Hot Little Hands Read Online Free PDF Page A

attention. There were posters behind them advertising films I’d never heard of, and the concession stand consisted of a basket of mixed-lolly bags, selling, the handwritten sign told us, for $1.50 each.
    The woman at the box office was glaring at us, as though we should be paying for the privilege of taking refuge in her dingy little foyer. As though he agreed, Mr. Ackerman went over and asked when the next movie started.
    “There’s one just started at four,” she told him. “Or the next one’s at five thirty.”
    “Should we hide out till the rain stops?” he asked me, and they both watched me nodding.
    “One adult and one child?” She coolly met his eyes.
    “Student.” We both reached for our wallets. “One adult and one student.”
    —
    The movie was a foreign one, old and black-and-white, and as we sneaked in he whispered that he’d seen it before. The plot was nonexistent and there were no effects or celebrities, it was just people talking. I ignored the subtitles and studied the main girl, who had cropped hair and sold newspapers on the street. I wondered if he found her attractive. Probably, but why? I was yet to work out exactly what it was that guys found sexy in women, but I knew whatever it was, I had it. My body was still boyish and small and straight up and down, but I knew that it was interesting to men. Not necessarily the guys from school, but other men. I’d known this fact for two years now, since the day on the train.
    I had felt them before I saw them, the man’s eyes on me. I had been sitting across from him and his family and looking out the window behind them, at the back fences and side streets, and the lights being turned off in small office buildings. Then, with a snap like a rubber band, I felt the heat of his gaze, and shifted mine until we met.
    It had been a Tuesday evening and I was twelve years old, heading home from school with my mind on homework and netball and
Survivor,
and then suddenly this man had found me, my reflection in the window, and held me there. His arm was thrown around his wife’s shoulders and she fussed with the two small kids beside her.
    “Don’t do that!” She slapped the toddler’s hand from its nose. The man smirked at me in the window and raised his eyebrows.
    I don’t know how long we sat like that for. My house was pretty close to school, so it couldn’t have been longer than five minutes. But I knew as I sat there in my uniform, my nipples growing hard, my cheeks hot, the terrible secret passing between me and the stranger, that I was being admitted into a new world—that I was growing old or dying or changing or something. A sensation passed over me then, like insects crawling around on my back.
    That was the first time. Since then, I had started a list in a notebook in my room of other things that gave me that sensation. Like 50 Cent videos on MTV. A car crash I saw happen on Glenferrie Road. An article I read about peacekeepers and refugees in Africa. Being on a tram without a ticket when the inspectors climbed on. The faces of people waiting outside nightclubs on weekends. A porn site I’d found open on my dad’s computer when I was checking my email in his study one night. And standing in front of Mr. Ackerman in his office and lying to his stern face that I had been shoving tampons up into my vagina, two at a time.
    And so today, walking down Smith Street, when I’d glanced up from the sidewalk and seen him sitting there in the window, looking both strange and familiar, like photos of my parents when they were young, I had felt it: the heat, the hardness, the insects. I had turned into the café without missing a beat, as though this were a movie and I was only just now being shown the script. I had had the sudden and full knowledge that there was a reason that I had been admitted into this new world; that here, today, later today, sometime, Mr. Ackerman was going to take this feeling to its real and necessary ending.
    In the