Short Story Competition!

The Thoughts of a Teenage Girl

by Emily (Year 8)

God, I hate maths. I really, really despise it with a passion. It’s just so boring. And then there is the teacher! An old fart, about a hundred and twenty, stalking around the room and popping up over my shoulder when I least expect it and I’m just about to sneak a peek at the novel I hide under my school books.

I slip my earphone into my ear, making sure that my black hair hides it from the hawk-like gaze of the teacher. I swear, those eyes could turn most of the girls in the class to stone.

Not me, though. I don’t care if that old bat sprouted wings and started singing opera while sipping Coke through her nose. I really wasn’t in the classroom at all, in fact. Sometimes I am at the beach. Sometimes I am at home, in my bed and a good book under my nose. Sometimes I am just talking with my sister. Anything was better than the torture of sitting through a lesson on what I figured out weeks ago. Everything was better than listening to the fat pig at the front of the room, with her frail old stooped body and her leather skirt that was about a thousand years old.

My iPod starts pumping out Paramore and the girl sitting next to me-I can’t remember her name- is staring at me, her mouth moving in the form of speaking and her finger going from her ear to the roof.

“What?” I snap, turning the music down. I’m not rude on purpose. It just comes out sometimes.

“Could you turn your goddamn music down, please?” she says, exasperation moulding her voice into a whine. See what I mean about the girls here being the Spawn of Satan?

“No,” I whine back, turning up my nose and looking back at my work. I switch my iPod back up again-now giving the beginning of Tori Amos’ ­Precious Things a thrashing-and I can almost feel her hatred burning through my side and into my bones. I smirk with satisfaction and she huffs in exasperation. I’m sure she thinks that I’m taking her ‘opportunities to learn’ away from her. 

The numbers on my page make so much sense it’s insane and I feel like throwing the page full of working out and correct answers at the teacher, asking her to make sense of it. I’m sure she wouldn’t be able to. I have no ambition in becoming the master of all things maths and its many ‘gifts’ anyway so I figure this class is just an unnecessary formality. I tap my foot to the beat and lose myself in my thoughts once more.

I know most of the girls at my school didn’t like me but I wasn’t that crazy about them either. They all pretended they were too good, too posh, to hang out with me. But that suited me fine. I didn’t mind being alone.

Outside, a bird is sitting on a branch, minding its own business. I envy the bird. I want to be able to fly and be as free as my heart desires. I name the little bird Katy, because that’s what my mum’s name was. Yes, was. She was like the bird. Free.

I bet the bird never felt like it was drowning. I did.

Someone coughs to my right and I flick my gaze to them. Ms Old Fart is stalking over to the girl, her expression mutinous. How dare anyone cough in her classroom? I don’t know how The Bat even maintains a healthy blood pressure.

I sit back, waiting in excited anticipation for a serious telling-off. It’s the only entertainment I get around here. The girl’s face is all scrunched up, like she is smoking her first cigarette and her eyes are welling up with tears.

The something happens that I would never have expected. The Ms Old Fart throws a sickly smile across her face just before she reaches the girl, like she enjoys torturing us. She turns around and goes back. I feel quite ripped off.

The girl looks like she is about to have a heart attack, if her heavy breathing is anything to go by. Her friend is comforting her and I look away in disgust. It looks like she had just seen her whole family die.

As the Old Fart makes her way back to her lair, I close one eye and outstretch one finger so it looks like I’m hitting her on the head. I laugh to myself as I start picking her nose and pulling her hair out.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see that fat kid Christina pick her nose and hide behind her hand as she ate it. I scrunch up my nose but I don’t say anything. Chris used to be my best friend. We moved here to hell at the same time. We refused to be separated.

But that all changed when she met Renee and her clique. Obviously, the ten years of close friendship that we shared had nothing on three hours in the same classroom as Renee and her little Three Musketeers and she had left me for dead by the time the bell went for lunch.

So when they all look at me and whisper amongst themselves, ‘Wow, how can she be such a bitch?’ I don’t say anything.  Even when all I want to do is punch their lights out. Even when I run into the bathroom and cry. Because I know that it’s not me being the bitch. It’s them.

But I still don’t want to fall to the level of Chris, so I don’t say anything to anyone about her disgusting habit. I don’t even snicker or roll my eyes as if this was the stupidest thing anyone could ever have done. I don’t want to be as low as her. And besides, no friendship is way better than the friendship of these clones. Isn’t it?