Part 1 of a Novella

This piece is quite long so if people don't like the first part, I probably won't post the rest

I hope you enjoy the beginning and be completely honest with feedback, if it's terrible I need to know

The narrative seems a little clumsy in places, it's supposed to reflect the character of Jennifer

‘Do you know why you’re sat here today, Jennifer?’

‘Um, well Ms Raymond said I had to go to the career’s advisor to discuss what I want to do in the future, so I’ve come to the career’s advisor to –’

‘No, no, no, Jennifer. Do you know why you’re sitting here? Are you going to tell me you want to be a doctor who saves lives? Are you going to tell me you’ll be a world famous actor of the theatre? Are you going to be a pilot? Anything?’

‘Well, I can’t be a doctor because I faint at the sight of blood, and when I was in the nativity play in reception playing one of the angels I got stage fright and ran off, and if you’re a pilot you increase your chances of being in a plane crash, like… lots. It’s like playing with fire. I don’t want to have to tell my parents that if I don’t see them again they should know I love them every time I go to work.’ (According to every student and teacher at school, my home life is ‘one big happy family’ and my dad isn’t a beauty contest judge, and that’s the way I want it).

‘Jennifer, these are only my suggestions. What you’ve got to learn to do is think for yourself.’ The bald man leaned over his desk and tapped my forehead hard, twice, like he wouldn’t be surprised if there was nothing in my head but air. ‘You know what’s up here, in that brain of yours? Potential. All that potential locked away, waiting to be let out. Oh, I know you girls are brainwashed with your… glamour magazines, aspiring to be the new Kate Moss of the twenty first century, but all that does is raise false hope while any real hopes disappear. You might think that tomorrow’s maths test is useless, but think of all the consequences that could happen. I know about you bunking off school, young lady. If you don’t attend lessons you won’t know what to study for your GCSEs, so you’ll fail, you won’t get into a good university and your life will be a mess. Sort it out, missy, do you understand? I want you to think about your future, about the life you are going to have to live, and what you want to pursue in that life. Children are the future! Let’s hope the name Jennifer Simmons will be around for many, many years to come. Go out there and find the cure for cancer. Or invent something really useful. It’s that satisfactory feeling you get that’s the real reward, no longer feeling guilty for doing nothing but wasting your parent’s money on a pointless upbringing. Right, our five minutes is up. Go ask Matthew from class C to come see me next.’

‘Yes, sir. Thanks, sir.’ I felt that when I walked through the doorway, a huge weight was lifted from that man’s shoulders. That’s how it always is, I walk into a room and I practically hear a unanimous sigh of ‘here we go… that Jennifer’. I’ve never just been called Jennifer, it’s always ‘that’ Jennifer, probably even to people I don’t know. If I bumped into someone in the streets, they’d probably mutter ‘that Jennifer. Always bumping into people in the streets, so typical and Jennifer-like.’ And when I leave the room, it feels like I’m carrying all the negative energy out the room with me, like I can see the sun shining in the room I’ve just left. But I walk back in, and the storm cloud follows me. So why am I the way I am? Well, people say that the people you’ve met make up who you are. It’s like, if you befriend someone who’s a complete and utter bitch, that’ll rub off on you. You’ll start talking back to people. Swearing at your mum. And then apparently your parents always screw you up. Apparently if you’re a boy you turn into your dad, if you’re a girl you turn into your mum. But, my mum’s mum was from the fourties, without women’s rights, stuck indoors with her hands in the sink not allowed to talk back. Her daughter (my mum) just sits around chain-smoking asking me to clean up the trail of mess she’s left, so that parent rule can’t be right. She honestly leaves a trail, like a large slug disguised as a practically anorexic forty-something wearing the skirt from when she was twenty-something. Even if my mum ran away from home, there’d be a trail for me to follow. Cigarette butts. More cigarette butts. A fake nail or two (she always bites her nails so now she wears fake ones, meaning she has a new habit of unconsciously pulling off the fake ones). Hair extensions. Her torn up ‘Miss England 1987’ sash. I’m not deluded with that whole fame obsession like most girls my age, and that’s because I’ve seen my mum. So full of hope as a kid, desperate to ‘make it’ and work her way to the top, she got a taste of stardom when she won the beauty contest, had TV appearances, magazine interviews, before the public lost interest and she was thrown back to earth with a bump. There are those celebrities that come and go. People say they ‘disappear’. Well I’ve learnt they definitely don’t ‘disappear’, they live through the post-fame depression after having being chewed and spat out. They refuse to give up, they fight to work back to the top but comebacks just never work. The public have such short attention span and are so inconsiderate of people’s feelings. Just turn on a TV. Flick through the channels. What are the reactions? ‘He’s an arsehole… she’s an ugly bore… who the hell’s he... my god, she’s put on weight recently’. Bet you laughed when that one-hit wonder singer disappeared and your ears recovered. Where are they now? Have they ‘disappeared’? No, they’re sat in solitary confinement replaying their music video over and over and over, tears in their eyes, wondering where it all went wrong. I don’t understand the whole fame thing, it’s sort of a ‘look at me! Remember me!’ attitude. I can understand why someone who was bullied might want it, the ultimate revenge for being called ugly at school if you then become a top supermodel. Really it’s just because anyone wants to stand the test of time, they want their name to live on and on and on because if people can’t live in the walking, talking, breathing sense, at least they can live on through written word.

