Do You Remember the First Time?

anyway though,’ I said. ‘For Mum.’
    ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know how you’re going to feel on the day. You don’t know, OK?’ She was angry. ‘And if I take that window away, that’s it. Game over. Hockey sticks and driving tests till kingdom come.’
    We sat in silence, tears dripping down our cheeks.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ said Justin, playfully kicking at leaves as he caught up with me as I was leaving school. His feet were enormous in his trainers, I noticed, completely out of proportion to his skinny legs. That made me smile.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said, shaking my head. Nothing I was going to inflict on this innocent.
    We headed up to the caff. Stanzi, Kendall and Ethan were squeezed into the faded upholstered booth. Stanzi was playing with the big red plastic tomato full of ketchup, clearly delighted to be the centre of attention with two men.
    ‘Hey, hey,’ said Ethan as we went in, and I sat down. I looked around. This place was as dingy as I remembered, with tinfoil ashtrays and curtains held together with grime. The cracked tiles were stacked with dirt. But, picking up the sticky laminated menu, I didn’t care. Here we were, on the high street, kids on the town, drinking Coke floats. Theworld couldn’t be as bad as we thought, could it? Tash was going to be alright, wasn’t she? I looked at Justin, who was buying me my drink from the filthy-looking waitress. Kendall and Ethan were talking about what they wanted to do when they left school.
    ‘Space programme,’ Kendall was saying earnestly. ‘They need good engineers.’
    ‘They need better ones than they have,’ Ethan agreed. ‘St Martin’s for me, I think.’
    ‘Ooh, me too,’ I said without thinking.
    ‘Really? Art college? For you?’
    ‘Are you calling this lovely lady a swot?’ said Justin, adding white sugar to the top of his float.
    ‘No,’ said Ethan. ‘We can discover our inner debauchery together.’
    ‘Maybe not strictly together,’ I said.
    ‘No,’ said Ethan.
    ‘I’m going to be fashion designer,’ said Stanzi. ‘All the great designers are Italian.’
    ‘Except for the French ones,’ I said.
    ‘I am going to be Di Ruggerio Designs. Fantastic.’
    ‘I don’t want to be rude,’ said Justin, ‘but you wear a Darius T-shirt over your school shirt every single day.’
    Smiling, I looked out the window. Fallon was walking past, on her own. She looked annoyed and was kicking a leaf out of her way. I soon realised why: she’d clocked us all, sitting in the window. I stared at her until she lifted her gaze and saw me.
    ‘Come over,’ I mouthed, beckoning. She flipped me the bird and I smiled at her. This was nuts.
    ‘Come in!’ I mouthed again.
    After a pause, she turned into the caff.
    Kendall and Stanzi budged up for her, after Stanzi shot me a ‘what the hell are you doing?’ glance.
    ‘Coke?’ I asked pleasantly.
    ‘Diet,’ she said.
    It was fun. It really was. It took me out of myself, my choices. We were invincible, we could do anything, we were all ready to take on the world. And as Justin and I walked home in the golden evening sunlight, I really was just a schoolgirl, swinging a book bag, tugging at the tie I once again tied without thinking about it.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ Justin asked me.
    ‘Um, I …’
    But before I could answer, he leaned over and kissed me, right in the middle of the street. It was a stupid thing to do. We were just across the road from his house. In the daytime. Anyone could walk past. My parents, Tashy, Clelland … After a second I squirmed out of his grip.
    ‘This is silly,’ I said.
    ‘Silly how?’ he asked and bent back over.
    ‘Just … silly.’
    He rolled his eyes and looked surprised.
    ‘Silly … how? And he smiled again and gently stroked my neck in a way that felt oddly familiar. I closed my eyes. I could feel he was gradually moving in towards me. I kept my eyes closed. He gently kissed me on the side of the neck. It felt wonderful. The sunny autumn day was reduced to a dazzle behind my eyes as I gave in to the feeling of Justin’s lips and his body pressing up against me.
    I gave myself up to it completely. His soft, young lips, his seventeen-year-old body. I felt the lean hard muscle through his T-shirt, well on his way to becoming a man. His mouth was salty and soft and hard at the same time and tasted as good as … as good as … no, I was not going to think about the last time I’d been kissed like this, under an