Lunch Money

I didn't know that it was about sex. Our uniforms, the ugly blue check, the sack-dresses, the horrid puffiness of my new breasts all hid the fact from me, but I know better now. The thing with Richard was about sex. It started innocently enough, a tall boy standing over me, the shortest girl in the class and demanding my lunch money. I didn't have lunch money. I didn't have any money at all. I brought my sandwiches wrapped up in Glad Wrap, sweaty from my bag, smelling like damp socks and sweaty banana.
"I'll have your sandwiches then."and to prove it, Richard pinched me hard enough to bruise. I gave him my sandwiches. I was the fat girl. I wasn't about to starve. I ate too much at breakfast and at dinner and I hid around the corner of the building at recess and lunch so that no one would pick on me. That is where he found me, hidden away and furious.
"Give me your sandwiches,"and when I'd given them to him he pinched me again.
Bruises sprung up like a plague. Little patches of blue and purple that I stroked and prodded in Maths class. In science they became constellations of stars, black holes, planets orbiting my elbow. Sometimes at night I pressed my legs together and thought about Richard. I was overwhelmed by the complexity of my feelings for him. Sad that he did not have a lunch box of his own. Frightened that he would pinch me harder next time I saw him, flattered by the attention. None of the other boys paid any attention to me at all. Something was developing between Richard and I and it made me wary.

Then there was the day when Richard was not there. The lunch bell had rung. I was sitting in my usual place, reading, wearing my ugly government issue horn-rimmed glasses. All of it just like any other day. And like any other day I was waiting for Richard. I could barely concentrate on my book. My lunch was on the bench beside me. I looked over and saw the moisture running off the underside of the plastic. The sandwiches looked limp and inedible. I had long since grown out of lunch-time hunger. My lunches were no longer for me. They were for Richard. I waited for Richard until, reluctantly, I closed the book and thrust it into my school case. Maths next. I could barely concentrate on long division. I loved long division. But there was Richard, sitting sullen, brooding in the back of the classroom where he always sat and it was as if I had suddenly ceased to mean anything at all too him. He didn't look in my direction. He didn't even sneer or look threateningly, or seem to notice me.

Lunch time. Another lunch time. Another and another. And this is how a relationship ends. A disappointment of space between us. Bruises fading. Lunches mouldering in the bin uneaten. I had given up on the possibility of Richard rounding the far corner at the bottom end of the school. When the shadow fell on my tatty paperback I was genuinely surprised.

Richard. The tallest, meanest boy in the class standing slumped and crumpled looking in front of me. I had already thrown my sandwich in the bin. I thought about rummaging around in it, but it was too late, really. There would be ants, and all the rules had changed. He was my ex-bully. Something distant and belonging to someone else. For all I knew he had eaten little Wendy Lee's lunch instead.
He sat beside me and I shuffled away because that is what you are supposed to do, but I felt like draping my arm around his shoulder. He seemed much less of himself than I remembered. He seemed depleted.
He showed me his penis. No preamble, no 'I'll show you mine' just a quick shuffle in his ugly faded blue shorts and something lying in his lap like a dead baby bird. I glanced. Just a glance. I knew that it was something private, lying there in a little nest of downy hair. I didn't look too hard and eventually he put it away.
"Do you want my lunch?" I asked him, already moving towards the rubbish bin and the ants and the limp, abandoned bread.
He shook his head.
"No," he said, "It's all right." And he stood up, shifted his school bag higher on his shoulder and was gone.