Cinnamon Twigs: The Life and Pseudocide of a Celebrity

CHAPTER FOUR: High School

CHAPTER FOUR

High School

And then I came to the cocoon phase, those metamorphosing years of acne and pubic hair. St Joseph’s Catholic High School cast an ominous shadow over each weekday morning. The headmaster ran the place like a concentration camp, mimicking Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks while he twisted his moustache and peered through classroom windows. The place was drab, save for the colorful graffiti on the walls and the radioactive green beef burgers in the canteen.

     ‘Don’t worry. First years never really have their heads stuck down the toilet in high school. That’s just a myth!’ Mrs Parker’s final words to me resounded in my ears.

     They resounded in my ears at the very moment I had my head stuck down the shitter by a sixth former, just two hours into high school life.

     Bang, your head’s shoved down the bog and you realize that hey, you’re growing up now. You’re a teenager, and adolescent life can be crappy.

     I took a giant leap backwards in the school popularity hierarchy. Older kids bullied me until I was fully ingratiated with the toilet seat, badly bruised and looking flushed. School life became a haze of fist head-butting and atomic wedgies - that’s a really, really big wedgie. Even the teachers disliked me. Mrs Bach, my Geography teacher, could send any insomniac to sleep, but if I closed my eyes for a moment’s kip, she’d have me in detention faster than I could name the capital of Thailand. Most of my lunchtimes consisted of doing lines and listening to her talk about such varied subjects as pancakes and salt corrosion.

     I became a regular pizza face, no longer complimented for my blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. I experimented with acne treatment, but one cream made the skin on my chin go hard and dry. I still persevered with it and during the winter my skin became chapped. A bully cut my face during a confrontation and the chapped skin turned into painful scabs, which stretched and cracked whenever I spoke.

     I spent the next two years with an angry red scar on my face. Kids called me ‘Scarface’ and ‘vagina chin’, staring at me as I walked down the corridors and assuming I had a skin disease. My mother laughed when I told her about the nicknames. But she reassured me that the scar would fade, and I wouldn’t be an ugly duckling for much longer. To add to these calamitous trivialities, I had braces. Regardless of what anyone says, they’re not cool; they hurt and food gets stuck in them. Plus I kept breaking them every time I bit into an apple or chewed gum. The orthodontist hated my guts. She was always complaining about my lack of care when it came to brushing. She loved to scrape my gums until they bled, claiming this was due to insufficient care. But I’m guessing even Superman’s gums would bleed if you scratched them with a scalpel for long enough.

     When I wasn’t with Mrs Bach, talking about terracettes and cupcakes, I spent my lunchtimes in the library, reading about Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. This extra reading meant my literary terminology exceeded my classmates’. My English teacher Mrs Harper asked me to stay behind after one of her lessons.

     ‘You’re very quiet in class.’ She placed her pen on her desk and smiled broadly at me.

     ‘Well, I don’t have anybody to talk to.’

     ‘You never answer any questions during lessons. But you’re the brightest student of your age I’ve ever come across.’

     ‘Really?’

     ‘You mention intertextuality, feminist theories and deconstruction in your essays.’

     ‘Yeah, well I don’t really know what I’m talking about.’

     ‘These are theories you’ll come across at university. You shouldn’t know anything about them in high school!’ She laughed.

     ‘I read a lot,’ I said. ‘There were some books in the library.’

     ‘About deconstruction?’

     ‘Well, one textbook mentioned the word and I looked it up. I read something by this guy named Jacques Derrida.’

     ‘You read something by Derrida!’

     ‘Yeah, but it was confusing. And then I came across this other guy. Fuckster or Foucault, I think his name was.’

     ‘You’re fourteen!’

     ‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.

     ‘You have a special gift. I want you to start answering questions in class. If you like, I could recommend some books for you?’

     ‘I’d like that.’

     ‘Good. Daniel, you should make the most of your talent. You need to harness it. You’re years ahead of your classmates. I think you could go very, very far.’

     Mrs Harper was my only source of light in high school. She introduced me to the likes of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, Wordsworth and Donne. And she taught me a Latin phrase I’ll never forget: ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’, which meant, ‘Life is short, but art is long’. I had it tattooed on my right shoulder on my nineteenth birthday.

     I wrote poetry under Mrs Harper’s guidance. She taught me terms like anapaest and spondee. I soon had a poem published in a children’s anthology, which was passed around the class so everyone could have a read. It felt great to see my name in print, and I wanted to experience that feeling again. I remember having tears in my eyes and a swelling tingly feeling in my chest when people complimented it. I’d never felt like that before. So I entered another poem into a competition, which was also published. I realized then that I wanted to be a writer.