Act Your Age

by Eve Dangerfield

A warm hand closed over her arm and Kate found herself face-to-face with an extra irritated Maria. “You told your teammates about Tyler Henderson?” she asked.

  So much for her big escape. “No, well, kind of,” Kate said. “I told them I was seeing someone from work.”

  Maria’s lips thinned. “Are you seeing someone from work? I was under the impression you were having casual daddy-daughter sex with a forty-five-year-old man who happens to be your boss.”

  “Maria!” Kate glanced around to see if anyone had heard, but mercifully everyone was still bitching out Rapunzel for blowing the whistle. “I didn’t mean to tell them about Ty. They guessed I was seeing someone and I panicked.”

  Maria’s fierce expression softened slightly. “I understand you wanting to bond with them, Katie, but telling more people about Tyler is only going to raise your expectations even higher than they already are.”

  Kate looked down at her pink and black skates. “I know, but I just—”

  “We still haven’t discussed how this situation has progressed,” Maria said. “Are you free after practice? You should come to my place for dinner.”

  Her heart sinking, Kate opened her mouth to say ‘yes, I’m free’ when, over Maria’s shoulder, she saw Casey and Tam trying to steal Rapunzel’s whistle while Gilly filmed them on her phone. All four of them were laughing. They looked so happy, so careless and unlikely to lecture her for sleeping with a gorgeous older man. So Kate did something bad. She smiled at Maria and said, “I’d love to have dinner, but the girls just invited me out for drinks.”

  It wasn’t technically a lie. The team usually went to Rumba Bar after training on Thursdays, she’d just never gone along.

  Maria glanced over at the girls’ play-fight and frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? They’ll only grill you about Tyler.”

  And you won’t? Kate shoved the angsty thought aside. “I joined the team to learn how to be friends with women. It’s been three years; I think I might be ready to go out for drinks.”

  Maria didn’t smile. “Very well. Come and help me pull out the mats for stretching, please.”

  She was pissed, but Kate didn’t have enough emotional space to feel bad, she needed to confront one of her greatest personal fears. She skated over to the girls whose play fight appeared to be wrapping up out of sheer exhaustion.

  “Macca!” Tam said, draping her arm across Kate’s shoulder. She smelled incredible, like vanilla and spice. “Did you see me kick this big bitch in the shins?”

  “No, but you smell amazing.” The moment the dorky compliment left her mouth, Kate was mortified, but Tam grinned.

  “Thanks, it’s a body butter my mum makes. Hey, want to come out for drinks tonight?”

  Kate couldn’t believe it was that easy. “Um, okay?”

  “Excellent! Do you like espresso martinis?”

  “I’ve never had one.”

  “So you are a virgin.” Rapunzel shoved Kate in her side. “And tonight we’ll collectively pop your cherry.”

  Tam gave her a look of disgust. “Don’t worry about her. We muzzle her outside the stadium.”

  Rapunzel smacked her friend on the ass. “You wish. How fucking kinky are you, anyway?”

  “Very,” Tam shouted back. “You know that.”

  Rumba Bar courted the derby crowd; they gave players half-price drinks and let them wear their skates on the battered hardwood floors. Kate figured the short shorts and counter-culture vibe was good for business; the place was packed. She crammed herself into a booth between Tam and Rapunzel and despite her plan to eat something before drinking, was sipping an espresso martini in five seconds flat. Turned out they were just cold vodka coffees, but she liked the taste. Despite Maria’s prediction that she would be grilled about Ty, the girls didn’t even mention him. They started teasing one another about their derby names instead.

  “I get that you wanted a witch theme,” Rapunzel said to Casey. “But Hermione Maim-Her? That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “You can fucking talk! Your name is just ‘Rapunzel.’ That’s not a play on words, that’s just what we call you.”

  “You try thinking of a play on words about Rapunzel then.”

  “My derby name is perfect.” Tam raised her martini glass as though toasting herself.

  Rapunzel scoffed. “You stole it. There are about fifty thousand Foxxy Balboas in America. Face it, the only person on the team who has a cool original name is Mac.”

