But still, I wish I could make him a better person. I wish that I could somehow cleanse the dirty, slimy, brown and grey aura that surrounds his body. But I can’t. I’m useless. What’s the point of being able to see the very core of a person and not have any kind of power to change it? I can’t change the fact that he’s left me here to return to Tribane, a city hours away, to continue his life as a small time drug dealer.
I gather my books and stack them onto my new shelves, and I try not to think of my dad. He more or less indicated that I wouldn’t be seeing him again. Here’s to wishful thinking. I don’t like to be selfish, but I do deserve a nice life, I have suffered enough. If he wants to kill himself slowly with heroin, well, that just isn’t my problem any longer.
I repeat to myself, You don’t care. You don’t care. You don’t care. You do NOT care what he does with the remnants of his fucked up existence. But it’s difficult to stop caring. Maybe I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome, where the captive begins to feel for their captor. I cannot let it overwhelm me. I need to be emotionless when it comes to my father.
I sigh as I change into the grey tracksuit pants and old white t-shirt that I wear to bed. It’s only eight-thirty in the evening. Yet, I am going to do my best to sleep, perchance to dream.
I had a nice weekend with Gran. She baked cookies and fairy cakes and we sat out in the sun in her back garden to eat them, and drink tea, and look through my book list for school. Some of the books I already have from my school back home. Gran said she’d call her care assistant Diana, who I haven’t met yet, to go into town and buy the ones that I need. It’s a strange sensation having people give me help, but a good one all the same.
I did some exploring of the town over the weekend, but there wasn’t too much to see other than some shops, a church and various residential streets. So I spent most of my time getting to know Gran better. I learned that she is actually seventy-two, and has lived all her life in Chesterport. She retired four years ago from her job as a florist. That was when her sight had started to get bad. She told me that she’s not entirely blind, she can still see shapes and outlines.
She gave me a silver locket with some sort of dried flowery herbs inside as a welcoming gift. Her generosity made me feel like crying again. After breakfast on Monday morning I make a quick run up to my room to comb my hair and grab my school bag. I hope that all goes well. Maybe I’ll be lucky and I might even make a new friend or two. I only had one friend in my old school, her name was Casey and she wasn’t really much of a friend at all.
One day I caught her doing an impression of my stammer to some other girls in my class. It’s horrible when you discover that the person you thought was your friend really doesn’t care about you at all. I should have known though, Casey’s aura always had a hint of selfishness about it.
When I arrive at the school there are a couple of buses pulling into the car park with teenagers spilling out of them. Some of the older students have cars of their own. There are grassy areas on either side of the car park where students hang about, sitting on the grass and socialising since the weather is sunny today. I like the sun. It energises me. I like it in Gran’s because in my new room I can get up early and open the shutters and let the light flood in and nourish me. My dad slept most of the day you see, he’d never let me pull the curtains. Our apartment never knew the sun.
There seems to be a lot of students at this school, if I had to guess I’d say there are about one and a half to two thousand in all. This terrifies me. I go straight to the secretary’s office to collect my timetable, where I find several women standing around drinking cups of coffee and talking about their weekends. One of the secretaries makes her way toward me and takes a seat at the service window.
“How can I help you?” she asks.
“I – I’m a n-new student.”
She gives me a dirty look. “Name?”
“Florence V-v-vaine.”
She gives me another dirty look. Jesus. Some people just don’t get that my stammer isn’t my fault. They think I’m either retarded or taking the piss. She opens a drawer and flicks through several files, then whips out a sheet of white paper.
“Here’s your schedule Florence, and your locker number and code.” She hands them to me, and then says, with complete insincerity because her aura tells me so, “Good luck with your first day.”
I walk out of the office and take a look at my time table, first class is C.S.P.E? I have no clue what that is. We didn’t have that subject in my last school. I hope it isn’t anything difficult. My locker is number 356. I look on either side of me. The ones lining the hall I’m walking through are in the two hundreds, so if I keep going straight ahead I should eventually reach the three hundreds. The hall is loud and packed with students. I want to find my locker before I go to my first class because my bag is a dead weight.
