Read Dead Dogs for Free Online

heat and for the rest of the day I can feel a red stain swimming under my skin.
    Now and then Jenny will catch my eye as I’m contorting like a fucking circus act in my chair and she will smile at me. She willsmile at me and there’s an expression on her face when she does this that I can’t quite fathom. It’s like someone looking at a baby or something. But as far as I’m concerned a smile is a smile and on each occasion I’m gurning back at her like a simpleton.
    This all comes to a head one day in Maths.
    I’m shit at sums and I start thinking about how Jenny looks with her head bent over her copy, the blonde curtain of her hair tucked behind her ear and the white nubs of her teeth nipping at the end of her pencil. Mr Fogarty isn’t paying much attention to the class. He’s doing something with the roll, his face wrinkled beneath his dome of slick, hairless, pale skin. It’s like his entire head is a ball of scar tissue. His control over his classes is absolute. His discipline is a beartrap thing of sudden cruelty. The only noises in his room are the scratching of pencils and the chitinous clicking of calculators.
    Like something out of a pantomime, I’m flicking little stilletto glances around me under my brows before I elbow my red pen off the desk with all the finesse of a fat man falling off a high stool. Mr Fogarty looks up at me. Only his eyes move. His head stays bowed but his eyes move and his gaze travels from me to the fallen red pen and back to me again. His upper lip wrinkles in silent contempt and he goes back to his work.
    Smiling inanely I lean out of my chair and smiling inanely I turn my head to catch Jenny’s eye.
    She lifts her face and for a long moment we are locked together , she staring at me, me suspended awkwardly over the edge of the chair, my body torqued out into space.
    The chair creaks once before the legs give way and the class explodes into laughter. One creak. Like it was jeering me.
    At big break Seán says, ‘You have to say something to her.’
    We’re in the gym and the place is an echoing church of laughter and conversation. I’m looking at him over the rumpled, golden hump of a chicken goujon roll. Around a mouthful of dough, ketchup and reconstituted chicken gloop, I go, ‘What are you talking about?’
    I’m still embarrassed about what happened in Maths this morning and the last thing I want to do is go anywhere near Jenny O’Riordan for the rest of the day. I can picture her hand coming up to hide the laughter that sings in her eyes and shakes her shoulders. I can picture the hilarity on her face as Mr Fogarty hauls me off the floor by the collar.
    I lost my fucking pen as well.
    Seán looks at me with his big, blank eyes and he says slowly, like he’s thinking hard about every syllable, ‘You have to say something to her. Everyone saw that you were staring at her when you fell. Everyone sees you every day staring at her. I can hear everyone saying that you’re dying about her.’
    I’m swallowing my mouthful of carbohydrates and pretend chicken and I’m going, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake. Is everyone talking about us?’
    Seán looks at me and his lips squirm in a weird smile and he says, ‘Why do you say “us”?’
    He says, ‘They are talking about you. Not Jenny. You don’t have an “us”.’
    I look at him for a moment that stretches into a long expanse of silence. Everyone else is having their lunch too and the silence between us is filled with other people’s laughter and monkey-house chatter. He’s right of course. There is no ‘us’ when it comes to me and Jenny. The admission of this is hooked into my bowels.
    I’m shaking my head because I’m an idiot. I’m shaking my head and then I’m saying, ‘Yeah.’
    And then I go, ‘Just don’t you start taking the piss as well.’
    Seán looks at me then with his great heavy face and he says, ‘I won’t take the piss. I don’t ever take the piss. Even when all the others were laughing at