Page 9 of Kiwi Sin
The book started out with a man riding a police horse at a gallop toward the woman, which seemed pretty reckless, and her tripping and nearly falling in a milling crowd, until he reached down and swung her up in front of him on the horse.
Huh. That seemed as improbable a scenario as the books about shooting and explosions. Also, if your job was working with animals, you’d surely know how to control your horse. The woman, whose name was Nikki, was quite rude to the bloke in a funny sort of way, though, and he didn’t mind, so that was useful.
I was going along pretty well like that, forgetting to think about how I’d knocked the pins out from under myself and had burned myself fairly well in the process, which meant I probably wasn’t going to be able to start work tomorrow the way I’d planned, when Nikki fell across the bloke’s unmarked police car—his name was Roarke, which seemed odd, but what did I know?—as he was pulling out of something called a “stakeout”—these two people were the clumsiest couple I’d ever heard of—upon which he pulled her into the car to hide from the bad guys, or the other cops, and they ended up kissing. In his police car, which, again, didn’t sound right, but …
His mouth slanted down over hers. His hand was in her hair, and that mouth was a hungry thing. Demanding, and taking. She forgot about the rip in her jeans, because her hand was on the rock-hard muscle of his upper back, and she was falling against the door with him following her.
His hand inside her T-shirt now, his mouth at her neck. His voice, dark as smoke, in her ear. “We can’t do this.” And his hands telling a different story. His hands, and his talented, terrible mouth. Biting now. Sucking at her, like he couldn’t get enough. And then his hand reached her breast, and the kiss changed to something else.
I tore my eyes from the book. Whatwasthis? I looked at the cover again. Same girl in her jeans and boots. The background was a big red heart, and the smaller print across the cover said,“A sexy, breezy, laugh-out-loud romp. Great fun!” – Alison Moriarty, author ofFrankly Yours.
Greatfun?It was pornography! I was reading pornography!
I read to the end of the chapter. Just to check.
5
DROWNING IN THE FLOOD
Oriana
On the last day of January, I wasn’t enjoying being out in the fine weather, mucking out the chicken coop and mulching the fruit trees, harvesting the honey, making huge batches of jam, babysitting, or knitting hats and scarves to sell at the farmer’s market, adding week by week to the account Daisy had helped me set up at KiwiBank. I wasn’t even cooking dinner for the family and cleaning bathrooms the way I did every day, because most people didn’t like cleaning, baths should be clean, and I didn’t mind.
Instead, I was back in school.
My second chance to get this right,I told myself.It can’t be worse than it was before.That would be my first six weeks or so at this school before the summer holidays had arrived. Those days had receded into a terror-blurred memory of walking into this huge, echoing old place every day with Frankie, dressed in our new uniforms, though they were at least a little familiar, with their long skirts and loose tops, the clunky shoes, the forbidding of makeup.
Walking in, and failing. Failing to understand. Failing to succeed. Failing to fit in.
Me, that is, not Frankie.
It hadn’t really been starting school. It had beenrestartingschool, because like Frankie and every other girl at Mount Zion, my schooling had ended as soon as I’d turned fifteen. That meant I was more than a year behind for my age, and going to school with younger girls. I’d told myself that first day, through my nerves,Frankie’s even worse off, because she’s more thantwoyears behind and still in Year 10 with me, even though she’s seventeen.
It hadn’t turned out to be true, though, because Frankie was clever. She’d learnt to use a computer within days of leaving Mount Zion, and every minute she wasn’t messing about with that, she was reading. She readeverything.Novels, which were worldly, even though the ones she read were called “classics,” and books about history and science, too.
And maths. She’d spent the entire school holidays “catching up” on maths, along with those other subjects, using books the teachers had lent her, and was starting Year 12 today instead of Year 11 like me.
“I have no choice but to skip Year 11,” she’d told Daisy last week, when Daisy had commented on the way Frankie was rubbing her eyes at dinner after a day of scribbling in exercise books with a mechanical pencil, learning something called “quadratic equations,” whatever those were, in addition to all the reading. “I’m nearly too old as it is, turning nineteen halfway into Year 13. That’sifI can convince my teachers that I can do Year 12 work this year. I need all three of my NCEA levels in order to qualify for University, and that’s going to take effort.”
Daisy said, “Well, as I felt the same, I can’t say much.” Daisy was applying now to study as a nurse practitioner, on top of her work as an Emergency nurse and everything she was doing to help us. Whenshe’dcome out of Mount Zion, she’d had to work a cleaning job at night on top of her schooling in order to live. Which made me, as always, ashamed at how easy life was for me—or, rather, howhardlife was for me, when I had it so easy.
For example, today. Here I was, doing nothing more difficult for money than looking after a few kids and weeding the vegie beds, starting Year 11, not trying to skip ahead to anything, just trying to survive. I was sitting in the back row in my first class, which was Biology, and hoping nobody would notice me. Not the other pupils, and, oh, please, not the teacher. Hence the back row.
The first bad thing happened when the teacher, whose name was Mr. Smith, started ticking off names. He went down his list of Emmas and Zoes and Jasmines, and the girls answered, sounding alert or happy or bored.
When I’d first started here, I’d looked around at the others during the calling-out of names and done my best to smile, thinking,Which ones look like they might be my friend?Based on those weeks, though, the answer was, “None of them.”
I’d had friends at Mount Zion, always. My sisters, my girl cousins, my girl classmates. Girls had never just plain notlikedme, because I was kind and didn’t hurt people’s feelings, but it wasn’t like that here. Somehow, I seemed too different. Somehow, they knew.
Well, some of them probablydidknow. The teachers knew, Daisy had said, which was why Frankie and I had been admitted, even though we really didn’t qualify, because the school was “selective.” Which meant they only chose clever girls.
Like Frankie.
Twenty names called out. Twenty-five. And then the last one, as always, because my surname came at the end.
“Obedience Worthy?”
Shocked silence, and then somebody laughed and somebody else muttered. I put up my hand and said, “Present. But … can you please …” I faltered.
