Marion's Memoirs

3. Bridge

Do you know something? I think I could get used to this.

I'd doubted Professor Lovejoy when she gave me that book. I mean, don't I do enough work? Why do I need to write a dissertation on my life, too? But you know- I actually kind of like this. This is the sort of thing people need to know about, I think. I like how my handwriting feels, too. It's like carving the words in with ink, and they don't come out. This was just a pen I found in the corridor. It's someone else's and it has a name engraved on it, but that means nothing, does it? I took it, so it's mine now.

So at present, I'm preparing to go out. I had a plan (sort of) for the whole thing. I was going to meet Juniper back at the dorm once I'd got everything. "Everything" was food. Did I need anything else? Probably not. So once I did that I'd get her and then we'd climb out of the window of the dorm. Between the dorm building and the big wall around the school there's only a small stretch of grass, so then we'd climb over the wall and be out of school. I think after that it's just forest for a while until you come to the next towns. So we'd go and do all of that. That was my plan. The rest was up to destiny.

A weaker person would maybe feel sentimental, walking through Greenbough Village for the last time. But I wouldn't miss this place. It was just some insular rural shithive full of rich people who never did anything but doubt me. For a while after my plan there was the big gap where I'd let fate have its fun, yes, but I had plans for after that too. Maybe having Juniper around would be a drawback in this regard, but I didn't plan on returning here. No. The rest of the world had more room for me.

Isn't it just mind-boggling how you can walk through an entire village full of people in just five minutes? It is for me. Mind-bogglingly dull. I was already at the cemetery feeling a deep sense of infuriation. It was like it was taunting me. Like, hey, Marion, you're trapped inside a boring, pathetic prison.  For good measure I gave the gates a nice hearty kick before I set off for the Galder Estate. (Is that how you spell it?)

I think I might have dislodged something because I heard a lot of creaking for a while afterwards, but I didn't really care. I'd done worse things to the florist's window and got off. Well, got off with two week's community service, but that was nothing. Really.

I expected to walk through undisturbed, because rich people usually did demi-luncheon or petit-dejeuner or high tea ceremony by now and so stayed in their cozy little giant houses. However, I ended up bumping into someone. That's not like a leading sentence; "someone" wasn't anyone I recognised.

"Sorry!" they said, giving me a smile full of gaps in their teeth. It was a short, blonde-haired boy who looked a million miles away from puberty. "Wasn't lookin' where I was goin'. Nice house you got, miss."

He darted around me and ran away.

"I'm not a miss, you condescending fuck!" I called back, waving my fist. I watched after him, wondering whether to chase after him- despite carrying something big and glassy that looked like an entire window taken out, he was pretty quick. "And- wait a minute-"

It had just occurred to me that it was probably my house he stole the window from.

I let him run. Kid was clever.

Sure enough, round the back of the house, there was a giant gap into a side-room where a window had been ripped out. Like, literally, there was just this huge black space there. It was kind of impressive, actually. I decided to take advantage of the situation and enter the house by leaping through. Incidentally, this was fucking awesome. Leaping through a window was cool enough on its own, but leaping through a former window was even cooler.

So I went in and I got some food. I didn't pay much attention to this part, I just took what was in the cupboards. It was difficult to carry all of it, so I took one of Cassiopia's fancy handbags and out I was. And I walked back to school and yadda yadda and god this part is so boring, it's not significant enough for me to write down. And wait a minute oh no it better not goddamnit no wait good my pen isn't running out of ink after all. Good. I didn't know how much was in this thing.