Rachel always sat in the hottest spot she could find. I was frightened of that pitiless, slow sense of burning, the creeping pinkness on the back of my neck. I would have preferred to sit in the shade. Those few stragglers-like me-who arrived too late to get a spot on the bench had to sit on the ground. Before me, a row of girls perched on the rickety wooden bench. I sat cross-legged on the grass, nibbling at my thin vegemite sandwiches. I met my friends for lunch behind the library. The recess before I met you passed like any other.

My whole life was geared around avoiding it. A ring of empty space would start to form around me as the people shrank away, and I'd be left standing on my own, irrefutably alien. I kept assuming that eventually, inevitably, I'd be standing in a crowded place and suddenly everyone would start shifting uncomfortably and turning their heads at the smell of other. I was, as always, amazed at my ability to blend in with the masses of us. Red trim pointed like an arrow at our bellies. We also had semi-transparent V-necked white shirts. They were off-red, and looked the way the name sounded. The little shorts were called ‘scungies’. They showed your bum when you bent over, so you had to wear little shorts underneath. They were horrible, scanty, red-pleated things, obviously designed by a pervert.

I'm not for one second suggesting that my legs were what you were after. I suppose, at the very beginning, you must have seen my legs. The very beginning seems so long ago, though. It may also help other readers to find your point of reference if you include a page/chapter/percentage notation at the start of your comment, too, but proceed however you find it's easiest.Īnonymous commenting is enabled here, as promised if anyone tries it and finds it's not working, please let me know & I'll tweak things until it does.I know you think you're to blame for what happened. Welcome to our sticky post for ' INNOCENTS', this month's book club read! I've actually read this one before & am quite curious to see how it sits upon a second time round.įeel free to post any and all thoughts, questions, and discussion topics as threads to this post if you're in doubt about whether you're spoiling plot points, you can simply use the spoiler tags (much like an LJ-cut) in your comments, like this! You can use the html code of spoilery stuff goes here, minus the spaces, of course.

Innocents by Cathy Coote