At this point I feel it would be worthwhile to mention how I felt about Emily. It was as if every moment I spent with her was perfect and when I couldn’t be with her it hurt.
Seriously, I literally had a pain in my stomach. I would spend hours staring at her facebook profile, looking at the girl she had been before me.
Then I would lean out my window and stare. Sometimes I could see if her light was on or if her computer was flickering. It made me happy just to know that she was there.
There was this one picture of us that she had taken when we were on the rooftop. She had put the camera down on the floor, and activated a delay. We were lucky. The picture came out fantastically. We were silhouetted against the setting sun, and she was kissing me on the cheek. I printed it off and put it in a frame on my desk. Whenever I missed her I would look at that photo.
Halloween had come and I had never seen anything like it. See, while in London Halloween was an excuse for teenagers to destroy things here it was a day to dress up and pretend to be someone else.
I went into school and the seniors had apparently come in during the night and set up a ‘scary corridor’. I went through it, being grabbed from behind while “HAHAHAH now you die!” was yelled in my ear.
In English we were reading the Catcher in The Rye. I gotta say, I don’t like it. Its effectively one long, poorly written complaint: oh my life is so shit. If I wanted to read that kind of stuff I would go read a blog!
Our teacher says that every line has a reason, but I am not sure I agree. God, the worst thing about the author is that he was a one hit wonder; he wrote this one novel and then became a recluse, refused to publish anything else.
The thing I do like about English is I can have an opinion without it simply being wrong.
So the reason I’m talking about English is because Miss Matters came in to class today with a scream mask on.
A couple of the girls jumped, and the guys laughed. It was cool when teachers were cool.
“Hello class,” She said. “Today we’re going to be doing something a little different. As you know its Halloween and I thought I would tell you guys some local myths and legends.
Some idiot in the back of the class (not me, I swear) asked if this was going to be on the test. You could see Miss Matters sigh.
“No. Kieran. It won’t be. I just thought it would be fun for you.” She said, but as soon as he had heard the word ‘no’ he had put his head on the desk.
Miss Matters sighed again. Then, regaining her composure, “Okay, so Alec can you put the blinds down?”
I went over to the window and closed the blinds. Another boy switched off the lights. Miss Matters turned on the projector and showed us a black and white picture.
The picture was of a girl, with frizzy hair, maybe ten or eleven years old. “This is Janet Curtis. Janet went to this very school back in the eighteen forties back when it was an all girls school. She was a child prodigy and skipped several grades hence her enrolment here. By all accounts she was exceptionally unpopular.”
“I can see why.” One of the girls joked. “She looks like a horse came and sat on her face.”
I knew it was wrong. But I laughed.
“Thank you class.” Miss Matters said, to quash the laughter. “Janet, was unfortunately found dead, hanging in her bedroom.” The class was quiet. The girl who had made the joke looked uncomfortable. She changed slides to a newspaper with the headline ‘Bullied girl commits suicide.’
