The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine by Krissy Kneen Read Free Book Online Page B

concentrates. ‘I believe in you forever,
Orgone Man,’ he whispers. ‘I promise I believe.’

Vox
    by NICHOLSON BAKER
    Holly was seriously overdressed for ENGL1500 : Contemporary Literature .
Her
regular
law subjects had not prepared her for this change of aesthetic and she
was
suddenly
conscious of her flimsy summer dress. Her face felt masked by the makeup
she
was
wearing; her lemon yellow heels were stared at by girls in Doc Martens and
ugly
black
flats.
    Holly had been hiding books all her life. It wasn’t as if they were banned; no one
had explicitly told her not to read. But she knew that bookish girls were different
somehow: not to be trusted. Their skin dry and crisp like paper spilling from the
press, their eyes squinting behind the thick glass of their spectacles. And they
didn’t waste time on grooming, electing presumably to finish a chapter when they
might have been getting their eyeliner just right. Magazines were more useful to
her group of friends. Magazines kept you in touch with fashion, taught you how to
apply rouge or how to avoid cellulite.
    Holly nonetheless liked books. Sometimes she hid one behind the pages of the latest Vogue or Marie Claire . She left the television on in her room, relying on the characters
and plot of her current paperback to drown out the incessant noise, the relentless
colour and movement on the screen. Reading was Holly’s secret guilty pleasure.
    The course title had leaped out at her from the list of unit choices. A class devoted
to her secret passion. Her friends wouldn’t get it at all. She wouldn’t be mocked,
exactly, or ostracised; but there would be raised eyebrows. There would be gossip
behind her back. What had possessed her to tick that box?
    There was only one free seat left and she moved quickly towards it. The boy beside
her shifted a little to make room. He stared at Holly, pushing his wire-framed glasses
further up his nose. It wasn’t a menacing stare but there was no warmth in it either.
The glasses were held together by gaffer tape, the black edge stuck against the side
of the lens. Holly thought that the impediment to his vision would bother him but
he seemed not to notice. His hoodie was loose but too short, the sleeves riding up
to expose lightly furred wrists. His eyebrows met in the middle and she felt an urge
to take her tweezers to them. She stared back; there was nothing else to do. He smiled
as if an unblinking stare in this world was equivalent to a friendly wave.
    She had seen bookish types at high school—they sat in the front row in class and
gathered under the jacaranda at lunchtime—but she had never really interacted with
any of them. She had certainly never sat among them, the only girl of her own tribe
thrust into the habitat of these furiously intelligent, belligerently unstylish
aliens.
    Holly smoothed out the reading list on her desk and comforted herself with the words
there. McEwan, Coetzee, Adamson. She had read some of the set texts already, secretly,
under the cover of MTV. They felt a little like friends she would soon be revisiting.
    She put an asterisk next to the Adamson, which she didn’t know. She would have to
track it down. The boy with the monobrow watched as she did it, staring intently
at her pen as if she were writing the original commandments. He watched her underline
the title. He shuffled awkwardly through the books and papers heaped in an untidy
mess on the desk in front of him, and pulled a book from the pile. The Clean Dark by Robert Adamson.
    ‘You can have it,’ he whispered.
    ‘I can’t take your copy.’
    ‘It’s OK. I’ve got the e-book on my iPad.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
    He must have seen the disappointment on her face when she opened it to find it filled
with neat stanzas. He shrugged. ‘Poetry is good for you. It teaches you about language.’
    ‘OK,’ she said, slipping the book into her bag.
    ‘I understand,’ he said, reaching across to pat the cover of Atonement as