Kiss Kill

by Mawter, Jeni

  Jonno must have read my mind, ‘cause he leaned over and whispered, “Whiskey Charlie?” which is aviator slang for “Who cares?” He grinned as I answered in code, “Whiskey Delta” which is our way of calling someone a ‘Weak Dick’.

  “Dash Two to the rescue, over and out.”

  And it was then that I realised everyone needs a wingman.

  My wingman set his sights on the target and zoomed in saying in a voice loud enough for me to hear, “Luke. Mr V’s looking for you.” At the mention of Mr V, Luke jumped. He’d been waiting for this year’s soccer teams to go up and was gunning for captain.

  “S’cuse me,” said Luke to Elle. “Gotta go.”

  Give the man a round of applause. Jonno couldn’t have thought of a better diversionary tactic if he tried. “Hi. We’re in the same maths class.” It was at this point that Jonno did what only a real mate would do. Taking Elle by the elbow, he steered her in my direction. “And this is my best friend, Mat.”

  If he had’ve stopped there I’d have owed him big time. But he didn’t. He tacked on, “He fancies you.”

  I considered countering with a “Do not!” ‒ a natural defensive argument ‒ but it was a catch-22. Cut him down and get the final say, or cut her down and offend her.

  “Do not fancy you!”

  I hoped Elle knew that being mean is a sign of affection and is a boy tactic for hooking up. She had the last laugh. Looking me straight in the eye she announced, “Girls prefer bastards to wimps,” and walked away, leaving me soaring with hope.

  Why are mobile phones responsible for life’s worst moments?

  1, 2, 3, Blast Off

  Watching Elle in English inspires me to try to write a poem, exactly like Mrs Beanie is getting at when she says that poetry is a form of literary art where language is used for aesthetic and evocative qualities as well as meaning.

  Finger Porn

  The fingers flit across the keys

  The fingers skip across the keys

  The fingers flit and skip and trip

  Across me.

  I’m watching Elle’s fingers

  On the computer keys

  Not clicking and clacking

  Or hitting and tapping

  Touching lightly

  Touching free

  Oh to be that plastic.

  To be caressed by

  moving-on fingers

  dancing across letters

  Dancing across me

  Secrets to be revealed

  Cajoling and coaxing

  Caressing. Undressing

  She glances up, I smile

  She glances down

  And as I watch them falling and rising

  Rising then falling

  Up and down

  Up and down

  Faster, faster,

  Harder, harder

  Thrusting at those keys

  I know

  That finger porn is for me

  My finger porn poem made Mrs Beanie hyperventilate and gave her facial spasm. I thought she was up for rigor mortis for sure, but she recovered and gave me an assignment to write for punishment …

  Write an ode to someone you love, inspired by the quote below:

  To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Here goes:

  Ode to Elle

  You enter the room and my heart flutters. The butterflies swarm my stomach, my gut tingles from the caress of their wings. Every head turns, in homage to your beauty and magnificence. You are a vacuum, that sucks the oxygen from the air, creating that delicious dizziness from childhood fainting games.

  I look around the room, all eyes on you, the elixir of existence for which we are eternally searching. I flow with a sense of heightened well-being, a sense that I am beyond my senses. I experience this moment like a dreamer who knows he is dreaming while he is dreaming. One glimpse of you and I know that this moment is the most important moment in my life. No future time is better than now to let down my guard and love. Everything you do ripples outwards and effects everyone:

  Your breath radiates love.

  Your glance awakens joy.

  Your smile inspires freedom so that our hearts and minds can soar.

  My thoughts bend and melt and swirl together. The senses merge in an overload of transcendent happiness. I have an overwhelming sense of well-being. Of feelings bigger and stronger than I am. My body floods with warmth, my nose tingles, and I remind myself to breathe.

  I desire your closeness and contact, the urge so strong, you are a magnetic field charged with the force of my attraction.

  Part of me detaches, mesmerised by the mongrel hordes that surround you. Pathetic in their cravings. You are the pink pill to cure their blues. I can almost hear them struggling to love, peering with optimism through their veils of despair. What pathetic creatures they are! Retching with their pathological desire for euphoria.

  One look at you and the music magnifies, sounds I can now see and taste and smell. I’m freed from the confines of logic, like writing without the use of fingers or kicking without feet. I feel myself relax into the music. It soars and dives in an ecstatic echo of some forgotten dream. Oh happy dream, my new reality, my future. I am filled with a sense of the Divine, a feeling greater than the natural highs from exercise, laughter, touch or orgasms. You are the God I can trust:

  You are the heaven up above

  You are mystery in a glove

  You are wonder, awe and love.

  With you I know I can be fulfilled. I pity those fools who shun love, who seek aloneness to escape hurt or pain. This saving belief in love fuels me.

  Elle, you have sucked away my mind’s freedom, replaced it with sweet euphoric dreams instead and the only way to satisfy this addiction is to feed it with your presence.

  Mrs Beanie tells me this isn’t an ode.

  An ode is an effing personal poem!

  In front of the class she asks me where I was when brains were handed out.

  Flashback to a Second Grade Nothing

  Mr White holding my work up in front of the class.

