louis vuitton sunglasses Then there was the whole business about our not being able to have babies. Miss Emily used to give a lot of the sex lectures herself, and I remember once, she brought in a life-size skeleton from the biology class to demonstrate how it was done. We watched in complete astonishment as she put the skeleton through various contortions, thrusting her pointer around without the slightest self-consciousness. She was going through all the nuts and bolts of how you did it, what went in where, the different variations, like this was still Geography. Then suddenly, with the skeleton in an obscene heap on the desktop, she turned away and began telling us how we had to be careful who we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she said, "sex affects emotions in ways you'd never expect." We had to be extremely careful about having sex in the outside world, especially with people who weren't students, because out there sex meant all sorts of things. Out there people were even fighting and killing each other over who had sex with whom. nike shox shoes And the reason it meant so much--so much more than, say, dancing or table-tennis--was because the people out there were different from us students: they could have babies from sex. That was why it was so important to them, this question of who did it with whom. And even though, as we knew, it was completely impossible for any of us to have babies, out there, we had to behave like them. We had to respect the rules and treat sex as something pretty special.Miss Emily's lecture that day was typical of what I'm talking about. We'd be focusing on sex, and then the other stuff would creep in. I suppose that was all part of how we came to be "told and not told."I think in the end we must have absorbed quite a lot of information, because I remember, around that age, a marked change in the way we approached the whole territory surrounding the donations. Until then, as I've said, we'd done everything to avoid the subject; we'd backed off at the first sign we were entering that ground, and there'd been severe punishment for any idiot--like Marge that time--who got careless. nike air max 2012 But from when we were thirteen, like I say, things started to change. We still didn't discuss the donations and all that went with them; we still found the whole area awkward enough. But it became something we made jokes about, in much the way we joked about sex. Looking back now, I'd say the rule about not discussing the donations openly was still there, as strong as ever. But now it was okay, almost required, every now and then, to make some jokey allusion to these things that lay in front of us.A good example is what happened the time Tommy got the gash on his elbow. It must have been just before my talk with him by the pond; a time, I suppose, when Tommy was still coming out of that phase of being teased and taunted.IT WASN'T SUCH A BAD GASH, and though he was sent to Crow Face to have it seen to, he was back almost straight away with a square of dressing plastered to his elbow. No one thought much about it until a couple of days later, when Tommy took off the dressing to reveal something at just that stage between sealing and still being an open wound. air max 2012 You could see bits of skin starting to bond, and soft red bits peeping up from underneath. We were in the middle of lunch, so everyone crowded round to go "urgh!" Then Christopher H., from the year above, said with a dead straight face: "Pity it's on that bit of the elbow. Just about anywhere else, it wouldn't matter."Tommy looked worried--Christopher being someone he looked up to in those days--and asked what he meant. Christopher went on eating, then said nonchalantly: "Don't you know? If it's right on the elbow like that, it can unzip. All you have to do is bend your arm quickly. Not just that actual bit, the whole elbow, it can all unzip like a bag opening up. Thought you'd know that."I could hear Tommy complaining that Crow Face hadn't warned him of anything of that sort, but Christopher shrugged and said: "She thought you knew, of course. Everyone knows."A number of people nearby murmured agreement. "You've got to keep your arm dead straight," someone else said. "Bending it at all's really dangerous."The next day I could see Tommy going about with his arm held out very rigidly and looking worried. nike shoes 2012 Everybody was laughing at him, and I was cross about that, but I had to admit, there was a funny side to it. Then towards the end of the afternoon as we were leaving the Art Room, he came up to me in the corridor and said: "Kath, can I just have a quick word?"This was maybe a couple of weeks after the time I'd gone up to him in the playing field to remind him about his polo shirt, so it had got about we were special friends of some sort. All the same, his coming up like that asking for a private talk was pretty embarrassing and threw me off balance. Maybe that partly explains why I wasn't more helpful than I was."I'm not too worried or anything," he began, once he'd got me aside. "But I wanted to play safe, that's all. We should never take chances with our health. I need someone to help, Kath." He was, he explained, concerned about what he'd do in his sleep. He might easily bend his elbow in the night. "I have these dreams all the time where I'm fighting loads of Roman soldiers."When I quizzed him a bit, it became obvious all kinds of people--people who hadn't been there that lunch-time--had been coming up to him to repeat Christopher H.'s warning.