Quickly, she slung out an arm.
Her slender and delicate fingers.
She’d stopped me beside the instrument.
“What,” said Penelope, “is that?”
* * *
—
As I’ve told you before, our parents back then, they were certainly something else.
Did I hate them for the piano?
Of course I did.
Did I love them for what they did next?
Bet your house, your car, and your hands on it.
Because next came moments like this.
* * *
—
I remember sitting in the kitchen, in the river mouth of light.
I sat and spoke down all of it, and they listened intently, in silence. Even Jimmy Hartnell’s boxing prowess, there was first only taking it in.
“Poofters,” said Penelope, eventually. “Don’t you know that’s bloody stupid—and wrong, and…” She was searching, it seemed, for more—its greatest crime of all. “Unimaginative?”
Me, I had to be honest. “It’s the nipple cripples that really hurt….”
She looked down into her tea. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
But my dad was a clear-eyed genius.
“He’s a boy,” he said, and he winked at me, and everything would be okay. “Am I right, or am I right?”
And Penelope understood.
She admonished herself, and quickly.
“Of course,” she whispered, “like them…”
The boys from Hyperno High.
* * *
—
In the end, it was decided in the time she drank her tea. There was the abject knowledge of only one way to help me, and it wasn’t them going to the school. It wasn’t seeking protection.
Michael said okay.
A quiet declaration.