miss you so much, you know?"
She gave in to the anguish and broke down in floods of tears, leaving herself drained but somehow liberated.
As the torment began to subside, her lips forced themselves into a wry smile as she remembered how much joy her mother had brought her.
Chantal was in Year 6. Until that year she had always been shy around boys, but in Year 6 everything changed.
There was a knock on the door during Maths. It was the caretaker, and with her was the most handsome boy Chantal had ever seen. He had fair hair and blue eyes. Just looking at his smile made her feel good.
"This is Davide," the caretaker announced.
The teacher nodded at the caretaker and took up the story. "Davide has come from Veneto. He'll be joining our class from today."
From that moment on, Chantal learned nothing more about decimals, fractions, multiplication or division. From the minute he entered the classroom, she didn't take her eyes off that boy for a second.
Within weeks, it was as if they'd known each other all their lives, grown up together and played the same games in the same playground.
One breaktime, he asked her to follow him. So she did. He led her almost to the bottom of the park, where there stood two enormous trees. He told her to close her eyes and count to ten before opening them again.
"Why?" she asked, bursting with intrigue.
"I have a surprise for you," Davide announced, flashing her that smile of his.
"You're not going to play a trick on me, are you?"
"No! Trust me. Just close your eyes."
Chantal closed her eyes and began to count.
One, two, three...
Just as she reached nine, her voice was smothered as something pressed against her lips. She was startled and wanted to open her eyes, but she realised what was happening and kept them closed.
Not only that, she reciprocated.
It was her first kiss. Their magical moment was rudely interrupted by the sound of the school bell. As she opened her eyes, he said: "I like you."
They returned to class in silence, totally wrapped up in each other, and as the lesson unfolded Chantal was certain that she knew less then than she had when she'd first laid eyes on Davide.
At the end of school, she got on the bus and went home. She couldn't eat a thing: her stomach was so full of butterflies flitting about that there was no room for anything else.
Her mother asked her what the matter was, and suddenly she had a crazy thought. Her expression turned sullen and her mother urged her to get whatever was bothering her off her chest.
Chantal was afraid her mother would shout at her, but eventually she decided to speak.
She said she was worried she was pregnant.
"Pregnant?" her mother repeated, with eyes as wide as saucers. "And what makes you think you might be pregnant?"
Chantal hesitated.
"You know the friend I've been telling you about over the last few days? The new kid?"
"Yeeeesss."
She looked down at the floor to avoid her mother's gaze.
"He kissed me today. On the lips."
Her mother waited a few seconds and, once she was sure her little girl had nothing more to add, asked:
"And then what?"
"Nothing. That was it. We kissed on the lips for five minutes. Non-stop. And with our eyes closed!"
Her mother smiled affectionately at her, but it was a smile that also betrayed a ruefulness that her little girl would soon become a young woman. She took her daughter's face in her hands and explained to her, calmly and in very simple terms, what needed to happen for a woman to get pregnant.
"Pregnant because of a kiss?" she finished, "oh Chanty!"
"But Mamma, I thought th..."
Her mother smiled at her warmly. "You're so naive, Chanty. Just like your mother. "You and me, we're like two drops of water."
As Chantal opened her eyes, she raised a finger to her lips and smiled. She wiped her cheeks dry and looked once more at the smiling face of her mother, who had been right yet again.
CHAPTER 6
He looked in the mirror.
His eyes were so lifeless that the blue of his irises appeared as black as the pupil inside them.
He opened his mouth slightly and stared at the prominent cavity on one of his incisors. Goodness knows how many years the tooth had been blighted by that hideous brown mark.
He couldn't care less. He was on a mission.
If he didn't smile, no one would see it - simple as that. He had begun to use his dental defect as a way of passing the time and relieving tension. The thrill - or perhaps it was pain - he experienced when he flicked at the cavity with his tongue was arousing. Sometimes, it even gave him a hard-on.
He stared at his swollen red ear lobe, and then shifted his gaze to the other one, which was as white as the rest of him.
He had no idea why he only ever scratched and butchered his right lobe.
Initially, it was an unconscious response to the pain emanating from his tooth. The tic had stayed with him ever since. It wasn't an attractive habit, he knew that much, so he tried to make sure he only ever did it when he was alone.
It gave him such a thrill...not as much as rubbing his tongue against the cavity, mind.
He scratched his right lobe and slowly slid his tongue over the decayed incisor. He weighed up which gave him more pleasure and decided that it was indeed the tongue on the cavity, by some distance. No contest.
He looked once more at his reflection. His hair was totally dishevelled. He dipped his fingers into a tub of gel and retrieved a small amount, which he carefully applied to the tips of his short hair.
Now he was ready.
Although he kept staring at himself in the mirror, his mind was elsewhere. On his mission. His obsession. He removed his phone from his pocket and re-read the message.
It was time. To hell with the arguments. It was all water under the bridge. Some things were more important.
He slid the phone back into his pocket and walked out of the room.
He needed to get a move on.
CHAPTER 7
She was still wondering whether to accept his job offer. If she said yes, she'd have to leave her hometown behind for...months? Years?
