Penny Bradley set her own curriculum the first time she took a joyride through Year 12, with a major in Sex Education.
An only child with a clear, analytical mind, her university professor parents both reduced their working hours to nurture her until she started school, hugely advanced, at the age of six. She completed her schoolwork so quickly that her teachers would send her to the library, where she diligently worked her way through the non-fiction section, or to higher-grade classrooms for extension lessons. She spent term one in Year One before being skipped to the next grade to keep her teachers sane.
Her parents were avid campers and she learned to love the outdoors from babyhood, swimming in the sea, climbing trees and making campfires. She grew strong in body and spirit and her parents reveled in the fine future in front of her.
Towards the end of Year 11 Penny discovered her parents’ secret cache of books. She’d had the essentials of Sex Ed at school with fornication presented as an activity essential to have a family (in stark contrast her parents had been upfront about its pleasures) and to her mind reaching the age of consent presented her with a license to see what all the fuss was about.
More than her curiosity was aroused. She put paid to her own virginity by way of something she saw in an Adult Shop window (having easily lied about her age to the leering bloke behind the counter) and her first orgasm, by way of her own exploration, left her breathless for more.
Her mother Jacqueline, seeing the light still on in her daughter’s room one night and finding her fast asleep with one of the books open on the bed, spoke the next day about “the twin pillars of protection and contraception” and gave her a packet of condoms, ribbed for her pleasure.
Joni Page 