Victim

Chapter 1

From day one, my life has been one action-packed rollercoaster. I can't change that. My future has been decided already, by my parents and people that claim to love me. Then Tanya Turner arrived and made things worse, by bullying me, so now I'm in Brazil, the South American country where my grandfather died. It makes me depressed to think that such a wonderful country could kill my ancestor.

I can start from the very beginning. I was a weak baby, and I was dying from being born way too early. The doctors performed various operations; my life got saved because of them. I was taken home and cared for like any other baby, I presume. I went to nursery, but when I joined primary school, a girl named Tanya Turner started bullying me. I had become popular, which she didn't like. Then I became Class President, and Tanya became outraged by how people liked me. She made every one of them turn away, and she had found information about me that was personal by hacking into my computer account. I was amazed that she could do such reckless things without a care in the world.

It annoyed me to a certain degree that people believed her so-called amazing stories about her past. She would brag on about how she had a huge house, painted creamy white with several balconies and beautiful rose bushes out the front. Apparently she had her own bedroom, with a four poster bed with silk covers, which were coloured pale pink. Then it was all about her marble bathroom and her cinema room, with comfy red armchairs and her own popcorn machine, which came with matching tubs stating, 'Tanya's Popcorn Machine'. Tanya would describe lounging on sunbathers in Hawaii, or feeding huge elephants with pure ivory tusks in India, or even visiting Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa!

Constantly I was finding that more and more of my belongings were missing, and then found near Tanya's locker. Once I had the unpleasant experience of finding my blouse in one of the toilets in the girl's bathroom. So, of course, I had to pull it out and take it home, whilst it was leaking urine all over my substitute top, which I always carried around with me. Tanya and all of her friends laughed at me, calling me names like, "Birdbrain!" It did hurt, but my mum wouldn't understand. Neither of my parents would understand, nor agree on anything, because they divorced a few years after I was born.

One day, she pushed it to the full limit. We were in a music lesson and our teacher had just announced that I was going to perform a guitar piece I front of everyone. Tanya sneered when she heard this.

"Hey Jelly Belly! How are you? Oh, I know, depressed and ugly!" Tanya and her stupid girly gang were standing behind me. Carefully scraping back my wild blonde hair, I walked towards the guitars. Picking one my size, I then sat down and started to play. The music flowed through my fingers and vibrated on each individual string. When I had finished, everybody started clapping, but Tanya sat there, genuinely speechless.

"Well, that was good, for a fat girl with family problems. What are you gonna do, huh?"

I punched her so hard that she was stuck in Addenbrooke's for a week, with a black eye and a broken nose. I ran as fast away from school as I could, I would never go back there, ever. Once I got home, I pulled out a packet of my favourite Jelly Snakes (hence the Jelly Belly nickname.) One by one, I ate them, but they didn't taste the same, even though I ate them my favourite way: biting the head of first and then slurping the rest of the gooey body down my throat. Why did Tanya Turner hate me so much? I might never find out...