Rosie O'Dell (21 page)

Two days later at school, Rosie came up behind me at my locker and whispered,
“There’s a meeting of the medical association tonight, Mom will be upstairs, and
I need help with my assignment, bad.”

“You poor little thing,” I said. “I’ll come and lend a
hand.”

At eight o’clock that evening, Rosie and I were sitting on the couch in her
entertainment room with our pants down around our knees caressing each other.
“Would you mind,” I asked, “if I kissed your… ah?”

“My what?” she said, taking hold of my head and pushing my face down until my
lips and nose were against her silky pubic hair. “Oh, you mean my chummy-thing.
That’s what Gram called it one time when I had a little rash: ‘This salve will
be good for your chummy-thing.’ First, though, let me nip into the bathroom for
a sec.” She tugged up her jeans and walked across the room, looking back at my
erection. “Hold that thought,” she said.

Sitting there, I heard something upstairs. Was Rothesay home early? I yanked my
pants up and crept out of the room and stood by the stairs. The refrigerator
door slammed.

From inside the entertainment room, Rosie said, “That’s just Mom getting her
juice out of the fridge. You can set your watch by when she does that every
night.”

I listened for a moment to make sure and heard a shuffling in the hall up there
heading towards the stairs to the top floor. When I came back in, Rosie was
slumped back on the sofa with her feet outstretched and her legs wide open. Her
jeans were on the floor and her panties around one ankle. Both hands were
between her legs and she was holding her labia open with her fingers. I nearly
fainted. She said nothing, didn’t move, and her eyes were closed. When I got
down on my knees to kiss her there, looking up at her face, her eyes sprang open
as if she had just come out of a trance and she raised her knees high and wide
without a word. I got an excellent and galvanizing look at her pink little anus.
My kiss was a prolonged one, partly because she placed her hands on the back of
my head and pressed hard. Sometimes I felt her feet pushing down on my back with
force while she thrust her crotch against my mouth and tongue half a dozen times
in a row. Not that I was about to complain, but I might have taken a couple of
breathers during those ten minutes of bliss if the skilful coordination of her
hands, feet, and crotch had not determined otherwise. When she loosened her
grips and I was able to turn my head and lay it on her pelvis, she said,
smoothing down my hair, “I kind of had an inkling, but I never really knew, that
life could be so good.”

I moved up beside her and she kissed my bruised and still damp lips. I moved
her hand down to my straining penis and said, “Rosie, can I put it in?”

“I’d love you to,” she said, “but we can’t risk it tonight
with someone else in the house. He and Mom visit Pagan at school every term, and
they were talking about going up in a week or so. I’ll be sleeping at Suzy’s,
but other than that you and I will have this house entirely to ourselves for a
week. I’ll get protection at Planned Parenthood so I don’t get preggers.”

Preggers? It took me a moment to figure it out. Oh, pregnant. “Can you get
safes from them when you’re only fourteen?”

“Suzy knows someone there. She used to volunteer there till Child Welfare
stopped her. Too young.” After a minute of quiet, during which Rosie gently
caressed my cock and balls, she said, “Now. I’m going to do the same for you as
you did for me.”

“You’re some fair and square.”

“Count on it, crumpet.” Hand tight around the shaft, and mouth over the top,
she pulled and sucked until I was about to come. When I went to withdraw from
her mouth in anticipation, she said quickly, “Leave it in, leave it in,” and
clamped her lips back on.

Halfway through my ejaculation, she pulled her head away and put her hand over
the top. “Aaagh,” she said when it was over. “That tastes awful. I’m not doing
that again.” We both shuddered with laughter.

“Rosie, are you in there?” Jesus Christ, it was her mother on the staircase
outside.

Rosie raised her head with my semen still on her lips. “Yes, Mother. What? What
are you creeping about the house for?” Quietly, we pulled up our pants and she
wiped her mouth and chin and hands with tissues.

“Are you all right?” asked her mother.

“Yes, I’m all right. What do you want?”

“Is Heathcliff in there with you?”

Rosie kept her eyes off me. “God, Mother, no. He’s at a meeting, isn’t
he?”

“Oh yes. That’s what he said, wasn’t it? But I thought I heard—I was afraid he…
Okay then, good night.”

“Good night, Mother, good night.”

Rosie got up abruptly and strode over to the bathroom. When she came out thirty
seconds later, she was unsmiling and still abrupt. “I’d better make sure she
gets in bed all right. See you in school tomorrow. The front door locks itself
when you go out.” Within one minute, she’d gone from hot to icy. She went
through the door and jogged up the stairs.

THE NEXT WEEK ROSIE
’
S
mind was
preoccupied by the investigation in the school board office into the gym
teacher’s “racist” remark regarding her backside. The teachers’ association had
put in an immediate grievance against his suspension, and the board agreed to
fast-track it to resolve it one way or the other as soon as possible. The
teacher was popular among students and they considered him competent in an
agreeably down-to-earth way. They mimicked the instructions he gave at the
beginning of the year to every new team: “You ask me, How do you play
basketball? And I say unto you, ‘You take the darn ball and you dribble down the
darn court and you pass it to your teammates and you put the ball in the darn
basket. Now go out there and darn-well do it.’”