  Mr White, the colour of purple.

  Telling the class this is an example of what you’re NOT meant to do.

  Ripping up my work and flinging it in the bin, all the while saying stuff, calling me messy, dirty, lazy.

  Dumb.

  He made me sit under his desk. He told everyone to look at the stupidest boy in the class.

  He went on and on and on. I remember flicking the scab on my knee.

  I can’t remember everything Mr White said but can I remember how good it felt to make my scab bleed.

  The text message when it came blew me out of the water.

  “Why me?” I ask Jonno. “Why not you, or someone else from your maths class?”

  “Maybe she likes you.”

  I feel elated sick.

  How Not to Kill a Purple Bug

  “You’re such a girl.”

  I gave Elle my most ungirly look – macho meets Rambo – crossed my eyes, jutted my jaw, went for the nasal flare.

  She laughed. “Girl.”

  I shrugged and went back to killing the bug.

  When I arrived with the homework for Elle, I couldn’t believe it when her mum sent me up to her bedroom. Talk about home delivery.

  She looked so pathetic, in a fluffy white robe, red socks and Ugg boots, but that quickly changed. After I opened the door, a bug flew in. “Get it out!” she screamed.

  Mozzies I can swipe. Cockroaches I can squish. Have been known to step on a spider, or two. But this little guy evaded me. It flew through Elle’s room like a hornet on heat, zip-zap-zipping, dodging Elle’s screams.

  I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, her Spice-is-Nice deodorant, and gave it a squirt. The smell reminded me of running through pine needles as a kid.

  The bug didn’t falter, charging through the mist with me as its target, chrrrrt-ing furiously.

/>   “Aaagh!” I swivelled out of the way, noting with some satisfaction that it was heading for Elle. “Duck!”

  Elle dive-bombed onto her bed. The bug hit the headboard and bounced off. Ka-tong. Elle hit the floor and rolled under the bed.

  The bug followed. Sksssssst.

  I busted a gut laughing.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek.”

  The bed was bedevilled. It thumped and jumped and grunted, occasionally spewing out a foot or a hand that was immediately repossessed.

  I reached in, grabbed a handful of clothes and yanked. Out came Elle, screaming and flailing at me, as if it was my fault.

  “Kill it!” she screeched, shoving me across the room as she headed for the hallway.

  “Where’d it go?”

  Elle pointed the finger. “Under there.”

  I peered under the bed, it was like Davy Jones’s locker under there, and scanned the murky depths.

  “Did you get it?”

  The bug lay curled up in the corner, covered in deodorant and everything else that was under the bed. Death by dust. Poor little critter. “It’s dead,” I announced to the disembodied voice coming from the hallway.

  The voice became a face as Elle peered around the doorway. “Are you sure? Maybe it’s just acting dead.”

  I studied the bug – shrivelled up legs, wonky antenna – thinking the belly-up position was a dead give-away. But as I reached to pick it up it waved its legs as if tap-dancing on air. “‘It’s alive!”

  I exited from under the bed to review my position. How was I going to get the sucker?

  “Hit it with a shoe,” came the helpful suggestion, but I was barefoot and the flimsy-excuse-for-a-sandal she handed me wouldn’t squash an ant. I searched the room. Where was a flame-thrower when you needed one? I remembered the time Dodgy tried to skewer this fly and how he ended up cutting its head off – walked around headless for ages – landed on Dodgy’s meat pie and got its revenge. I remembered the time at camp when we were invaded by wasps. I remembered the welt where one bit me and how I swore I’d never take on an insect again.

  But here I was.

  And there it was.

  Still under the bed.

  “Do something!” yelled Elle as an angry Tsssss filled the air. “You wuss. You big wimp. Are you scared?”

  Scared? I’m not scared. I’m the man.

  But just as a reached in to pick it up in my fingers like Tarzan would have done, it came crawling out, doing a death-march south. “It’ll be dead soon,” I announced, grabbing a boot by the door and raising it above my head.

  “Stop!”

  I glanced at Elle. “What?”

  Elle stepped into the room and bent to inspect the bug, her face so close I prayed it would start its jitterbug routine.

  “You can’t kill him,” said Elle, her voice a statement, not a question.

  “Why not?” I said.

  Elle looked at me and I swear the deadpan expression wasn’t an act.

  “It’s purple for a start. How can you kill a purple bug?”

  Purple.

  Go figure.

  Facebook Status Update from Elle

  Elle Taylor regrets asking for her homework to be delivered.

  Reaction to Elle’s Facebook Status

  What’s she mean by that? That she has a problem with the homework? Or the fact it was delivered? In which case, the problem would be me!

  Valentine’s Day

  I’m standing in the Newsagency the day before Valentine’s Day reading cards that say ‘I’m nuts about you’ and have a nutcracker on the front, or ‘I dig you’ with a picture of a shovel on the front, thinking whoever writes these things should be locked up, when I come to one that reads, ‘Love Sucks. Don’t waste your time’, and I burst out laughing. I can so relate to that.