I continue my way down the long hall, turn a corner, and finally I’ve reached the three hundreds. I take another look at my time table. I’ve got three classes before the mid-morning break, C.S.P.E, English, and then Mathematics. I open my locker and load all the books I don’t need into it, trying to stack them as neatly as possible.
As I close my locker I hear a curious voice ask, “Who are you?”
I turn and find a girl with short dark red hair, what do you call that colour? Auburn? Yes, auburn hair, and she’s got black eyes and freckles sprinkled over her cheeks and nose. She’s looking at me expectantly.
“I’m n-new.” I reply.
She grins. “My name’s Caroline, you can latch onto me for the day if you’d like. I don’t mind showing you the ropes.”
“Thanks, that’d be great.” I tell her. “I’m Flo.”
“You’re in fifth year right, what’s your first class?”
“I’ve got C.S.P.E first, but I don’t know what that is.”
“You’re in with me then. C.S.P.E means Civic, Social and Political Education.” Caroline answers, her words are mildly sarcastic.
“Oh, I-I-I s-see.”
She smiles. She must have noticed my stammer, but is nice enough not to mention it. Caroline’s aura is a shimmering yellow, that kind of colour normally indicates a sharp mind and an interest in knowledge. I like her already. There’s also a hint of sadness nestled deep within her, a long felt grief that won’t ever go away. I wonder what it could mean. It makes me want to get to know her better so that I can discover the source of her anguish.
“Come on then,” she says, leading the way down the hall.
As we walk I tell her how I moved here to live with my grandmother because my dad got a new job in Australia and I didn’t want to move so far away. I know it’s a terrible lie, but I’d rather not get into the fact that he’s a low life, abusive, drug dealing heroin addict who couldn’t give a crap whether I lived or died.
Inside of the classroom the rest of the students are taking their seats and chatting with each other. The teacher has already arrived and is writing something in chalk on the blackboard. She looks about forty, has short pixie cut hair and is wearing a beady green hippie dress and brown leather sandals. The desks in the classroom are arranged into a circle, with the teacher’s larger desk at the head of the circle. Cynically, I wonder if this is supposed to symbolise equality. I’m just about to follow Caroline and take a seat beside her when the teacher turns around and clocks me. She smiles widely.
“Hey, are you the new girl I was told about, Florence?”
“Y-yes.” I answer, a bit grudgingly. I’d been hoping to slip in undetected.
“Wonderful!” she exclaims, the rest of the students have gone quiet and taken their seats, watching the exchange between myself and the teacher. “My name is Miss O’Brien, welcome, please do introduce yourself to everybody before we begin.” She makes a hand gesture for me to stand at the front of the room.
Christ on a bike. I take a deep breath and try to speak but the words won’t come out. My heart sinks. These are the times when my stammer is at i
ts worst. I don’t just mess up the words, I can’t get them out at all. I breathe slowly, deeply, and try again, but nothing. At this point the entire room is staring at me, probably wondering if I’m some sort of defective. Another deep breath. Again, no words will come. And another…
Finally I manage to say, “H-hi, m-m-my n-n-n…” Come on just say it. I get stuck on the word “name”. The harder I try the worse it gets. I continue, “N-n-n…” I sigh and breathe. Crinkle my forehead in frustration. My cheeks are blazing red. I look to Miss O’Brien, realisation must have hit her that I’ve got a speech impediment because she finishes for me.
“Class, this is a new student, her name is Florence Vaine. I hope you’ll all be very welcoming. Please take a seat where ever you like Florence.”
I nod and take a seat on the left side of the circle beside Caroline, she smiles at me sympathetically. The rest of the students are grinning and whispering and looking at me through judgemental eyes. Tears and embarrassment catch in my throat. This is definitely not the start I’d been hoping for.
