Blue Lavender Girl

Oh forget it! Kira has this crazy idea that if you count to five hundred while imagining him kissing you, then the next time it has to happen.
Has
to. The energy you give it, or whatever, makes it so that the universe
must
deliver, and if you write it down then it’s even stronger.

Kira is a bit ‘out there’ thanks to having swum with the dolphins on her holidays and now she fancies herself as a spiritual something-or-other.

It might work, the five hundred thing. My second cousin Susie tried it and ended up getting this guy called George. Problem is, each time I do it I keep changing my mind and imagining different guys. So by the time the party happens I’ll be either alone, or
what Mum would call a ‘young hussy’.

I’ll take hussy. No, actually, I haven’t the energy, and it’s not how I’d want them to finally notice me.

Kira and Dee’s mums both went to a self-help seminar last week (my mum would never go to anything new like that) and bought us all these journals ‘For Successful Living’, and I’ve now been writing in mine for a full five minutes and don’t feel any different. I don’t give a crap about successful living, I’m just bored rigid because of this stupid power cut.

FACT
:
It takes fifteen candles to make enough light to just about read and write by.

FACT
:
Twelve of the candles have religious pictures on them and the others are actually mine. My mother is so embarrassing. She should have just been a nun and had done with it and then my dad could have married someone who would have forced him to be cool, instead of forcing him to go to church every morning. At least they’ve given up on making me go. My mum and dad are older than just about everyone else’s by about, oh, a hundred years. I guess that’s why they don’t mind power cuts, it’s nice and old-fashioned for them. I have just fought Dad off from putting geranium oil in these candles. Geranium oil smells of cat, and not in a good way.

I have been trying all day to work out how to be sick tomorrow. Problem is how to be sick for the exams and not so sick that I won’t be able to stay over at Kira’s on Friday.

Wait! Hold on! Just remembered, there’s
no way
they’ll let me go to Kira’s after last week.

BACKGROUND
:
Kira’s mum never got the parent note, or whatever, about how when teenage girls come to visit they are supposed to stay in the house, giggling in their daughter’s bedroom. She also never got the other note about how, ‘going down the road to the corner shop’, secretly means, ‘going into town to hang out for half the night’.

But then, mine believed me about Kira’s house not having a phone, so for a while we just thought we could do what we wanted, that we were all being dragged up by idiots.

Then last Saturday night Mum and Dad came out of their big annual ‘all the churches’ meeting, and were walking to the parking garage just as me and the girls and some friends of Dee’s brothers were walking back towards the cinema. Only ten miles from where I said I’d be and with a dozen more people.

Disaster, total, on so many levels, lots of shouting. Maybe they organised the power cut just to punish
me. They were going to think of a big punishment, but then they forgot. I always felt OK about the stuff we did because I figured that I was getting punished already by having freaks for parents. Now the freaks have had a meeting with a counsellor and decided to take an ‘active interest’ in me, which means they ask me how I am all the time and recommend films that they can’t quite remember the title of, but are apparently very good.

God, this
has
to end.

We have been finding bits of Aidan all over the house. Well, not actual bits of him, arms and ears and eyeballs, but stuff he probably meant to take with him.

I’m
sure
his pasta-maker was meant to make the trip with him, there’s no way Mum would make a meal from anything other than a frozen thing. I imagine he will be king of his university because he can cook like on the TV shows where the chefs pile things up and drizzle stuff over it just in time, except he favours normal food over pheasant. It’s a shame he’s doing the summer classes first, otherwise he’d have been here for the holidays. I will now have to eat peanut butter and crackers for the next four years
unless something drastic happens.

God, why am I even writing in this again? I mean, the lights are on today. They discovered a branch had fallen on the wires in front of next door’s house and someone intelligently sent fifteen men in hard hats around to stare at it until a truck arrived.

It’s a risky thing to do, to write down all the secret bits of you on paper. I’ve decided to write it on the wrong pages so if they find it then I can say, ‘How can it be true? Look, that was the date I went to the dentist and not a mention of that!’ Have to make sure free expression doesn’t turn into damning evidence.

I only stayed for the first half of my last exam today. Anyway, I hate being around after exams, it just ends up with everyone comforting the class genius who thinks she missed one of the hundred questions on the test, and everyone else saying, ‘I’m sure I failed’, when they know they didn’t.

