Etiquette for a Dinner Party by Sue Orr

necklace.
    She had her ears pierced.
    It dawned on me that I was looking at a tart. I'd never seen one before. I started again, from the top of her head down to her shoes, which I didn't mention before but they were the exact slingbacks that I had been begging Mum to get me all summer. I never got them, they weren't practical.
    Only tarts get their ears pierced.
    This was a fact. My mother had said it often enough, when we stopped by Johnson's Jewellers in town to look in the window. She'd be admiring the rings, and I always ended up looking at the tiny sparkling earrings. Mothers weren't always right but I accepted her word on this one. None of the girls in my class had their ears pierced, and definitely none of them had had sex.
    I couldn't help it. I looked at the earrings, then at the crotch of her Levis, at the place where she did it. Up and down I looked, trying to tie it all up. I saw that even though she was so skinny she was starting to get boobs, and I thought what's the bet she's got a bra. One of the colourful unpractical ones from McKenzies. One time, when I looked up, she was staring straight back at me.

    Mr Frank was at the end of the new kids' line, grinning like a kid himself. His hair flicked down towards his Mr Magoo glasses. He grabbed the long ruler off the chalk ledge and used it as a sort of leaning thing, like Dick Van Dyke in that part of Mary Poppins when he dances with the penguins. This was not something he normally did, so maybe he was nervous too. I watched it bend in the middle, wondered whether it might just snap and wouldn't that be a laugh, in front of the new kids. But it didn't.
    'Ah . . . well, right,' he said, and waited. It sounded like the end of something, not the beginning. We locals knew he started most of his talks like that, but the new kids looked confused.
    'As you all know, we have some new children joining us today . . .' He looked down the line of kids and smiled again, quickly. You could see his eyes flicking across them, and then back, as though he was skim-reading a book. He kept going back to the girl, as if she might be the bit he was looking for.
    'Welcome to you all. I'm Mr Frank, your teacher and also the headmaster of Pekapeka Primary.' Mr Frank's body swelled up when he said this, and he got on with his walking back and forth. Like a cocky bloody rooster. That was Dad's usual description of Mr Frank, not mine.
    'Perhaps you'd like to take turns to tell us what your name is, where you've come from, the things you like doing and whose farm you are working on!' He swung around and tapped the first one, a boy, lightly on the shoulder with the ruler.
    The boy had red hair and black-dot freckles and snot coming out his nose. He had his arms crossed in front of him like the All Blacks do in newspaper photos. I could see his shirt fabric sticking out through a hole in the elbow of his jersey. I knew what my mother would say about this. Poor little buggers . . . a needle and a bit of wool, that's all it takes. He said his name was Wayne Bennett and he'd come from down south. And that he lived on the Maxwell's farm and liked feeding out. You could tell, the way he said it, that he'd done this talk before. He didn't look at Mr Frank, or any of us; he just stared at a spot somewhere on the back wall.
    Hailstones smashed against the windows as the other kids had their turns telling us about themselves. They had to shout over the noise of the storm and the windows rattling. Mr Frank threw some more coal in the big black burner during one boy's talk so I missed his details entirely. Then Mr Frank went back to his desk. He wrote notes while they talked, and thanked each of them as they finished.
    I never listened to the boys. Their stories were always the same — duck shooting and calving — and also they were younger than me and even from the back of the mat I could tell that the smell from them was pretty bad. I am certainly not saying all sharemilker kids smell, but the boys