Miss O’Brien speaks again, “I’ve printed out some notes for this class, but I left them in the office. I’ll be back in two minutes, no talking please, read over last week’s homework until I get back.”
Caroline nudges me in the side and whispers, “Are you okay?”
I manage a quick nod, and then begin meticulously fidgeting with the hem of my top.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but do you have some kind of stutter, or, um, what do you call it, a stammer?”
“Yes I have a-a s-stammer, it’s only this bad when I’m stressed.”
“Oh I see.” There’s pity in her expression, and I don’t like it one bit.
A second later I hear somebody say mockingly, “H-h-hello m-m-my n-n-name is F-F-Florence,” and then the whole class starts laughing. I look around the room for the first time. The person who’d mocked me is a boy with expertly tousled blond hair and a blue Abercrombie t-shirt on. I should complement him on the originality of his joke.
“Don’t mind them,” Caroline continues to whisper to me. “Every school has to have a variety of dick heads to make life just that much more painful for the rest of us, you know.”
“Unfortunately.” I reply quietly.
One of the boys sitting beside Abercrombie says, “Nice though, pity she can’t talk right.”
Then Abercrombie retorts, “Yeah but she doesn’t need to talk to do certain things.”
The girls who’d been laughing with them scowl now, as if the fact that he made a sexual innuendo about me means that I’m suddenly a threat. Talk about the death of feminism.
Completely out of the blue, Caroline sticks up for me. “It really is depressing how retarded you are Josh.”
“Shut up, ginger,” says Abercrombie.
Then a boy I hadn’t noticed before speaks up, he’s sitting directly across from Caroline and me on the other side of the circle. “Hey Josh, you wanna throw abuse, direct it at someone your own size, what do you say?”
Abercrombie turns to look at the boy who’d just spoken, an angry expression causing his forehead to crease. But before he can say anything Miss O’Brien returns to the class, handing out photocopied sheets of paper and beginning her lecture about the formation of the United Nations.
I take a peek at the boy who had sort of stuck up for us. He’s got golden brown hair and his eyes are bright blue. He’s sitting beside a boy with shoulder length black hair and a lip ring. If I didn’t know any better I would have said they were brothers. They look nothing alike but their auras are strikingly similar, and strikingly unusual.
Both of their bodies are surrounded by blazing orange, it curls and swirls like fire. In fact, the more I study them, the more their auras resemble the element. Orange is a good colour, it indicates vitality and stamina. Perhaps they are athletes.
Preoccupied with the auras of these two boys, I fail to notice that the one who’d spoken up to Josh is staring at me. He looks over his shoulder a second, seemingly wondering what I’m gawking at. He can’t see the fire, only I can. I avert my eyes and look down at the notes Miss O’Brien handed out.
Caroline whispers to me again, “Franklin Marsters is giving you the glad eye.”
I turn my head a fraction to her. “Who is that?”
“Twelve o’clock,” is all she says. I look up. Fire aura boy is gazing at me. His expression is quizzical, then he smiles and I quickly look away.
Miss O’Brien asks the class, “So can anybody tell me when the U.N was founded?”
This is a simple question, it’s printed right there on the notes. One of the girls who’d laughed at me earlier speaks up. “1945 Miss.”
She’s got long dark blond hair and her aura is pink, but not Barbie doll pink like the nail varnish she’s wearing. It’s more of a dark, murky pink, usually a sign of immaturity, sometimes dishonesty. Don’t ask me how I know which colours mean what, I’ve always just known, it’s intuitive somehow.
“Well done Ingrid, you managed to read the notes then,” says Miss O’Brien, with a hint of sarcasm that makes me smile. “And since you’ve volunteered to answer, maybe you could also tell me where the International Court of Justice is situated, what its function is?”
Now this one isn’t in the notes. Ingrid scans the paper in front of her. Nope. “I don’t know that one, Miss,” she almost sneers.
“Well if you’d been listening to me you would know, since I mentioned it not five minutes ago. The ICJ is located in The Hague in the Netherlands, and it is the main judicial organ of the U.N.”
