Read Inside Madeleine for Free Online

going crazy with the need to scratch the shit out of it. She rubbed her notebook, hard and fast, over her chest. She was in the back row. John Bellini sat next to her, a short Italian boy from her part of town.
    “What the fuck are you doing?”
    Polly stopped rubbing the notebook against her now burning burst nipple. Her face turned red from embarrassment, from exertion. “None of your business.”
    “You’re disgusting.”
    “Fuck you,” she said to him.
    He looked her squarely in the eye. Then he spit, slowly, a large wad of spit onto the floor next to his desk. Polly then spit herself, an equally large wad next to her desk.
    “I bet I can make a bigger pile of spit than you,” he said.
    “Betcha,” she said.
    In the weeks that followed, Polly and John continued their effort, every day a different puddle. Neither of them ever declared anyone a winner, but it made the time pass. Finally, the teacher, Mr. Rotterman, noticed.
    “Hey! Hey! What’s going on there!” He was on them now, from the blackboard at the front of the class to the two of them in the back in a heartbeat, grabbing John by the arm and pulling him away. “Go to the principal’s office. Now,” he said. And then to Polly, “You. You I’ll talk to after class.”
    The bell rang. Everyone left. The room seemed enormous, empty like that. Mr. Rotterman, from behind his desk, said, “Come here.”
    Polly sat still.
    “I said, come here.” His voice boomed across the room, echoing off the tiled floor, the empty white walls.
    Polly stood up and then stood on her chair. She felt tall this way. She was tall this way. “No.”
    “I don’t want to call your mother. But I will.”
    Fuck you
, Polly thought.
Fuck you
, she thought, hopping down from the chair, her feet thwacking the floor, like a capgun sounding off. She walked to the desk. She was wearing a pair of white corduroys, and they were too small. They crawled up the crack of her front and back. They also didn’t reach her shoes—floods, they called them. When she got to Mr. Rotterman’s desk, he grabbed her, quickly, and leaned her over the desk.
    “That,” he said, as his hand slapped her ass hard, “is for being bad.”
    “Bad, bad, bad,” he repeated as he spanked her over and over again.

    Fall turned to winter and Polly had a friend. The friend didn’t like her very much and wasn’t nice to her, but Polly was so grateful that none of that mattered. Her friend’s name was Breanna and she was from the other side of town, a skinny white girl, much like Polly herself, but one whose parents were divorced and one who was allowed to watch as much television as she wanted and eat sugar cereals for dinner.
    Once, during a Saturday night sleepover, while they were watching the dancers gyrate on Solid Gold, Polly said, “Mike Turley says my dad is a fag.”
    “Really?” Breanna grinned and looked at her with interest. Generally, anything that caused another person pain or humiliation interested Breanna.
    “Yeah. Maybe we should kick his ass.”
    “Whose ass? Michael Turley’s or your dad’s?” Breanna nearly fell over laughing.
    “Shut up!”
    “Maybe your dad is a fag.” Breanna started to guffaw. Then she smacked Polly’s arm.
    “How could he be married and have a kid if he’s a faggot?”
    “Fuck if I know. I don’t anything about fags.”
    When getting ready for bed, in the bathroom at Breanna’s, Polly stared at herself in the mirror. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. She grinned. She had big teeth in a small head. She pulled down her underpants and looked at the dark wisps of hair forming. This was new but not as troublesome as her nipples. It was more hidden, and it didn’t itchquite so much. She touched herself gently, just there where the hair was growing in. Then she looked at her teeth again. When she was a little girl and her teeth were coming out, she could barely stand the feeling. The agony of waiting! It was like her other itches. She