I’m going to sort my clothes out tonight, maybe even wash some of them. At least I’ll have weeks and weeks of being able to wear what I want and not be told that it is against approved school regulations. Who, tell me, was the smart ass who decided that wearing black all the time meant you were depressed? Imagine I made up a rule that wearing lilac meant you were a big fat liar. The lady two doors
down would have to go naked as I’m sure her underwear is as lilac and matchy as her hats and coats. Her name is Mrs Traynor and she stops me every now and then to tell me to stand up straight and smile.

Now that I think of it, if we are freely giving orders to each other, what’s to stop me telling her to pull the hat down over her face and shut up like a good little woman?

Last day of school. Huge relief. Massive.

This year they appointed a school psychologist so I’ve had to learn to look happy and well adjusted, at least while walking the halls. I know she has a file on me. Everyone who’s been less than angelic in the past has a file on them somewhere.

It used to be that me, Kira and Dee would all end up in various offices together, because we were all out to do what felt right, not what they told us. But the two of them have gone a bit boring, like they want to fit in and suck up. I’ve got wise and I stay out of everyone’s way, but at least I haven’t given in and started doing what they want. For example, homework was invented so they could control us
after school as well as during. Most of the teachers have given up asking me for it. I think they are secretly glad that I just avoid working and that I’m not one of the ones who acts up in class and says cheeky stuff.

I’m so proud of the fact that I have said
nothing
in any class for at least a month now.

I mean, look at them! What do they know? If I did what they told me to I would end up like them with their little jobs and little cars or like my parents with their meetings and services. No-one I know is really alive. I would love to know one person who does something amazing in the world.

It’s me too, I’m as dead as the rest of them.

I don’t say these things out loud anymore, so it’s nice to write them here. A couple of months ago they sent me to a special Saturday morning Artistic Communication class, which lasted four weeks until some department ran out of money. They called it ‘Artistic Communication’, but we saw the ‘art therapy’ labels on all the boxes of paint supplies. I remember the first class. We had to draw how we feel on one side of the paper, and what we love to do on the other. I felt sort of nothing. I don’t do that much either.

I remember two or three years ago I would do fun stuff and be really into it; one time I made a light-box out of my old dolls’ house, and I used to love tracing pictures of birds and pop-stars onto typing paper. I also remember being big into a band that is
way
too embarrassing to write down here, in fact I think the pen would die of shame and I’d have nothing left to write with. I belonged to the fan club and everything, and Aidan would give me money for my birthday so I could get the calendar and photos – which I would carefully hide under my bed, as if anyone on earth would want to steal them! Actually, I’ve just looked and they are still there. Must clean my room. Really. Any year now.

I wish I was back the way I was then. I was really happy then.

There’s one OK-ish-I-suppose thing – I’m
thrilled
they aren’t sending me to an activity camp this summer. I feel that I will be no more employable in a few years for being able to tie-dye scarves, play lacrosse or program a computer in a language that is already out of date. Mum keeps saying we really must sort something out, and then she’s pleased enough that she has said it, like that’s as good as sorting it. It drives me mental when she keeps
promising something good, like those boots I’ve been waiting a year for, but it’s perfect in this case because I can sleep late and hang out in town.

SECRET
:
Just between me and my last counsellor (and you if you are hideous enough to be reading someone else’s diary – in which case please get your own life and stop right now!!), apparently it is not my mother’s failure to pick up the telephone or get in the car with me that is the problem when it comes to organising my life, it’s my ‘hostile attitude’.

My ‘hostile attitude’ gets blamed for loads of stuff and lets everyone off the hook, I really don’t know what we’d all do without it. The funny thing is that Mum can spend so much time organising trips to the seaside for sick children and supervising activities for teenagers who seem to be
way
happier than me.

I have decided not to dress up for Claire Higgins’ end-of-term party tonight. All her friends look so exaggerated, like they have to wear every accessory ever invented all at the same time, with shoes as high as most scaffolding, and make-up that wouldn’t melt off with a blowtorch. I prefer to go as I am. I’m not out to impress anyone, especially not her lame bunch.

I would love to go to a party where people actually
sat down and talked about real things. Even though I know loads of people I feel really alone, like there’s no-one who really gets me.