’ I agreed, my voice one of six or seven chorusing confirmation. Sally went on, ‘Look at that crusty she's with!’Īnita's friend on the outside sported a nose-ring, and wore a grubby poncho. We all agreed that yes, Anita was a loser. King and Queen condemning a leper, they nodded towards Anita, who stood down by the fence that marked the boundary of the oval, sharing a surreptitious cigarette with a passing civilian. ‘I reckon,’ agreed Sally, opening her Mars bar. ‘Fuck, she's a loser!’ said Rachel in disgust. My skin meant very little to me, in those days. I laughed along with them, through my nose, contemptuously, abandoning my skin to the full light of the sun. So I squared my shoulders, and sat as I always did with the rest of the group. The others made fun of Gothic Anita, the witch of Year Ten, with her talcum-powdered face.

Rachel always sat in the hottest spot she could find. I was frightened of that pitiless, slow sense of burning, the creeping pinkness on the back of my neck. I would have preferred to sit in the shade. Those few stragglers-like me-who arrived too late to get a spot on the bench had to sit on the ground. Before me, a row of girls perched on the rickety wooden bench. I sat cross-legged on the grass, nibbling at my thin vegemite sandwiches. I met my friends for lunch behind the library. The recess before I met you passed like any other.

My whole life was geared around avoiding it. A ring of empty space would start to form around me as the people shrank away, and I'd be left standing on my own, irrefutably alien. I kept assuming that eventually, inevitably, I'd be standing in a crowded place and suddenly everyone would start shifting uncomfortably and turning their heads at the smell of other. I was, as always, amazed at my ability to blend in with the masses of us. Red trim pointed like an arrow at our bellies. We also had semi-transparent V-necked white shirts. They were off-red, and looked the way the name sounded. The little shorts were called ‘scungies’. They showed your bum when you bent over, so you had to wear little shorts underneath. They were horrible, scanty, red-pleated things, obviously designed by a pervert. I'm not for one second suggesting that my legs were what you were after. I suppose, at the very beginning, you must have seen my legs. The very beginning seems so long ago, though. I know you think you're to blame for what happened.

Innocents by Cathy Coote