(You) Set Me on Fire Read Online Free Page A

and functional oak and green-upholstered furniture, girls of all shapes and sizes in various positions between standing and sitting chatted and reached across each other for pizza.
    Stepping over a pizza box and a cluster of floormates, Carly headed toward the centre of the room, and I followed.
    In case you’re wondering, a room of giggling freshman-year dorm residents is not unlike any other room of giggling girls. It is not, in and of itself, a scary or intimidating thing, unless, of course, you know a little something about the individual particles of the girls who make up these masses.
    My parents sent me to my first all-girls’ school in grade six after a boy in grade seven attacked a girl in my class behind the music portable. With a clarinet. She was fine, eventually, but it totally shook up my parents (who spent years checking to see if residual memories of the horrific incident had stuck in my brain). After that, I suppose, it just seemed to be a good idea to continue the trend, and so my parents sent me to an all-girls’ overnight camp and, later, a horseback riding camp that allowed boys, although few came. As a result, my young memories of teenage boys are fleeting and grainy, focused on cousins and the tall but sickly boy who lived across the street from me until his parents moved toHong Kong. When I think of boys, I think of either birthdays or Halloween; boys were a holiday thing for me, is essentially what I’m saying.
    A life spent in this kind of environment is going to be either a surefire path to homosexuality or a surefire deterrent.
    I’m into girls, but I have some pretty strong reservations about this decision on my heart’s part. For me, “lesbianism,” if you want to call it that (I hate that word), is like a kind of physical betrayal, like Tourette syndrome. It’s like, why, given my MANY experiences with the claws and fangs of girls, would I decide to put myself on the path of pursuing them for the rest of my life? It’s shocking to me that I could fall in love with a girl, let alone more than one girl. Although, you know, let’s not exclude the possibility that some boy will come along and sweep me off my feet. Boys, it seems, are just so cool and everyone wants one. Why not me?
    By the time I joined the circle of girls from the eleventh floor, talk had moved to the subject of boyfriends and who had them. Most did. Of my floormates, June, Mary, this girl Katy, and Karen all had boyfriends, all attending other schools. Missy, who had roughly the same proportions as a Cabbage Patch doll (was I the tallest on my floor at five-five?), carried a little white old-lady purse, and wore her hair in long black braids, had a boyfriend at thetechnical college just on the other side of town. The boyfriend was living in an apartment downtown instead of a residence. So, clearly, this would be the last time any of us saw Missy. Everyone except this girl Hope, also the only girl in coveralls, was in the arts program and so, after hometown and more boyfriend information was exchanged, we settled into the comfortable topic of potential classes. I was seriously reconsidering just about every class I’d signed up for by the time girls started standing up and moving out.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Frat party,” Hope whispered.
    “Right.”
    Outside, Carly appeared waving a white card in her hand.
    “TA-DA! ID!”ou get the idea.
    A small group circled to check the match.
    “Trick is to find one of the older super geeky students who stays in residence forever,” Hope noted. “They, like, NEVER go out.”
    “Allison Lee,” Carly pronounced, holding the card up in the air like a superhero, “I hereby do … uh … name? No. Okay. I do hereby CHRISTEN you, uh, Jennifer Taylor. Jennifer is the older sister of GraceTaylor, who’s on the sixth floor. Okay? Just put your finger over the picture when you show them the card if they ask.”
    “Which they probs won’t,” Mary said. “These guys never