Borrowed Light Read Online Free Page A

say we talked all night, but what with the music and the phenomenon of irresistible attraction between two bodies, we began kissing quite soon.
    That was something to remember, that first kiss. Tim put his arms around me—honey-coloured, with little golden fireflies of hair—and drew me toward him. He looked at me, carefully, for thirty whole seconds. That’s a long time—you try it. While he was looking, I counted silently. It was less excruciating that way. No one had ever looked at me for that long. Except Jeremy, perhaps. But that’s because he was dying for me to tell him what happened when a planet collided with a meteor swarm.
    Once, a reporter came to our school and interviewed lots of students. ‘Pretty Callisto May,’ wrote the reporter a week later in the newspaper. Can you believe it? Everyone else just had their name in the paper, without the adjective. I read that phrase over and over again. There it was, in black and white, a judgement made by the world. Well, I couldn’t agree. What about my spiky hips, my disappointing breasts? I wanted to run after the reporter, ask him if he’d noticed the hairiness of my arms, my scrawny legs, with the knobble-bone on the ankle that could cut paper. Where were the womanly curves? Couldn’t he see the shadow of a moustache? Did he usually wear glasses? No, if he’d taken more than a glance out of the comer of his eye, he never would have written, ‘Pretty Callisto May’. That was for sure.
    But at Miranda Blair’s party, on the 3rd of March, Tim Cleary looked at me for thirty seconds. When he wasfinished, he still wanted to kiss me. I smiled so much my face ached. I was caught in his gaze, trapped in sunlight. Every cell of me was in focus, every movement seemed larger than life. I was exquisitely aware of my breathing, my treble clef nostrils, the itch under my tongue, the twitch beginning in my mouth. I felt beautiful for the first time. Tim Cleary picked me out with his eyes, he selected me,
me!
and suddenly I was alive.
    His mouth was hard and soft at the same time. I was amazed that a boy’s lips could be so silky, like the most secret parts of a girl. And behind the lips were the teeth and jaw, pushing and determined, carnivorous. I was excited, scared, breathless, thrilled. He didn’t close his eyes while he kissed me. Neither did I. I wasn’t going to miss anything. His eyes stared into mine. I didn’t know what would happen next. But I would do whatever he wanted. He’d given me the best gift in the world. I leapt for it eagerly, borrowing his warmth and making it my own, the way the moon borrows light.
    S CHOOL WAS VERY different after the 3rd of March. Miranda Blair, urban warrior, let me join her tribe. I ate my avocado sandwiches with her on the wooden seats under the oak tree. I stood on guard at the toilet door while she had a smoke. I bought some black nail polish. And I got my ears pierced.
    Grandma said that if I was so determined to do my ears she’d take me to the hospital herself—she has a friend who is a matron there. I bled profusely as if I were in a major car accident. As I said to my mother when I got home, I don’t know why I can’t just do things normally, and go to a chemist like everyone else. It’s over in two minutes, isn’t it?, with that little gun the chemist uses, and you haven’t got white-coated doctors rushing around talking abouttransfusions. My mother just shrugged and muttered something about Grandma’s absurd faith in doctors and then she did her dead bird gaze. Still, it gave me another bloodthirsty tale to tell the warriors. I was becoming an expert in tall tales.
    Miranda had wanted to know all the details about my night with Tim. I’m sure she still fancied him herself. ‘What did he say? Did he lick your earlobes? Did he put his tongue down your throat?’ Miranda and her friends orbited about me, like