Saving Nicole

1.4 - the pink slip

I had been planning on taking Friday off as well, but then changed my mind at the last minute.

Work life and home life were so different, that you'll probably forget all about Sean if you go to work, I reasoned with myself.

"Miss! Where were you yesterday?" Everyone in home room wanted to know.

"Um, well. There was a small emergency."

"Oh no! Is everyone okay?" Sarah Hadley, the class's resident suck up, asked.

No. "Yes, fine, thank you," I said, and the usual morning 'Guess who broke up with who over Facebook last night!' morning chatter began again.

I practically bounced into the year twelve creative writing class, more than ready to spend the next seventy minutes writing and teaching and just everything I loved combined into one class.

"Okay guys, I'm not going to lie," I said to the class after I marked the roll. "I didn't have enough time to plan exactly what we're doing today, so I'm just going to wing it. How about... pick a genre. Any genre you want. Write a short story, using conventions from that genre."

"Conventions?" I heard someone ask one of their friends.

"This is Unit 3 Creative Writing, I'm expecting that you all know what conventions are by now. However, if you've somehow forgotten, it's the expectations that come with genres. For example, in a crime novel readers will often expect a murder to take place in the first part of the novel. That's a convention about crime. Someone give me a convention for horror."

A girl whose name I didn't know yet with frizzy brown hair stuck her hand up. I gave it a moment to see if anyone else, namely Nicole, would raise their hand, but no one did. I nodded at the girl. "Readers would expect something scary to happen," she said. It's a bit tame, but technically she's correct. She just could of, I dunno, jazzed it up a bit? I wondered if she was good at writing; I couldn't imagine it. As judgemental as that sounds. 

"Correct," I told her. "Sorry, your name was..." I trailed off, waiting for her to fill in the blank.

"Callie." 

"Right, thanks Callie." Frizzy haired is Callie, frizzy haired is Callie, frizzy haired is Callie, I repeated to myself a couple of times, trying to commit it to memory.

I had just finished the rather short introduction to my thrilling crime story (note to self: write more crime) when two timid looking year sevens knocked on the door. "Yes?" I said to them, which caused the whole class to also look at them, and they nearly died. I remembered how scary the year twelves were when I was in year seven, so I gave them a big smile. The braver of the two, a short boy with platinum blonde hair, stepped forwards a bit. 

"Uh, is Nicole Whyte in this class?" He held up the little pink slip from the front office.

I nodded, and stood up to get the paper slip. "Thanks!"

"No, um, problem," the blonde kid said, and they both rushed away to deliver the other pink slips they had. in their hands. 

I looked at the paper slip. It had Nicole's name on it, and 'GO TO OFFICE NOW' was written in capitals. There was also a scribbly paragraph in illegible writing. I gave up trying to read it, and handed it to Nicole. 

She didn't move. "You can go," I told her, expecting her to get up and leave. No such luck.

Nicole looked at me dead in the eye, her liquid silver eyes looking very unimpressed. "What if I don't want to go?"

"And what if I made you go?"

"Shit, I was so not expecting that from you, Grace," she replied, studying her nails. The class oohed.

"It's Miss Riley to you, Nicole. And you don't have to go to the front office if you don't want to, but it won't be me you'll have to answer to, it'll be Mrs. Snyder." I could hear a collective intake of breath from the class, and Nicole looked slightly more flustered. Melissa Snyder was not someone you wanted to be angry with you. Hell, I was scared of her.

"Fair enough," Nicole said with a shrug, and stood. I sashayed back to my desk, pleased that I hadn't let her win.

I sat down at the table in the staff room at break, carefully placing down my mug of tea that I had absentmindedly overfilled as I was surveying the table, figuring out where to sit. I had been trying to sit next to someone new each day, because I really wanted to make some friends here. I'd also been avoiding sitting next to Kathy Atkins, the lady I'd met on my first day. I really disliked her; she was one of those people you hated but you had no clue why you did, you just did.

I sat down next to a pretty lady with red hair who looked like she wouldn't be too much older than me. I was the youngest of the staff, and all the others had years of experience on me. "Hello, I'm Sage Meyer! I'm the school psychologist. You're Grace Riley, right?" The pretty red head asked me.

"Yep!" I took a sip of my tea. "Sage is such a pretty name! Do you know the meaning behind it?

She beamed at me. "Thanks! I think it's something to do with wisdom and immortality, although I'm not entirely sure. Do you know the meaning behind Grace?"

"I actually don't! I'm sure I've probably looked it up before, but I don't remember."

"Grace means God's favour," said the man sitting across the table from Sage and I. We looked at him, and he explained: "I have a daughter named Grace."

"Oh, right. Thank you.."

"Terry Day."

"Terry. Well, thanks Terry! So, what do you teach?"

"Oh, I'm not a teacher. I'm with the IT department," he said.

"Oh, okay. Is that any fun? I've always thought it might be fun to work with computers, but most of the time I just find them too frustrating," I said.

"I know right? My Mac is always breaking!" Sage exclaimed.

"I like it," Terry said with a shrug. Sage and I nodded, and the conversation seemed to be very, very dead, so Sage and I started talking about being a school psychologist, which was what I wanted to do from the age of about eleven right up until I left school.

The collective groan in the staff room as the bell for the end of break rang was pretty much how I felt.

Authors note:

Heyyyy.

Trust me, I know it has been way too long since I've updated. I'm sorry as.
I'm home sick from school right now so I'm going to try get as much written as possible, so that I'm at least a couple chapters ahead.

This is the first story I've ever written where I didn't have at least ten chapters written before I started posting and dang that was a big mistake. Don't do it, kids. Get it all written first.

Ella x