  I think of all the Valentine’s Days I never got anything, not even a card, which is kind of fair in a way ‘cause I’ve never sent anything, and decide to change the status quo and send one to Elle. Most of them are vomit-making: Roses are red blah blah blah; Love Makes the World Go Round blah blah blah; You make my heart flutter blaa-a-h-h-h.

  Elle would laugh at me if I sent that. I decide her ridicule is not worth it and turn to leave when one catches my eye, ‘Love is blind’ and it reminds me of something Elle said ages ago. Inside it goes:

  A sticker on the removable plastic cover says this is braille for ‘I Love You’. I would normally never send this. I’m only sending it because Elle won’t be able to read braille. I buy the card, sign it ‘From Your Secret Admirer’ using my left hand so she can’t tell my handwriting, and early next morning slip it under the door of her school locker.

  From a distance, I watch as Elle opens her locker. $#+^! A whole stack of cards fall out. It seems like half the guys in our year have had the same corny idea as me. While ‘admiration en masse’ doesn’t thrill me, my guaranteed anonymity does.

  Text Message from Elle

  Text Message from Mat

  Text Message from Elle

  Silence from Mat.

  From WikiAnswers.com:

  Enter a question here …

  How do you show a girl you really like her?

  In: Relationships [Edit categories] [Edit]

  By talking to her. Don’t run her ear off but be nice smile freindly, talk to her. I mean don’t act like a stalker but be nice. Also just tell her... She may want a guy that is up front... Don’t muck around. And make sure you don’t act shy around her, because then she will think you not interested. Give her a present. Hold her hand. Kiss her. Give her a love bite.

  Mrs Potika says we should use one of our observations for critical evaluation, so here goes.

  Love Bite

  Whether you call a love bite a tattoo of love, a slag tag, or a tramp stamp, it doesn’t matter. When it comes right down to it, a love bite is just a bruise. The fact that the bruise is a blueberry-coloured blemish caused by serious internal bleeding is something I’d be prepared to forget in the pursuit of physical proof of my passion. And why would I want physical proof of my passion? Because it would show Elle that I’m attractive enough to be groped, that someone else could be so consumed with desire that they’d want to suck on my neck … enter a rabid state of altered consciousness … discover that pain can bring pleasure … and succumb to an animal desire to mark our territory.

  And ‘cause it would feel good.

  I realise that internal bleeding is studied in forensic criminology, usually with victims of homicide, but forensics would be over the top for calling a love bite internal bleeding. What they should realise is the fact that the skin is a canvas for the abstract expression of passion. A place to declare the shivery thrill of love.

  I was sitting on the lounge with Elle at Jonno’s place, trying to make conversation, when all I could think of was biting her neck. It was a particularly beautiful neck, with the sleek lines of a Lamborghini but the smoothness and colour of uncooked pizza base. Pizza. Yum.

  I’d read that the Kama Sutra says “if you can kiss it you can bite it” so I backtracked a bit and imagined kissing Elle’s neck. If you think about it, clamping your lips on someone’s throat is an odd thing to do, unless you live in Transylvania or you’re heavily into barnacle impersonations, but there is this primal urge to it: a caveman’s need to flag his sexual property; a teenager’s need for initiation to sex; the eternal sex, drugs, n’ rock ‘n roll quest. I wondered what part of the Kama Sutra my love bite would represent. Not the hidden bite, the swollen bite or the point, because those were usually made on the lower lip. I think the coral and the jewel comes the closest: the coming together of my lips (the coral) and my teeth (the jewel) on that smooth, smooth neck, although it would probably look more like a broken cloud than a jewel.

  I imagined Elle’s throat as a whitewash of sky and me filling it with clouds. Little nibbles for the alto-cumulus ones, a more open mouth for the cumulus and deep suction for the cumulo-nimbus. Here was my vocation. A landscape
artist! I got so carried away with the clouds and the whole Monet thing I forgot that I hadn’t really learned the basics, like snogging for a start. Oh, I’d pressed my lips softly against Lianne’s but the memory of teeth tussling with Tessa lay just below the surface and has haunted me since. As soon as I got to the head tilt with a new girl I’d be so busy trying to follow my own instructions that not much happened. It was so hard to be spontaneous with Don’t bump teeth. Vary the rhythm. Mouth not too wide. To use tongue tip or not? swirling about my head. And as for the next step – I was terrified.

  I’d heard Char once describe Nick’s French kissing as an electric eel caught in a fishing net, or Tyson’s ‘like kissing a rolled up wet newspaper’ and I didn’t want to bundled in with that lot. Up to now I’d done the only sensible thing and avoided it.

  But sitting with Elle on the lounge at Jonno’s place, I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever. I looked at Elle, laughing at Nadia’s joke. She seemed so confident, someone who’d never bash noses or miss lips, which was a great reason to begin with her. Her experience could cover-up my inexperience.

  “Not much of a talker, are you?” Elle was looking at me with an amused twinkle in her eye. I thought of saying the corny line ‘I’m a lover, not a talker’ but pulled myself up just in time. I watch far too much TV. What does she want me to talk about? Why do girls love to natter so much? I mean, what’s the point? Girls seem to need 20,000 words in a day but for me, I can get by with two. Long ago I figured out that nearly every question in life could be answered by a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.