Learning to Fly

Author’s note: Uh, yeah this is my first story on wattpad. A little swearing, but nothing too bad yet, don’t read if that makes you uncomfortable. Read, vote, comment, the usual.

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When did writing become such a chore?

When did reading become something that you only did when you were studying a book for school?

When did the art of storytelling collapse into a mediocre, repetitive task that was done with complete lack of enthusiasm?

When did all our creativity begin to be sucked out of us, transforming us from staunch believers in magic and rainbows into “mature adults”, not even willing to sanction the smallest hope of the existence of happiness? Was our education system the cause of the problem, teaching children that grammar and spelling were more important than the words themselves? Or did it lie, instead, deep within, a ticking time bomb, that, at the right age, will explode, with it exploding all childish imagination?

More importantly, when did it become so easy to write a whole goddamn paragraph of rhetorical questions?

Rose was a lot of things to a lot of people. To her mother, she was “her precious little baby, growing up too fast.” To her teachers, she was “rough but intelligent, has great potential.” To her friends she was “Y’know, a mate.” To some people, including most of her school, she was nothing, really, at all. And that was the way Rose Barnes liked it. The truth is, at 13 years of age, Rose had accepted that she was never going to be like the other girls. While girls her age were out at parties, wearing makeup and gossiping about their latest crush, because you know, that’s what high school girls did, she much preferred to stay at home, and maybe read a book, or practise guitar. She was unusual, different, not the same. And a whole thesaurus of other words that pretty much mean the same thing. Rose was basically an outcast. At her old school, she was the centre of much teasing and humiliation, but in her first year of high school, she fell into the shadows, ignored by most, apart from a select few in the same position as her. Rose didn’t really care what others thought of her. She lived for herself, and while adults might find that trait admirable, in the cutthroat world of Year 8, drawing any attention to herself meant she wouldn’t stand a chance.

Rose slammed her locker shut. It was the second day of her first year of high school. There were things that hadn’t changed since primary school, things that had, and things that she would take ages to get used to. Like this freaking locker, she thought to herself. Her stupid luck, or perhaps some devious, no-good year co-ordinator, had given her what appeared to be the only dodgy locker in the school. You had to slam it shut, which only made the people around her stare, like they  all thought she was in a bad mood. Which she usually was, thanks to the idiocy of 13 year olds other than herself. Rose had to remind herself, day after day, that they didn’t know who she was. No one in this school did. They had already separated into cliques, and guess what? She hadn’t found a single friend. Not that it even matters, Rose told herself. You don’t want to be friends with these people anyway. And she really didn’t. Year 8’s were just so damn shallow.

It wasn’t that Rose was ugly, if that was one of the things that deterred her peers from making friends with her. She was quite pretty, in fact. She had long dark hair, pale, acne-free skin, which was rare for girls her age, and what could only be described as perfect bone structure. She just wasn’t really as skinny as all the other girls, which basically threw any idea of fashion, the one thing all teenage girls seem to care about, out the window. Nothing nice these days was made for girls with a BMI over 18. Not that fashion was really important, considering the uniform. Which Rose didn’t even know why her school bothered with. Really, all the girls just got theirs tailored to be incredibly short, tight and well, slutty. Add thoroughly bleached hair and about three centimetres of makeup and you’ve pretty much got the entire female population of Dalton Creek High covered. Which was part of the reason why Rose didn’t want to be friends with them. Their sensationalised, media-based idea of beauty made them all the more ugly, inside and out. She would rather be alone than be friends with their back-stabbing bitchiness. And, although she tried to hide it, Rose was really too shy, as she was going through the awkward stages of adolescence, to be friends with boys. Even at primary school, the boys and the girls stayed separate. She just wasn’t used to them.