Lifesaving for Beginners

surprise in his room. Sweets. Tells him not to come down until he finds them.
    ‘That’s not nice,’ I say. ‘You haven’t hidden any sweets up there. Have you?’
    Elliot says, ‘Don’t worry. We won’t be long.’ He smiles his beautiful smile. He pulls my T-shirt up, undoes my bra. He calls my breasts tits. He says, ‘Your tits are gorgeous.’ He takes a nip out of each of them. Then undoes the button on my jeans, pulls the zip down. He is right. It doesn’t take long.
    I say, ‘We have to use johnnies the next time, OK?’ I don’t care about the next time. I’m glad the sex bit is out of the way. Now I can concentrate. On being in love. This is where the good stuff is.
    But there is no next time. The next day at school he looks away when I catch his eye in history. The day after, in the canteen, I say, ‘Hi!’ as I walk past the table where he is sitting with his friends. He ignores me and his friends snigger, as if I have something on my face. Ketchup, maybe. Or mayonnaise. I go into the toilets. Check myself in the mirror. There is nothing. Nothing on my face.
    After school, I walk home with Minnie. She says, ‘Nicola Moriarty told me that Porter’s after dumping you. True or false?’
    If Nicola Moriarty said it, then it must be true. I nod my head. ‘I think so.’
    Minnie punches the top of my arm with her fist in a rare public display of affection. ‘At least you didn’t do it with him, right?’
    Humiliation burns like acid. I think of Elliot Porter telling his friends. Telling them everything. Laughing at me. I wish I were dead.
    I say, ‘No, of course not.’ I want to tell her. But I can’t. She’ll feel sorry for me. I know she will. And if Minnie Driver feels sorry for you, things are bad.
    Two weeks later, he’s going out with Melissa Hegarty, a sixth-year doing a roaring trade in fourth-years, and a reputation for being ‘fast’.
    Minnie says, ‘How could you not know you’re up the duff ?’
    I sit on the stool in the cubicle in O’Connor’s Jeans in the Ilac Centre. I shake my head. I have no idea.
    In my bedroom, I play the Scorpion’s ‘Still Loving You’ from their Love at First Sting album, over and over and over again, the needle scratching deeper and deeper into the groove until you can nearly see the tip of it poking out the other side. I wear baggy Frankie T-shirts that fall to my knees and hide the safety pin that now strains across the waistband of my Levi’s.
    Sometimes, in the gap between Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms , Minnie asks the question: ‘What are we going to do?’ She says ‘we’. I am pathetic with gratitude. I am not alone.
    We don’t say much during those two months, Minnie and I. We spend a lot of time together. Even more than usual, I mean. We listen to music, we smoke out of my bedroom window, we play Snakes and Ladders with Ed.
    Ed notices. He says, ‘You’re fat, Kat. You’re really fat.’
    And Mum, not looking up from her notebook, says, ‘Edward, that’s rude. You don’t tell ladies they are fat.’
    Ed says, ‘But what if they are?’
    She doesn’t answer. Just sighs and returns to her office. Dad sits in his study. I pop corn in a hot, oily pot and me and Ed sit on the couch like puddings, with the bowl of popcorn between us, watching Mork and Mindy .
    Ed says, ‘You’re going to get even fatter now, Kat,’ nodding at my hand on its way to my mouth with its cargo of warm, buttery popcorn. I nod and Ed smiles. He is not rude. He is right.
    I skip school, citing innocuous ailments that need no formal medical intervention: sore throats, period pains, a cold, headaches. I vary them, so nobody notices.
    Mum is away again. A book tour in America and Canada. Her book is called The Ten-thirty from Heuston . Short stories.
    When Dad gets home from work, he says, ‘How are you feeling?’
    I say, ‘Better, thanks,’ and he nods and says, ‘Good, good,’ before picking up his briefcase and walking, in his vague, distracted way, into the study.
    Mrs Higginbotham scrapes half my dinner into the bin. She says, ‘You’re off your food, Kat-Nap,’ which is what she called me when I was a kid and sometimes still does. ‘What’s the matter?’
    I say, ‘Sore throat,’ or ‘Cramps in my tummy,’ or ‘I had something to eat at Minnie’s house,’ and Mrs Higginbotham fixes me with her steely stare and then, for a moment, I think: she knows. She knows everything. And I feel a