That girl

I counted back.

If I was in grade 12 then she was in grade nine.

She was confident. She taught me to drive a little, but that is perhaps another story.

She said "If I were gay I would be out and proud" and I lay beside her in my tightly wound desire and I stretched out a finger and I touched her leg and maybe she felt it. Maybe she was just pretending to be asleep. And I took my pyjama bottoms off because it was so hot, but we still lay under the sheet and I thought perhaps that one time she touched me too, but I can't be sure. I was pretending to be asleep, and it was such a shy touch anyway.

So we woke in the morning, although I had been awake the whole time and I imagined that her tiredness was the same, taught, longing. But it probably wasn't.

Don't we pretend so many things?

We say that we are one thing when we mean another.

Aren't we such silly human creatures?

And I wonder if she ever thinks about me now, but she has moved on probably, and I wasn't the first person to touch her leg. She had kissed a boy, so many years before I ever wanted one. And it wasn't till years later that I kissed a girl.