Seriously, I need something to make up for the fact that my life is spent in the purgatory of a burgundy school uniform. It’s the worst uniform I’ve ever seen; it actually involves a kilt and knee socks – no tights allowed. Let’s face it – at the age of nearly seventeen, it’s really pushing it to still be dressing us like some sort of deranged Lolita-themed strippers. Especially when they’re still locking us up in an all-girls’ school so that we allegedly won’t get ourselves into trouble – where’s the logic?
Yes, I did say nearly seventeen. I’m in the Lower Sixth – or Year Twelve as I believe they call it in some more modern institutions – not that you’d know it. After GCSEs, I begged my mum to let me go to the local community college instead – where I could do normal things like wear my own clothes and walk into town to go to Subway at lunchtime, not to mention actually learn how to talk to boys my own age – but she insisted that I stayed on for my school’s sixth form. She kept on so much about how proud of me she was for winning a scholarship and how she’d have killed to have had my advantages when she was my age – until eventually I decided it was best just to shut up and put up.
So, that’s why I’m nearly seventeen and still in school uniform, constantly getting in trouble about my voluminous eyeliner and scruffy hair, because the school dress code specifies neat ponytails and ‘natural make-up only’ for sixth formers.
‘Sorana Salem! Ready in ten seconds or we’re going without you!’
If only. Like my mum can talk – as I come down the stairs, she’s still hopping about in the hallway, frantically searching for a missing high heel. She’s worse than I am in the mornings, if that’s possible. She’s so scatty at home, you wouldn’t think that she has this big, important job as a headhunter – apparently not as gruesome as it sounds, but still pretty hardcore.
My little sister, Daisy, is watching the ubiquitous repeats of Friends on TV, the very picture of serenity, while she patiently waits for us to be ready. Daisy is three years younger than me, and we get on despite the fact that she often seems more mature than I am and makes me feel completely inept. She has a huge gang of friends who are considered the cool girls of her class; she makes it all look so effortless, as if she just magically knows how to look pretty all the time and make people like her.
‘Right! Let’s move it! Sorana, have you eaten anything?’
I shake my head, keeping my fringe over my eyes. The toaster pops and my mum shoves a chocolate Pop-Tart in my blazer pocket as we’re all hustling out the door. I love my mum; I know it’s not cool, but I really do.
One thing I don’t love, though, is that she insists upon driving me to school every morning bang on eight o’clock, just because she has to get to work early. I’d do anything not to have to be so early for school that I’m the first one there every single bloody morning. Still, I know that my mum already feels guilty enough about the amount of time she spends at work, so I don’t give her a hard time about it; like most things in my life, I keep quiet and hope that everyone’s happy.
‘Bye, darlings. Have a great day – don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ Mum roars off as soon as Daisy and I spill out of the car – well, I spill and Daisy elegantly skips.
‘See ya later, Daisy Chainsaw.’ I ruffle her perfect – thick, glossy – little cow – hair before she disappears in the direction of her Year Nine classroom, and I shuffle about and kill as much time as humanly possible before heading past the ‘old building’ and up the stairs to the Lower Sixth common room. Having been at St Therese’s for six long years, it is still not lost on me just how bloody weird a place it is. In a nutshell: small, strict, religious, weird. I’m counting the days until I can get out. All I can think is: at least it’s Friday, if nothing else.
The common room is deserted. The only concessions to it being nominally a ‘common room’ rather than boring old pre-GCSEs ‘classroom’ are subtle, to say the least. There’s a kettle so that we can make coffee, or more usually instant hot chocolate, at break times, and an ancient threadbare sofa in one corner to sit on while we drink it. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard classroom: a big, square space filled with rows of old-fashioned wooden desks, with one wall comprising an enormous window overlooking the road below and the forbidden freedom it represents.
I take advantage of the solitude to give the picture of Vincent August – lead singer and guitarist of Trouble Every Day – on my locker door a brief, ironic kiss, before grabbing my current recreational reading matter – William S. Burroughs, as you asked – and slouching down into my allocated plastic chair.
You may wonder why I wouldn’t sit on the sofa, as it’s there. The answer’s about to walk into the room, just as she does every morning – the next person after me to arrive each day.
Right on cue, Amie Bellairs strolls in. We nod ‘good morning’ at each other, but I don’t look up from my book. If I added up all of the cumulative time that the two of us have spent, just us, alone in a room together, it would probably be hundreds upon hundreds of hours. Yet we never, ever speak.
I don’t hate her, I don’t think she particularly hates me – but we have literally nothing to say to each other. Well, unless she’s whispering to her gaggle of cronies that I’m a freak with weird taste in music and clothes and, most crucially, skinny chicken legs and no tits.
She conducts her morning mini-routine just like I did, and I could tell you what she’s doing with my eyes closed: gummy pink lip-gloss applied, a final check of blonde hair in a mirror compact, crappy fashion magazine at the ready before curling up, cat-like, on the sofa. There’s easily room enough for both of us on there but that’s not the point. It’s not my territory, just like the back seat of the bus on school trips wasn’t when I was eleven.
Although none of it would ever exit my mouth, I still find myself trying to think of things I could say to fill the silence: ‘So, are you doing anything at the weekend?’; or, ‘Anything exciting there in Look magazine – pockets in or out this year?’ I already know the answers: ‘Going to The Crown with the girls, of course,’ as she and her friends do every weekend; and ‘Are you taking the piss?’
The irony is that some of the girls in my class think I’m spiky or even stuck up, just because I generally stay quiet and out of the way, keeping my nose in a book as often as I can. Do they seriously not understand that the book is a shield? It’s the only thing I’ve got.
I once heard there’s a saying in French that means ‘the wit of the staircase’, or, in other words, the perfect response you think of five minutes after a conversation has finished – well, that’s me. For someone who’s supposed to be quite clever, I seem to spend a lot of my time feeling incredibly stupid.
As you can probably gather, the reason that Amie Bellairs and I don’t speak in the mornings is not only because we have nothing in common, but because we exist in different universes. She is a part of what I privately refer to in my head as ‘the A Group’ – not that they have anything as lame as an official name or I would ever say this to their faces. They’re ‘A’ not only because they’re clearly at the top of the pile – pretty, reasonably clever but not unusually so, the ones who always seem to know whether it’s cooler to wear your school shirt tucked in or out – but because a bizarrely high proportion of them seem to have names that begin with the letter ‘A’. As well as Amie, there’s an Alice, Amanda and two Alexandras (Alex and Lexy). Other than the anomaly that is Katey Sewell – but she’s tiny and elfin and the most gorgeous thing you’ve seen in your life, so of course she’s in the A Group regardless of name.
It’s kind of a weird thing. I don’t really want to be like them, but I’m jealous of them anyway. I just wish I could fit in as easily as that, but I seem to be incapable of it. My mum says it’s because I’m a Gemini – I can never make up my mind about anything.
A