TRAMPOLINE

He is in Year Twelve, and his girlfriend carries razor blades in her pencil case.

One day, not so long before the end, she shows him. They have been sitting together in the heat of the common room, as they had been when they first started – though back then they would always sit with something bridging the air between them, a hand on a hand, a mouth on a mouth, a headphone cable ear to ear. At seventeen, they have shared skin, saliva, sound – possibly the other contents of each other’s ears – a little less often now, in the distracted heat of June, as the end approaches.

But they have not shared this before. Bored, she opens her pencil case and takes it out. It’s dull, grey. There’s no shine to it, in the smudged light from the window, no cartoon glint that suggests it can cut through anything.

There’s something strange in the air that day. A hay fever itch, restless under the skin. He does not feel the bolt of panic he should, seeing the razor there, poised between her fingers. It’s only when she holds it over his hand, over the flesh of his knuckles, that the unease creeps in, his arm recoils.

Look.

She takes out a rubber and presses, and the blade goes cleanly in, two halves opening, like the mouth of a marionette. She takes out a couple of pencils and makes a little notch in each one – she holds the razor out to him, tells him to try.  

Goon.

He wants, very badly, to feel it in his hand. Could the edge cut him, even a little, lying flat against his palm? A notch of his own on the pencil, a mark on the edge of the desk – the thrill of something irrevocably changed by his hand. To be her accomplice, to step over some threshold carved into the air – the rules he’d break with her, at last, at last.

But he cannot move his hand. He feels that touching the razor will leave some mark on him, something the adults waiting in the corridors will see. It might be an actual genuine crime for her even to have the thing, he doesn’t know.  He is looking around now, at the students some distance from their corner, at the row of windows – for the rattle of the dull gold doorknob, a breeze whispering through the crack. He asks her if they can listen to that song again – the one she showed him months ago, with the strings and the lyrics asking to be smothered alive – a safe little bubble of romantic disquiet, unlike the rising unease he feels now.

Go on.