Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,72

morning braiding her golden locks into three long strands that swung pendulously down her back.

Her hazel eyes twinkled with delight and she ambled towards me.

‘Laura said--’

Kerry grabbed my hand and quickly turned away, not interested in anything I had to say.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, careful not to trip over the heels of her scuffed black shoes as she pulled me across the playground.

‘Come on,’ she urged without explanation.

The side of the furthest bike-shed was bordered by a thicket of outstretched bushes. A thin, wood-chipped alleyway led to the rear of the sheds and a secluded spot used by the older, more delinquent, juveniles.

Cigarette butts covered the floor like a carpet of discarded cancer. I stepped through the slalom of filters -- blackened and soggy from the rain -- and found a patch of clean mud to rest my tattered trainers on.

Kerry didn’t seem to mind the ashy assault course. She waded through the butts with tiptoed glee and rested her back against the shed, her hands tucked behind her backside. She eyed me with a sly smile.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, wondering why I had followed her this far.

She giggled, looked away awkwardly and then exclaimed: ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,’ without lifting her eyes from the pavement.

I let a smile creep onto my face. I didn’t know she was interested in that, if I had I wouldn’t have been so reluctant to follow her. This was what my schooldays were made for after all, this was the reason I became exited at the thought of going to school.

I looked around to double check that no one was looking. There was no movement in the bushes, no eyes peeking through the many holes in the back of the shed.

‘Okay,’ I said with a prepare yourself for this inflection.

I pulled it out and beamed a broad, dimpled smile.

Slowly, preparing herself for what she was about to see, she lifted her eyes from the ground.

‘What the hell is that?’ she declared, twisting her face.

I looked down at my hand. I turned it this way and that, examining the grasped item.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ I said, worried, ‘It's perfect.’

She shook her head as she stared at me, disbelief in her eyes. ‘A football sticker?’ she spoke slowly.

‘Not just any football sticker,’ I said proudly. ‘It’s Andy Cole. Leading Premiership goal scorer, record breaker, signed from--’

‘I’m not interested in bloody football!’ she spat, annoyed.

I looked around, visibly aware that she had dragged me to the middle of nowhere. ‘But you said--’

‘I didn’t mean that!’ she spat.

‘I have Teddy Sheringham, but it’s nowhere near as--’

An exasperated sigh stopped me short. ‘You’re useless!’ she said, throwing her hands in the air. She barged forward, knocked me aside, and trudged angrily back towards the playground.

That’s hardly fair, I thought to myself as I watched her stomp away. I never got to see hers.

Synopsis:

Kieran McCall has never been lucky in love. This socially awkward, intellectually impaired Romeo has had his fair share of relationships, but none of them have ended well.

There was the time behind the bike-sheds, his first time, when he kissed little Kerry Newsome, vomited on her and then received an arse-kicking in the cloakroom. The time he found himself embroiled in an animal murdering plot after trying to acquire his first girlfriend. The ‘bulge’ incident in front of a naked class of showering classmates, and then there was the time he lost his virginity to an unenthusiastic sociopath in the supermarket stockroom; but these things were merely incidental in comparison to the others, because as bad as growing up was for this persistently unlucky idiot, adulthood was worse.

An Idiot in Love is a fictional piece written in an autobiographical style, following the car-crash life of protagonist Kieran McCall to a happy ending with the one girl who he didn’t insult, maim or hospitalize.

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The Line the Itch and the Rabbit Hole (Memoir):

Sample Chapter: “The Sniffles”

‘Where are we going?’ I pleaded with my mother, desperate for an answer she had given many times.

‘I told you a million times, it’s a safari park,’ she replied patiently.

I was eight years old and had the attention span to match. Information went in clearly enough but it was soon diluted by a million other things and then quickly forgotten.

‘Christine is taking you and your brother,’ my mother went on to explain as she pottered around the kitchen making dinner, with me hot on her heels.

Christine lived just down the street