Di Amore -A Jai Brooks Fan Fiction

Chapter 2- Reflections

I had just finished rolling up my tights when I realised that if I didn’t get a move on I would be late for the first day of school and that was never a good impression. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and sighed. Maroon really wasn’t my colour. Why did this school have to pick such an ugly uniform urgh. I looked closer and examined my face. My skin wasn’t too bad today, no unexpected breakouts overnight. I still powdered it so that it wouldn’t look shiny and added a few brushes of mascara on each eye.

***

I was looking forward to meeting my new classmates and being awed by their Australian accents, however as I walked down the empty, squeaky corridor with my new, grey haired, head teacher, my palms had started to become clammy and my stomach definitely didn’t feel too well. It was already half an hour into the first period, this was due to the fact that when I arrived at the school the head had made me fill out some admin forms and then shown me to my locker. It was bad interrupting a lesson midway and even worse that I was accompanied my by slightly eccentric head.  I hoped that I wouldn’t be forced into making some sort of introduction speech. I took a deep breath as the head placed his hand on the scratched metal handle, turned it, and ushered me into the maths classroom.

***

My first impression was that the classroom resembled a typical maths room with coloured posters on the walls that the younger years had made about fractions and so on, the pupils were sitting in pairs on desks which stretched along them, the same as the ones that I had had at my old school, however then I noticed 30 pairs of lazy eyes suddenly become lit with curiosity as they turned their attention to me, and that definitely wasn’t something I was used to. I quickly did a sweep across the classroom and felt relief as none of them seemed very posh at all, in fact, I even spotted a few head obviously bopping along to music they were somehow listening to. A few girls nervously smiled at me and I was sure it would be easy to make friends here.

“Oh yes, class, this is the new student that will be joining us today as I said earlier, what’s your name again?” the old woman encouraged me with a smile.

I suddenly felt very conscious of my British, London accent, I realised that it sounded very posh compared to the laid back Australian accent the woman had adopted.

“Umm...my name’s Olivia” I stuttered

“Well, why don’t you take a seat Olivia, we’re just going over percentages, I’m sure you would’ve done them at your old school” she said as she pointed me over to a spare seat near the back of the classroom before handing me a red exercise book. Hah, they were just like the ones back in London.

As I approached the empty seat, I looked at who I would be sitting next to at the table, it was one of the bopping heads that I had made out earlier, I saw the clever way that he was managing to listen to his music, he had one of his earphones down his left sleeve and he was leaning on his hand, pretending to be resting on it, when in fact it was so he would be entertained during his lesson. As I came closer my shadow landed onto the table and he looked up in surprise. He had been one of the people who lowered their heads after realising I wasn’t going to be an excuse to leave the lesson. As our eyes locked together, I realised he looked vaguely familiar. Then it hit me. He was the boy who had knocked my drink onto me yesterday. What was his name again? Liam? No, that wasn’t it.....Luke! That was it. He didn’t seem to recognise me though, as he had quickly lowered his head after the ‘all clear’ that I wasn’t the teacher, and returned to slightly bopping his head along to his music.

As I sat to his left, I fished out my pencil case from my bag and made a mental note to bring a calculator to the next lesson. I then looked up at the whiteboard and sighed with relief that I had taken this unit last term and that it would be easy to catch up on the questions. I wrote my name on the first, of three lines, that were on the front of the exercise book and then Maths onto the second line, realising I didn’t actually know the name of my teacher I turned to ask the boy next to me, or should I say, Luke. His left arm was a barrier between us as he was leaning on it, I wondered if he’d be able to even hear me if I spoke.