Tell Me Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

you?” Mr. Roberts asked me.
    “I didn't go to the disco. My dad never let me go to dances,” I said. “I know all about it though because one of the boys wrote it up as if it was a rugby match report and circulated it.” It had been badly written too, full of jokes about odd-shaped balls, but as I told Mr. Roberts this, I realized something else I hadn't thought about before. That, even with all her potential, Sylvia was never seen back at school after the disco. The nice girls must have made sure of that.
    Mr. Roberts let go of the ladder. “That's enough for today, Molly,” he said. “When we do this again maybe you could try to think of something of your own. And perhaps you could be, ah, a little more delicate.” And he went to fiddle with the cash register in the shop while I clambered down gracelessly.
    I thought I'd got it sussed the second time.
    This was more my own story, even if I had been just a spectator. But that had been the whole point of it, I told Mr. Roberts.
    Before they'd turned their attentions to me, all the boys in school had fancied Christine Chambers. She was fully developed by Year Three, and wore sheer skin-colored tights in the summer while the rest of us struggled with keeping up our drooping white socks. She had curly black hair and a snub nose. Her eyes were green, and although she wasn't bright, she appeared to listenin class so she wasn't told off as much as the others in her group. Strangely this only added to her allure, because she used her popularity with the teachers to lessen punishments for her friends.
    Christine's only obvious form of rebellion was a thin leather cord of brightly colored beads. She always wore them around her neck although no jewelery was allowed with the school uniform, and with this she'd draw attention to herself, running her hands over the beads, pulling them this way and that, up to her lips, in lessons. I guessed she knew how mesmerizing it was. One day though, in history, she pulled so hard her necklace broke and the beads spilled everywhere, noisily, over the wooden floor of the classroom, dancing this way, that way. Anxious for any diversion, we'd all thrown ourselves whooping onto the ground, hunting for the runaway plastic jewels.
    “ E ven you?” Mr. Roberts asked. “Can someone of your size throw themselves anywhere? I'd have liked to have seen that.” He cupped my calves with his open palms. “Potatoes,” he groaned. “Big fat potatoes. All mashed up tight in your naughty nylons.”
    I shifted on the ladder so he couldn't hold onto me quite so tightly.
    “Well, I haven't always been this exact shape, but no, I wasn't on the floor,” I admitted. “I was watching what went on.”
    T he only person—only other person, I corrected myself—who didn't leave her chair was Christine. So I'd been on the right level to see how, with her classmates scrambling round her feet, she fixed her eyes on the history teacher and lingeringly, slowly,she licked her lips and laughed silently at him. He smiled back and he almost seemed not to be aware of how his fingers went up to his neck and traced a line where a necklace might be. He looked as if he might be cutting his throat. Then, still without breaking the spell between them, he put his index finger to his lips and half-blew her a kiss, which he transformed into a sigh as he noticed me sitting there.
    “And that's it then? That's all that happened?” Mr. Roberts said after I'd been silent for a moment.
    “It was sex, the way they did it,” I explained. “There must have been something going on between them.”
    “Maybe you were imagining it. I know all about a young lady's imagination.”
    “Maybe. But I know what I saw.”
    “But it still wasn't you, Molly. That has to be the point of these stories. I thought I explained all that.”
    I felt my throat ice over and Mr. Roberts jumped to one side as I almost fell down the ladder then. I think I took him by surprise. Apart from the leg-holding