  Kate almost spat out her vodka coffee. “Seriously?”

  “Hell yeah. Princess Bleach, how’d you come up with that?”

  Kate felt her smile stiffen like day-old bread. “I’m, um, the youngest kid in my family. Everyone used to call me Princess.”

  The rest of the girls at the table gave her big ‘nawww’ smiles, telling her she’d sounded convincingly cheerful. Kate wondered what they’d say if she told them the term had never been one of endearment.

  Her dad was one of those Catholics who took the lords name in vain, plucked two dollar coins out of shopping center fountains, never went to church and invoked his religion whenever the subject of birth control was raised. Child after child he told her mother she’d soon be too old to get pregnant and he didn’t need to offend the big man in the sky by getting a vasectomy. Her dad didn’t know shit. At the age of forty-seven Brenda McGrath fell pregnant with her ninth kid.

  Kate was five years younger than her nearest sister, Claudia. All her older siblings thought they were done enduring screaming, shitting babies. They welcomed her as one would welcome a sex offender into a community swimming pool, which was to say, not at all. Once, when he was drunk, her brother Josh had told her they planned to smother her. “We picked out a blanket and everything, but then mum found out and stopped us.”

  Kate grew up fully aware no one wanted her to be born. That would have been bad enough, but she’d cried a lot, slept poorly and struggled to make friends. That was the undiagnosed ADHD, but her family didn’t know that. They thought she was a brat. Her parents were exhausted by then, completely over the whole child-rearing lark. All they wanted was for her to shut up and stay out of their way. Because she couldn’t, because she made things hard, Kate became the little princess. As in, “Suck it up, Princess. Stop crying, Princess. Hurry up, Princess. Mummmm, Princess locked herself in the bathroom again.”

  Kate wasn’t sure why she’d chosen Princess as her derby name. Maybe she was trying to reclaim it, maybe the word had been drilled so deep, it was the first thing she’d considered labelling herself when she was asked to choose a name. The only thing she knew was that ‘Princess Bleach’ was a better derby name than her other childhood monikers; ‘Runty,’ ‘Spaz-basket’ and ‘Dipshit Magee.’

  Mercifully the conversation steered away from derby names and toward who was the most fuckable ‘90s rock star. Kate sipped her vodka coffee and had just put forward Gavin Rossdale (unfortunate band, gorgeous face) when Casey squealed, “Maria! I didn’t know you were coming!”

  Kate’s stomach dropped. Sure enough their coach was squeezing herself into the booth beside Gilly. “I felt like unwinding so I called my babysitter,” she said. “What are we all drinking?”

  Another round of espresso martinis was ordered, and the conversation picked up again, this time with Maria at the helm. Soon the whole team was laughing at her stories and discussing sex and BDSM and politics. Kate couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She felt irrelevant and completely out of place. She was probably being paranoid but it also felt like Maria was shutting her out of the conversation. When she hit the bottom of her second martini, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and decided she’d leave. It had been silly of her to come to Rumba for drinks, as though she could just make friends with all these cool, uninhibited women. She exited the bathroom stall and walked straight into Maria’s velvet-covered boobs. “Sugar!”

  Maria barely seemed to notice, her dark eyes were wild. “Katie,
are you upset with me?”

  Kate didn’t know what to say. The obvious answer was ‘yes,’ but she didn’t know if she should say it. Maria looked so upset and really, what had she done? Ask after her, invite her to dinner and then come to the same social gathering Kate had been at. How was that a crime? “No, I’m not.”

  “Thank the lord,” Maria beamed at her. “Come back to the table and hang out with the rest of the team.”

  “That’s okay. I’m probably going to head home.”

  “Why? I only just got here!”

  Kate walked over to the graffitied rack of sinks and turned taps until she found one that worked. “I’m sorry,” she said to the Maria in the cracked mirror. “I’m, um, seeing Ty tonight.”

