Mannequin Madness

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Art sucked. I’d always considered myself pretty good at it- I had an artist’s eye, great colour co-ordination and a good knowledge of materials. So, yeah, I’ve always been pretty good at it. Until Mr Michaels handed me a lump of clay in a bag. It was that exact moment when I lost all interest for one of my favourite classes.

My thing –I’d like to call it a pot, but I couldn’t deceive myself that well- imploded into a soggy, reddish lump on the stand in front of me after almost forty minutes of concentration and gently, delicately probing it into shape. By the end of the lesson, it actually looked an awful lot like the cafeteria food I’d bought at lunch.

I’d given up after that and slowly cleaned up my work station. Kids spoke to me after they recognised me as ‘the girl who sat with Mackenzie at lunch.’ Honestly, I’d never attended a more cliché school- Mackenzie couldn’t seriously run the joint, could she? There’s usually more than one of them and kids don’t usually bow down to them nearly as much. Somewhere along the line, I’d left Reality behind.

I’d politely excused myself from conversation with them, using my frail pot as an excuse to silently concentrate on the task as hand instead of the latest gossip- which I was still certain was me. Maybe I was becoming  paranoid.

After class had ended, I trudged back down the staircase and got elbowed several times, across the school campus and sat in maths class. It was my last class of the day and, stuck in the bereavement of my tragically deceased clay masterpiece, I stumbled through the hour like a zombie, declining invites to meet up with people, monotonously answering questions when my name got called and silently watching the clock. I’d just longed for home.

And now, I was stood on the curb, waiting for my mother to show up in a ridiculously flashy car. I was aware that a group of girls, who I recognised as some of Mackenzie’s friends/minions, had just happened to pick a bench a few meters behind me for their after-school chat. Was Mackenzie really so anxious about my heritage that she’d post spies on me? Or was I just well and truly developing paranoia?

Either way, we were all disappointed, because my mum didn’t pick me up. Ryan did. And, thankfully, he had a more humble taste in cars. He braked quickly and skidded his black Range Rover Evoque to a sudden stop on the road in front of me, leaving black tyre tracks on the gravel, and lent of to open the door. I was irritated at that because I can open a damn door for myself. But I was grateful for a ride so I kept quiet.

I shrugged my bag off my shoulder and dropped it by my feet once I’d sat down and slammed the door.

“You’re mothers in a meeting,” was my initial greeting.

“Uhuh. About?” I asked as I steered my gaze out of the window. Mackenzie’s girls were frantic, two had entered a heated debate about something, whilst another was trying to discreetly see into the car and the fourth was in a corybantic state, hectically tapping at the screen of her phone. Maybe I’m not crazy, after all. It’s good to know my sanity, at least, was intact. Though I doubt my image would be come tomorrow morning.

“Just work- same as usual. She left early today to meet someone, asked me to pick you up and drop you home. So, how was your day, Penny?” Ryan asked as he hit the pedal. Here, safe in the car, I could forget about the kids at school, I could forget about the gossip I feared and I could forget that I was anything but an ordinary girl.

“It was good,” I told him. “And bad- my art project was reduced to a gooey mess.”

Although he didn’t look away from the road, he raised his eyebrows enough to show me his surprise. “Really? But you’re usually good at art.”