Miss O’Brien continues to tell us the ins and outs of the U.N, and I wonder why we never did CSPE in my old school. Then again, it was in a run down part of Tribane, and I suppose those kinds of places only bother to give you the bare essentials of an education.
When the bell rings I shove the print out into my bag and Caroline asks, “What’s your next class?”
“English,” I reply, after consulting my time table.
“Damn, I’ve got biology next, but I can show you where your room is, my brother’s in your English class.”
“O-okay, thank you.”
Caroline smiles and shows me the way to classroom number twenty-six, where I’ve got English with Mr Sinclair. She tells me that she and her brother Christian are twins, and that I should introduce myself to him as a friend of his sister’s, she assures me he’ll be nice to me. I nod in agreement, but have no intention of introducing myself to anybody in my next class. It’s hard enough being looked at like an oddity when you’re new. Speaking would only gain me more unwanted attention.
Thankfully, the seats in my English class aren’t organised into a circle like in Miss O’Brien’s. That must be a hippy thing. The teacher is in his fifties with grey hair and a brown shirt on. He gives me a look over, probably noting that I’m the new girl and then turns back to sort through the papers on his desk. Thank God he didn’t tell me to stand in front of the class and talk about myself like before. I take a seat in the middle row beside the window.
I sit and gaze out at the front gates of the school as the class begins, and I notice a boy to my left raise his hand to ask a question.
When Mr Sinclair asks, “Yes, Christian?” I realise that this must be Caroline’s brother.
I turn a little in my seat to get a better look at him. He’s got the same auburn hair, only it’s a little darker, and the same black eyes. He looks like one of those cool nerd types. There’s a copy of a Sandman comic sticking out of his bag. His aura is similar to Caroline’s, he’s got the yellow but it also has some green in it, creativity and good communication skills.
The boy who’d been sitting next to Franklin Marsters is in this class too. I notice that he’s sitting right behind me. He came in with another boy with pale blond hair and ice blue eyes. Funnily enough, this boy has the same fiery aura as the other two. I wonder why their energy is all so similar. Perhaps they’re related, they can’t possibly be
brothers because they’re all the same age, but maybe they’re first cousins or something.
On my way to my locker during the mid-morning break I pass by Josh and his friends, he shouts over, “Hey, it’s stutter girl!” but I hurry on before they can bother me further. I really hate teenagers, even though I am one, with their stupid social hierarchies and need to ostracise the weak.
I dig in my bag to make sure I put my Xanax in this morning before I left Gran’s. My doctor back home prescribed it to me six months ago because apparently I’ve got an anxiety disorder that’s related to my speech impediment. But I try to only take the pills when I really need them. Growing up with my dad, I came to hate any kind of drugs, even prescription ones.
Unfortunately, this first day of school thing has my chest seizing up, and I need something to calm me down. I open my locker and switch my books for the ones I need for my next three classes before lunch. Then I take one of the pills from the bottle and swallow it down, making an effort to do it discretely so that the passing students can’t see. But I sense I’m being observed, I look quickly to my left and find Franklin Marsters had been watching the whole time. Shit.
I shouldn’t be ashamed, but I am. I don’t like people knowing I’m so screwed up in the head that I have to take pills because I become so anxious I can barely function sometimes. I shove the bottle back in my bag and zip it up. It could have just been a headache tablet. He can’t know that it’s anything else. I look in his direction again, he’s still watching me. His locker is about six or seven down from mine. His blue eyes seem to see right into my soul, it’s unsettling. Just because I can see people’s auras and am often preoccupied with studying them, it doesn’t mean that I like it when I become the subject of analysis.
Franklin doesn’t smile. He doesn’t do anything for a minute, but above his head the orange fire has sparks of turquoise in it. Compassion? Is he feeling sorry for me? That makes me even more self-conscious, but I can’t stop staring at the turquoise, it’s too lovely.