Wildlife Read Online Free Page A

it’s just that they’ve migrated to another country.
    No matter how much you tell yourself that nothing’s changed, it has. You worry that all your dumb old secrets are about to be whispered on someone else’s pillow, or to be superseded by somebody else’s better secrets.
    Just as wide as the gulf between “have had sex” and “haven’t had sex” is the gulf between my fantasy life and my real life, fantasy boys and real boys.
    Until last night, when I kissed my fantasy boy. That was a particularly disturbing, worlds-colliding event.
    It’s very frustrating, and seems illogical, that you can know everything there is to know about sex of all persuasions, variations, and deviations, in theory, and yet still you know zero if you haven’t done it. It. IT.
    Being a virgin makes me feel inexperienced, childish, gauche, uncool.
    It is honest to god like I’m sitting at the little kids’ table on Christmas Day, while other girls my age are over there sipping from champagne flutes and using the good cutlery.
    Add to that the pressure to act like it’s cool… no big deal… my choice…
    And that’s
me
, and I’m not even a very peer-group person.
    My virginity does not feel like some wondrous thing I will one day bestow on a lucky boy; it’s more in the realm of something I need to get rid of, like my braces were, before real life can begin.
    But annoyingly enough, while I am dead keen to cross “sex” off my to-do list, I don’t feel at all ready to remove anything other than a top-layer garment in front of a boy. That is the reason why, before I’m even properly awake, the challenge, and probable impossibility, of fully clothed sex with Ben Capaldi is occupying my thoughts.
    What is it going to be like seeing him today? My lips still tender, chin scratched. It had to be a casual hookup, right? A party thing? Please, party-fling fairy, oh, please visit and tell me what face to put on this morning. Friendly but distant? Casual hello hug? Ignore him before he ignores me?
    What was I
thinking
? We’re going to be in the wilderness together for nine weeks.

8
    monday 8 october, 5 am
    If you don’t want to write about feelings, you can write about facts, Lou.
    I met Fred last year.
    Our mutual friend Dan Cereill introduced us.
    We saw a movie, ate boysenberry ice-cream cones, kissed, arranged to meet again.
    I invited him to our year nine social at the end of term three.
    It was a surprise.
    I was not looking for a boyfriend.
    We had five perfect months together.
    He died in a cycling accident. He was dead at the scene, could not be resuscitated, is believed to have died instantly of head injuries.
    There was a funeral.
    There was scattering of ash.
    I did not go back to school when the school year started. I was a basket case. Everything shut down.
    This term I was to be part of a wonderful new French exchange program for government schools.
    My three friends, Dan, Estelle, and Janie, are part of a wonderful new French exchange program.
    When it came down to it, I couldn’t leave Fred.
    I decided to stay in the same country as Fred.
    I did not put it that way to anyone else but Dan.
    It might have sounded a bit crazy, but it was what I needed to do.
    Dan couldn’t wait to leave the city that killed Fred.
    We understood perfectly well that each other’s positions sprang from the same place. The place where the floor falls out from under you and nothing can ever be the same.
    I have seen a psychiatrist called Esther, who specializes in teenagers and grief, twice a week since Fred died.
    I don’t sleep well.
    I don’t wake well.
    I have done distance education from home for the first three terms this year. My results have been excellent.
    Today I am starting at a new school, in fourth term.
    I don’t have to tell people about Fred unless I choose to do so.
    This school is a private school called Crowthorne Grammar that sends its students away for a whole term in year ten. They/we go to an outdoor education