Chapter 6

As unhappy as I was about the developments between Josh and Nao during boot camp, I had little time to focus on it. School returned on Monday and I was back to my regular schedule: up at five to ride my bike to the pool, three hours of training, shower, muesli and powdered milk out of a plastic bag (those ‘breakfast shakes’ in a carton were rubbish) with a few pieces of fruit on the side, homeroom from eight-thirty, a full class load, then another three hours of weights and swimming in the afternoon before homework and then bed by nine. I don’t even know how athletes functioned before video recorders were invented - they must have never watched any TV.

This year Nao and I were in the same maths and gym class but had separate lunch periods, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to her outside of class. Since I was so busy, I never saw her and Josh together, and I didn’t hear anything in the usual gossip about them being an item, so I figured Nao had taken my advice about staying away from him or had realised herself that he was a slime ball piece of shit.

I found that she hadn’t, and what later transpired turned out to be one of those ‘epic’ stories that was retold over and over in hushed, awed voices, long after everybody concerned with the story had moved on.

It was three weeks after school had returned, and Josh was doing his usual Monday afternoon performance in the locker room, regaling a bunch of squad members with the weekend’s lurid escapades. If half of what he ever said was true, not even a Mother Superior would be able to resist his charms. I think the only reason why nobody called bullshit on his fantastical tales was the pure entertainment value, the eternally horny optimism of high school boys that there might actually be girls like that about, and the fact that Josh had a fairly large cock which he often paraded around the locker room. Of course, to high school boys, penis size has to be analogous to sexual prowess. Whilst in the past I had sometimes given Josh’s antics an audience, I had gone cold on them after watching him employ his ‘skills’ on Nao during boot camp. I walked out from the showers as he reached the climax of his latest ready-to-print letter to Penthouse.

“And then she said ‘I need it now. Give it to me!’ So I put my hands up her skirt and the bitch wasn’t even wearing panties, so I knew she’d come planning to give it up! And she was soaking wet, the slut. Then I unsheathed my weapon–” Josh often employed the language of combat when relating sexual encounters, “–and got stuck up her.” A hopeless romantic.

Derek was standing there and shot me a look that I didn’t follow. Josh finished up his story to high-fives and whistles from some of the tenth and eleventh graders whilst most of the juniors looked on in a mixture of shock and awe. Then Josh took his swinging dick off to the showers and the crowd dispersed. Derek came over as I opened my locker.

“Are you going to take that?”

“Take what?”

“Did you hear Josh?”

“Yeah,” I said, rolling deodorant on. “The usual bullshit. If he got as much pussy as he claims, half the girls in school would be knocked up or his dick would have dropped off from the clap.” I pulled out a clean shirt and pulled it over my head.

“Naw, man. He was talking about Nao.”

My gut tightened.

“So?” I managed evenly. “Why should I care?”

“Seriously? Are you that fucking dumb? None of the rest of us are.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I began to dry my hair.

“Fuck off, you don’t. I was with Sarah on Saturday night, and she got a text from Tammy saying that she was at Central and she’d seen Josh and Nao getting all goo-goo eyed in the food court. Then later when Tammy was leaving, she saw his car heading up the coast road.”

The coast road led to a stretch of gravel called Carradine Beach – everyone in town over the age of fifteen knew it as ‘Make Out Mile’. I threw my towel into my locker and closed the door, a bit louder than I really meant to.

“What does it matter to me?”

“Dude - what is wrong with you? You like her.”

“Says who?”

“Seriously? Thank God you’re not this slow in the water. Everybody knows you’re hot for her. At the very least, Josh is spreading shit about Nao. At the worst, he’s touching her up. And you know he’s a scumbag. He’ll get bored and trash her when he’s done.”

I sighed.

“So, what am I supposed to do about it? Throw down? Fuck him up? Then we’ll both get thrown off the squad for fighting. And he’ll kick my arse anyway because he’s got about twenty kilos and half a foot over me.”

“Well, it’ll be worse if—”

“If what?” I interrupted him. “I warned her about him back at boot camp. She didn’t want to listen then so what’s going to change now? I’ll look like some desperate creep trash-talking her boyfriend.”

“And if you don’t say or do something, eventually it’ll get back to her that you didn’t care enough to do anything and you’ll be on her shit list forever.”

’I’m already on her shitlist forever.’ I thought. But Derek was right. Even if she hated me for it, I should do something.

“Hey, Nao.”

It was a few days later. We were standing in the starting line for warm-up sprints and had ended up in the same race for the first time since I had met her. She turned and regarded me. She was unreadable.

“Yeah?”