My name wasn’t going to be remembered. ‘Jennifer Simmons’, she would have a short existence and then disappear forever, and she didn’t mind that at all. You can’t live forever, but hey, life goes on, every old person that dies a baby’s born etcetera. Anyone striving to stand the test of time’s just selfish.

I had this philosophy. ‘Live however the hell you like, when you like, as long as it doesn’t affect others’. It’s hardly like I’d go round hitting people because ‘I felt like it’. Skipping lessons, that didn’t affect anyone but me and my future, and I didn’t mind too much because I couldn’t imagine myself having a future, I pictured getting hit by a car or getting stabbed in a dark alley or drinking too much, so why waste the here and now preparing for a potentially non-existent future? It’s not like skipping lessons affected the teacher, if anything they’d be secretly relieved. I have no bloody idea about algebra, electrons, biomass, Stalin, mountain peaks and whenever the teacher asked me about it I gave them a look to say ‘come on, didn’t you set your expectations too high thinking I’d know the answer? Now you’ve embarrassed both of us’. All I could picture myself doing, really… was travelling. Moving to a new country, finding a home, making friends, and then just when I’d be settled I’d get on a train and leave it all to start from scratch again. I had nothing to stay for. Mum was a bitch and blamed me for her failures. (She was also trying to make me into a beauty queen, getting me to go to modelling auditions. Hah! Standing with one hip holding a smile while people leer at you? I’d storm out in frustration, probably. I get short sudden spouts of anger. When they’re over I’m fine again, but they are pretty intense, shouting, swearing, I’ve hit my mum too). My boyfriend had left me after nearly two years. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t going to ask him either, I’d just seem like those whiny clingy girls, even though it was completely out of the blue (or was it? Should I have realised something was wrong?) So I ignored him and expected him to realise what he’d missed and come running back. When he didn’t, that was when I got angry. I wished I’d been able to have the satisfaction of dumping him first. Friends-wise, my friends were ok, just a little… dull. Never spontaneous.

Them: Want to go to the mall today?

Me: Nah, I can’t stand loads of people confined in one space, I get anxious and feel like the air’s full of mixed strangers’ breath. Do you want to do something different, like… get a train to Cornwall?

Them: Cornwall? Why?

Me: Just… because. Because sometimes we forget what we have access to. You know, every day’s the same, go to school, go home, but there are soo many others things we could so easily do…

Them: It’s fine, don’t worry, there’s loads of school work to do this weekend anyway. You should make more of an effort with homework Jen.

Backstabbers probably secretly met up without me.

So I’d left the career guy’s little office and I was walking back to the classroom, when I thought remember Jen, you can do whatever the hell you want. Stop putting up boundaries. So instead of going forward, up the stairs, I turned right and walked right out of school and no one noticed. Look unsuspicious and you can get away with anything. My friend once walked into Topshop, found this really gorgeous sixty pound jacket, pulled off the security tag that would set off the alarms, put on the jacket and walked out the shop, as casual as possible. No one stopped her either because her body language confused them. They could see what she was doing was wrong, but because she looked so assured, for some reason or other she must have been given permission to shoplift. Probably those witnesses only digested what they saw several minutes later.

I walked down to the park, I often go there to get away from mum or the guilt I feel everyday. Guilt at not doing schoolwork. Guilt at consuming the planet’s natural resources when they’re running out. Guilt at leaving my computer on standby when global warming means the ice caps are melting and soon we’ll all be dead from an ice age. Guilt at being a meat eater, eating animals who once lived and had a brain and a conscience, when people must eat hundreds of animals in their lifetime. Guilt at being alive when people starve to death all the time. Guilt at not inventing the cure for cancer! Guilt at not working out whether god is real or not! Guilt, guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt, it was like a backpack I carried around everywhere and I could only take it off at the park. Most of all, guilt for being a disappointment to my mum, though I’ve never known why. I reckon in the maternity ward fifteen years ago she expected to push out this size six gorgeous model slathered in fake tan with blonde hair, ready to accomplish everything she herself hadn’t. What did she want from me? Who knew. I didn’t really matter to anyone and I’d come to terms with that. There are five stages you go through, aren’t there? I can’t remember all of them, but there’s anger somewhere, depression, denial… the last one’s acceptance. That’s where I was, just kind of existing in a mellow state of being. I went to my usual park bench.

Someone else was there.