Rosie had already told the principal that this whole foofaraw was an example of
his occasionally foolish jock-talk, which nobody minded. While she could see how
some might view his remark as a racist stereotype from the old days that should
be avoided, she didn’t think he meant it as a negative comment against a race
but as a simple recognition of one of the reasons why, physically, some
African-Americans were such tremendous athletes. Hence, she did not feel
insulted by the remark because, in fact, it was high praise. For someone to take
it as demeaning, such a person would have to be harbouring a negative racist
notion of the physical characteristic described by the coach. And who would be
silly enough to harbour that notion?

One of Rosie’s best friends on the basketball team was a Native Canadian who’d
come here a couple of years ago from Manitoba with her structural engineer
father and her anthropologist mother. Her name was Nancy Toogood. There was fear
at the board level that the aboriginal girl, the only “visible minority” present
at the time, might have been specifically insulted by the coach’s remark. Rosie
told me that, in response to questions in the principal’s office, Nancy Toogood
had said that, while she realized that all “coloured” people looked alike to the
powers that be, or else she wouldn’t have been singled out and dragged in here,
the coach was actually referring to athletic black girls, “not Native American
red-skin girls.” Now, Nancy continued, if the coach had said that Rosie was
“flat-assed like an Indian maiden,” then, as an aboriginal, she would have
considered that to be a stereotypical racist remark because, as she hoped it was
plain to see, she too was rather “high-assed like a coloured girl” and very
proud of it.

As a result of the reaction of Rosie and her friend, the board withdrew the
disciplinary suspension and offered to replace it with a letter of reprimand in
the coach’s file plus an order that he never again use the inap
propriate terms “ass” or “coloured girl” in the future. The lawyer for the
coach’s teachers’ association consented to the order but protested against the
reprimand, even though the coach himself said he would have been more than happy
with it, and Rosie O’Dell and Nancy Toogood were called to the meeting at the
board office.

They both repeated what they said to the principal, but the overzealous young
lawyer for the teachers’ association then asked Rosie, “Ms. O’Dell, you appear
to be very fit and in excellent condition as a female athlete. Would you agree
that this fact might cause you, naturally and understandably, to flaunt your
anatomy somewhat in the gym and perhaps, equally understandably, provoke a
comment such as the one attributed to your coach, the grievor?”

Rosie replied, “I wouldn’t say I flaunt my anatomy in the gym or anywhere else
as much as you just flaunted your obnoxious stupidity. Sir, I am not responsible
for my human anatomy. My DNA is responsible for that, and that is so no matter
how much a certain type of perverted male attitude may try to make me personally
responsible for some disgusting, even criminal, reaction by some man like
yourself to my normal use of my natural female body.”

Even the coach got the drift of this and bawled out, “Rosie never flaunted
anything at me, top or bottom. She goes out on the court and plays darn super
basketball just like one of those… ah,
American
girls, and that’s all I
was talking about.”

The young lawyer retreated in disarray after his one question and caucused with
the coach and the association rep and returned with his acquiescence to the
reprimand. On the way out of the board office, the coach said, “Thank you for
your attitude to all this, Rosie. My wife was worried sick. I could hug and kiss
you and Nancy to death.”

“Careful who you hug and kiss to death, now, Coach,” said Rosie. “You don’t
want to be suspended again.” They had a good laugh.

And laugh Rosie and Nancy Toogood did together, as well. I saw them strutting
their striking natural anatomies along the corridor in school the next day,
their heads close together, repeating things to each other and practically
bending over in peals of laughter at what they had said to the gobsmacked powers
that be. God, how much did I love my beautiful, brilliant, and funny Rosie
O’Dell. And bad. Oh, she was bad, every bit as bad as I wanted her to be.

I CONFIRMED THAT HE
next Saturday
afternoon. Rothesay and Nina had flown to Ontario that morning to visit Pagan.
They weren’t flying back till Tuesday night. Nina had made arrangements as usual
with Suzy Martin’s mother for Rosie to sleep at Suzy’s house, under close
parental and professional supervision. Mrs. Martin was soon to graduate as a
social worker. Naturally, Rosie had a key to her own house and would need to go
there frequently for clothes and toiletries and whatnot.

The whatnot was where I came in. We weren’t in her house ten minutes before we
carried our Coke floats up to her bedroom and took off our clothes. Then we
climbed into bed in the bright broad daylight and embraced. It was the first
time we had been entirely naked together, without scraps of clothes hanging off
one or other of our limbs, and our first time in a bed. Rosie pulled the sheet
up over us and we snuggled under it. “Oh God, this is so great,” she said,
pressing herself hard against me and moving a leg over my hip. Then she put her
hand down and grasped my penis, throwing the sheet off us and looking down at
it. “That is a very beautiful part of you,” she said.

“You too,” I said, reaching for her from behind, between her buttocks,
“absolutely beautiful.”

“Just feel in there,” she said opening her thighs wider. Between them it felt
soaking wet. She rolled away from me and opened the drawer in her bedside table.
She took out a diary-like book with a lock, unhasped it, and removed from the
pages a circle of tinsel.