Fight Or Flight

Chapter 3 - Art

Chapter 3 - Art

Back before all this happened, if you hadn't known Layla - and she was stood before you - you'd probably begin to make some assumptions about her.

A snap judgement, perhaps.

You'd guess from her dress that she was just following the latest emo fashion. You'd decide her dyed-blonde hair - with overgrown black roots, which seemed to be furiously attempting to escape her scalp - and her even darker eye make-up, (against school rules!) was all part of some sort of look she wished to achieve; that her unkempt clothing was merely a further statement of intent; that her thinness, the whiteness of her skin, the a-sexual figure beneath those ill-fitting clothes, her isolation from almost everyone else...You'd naturally assume it was all a deliberate ploy. Her attempt at being different, a way of standing out from the crowd.

You might still think that.

But I don't think she was trying to be different. She was different.

And she just didn't give a shit.

Or so it seemed to me, at first.

She didn't give a shit about the opinions of others, didn't give a shit that nobody wanted to be her friend. Couldn't care less about school, homework, GCSE results, success, achievement and all the other things that are supposed to get us so stressed out, as we enter the final year of high school.

When you began talking to her, you got the impression that she wasn't any more unhappy than the rest of us. She just didn't try and pretend or disguise the fact that she was unhappy.

That she hardly ever smiled or spoke, was her choice, she told me.

Yes, she did eventually acknowledge my existence.

"Why waste your energy on idiots," she said one day, looking around the classroom. "Most people in this class have nothing remotely interesting to say anyway. What is it I'm missing again?"

When she did speak, it was nearly always to the point. No shitting around, no phoney compliments.

She wasn't tactile, either. No artificial hugs or kisses. Not even a wave when she left you at the school gate to go in the opposite direction on her way home.

And if she did speak directly to you, without you first beginning the conversation, it was always to complain about how bored she was with school, how boring the others students were, and what an uncaring bitch her mother was.

At first, I wasn't too keen on bringing up the subject of Kelly Stone. During the first few weeks after she arrived at our school, there were constant whispers about what really happened the day Kelly died.

There had been CCTV footage of Kelly shown on TV. You can see her running along the bicycle path close to the main road. The figure following her, running after her, was deliberately blurred.

People said it was Layla. The TV simply said it was Kelly's friend.

Then Kelly disappeared from view, where the road turns off towards the weir, close to the place where she fell to her death.

Or was pushed.

There was a headline in the local newspaper which asked: Was She Pushed Or Did She Fall? The fact that they put the word pushed before the word fall, some argued, meant that the police weren't convinced that it was an accident at all. Then the story went on to say how Kelly's family demanded answers from the police and witnesses.

But there was only one witness - Layla.

***

The only person Layla had good word to say about was Ed.