However, the first thing I’d better do before I continue is to warn you: I am not a ‘rebel’.
I only say this in case you’re hoping I’m going to be one of those daredevil kids who is always getting into trouble and being ‘sassy’ to grown-ups.
That is, unless you count becoming invisible as getting into trouble.
As for the time I swore at Mrs Abercrombie: that was an accident, as I have said a thousand times. I had meant to call her a ‘witch’ – which, I admit, is rude enough in itself, but not as rude as the word I used by mistake that rhymes with it. It got me into a LOT of trouble with Gram. To this day, Mrs Abercrombie thinks I’m a very rude girl even though it was more than three years ago and I wrote her a letter of apology on Gram’s best notepaper.
(I know she’s still angry because her dog Geoffrey always snarls at me. Geoffrey snarls at everyone, but Mrs Abercrombie always says, ‘Stop it, Geoffrey’ – except when he snarls at me.)
Anyway, usually I just sit quietly at the back at school, minding my own business, getting on with my stuff – la-la-la, don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you kind of thing.
But you know what grown-ups say, in that way they have that’s designed to make them seem clever, ‘Ah, you see – it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?’
That’s me. A ‘quiet one’. So quiet that I’m almost invisible.
Which, come to think of it, is quite funny.
How far back do you want to go?
If you ask me, it all started with the pizza thing. That was what got me so upset that I kind of lost a bit of my mind, and then ended up losing a lot more.
This is how it happened.
Jarrow Knight – who else? – shouted, ‘Pizza delivery!’ when I walked in the class, and pretty much everyone laughed. Not a LOL sort of laugh – more a spluttering cackle. Most people in my class are not actually cruel.
I didn’t get it at first. I had no idea it had anything to do with me. In fact, I thought it was some joke that I had walked in on halfway through, and so I smiled and laughed a bit as well, like you do when you don’t want to feel left out.
That must have looked odd, in hindsight.
Then a couple of days later, Jarrow, her brother, and some others were walking past me when I was talking to the girls outside the chemistry labs, and Jarrow said in a loud-ish voice, ‘Did you order the American Hot, Jez?’, and they high-fived, while Kirsten and Katie looked at their feet.
Do you get it? It still hurts to remember. (There’s going to be quite a lot of hurting and remembering, so we may as well get used to it.)
‘Pizza delivery’ is a reference to my face.
‘Pizza face’ = acne. That is, spots and zits and boils and the whole pimply shebang. You get it, yeah? The reference, not acne.
My face supposedly resembles the surface of a pizza. Hilarious. It doesn’t, anyway. It’s not as bad as that.
Acne on a twelve-year-old? I know, it’s kind of early. Even Dr Kemp said I was ‘at the earlier end of the spectrum’, but it’s not freakish. No, ‘freakish’ we’ll reserve for the acne itself, which is ‘towards the more severe end of the spectrum’. That’s nice family-doctor-speak for ‘Jeez, you’ve got it bad’.
I’ll spare you the details. You might be eating while you’re reading this and the details are not very nice.
So that was about three months ago. I realised a couple of things with those words, ‘Pizza Face’:
1 My policy of keeping a low profile at school had met with only limited success. Everyone knows Acne Girl. Up till that point, most of the mean stuff had been directed at Elliot Boyd, which was fine by me. Except, now I was a target too.
2 I honestly think some people reckon that you can catch acne. I mean, I’m not some saddo who spends the entire day alone, surrounded by people taunting her. It’s just that the whole ‘best friends’ thing is taking longer than I expected and I wonder if the acne is the cause? Gram says, ‘Just be yourself’, which sounds like good advice. I guess it is good advice if you have a reasonable idea of who you are – and I do. Or at least I did, until everything started to go wrong. Gram also says, ‘If you want a good friend, then be a good friend.’ She’s full of stuff like this. I sometimes think she collects it. Problem with that one is that there is a distinct lack of people around to be a friend to.
3 Jarrow Knight is a total nightmare. That’s not exactly a revelation but along with her twin brother the pair of them are pure poison.
4 I have got got got to do something about my skin.
My acne started about a year ago with a single, tiny pimple on my forehead. That pimple, I like to think, was sent as an advance scout by the Acne Army. It reported back to Pimple HQ, and within weeks a full regiment of spots and blackheads had encamped on my face and nothing I did could beat them back.
And then the Acne Army started colonising other parts of me. My neck hosted a small platoon of boils, which are actually large, shiny and painful. My chest had a company of tiny blackheads, which occasionally grew into whiteheads with pus in them, and within two months there was an expeditionary force annexing my legs.
Worst of all, though, Gram doesn’t really take me seriously and that is driving me nuts.
‘Spots, darling? You poor thing. I had spots too, and so did your mum. It’s just a phase. You’ll grow out of it.’
Even before the pizza incident, school had become much less fun than primary. It was just a coincidence, but at the same time as all this was happening, Flora McStay – who was probably my best friend – moved to Singapore, and Kirsten Olen was moved to a different class and started hanging out with the Knight twins.
Of whom more later.
The point is, I needed a plan to get rid of the acne, and that’s how the sunbed and the Chinese medicine entered my life.
And no, becoming invisible wasn’t part of the plan. That would definitely be ‘at the extreme end of the spectrum’.
Nor – in case it needs to be said – was getting any closer than strictly necessary to Elliot Boyd.
So, we’re still on backstory and you’re still around, which is good.
Elliot Boyd, eh? ‘Smelliot’ Boyd as he’s known, because someone once made the joke and it kind of hangs around him like his smell is supposed to.
The kid that no one likes.
Is it his height? His weight? His hair? His accent?
Or, in fact, his smell?
It could be any of them, and all of them. He’s a big bear of a boy, as tall as a couple of the teachers, with a large