beautiful monsters

Lola

The moment Daz walked into assembly, he knew his life was about to change forever.

She was sitting in the third row of seniors. The loose ringlets framing her face reminded him a bit of a Christmas card angel. Amidst the pale, pimply kiwi girls her skin seemed to glow.

Daz stumbled blindly to a seat and collapsed, letting his school bag sink between his knees. She was two rows in front of him now, and a little to the right. In the noisy hall he couldn’t make out the sound of her laughter, but he could see it rippling through her curls as her shoulders trembled.

Daz closed his eyes and let the realisation tingle through his body. He was in love.

*

“Lola,” Marama said at lunchtime.

“Huh?” Daz turned and stared at her blankly. Marama was his best mate, well, his best girl mate anyway. She was practically one of the guys.

“The new girl.” Marama rolled her eyes and sat down on the bench beside Daz.

“Her name’s Lola. She’s an exchange student from Mexico.”

“How…?”

“She’s in some of my classes, how do you think?” She threw her banana skin at him, and it landed on his knee.

“Gross.” Daz picked up the skin and dangled it in front of her. “No, I mean…”

“You’ve been staring at her all day, Lover-Boy. I’m not stupid.” She grabbed the skin and threw it into the bin behind him. “So aren’t you going to ask me about the rest of my holiday?”

“Yeah. Meet any cute babes?” After a few beers on New Years, Marama had told him that she was bi. Daz thought it was pretty cool, it meant they could babe-watch together.

“As if I’d tell you,” she snorted. “You’d just want to perve at them.”

“Yeah,” Daz grinned. “Speaking of perving,” he glanced across the courtyard. “What classes was she in?”

Marama folded her arms and raised one eyebrow. “Art, actually. And she’s helping out in the Spanish class.”

“Art.” Daz didn’t turn to look at Marama as he spoke. “Funny you should mention that. I was thinking about changing to art. And I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish.”

He could almost trace the outline of her bra underneath the thin uniform shirt.

*

Daz tried to turn his attention back to Mr Herrick’s integrations, but the numbers kept swimming around the whiteboard. How was he supposed to understand integration if the numbers wouldn’t keep still?

Daz was all for integration. Wasn’t that what the principal had been going on about? Racial integration, bringing people of all different cultures together in one school. But he couldn’t work out what that had to do with the curves Mr Herrick was drawing on the board.

He'd spent most of the class trying to spell something out on his calculator. He’d got as far as

but then got stuck.

He couldn’t even remember if it was possible to do an A with a calculator.

Posted by Fionnaigh at August 14, 2003 12:52 AM