Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
The first time that I ever kissed a boy was in the dark of a Byron Bay back alley, on the New Years Eve, between uni and High School. I had worn my best slinky, sequinned top and thought I was looking pretty hot. I was hoping to run into the boy from Chemistry, the boy I had failed to pluck up to courage to ask to the Blue Light Disco in year 10, or the year 11 semi-formal, or the year 12 graduation ball. The boy I’d been telling myself I didn’t really fancy for the previous two and a half years. And now school was finished and the chance was fading, maybe gone? God only knows where he was or what he was doing, I lost track of him in a drunken haze at the graduation ball after-party and I hadn’t heard what he was hoping to do next. The main thing was looking like I didn’t care, so I hadn’t asked.
I was spending New Years Eve at the Railway Hotel with most of my former class-mates, but I was looking over people’s shoulders as they were talking to me, searching the crowd, while still smiling at the face in front of me so I hoped, fairly sure that they wouldn’t notice. I was looking for his high cheekbones, his dark eyes and floppy curls. For his smouldering far away look. For my final chance. But I couldn’t spot him.
The next thing I noticed was a ginger, sun-freckled face too close in front of my own. It was Stella’s friend, that plumber’s apprentice who finished at the Catholic school a few years before us, who she new from Mass and family parties. He was grinning the drinker’s smile of a New Year’s Eve, chuckling and looking down my shirt and while I was still looking for my Chemistry boy. He took me by the hand and led me around the side to the bar, out the door and away from the shouting ding the crowd and grunge band, into the relative quiet of the alley, by the empty metal beer kegs and timber pallets and next to the parked utes and racks of the backpackers’ bikes. We kissed, with my eyes still open, still looking for the other boy.
What was that smell? We were too close to the toilets, the back alley stench. I broke off and began to look around again.
“Who are you looking for?”, he asked.
“Oh, um, no one”, I lied, and he laughed again, a broad tipsy grin spread over his face.
“Sure. So who is this no one?” he asked while drawing me close and hoping to kiss me again.
“Look you’re very nice and everything, but…” I said, and he backed away.
Stella appeared, tottering on her stilettos in her tiny red dress, swaying a little as she tried to steady herself.
“What are you two up to?”. She was flushed with dancing and party music and like us all, quite drunk and disoriented. Then her face fell.
“Patrick! Fucking typical, what the hell is going on?” She was yelling at both him, and me, I realised. They were together? And it dawned on me that while I was looking for my alchemist, she was looking for her chance with Patrick the plumber.
Suddenly the crowd the erupted in shouting and spilled into our alleyway scene. A dog was wildly chasing people who were scattering all directions trying not to spill their drinks and to keep talking. The dog’s lead dangling on the ground behind as it growled and barked through the crowd, both angry and terrified.
“Who owns this dog?” shouted a barman as he ran into the throng grabbing the lead. The spell was broken and Stella ran off into the night out the ally with Patrick following her close behind.
“Hey, Listen!” I yelled, then more quietly, “Oh, sorry…”
They were both gone.
I bought another beer and asked around for the dark boy but no one had seen him that night.
“I heard he was holed up in the hills, smoking dope and getting over his HSC blow-out”, I was told by one. Another said “Oh, he’s joined ASIO!” and then roared with laughter. Most of my class mates just looked at me blankly wondering why I cared.
Stella, appeared at my shoulder. “What was that?”
“Um, nothing?” I hoped too tipsy and preoccupied to answer properly.
“Well didn’t look like nothing.” she shouted, and then swayed around again like a wobbly children’s toy as her eyes welled up and her chin quivered.
“I didn’t know”, I replied. “I don’t even like him, he just kissed me…”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! You shafted me!” She stormed off.
I was still looking for Chemistry boy when my Christian friend from 3 Unit English came up, bright eyed and alive with her personal moral code and complete lack of alcohol “I think it’s time for to walk back to the campsite now”. She was rescuing me, one of her favourite pastimes.
“But when’s the countdown to New Year?” I asked.
“You missed it”, she said, “We all did, when that stray dog caused chaos.”
We had all totally missed it, and it just felt like the same year now. Like nothing had changed at all, like we were still stuck in year 12, but with no more chances left.