Apples Read Online Free Page B

Year Nine. Me and the girls started getting it on a small scale from Fairhurst every other week, to take round someone’s house and mess around or hang about the street. Everything changed – all at once we weren’t fighting any more, we kissed each other, we said we loved each other and we had the best fun of our lives. The boys were that much sweeter, and depending on what night you did them school was a lot easier to bear. We knew something about being happy that our mams and dads and the other kids at school wouldn’t understand.
    It was about a year back when I lost my pill virginity, and I went and lost my other virginity and all. I remember Fairhurst picking me up early from Brackenhoe when I was meant to be in English with Miss Moore, the reddish Citroën bopping away on the side of Marton Road. Fairhurst used to love me in the sexy uniform, but I felt dead young to be going out with him, and I felt bad about missing lessons but I was no star at punctuation anyway. You alright? he asked me. I scampered down the school drive then jumped in the front, and Fairhurst was the kind of boy who gave you whiplash every time he put his foot down. I got pushed back in the racing seat as he spun the Citroën into the other lane. We headed for Belle Vue shops, and while Fairhurst talked to me about dance music and the dole, occasionally he touched my thighs and I smiled. Sometimes he went a bit further up than expected, but so what. I wasn’t sure whether to touch him back – we were zooming round the roundabout at 40 mph, and there was no point doing it just for the sake of it. The music was blistering and we could hardly hear each other. I had to fake laughter at some things he said, and I was pretty blank-faced when he brought up going to Whinney Banks for pills. I guessed he meant drugs but I didn’t want to embarrass myself – all I’d done before was tac at this girl’s house; everyone said I was laughing and then I went white. Fairhurst took us down Keith Road near where my house was, but we carried on past the church and everything and ended up in Acklam and hit a right. Sometimes he liked showing off with wheelspins and stuff when we turned corners, but it got boring after a bit and I had to pretend I was impressed. Screech! I’d say in a dead girly voice, to humour him. Fairhurst brought the Citroën into Whinney Banks, through the bits with the run-down houses, and we stopped on the corner of Sydney Close or somewhere. I loved the name Sydney – if I ever got pregnant, I’d want to call the kid that. Sitting in the front with the heater blowing, Fairhurst left me and went to one of the doors down the close, walking like a daft arrogant monkey. He didn’t look hard at all. There was a big fuss with a lot of shouting at each other from the upstairs flat, and I tried not to stare when the front door unbolted and Fairhurst bolted in. Those days in Middlesbrough they were doing a Dealer-A-Day – you had to put a block of wood between the lock and the stairway to stop policemen coming in. I tried to occupy myself while Fairhurst got his prescription, flicking through his cassettes and pretending I knew the names of DJs he scrawled on the boxes. Me and the girls had seen Judge Jules at Empire before, but who the hell was Laurent Garnier? He sounded like a perfume. A few young lads were prowling around while I stopped in the car – I hoped they didn’t try to steal it with me inside. A few weeks before Fairhurst let me have a drive – we went to the incinerator, and I had a go with the biting-point and the blind-spot and the mirror-signal-manoeuvre thing and it was a good laugh. Supposedly the Citroën had been lowered and it had OZ alloys and a full-bore exhaust, but it wasn’t any easier to drive. At least I didn’t stall in front of my boyfriend, and if I had to I knew how to make a quick getaway from Whinney Banks. I’d be Ayrton Senna by the time I was seventeen, or someone else good at driving who