Girls

They were young, or at least youngish. Maybe too young. They were the kind of girls who made you uncomfortable with their age. They were dressed and posed and pretended to act in ways that were just too advanced, way too advanced for their age: smoked cigarettes and coughed, swore without knowing what their words really meant, wore shirts that attempted to show off breasts that were not fully formed and wore skirts that were a year or two too short. The kind that were so short they made you uncomfortable on anyone under the age of, say, 17. Or maybe 20, just to be safe.

But still, you couldn’t help looking, you couldn’t help thinking of them being fucked by a teacher, or camp counselor, or captain of the football team or … maybe the whole football team, all with your own face superimposed. It made you feel like a lecher. These were the kind of girls who made you feel filthy for thinking what they were thinking: wet breath and dim swallows, damp spots on sheets and wordless legs, shaky red lights and violin moans and miles upon miles of bone and brick.

You were disgusting. I was disgusting. The poor girls were still teary eyed and I tried my hardest not to look at them. The time when you could think things like that about girls like them was a long, long time ago. Their idea of sex was probably being slipped some tongue in the back of the bus or giving an occasional handjob in their mother’s blankets. I shook my head. Mind out of the gutter, please.

Damn it.

I started nervously drumming on my knees and looking out the windows as the landscape rolled by on wheels of its own.