Read Creepy and Maud for Free Online

obnoxious facets of human behaviour. You know, the ones you wouldn’t ordinarily see outside prison or parliament. And you know I like to watch.
     
    I never get into trouble at school. The teachers think I’m creepy, as well. They’d never say that. Parent – teacher conferences (one of the few times my parents erect thatunited front) are full of phrases reserved for students the teachers don’t really know or care about. Things like ‘Consistent’ (translation: ‘Turns up’) and ‘Has potential’ (translation: ‘Turns up on time’). Most of them need a class photo in front of them to remind them of who I am. If I had siblings, if Mum and Dad had to go to more than one of these things, they’d realise that what’s said is not individualised. It’s just recycling. But they don’t get it and always come away feeling validated and vindicated. We always have pizza on parent – teacher conference night.
     
    Maud gets into trouble at school a lot. And trouble at my school is public. Everyone hears about it. It’s like the French underground. I even heard about Audrey Foote getting her period in S & E. By the time she ran from the room, it looked like someone had slaughtered a goat in there. Or so I heard.
     
    Maud’s biggest trouble at school has been over a book. I remain quietly impressed by this. It makes me wonder what other controversial reading material she must be hiding behind the doll’s house with the booze.
     
    Our school has a total ban on graphic novels. They’re not even considered real books. There was a parent night about it. A meeting with the school board held after dark to discuss the infiltration of unsavoury materials and their effect on vulnerable developing adolescent minds. I’m notmaking that up. It was in the flyer. My parents didn’t go. If it’s not about them, they’re not interested.
     
    I know Maud likes to draw. I watch her, mostly at night, sitting at a little table, drawing. I love to watch her draw. It’s one of the only times she doesn’t pull and pluck. The little lamp she uses casts a pinkish glow through her hair. The light sinks like a blush down her face and into the paper in front of her. It’s solstice ritual, and she is the witch casting runes. She’s not a flamboyant artist. Her pencils (and she uses many) never scud across the paper in flourish, she never colours in splashy sweeps. It’s all very careful and precise. Her movements are small; everything about her seems small. I watch the shapes her pencil traces, study the interstices of shadow cast by her fingers and wrist, and try to imagine what it is that she draws with such intensity.
     
    Before the day Maud’s drawings became public knowledge, it never occurred to me that my Titian sorceress might be drawing dirty pictures.
     
    Maud took them to school slipped inside a book she’d bought at a bookshop in town. This particular bookshop is notorious for stocking literature that is guaranteed to end up on a flyer and be discussed at meetings between parents and the school board. The book is called How to Draw Graphic Novels. Technically, Maud was not breaking any rules, as the book is nota graphic novel in and of itself. It’s a reference book, really. But the school was not interested in technicalities when it discovered a panel towards the back, showing a woman masturbating.
     
    It isn’t even a good drawing. I’ve seen it, you see. Everybody has now. The one thing this scandal guaranteed was that that little bookshop full of dark corners and badly drawn graphic novels sold out of How to Draw Graphic Novels in two days. I’d like to believe it was out of some sort of camaraderie that everyone rushed out to buy the book, but I know it was just to see the wank panel. That’s what everyone called it. The wank panel. You had to buy the book to see the wank panel because the book was shrink-wrapped. Still, I’m sure the proprietors of the shop found some copies hidden in the back, torn from