, was flushed as if he’d drunk too much port.
    ‘While you are here in my house, I am responsible for you, and I cannot have you out behaving like a wanton little slut,’ he said, with a disturbing amount of relish.
    ‘I am not having this conversation with you,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice steady even though I was shaking and could feel my pulse everywhere, even in the tips of my ears.
    ‘I am in loco parentis here, and I have no intention of sending you home to your father pregnant,’ he hissed.
    ‘Well you are completely loco if you think that I’m going to let you talk to me like this. My father doesn’t talk to me like this.’
    ‘What you need, you smart-mouthed little tart, is a good —’ He lunged at me. ‘— spanking.’
    But I was too quick for him. I was up the stairs and behind the locked door of my room before he could catch me.
    I was safe. But trapped, since even if I’d been prepared to find a way down from the upper-storey window, its double-glazed security panels opened out only a few inches. I could hear, out in the hallway, the sound of Larry placing a call on his rotary dial telephone. He was dialling an awful lot of numbers, and I realised that because of the time difference, it was not an even slightly unreasonable hour at which to ring my parents. He would catch them on the back deck, eating sandwiches full of leftover ham, while they listened on the radio to the Boxing Day test.
    ‘Nymphomania,’ I heard Larry tell my mother (another word I would not have been familiar with if it had not been for Geoffrey Smethurst), and ‘inappropriate behaviour’, along with ‘might need to