Abroad Read Online Free Page A

Babs. If I went over it, you’d probably think us just ordinary kids groping in a guest room. Yet in truth, there is never anything ordinary about the discovery of another sixteen-year-old’s skin.
    I was desperate for us to marry. I knew it was silly; we were much too young and no one stayed together from secondary to uni. Yet I rashly clung to the hope that we would. Surely Sean wouldn’t leave me to navigate the world alone as my older sister did, with her one-night stands from pubs and bawdy talk of cocks and balls and dizzying lists of demands and frustrations. Blew him for two hours, and not even a bloody text. I was terrified of entering her arena and prayed Sean would protect me from it.
    Yet my boyfriend—oh how I loved that word!—with his thoughtfully packed rucksacks and those wonderful ears, was a year ahead of me at school. This was a gap we eventually couldn’t weather. He went away to Oxford, a place I could barely imagine visiting, much less attending. His going there only made me love him more, and when my mother dropped me off to visit, my mind fairly burst at the sight of those spires, those ancient corridors. It was a place, I knew, I was just being allowed a peek at. My grades weren’t nearly good enough for me to even apply. I was no more than a frog trying to climb the lip of a bucket. And after just a few hours in that hallowed place, I began to feel physically ill.
    “Hello, Beanie!” girl after girl cried all over campus as I walked beside him. These were college women, wild and free. They cruised the quads on bicycles with handlebar baskets loaded with impressive-looking books. One knobby-kneed brunette even stopped to talk. Gazing into his eyes, she chattered on, ignoring me completely.
    “Have you read the Sophocles yet, Beanie? The last bit at the tomb—ugh! I was up all night in my jammies, weeping…”
    Sean was sheepishly quiet after this one rode off. Sometimes first-years were given nicknames, he explained. Beanie! It was disgusting.
    A few hours later, a serious talk on his bed after that last sad shag, followed by a heartache so acute I couldn’t eat anything but broth and cocoa until the summer. Beanie. For years, the very word brought bile to my throat.
    Sean rearranged me. Sometimes, in the months after it was all played out, I would look around and find myself able to pick out the other girls it had happened to, being left. You could see it—the slight dimming of the eyes, no matter how loud the laugh. Yet maybe the worst thing about it all was my mother’s reaction. Leah Deacon had once had true passion: my father, an Irish doctor, who lured her from Tel Aviv after a series of research trips. But after children, his interest had waned, as had her faith and mental health. As a result, her absolute favorite pastime was hearing about the boyfriends she never had.
    Sean she loved the most. When he stopped calling from Oxford, she grew so agitated I became afraid. What had I done? she demanded one afternoon, her Hebrew accent cutting into the words. She was a small woman, her once beautiful face shrunken into sharp angles. Why hadn’t I managed to be more pleasing? Oh, it wasn’t that she was a complete throwback—equal pay for women and all that, yes, of course. But in terms of male-female relationships, she hung on to traces of the customs and beliefs of her former household, so if something had gone wrong, clearly it was my fault.
    No matter what they might say, the actual truth has no place in mothers’ ears. They beg to hear, but they don’t really want to know, do they? Not about how a boy might mash you up against a soda machine, scratching at your zipper. Not about an upperclassman who turns on a movie of bobble-breasted women spanking each other because he’s so drunk that’s what he needs. Yes, once university started, the stories for my mother had to turn to lies. But the first betrayal was this: her little jewel was no longer desired by this boy from