  Mirror-Maria’s smile faded. She walked closer, bringing with her the plum of her perfume and the faint acrylic scent of her freshly varnished nails. “You know it’s a vulnerable position you’re putting yourself in. Even pretending to be violated can take an emotional toll.”

  “I know,” Kate said. “But it’s been amazing. I have zero complaints.”

  A small huffing noise. “How is he at aftercare?”

  Truthfully, Kate didn’t know. In all the BDSM books Maria made her read, aftercare was listed as cuddles and kisses, emotional reassurance, and skin-to-skin contact. Kate wasn’t sure if watching documentaries and having a few drinks counted, nor did that weird thing where Ty wrapped her really tightly in a blanket, but she couldn’t tell Maria that.

  “He’s great at aftercare,” she said with a chirpiness that sounded weak even to her own ears.

  Mirror-Maria looked unimpressed. “Very convincing.”

  Kate sighed. “Okay, I get that I’ve never done this before and I don’t have anything to compare it to, but the sex is great and w e’re having a lot of fun.”

  “You’re using condoms?”

  Kate felt like Maria was hunting for something to get annoyed about. “Yes.”

  “What about for oral?”

  “No. He offered, but I hate the way they taste.”

  “Is he going down on you?”

  Kate winced. That was another danger zone. Ty had never put his mouth near or around her pussy and never expressed any interest in doing so. “Yeah, he uh, loves doing it.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh my gosh, what’s with the Spanish Inquisition, Maria?” Kate walked over to the hand towels and tore off a sheet with more force than was required.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding it. “I just don’t trust this man.”

  Kate dried her hands and threw the towel in the overflowing bin. “I get that, but you don’t need to worry. I think Ty and I are becoming friends.”

  Maria scoffed. “Friends? Like you were friends with all the boys at your school? Like you were friends with Mr Peterson?”

  It took a few seconds for the insult of what she was saying to sink in, but once it did, Kate felt something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. A thin red vein of anger wrapping itself around her like a jellyfish tentacle.

  “No,” she said. “Not like that.”

  She turned and walked toward the door. Maria dashed in front of her and blocked her exit. “Katie, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Kate agreed, but the look of agonized contrition on Maria’s face bled some of the heat out of her anger. “I get why you don’t trust Ty, but you need to understand this isn’t like what I did at school or…afterward. This is different. I know what I’m doing now.”

  Maria took her still-damp hand and squeezed it. “Just give me some time, Katie. Be patient. You mean so much to me, I don’t want to see this man hurt you.”

  Kate made herself smile. She was good at that. “I know.”

  They shared a slightly uncomfortable hug and Kate went back to the booth to retrieve her sports bag. The other girls were tipsy, and Kate knew her leaving wasn’t going to affect them in the slightest. Feeling depleted and headachy from the espresso martinis, she slipped out of Rumba and into the frosty night. She checked her phone and found a text from Ty.

  I’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes. I had better see those skates tonight, Middleton.

  She smiled at her screen, relieved to feel something as uncomplicated as lust. Then, as though her brain was determined to ruin it, something occurred to her. The guys at work had given her another princess nickname—Middleton—and no one called her Middleton more than Ty. Aside from when they were role playing, that was all he called her. As she stood on the cold street, Kate wondered why that was. It could have been a quirk, but something about it felt a little strange, the same way him never going down on her, or taking off his clothes when they were having sex was strange. Her own words to Maria echoed in her head. I think Ty and I are becoming friends. She shoved her phone back into her pocket, feeling stupid.

  Chapter 10

  Mr Peterson was in charge of the Willow Street carpool. When Kate was thirteen, he bought a battered old Kombi Van and offered to drive all the kids on his street to school.

  “It’s no problem,” he told her mum. “I work from home and I’m always going up and back to pick up Deidre; this way it benefits all of us.”

  It wasn’t a hard sell. The other parents were only too happy to give Mr Peterson ten bucks a week for petrol and let him chauffeur their kids, Kate’s parents included. They didn’t care that their daughter would have literally sat on nails to avoid riding in what her brother Mick had already dubbed ‘Rape on Wheels.’

