A Life Less Average

nineteen

lewis 

Poppy and I managed to get through Monday's tutoring session without getting distracted. At least I did. She was mostly quiet, nodding along to what I had to say, and agreeing with almost everything I advised her on. When we reached the end of the test paper, and her notebook was filled with loopy notes and labelled diagrams, we packed up. 

"Is everything okay?" I asked. 

There were a couple of our classmates still at computers, their headphones plugged in as they battled through their respective essays. 

"Hmm?" She looked up at me. I hadn't seen her all day, as was expected at school. We ran in different circles and that was okay. We had our scheduled dates to look forward to every Monday. 

"Is everything okay?" I repeated. 

She looked as though she hadn't slept properly the night before. Her eyes were half closed and dark, despite the two coffees she had bought from the Sixth Form coffee machine in the last hour. 

Her blue hair still made me smile. It was neater today, despite the obvious exhaustion written on her face. She had somehow managed an intricate plait down the centre of her scalp and it fell into a spiky pony tail at the back of her head. 

"Yeah," she managed to say. She tried to look away, but she knew that she hadn't convinced me. "My mum's just being a total bitch to me." 

I frowned. Poppy hadn't told me anything about her family, other than that she had two older sisters who had both graduated universities and had moved out. It had surprised me that we had similar families. She didn't strike me as the youngest child. She was too rebellious, too different. 

"What's happened?" I asked, as we stepped outside. I slipped my hand into hers. "Talk to me." 

She stayed silent. I guessed she was weighing the pros and cons of spilling the gory details of her family life into the pot of our relationship. If it was relationship. We hadn't really discussed labels yet. 

"You know you can tell me anything, right?" 

She took a deep breath as though the air was courage. Her chest rose and she emptied her lungs before she started to speak. "It's hard to explain. It's like she looks at me and she just sees disappointment. I've told you about my sisters, Rachel and Tara." 

I nodded. She had mentioned them but I didn't know anything about them, other than they had both gone to university. 

"They're both super smart and graduated at the top of their classes. And now they're both in really good jobs. Tara's engaged and Rachel's living with her boyfriend in this humongous house. They've just become these super successful people in every aspect of their lives. And then there's me." 

"Just because you don't want to go to university doesn't mean you're not going to be successful."

"I have absolutely no idea what I want to do when I leave school. And if the next couple of months aren't going to be stressful enough with these exams that I actually don't care about, my mum's made me get a job."

"Wait, what?" It was as though she had gone from step three to step ten. "Why has she made you get a job?" 

She rolled her eyes. "Because I'm an ungrateful little bitch," she said. "And I need to earn my right to live in her house." 

I stopped, and because her hand was in mine, she did too. 

"She said that to you?" 

"It's fine," she said. "I have a job. A place down town needed some extra waitresses for the weekend shifts. It pays weekly so she'll get whatever money she wants."