  “You’ll bloody well take the van and be grateful for it,” her mum had said when Kate begged for Rape on Wheels-free rides. “I’m not driving you forty minutes each way because you think you’re too good to go with everyone else.”

  Kate tried to tell her mum it wasn’t because of that, it was because Deidre Peterson called her ‘Accident’ and had once taken a poem out of her diary and read it aloud so that everyone laughed at her. Her mum—who was from a generation that believed bullying was entirely the fault of the spineless victim—snorted and said, “You’re not a baby anymore, Princess, you’re about to start high school. It’s time to grow up.”

  Her first trip in Rape on Wheels had gone as well as could be expected; she immediately sat on an unwrapped peanut butter sandwich Deidre had put on her seat.

  Every kid in the van started laughing, including Mick and her sister Claudia. Deidre then stood up and took a picture of her stained ass with her phone. “Sorry, Accident,” she said. “It was just an accident.”

  For the next forty minutes, Kate fought back tears, wondering what she’d do when she got to school with what looked like a shit stain on the back of her dress.

  When the van pulled up at Point Cook Secondary, she’d stayed in her seat as the other kids got out snickering.

  “Wagging, are we, princess?” Mick asked as he walked past.

  Kate nodded. If she hid, Mr Peterson might not see her and she could go back to Shell Street with him and sneak home. Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on her side.

  “Katie,” Mr Peterson said, sticking his head in the back of the van. “Come on, you need to go to school.”

  “I can’t,” she said, pent up tears leaking out of her eyes.

  “I know it’s scary but you’ll have a great time, I promise.”

  “It’s not that. Deidre…I sat on a sandwich. It’s all over my dress and it looks like…please don’t make me go out there?”

  She’d expected him to yell at her, to tell her to suck it up and stop being such a whiny precious princess, but he hadn’t. He’d smiled at her. “No problem. We’ll get this sorted out in no time. Wait here.”

  Kate had watched as he jogged toward the front office, utterly terrified he was calling her mum. He wasn’t. He returned two minutes later waving a blue and white checkered school dress like a flag.

  “It’s from lost and found. It might be a bit big, but it’ll fit,” he sai
d, handing it to her. “Pull down the blinds and get changed, I’ll keep watch outside.”

  Kate climbed out of the Kombi van feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. It was then she saw how handsome Mr Peterson was, with his thick hair and twinkly green-grey eyes. Like a movie star. She’d never really met anyone handsome before and now that she had, she couldn’t stop staring. He was so big and hard and young. How was he Deidre’s dad? He looked more like Kate’s brothers than her bald, perpetually scowling father.

  “Are you okay?” Mr Peterson had asked.

  “Yes,” Kate told her shoes. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime, Katie…” Mr Peterson knelt down and looked her right in the eyes. As they looked at one another, Kate felt something zap from her belly into what her mum called her ‘secret place.’

  “This afternoon, I think you should sit up front with me,” Mr Peterson said. “What do you think?”

  Kate smiled. “I think that would be good.”

  After that, Kate always rode up front with Mr Peterson, mornings and afternoons, five days a week. They’d talked about everything: books, movies, politics, the news. Mr Peterson never patronised her; if she didn’t understand something, he explained how the stock market or hydroponics or the Houses of Parliament worked. When he found out she loved studying complex systems he loaned her books like The Soul of a New Machine and The Design of Everyday Things. As Kate got older, he started teasing her about her nail polish and multicoloured hair, her failed attempts to show other girls she was just like them.

  “You’re becoming a rebel without a cause, Katie. Soon you’ll be too cool to ride up front with me.”

  Kate had never experienced teasing that didn’t come with the rubber band flick of dislike. She liked it. She told Mr Peterson maybe she wouldn’t want to sit up front with him because he was an old man and he’d laughed so loud, all the other kids in the van stared.

  When Kate was fifteen, she won a statewide geography competition. Upon seeing her certificate her dad had told her it was rigged. “They wanted to give the prize to a girl. That’s how things are these days.”