Through Her Lives

Morgandy

She'd scoured Morgandy's history and had come up blank. Gurtrude had never felt so frustrated. It was as if the whole family was clean, no scandals that hadn't been explained. Sure, there were lots of Morgandy messing with their image, all her drunken rants, parties and tattoos but they had somehow always smoothed it over. Now not only had Simon dropped his horrible daughter off at her school but he had also managed to bribe her into keeping her there. It was a situation she had put herself in whether she wanted to admit it or not. 

Years before, when she had been young and stupid, she had been dating the most popular guy in high school and then Simon came along. He was sarcastic, over bearing and horrible but they were attracted to one another. Something she would never forget, the connection they held for the short period of time they were together.  Simon had been a womanizer, everyone knew that  even now in the first few years of his marriage had had cheated on Dawn, his wife. Gurtrude had fallen for him knowing her was all of this, knowing deep down that in the end he would leave her but she allowed herself to be caught in the moment.

It was not something she liked to look back on, she could still remember the hot summer's day nearly twenty years ago. She had been camping with her cousin and Simon had come to visit her, they made love in the sweltering heat, in a tent covered in sweat. It took two months for her to notice the symptoms even though she had been hearing about them for years. She left her job, unable to tell anyone, she had nowhere to go. Simon had since left her and they had had no contact. 

After sleeping rough and finally finding a place to stay she had the baby and gave it up for adoption. She did not want the constant reminder of Simon and she needed to establish a career and life for herself. It was not only too early for her to have a baby but it would cause scandal. She started the long process of becoming a teacher and ended up head of Ashby Brymore Grammar. If anyone found out she had put her child up for adoption all those years ago her career would have been under scrutiny at such a prestigious school.

 She had never found out how Simon had found out.

--

Morgandy woke up, jumping slightly, blinking Dale's face from her eyelids. She had the strangest urge to revisit the forest. She had left something uncompleted there. It would be all day until she could though, she had to make it through classes first.

After pushing through her morning routine, she had breakfast, fresh fruit and went to her first class of the day. Maths, by far not her favourite, she didn't even bother to pretend to open her maths book as she sat in the back row. Instead she opened a magazine and started flipping through the new fashion trends of summer, they were the same as always. It amazed Morgandy sometimes that no one noticed that all fashion designers recycled their old pieces of work. They brought in 'new' fashions that had also been 'new' in the fifties. How could no one notice that?There was the impatient tapping of a pen on her desk and she looked up about to snap at the owner before realising the class was looking at her.

Ah bummer.

"No idea." She said with a smirk and turned her head back to the magazine, she could hear a collection of sighs as she did so. A few minutes later she lifted her head to see how the class was going, everyone was back to doing their work except Annett. Her mind seemed to be on something different all together, which was surprising as she was always one of the good students.

After managing to make it out of maths she made it through music, recess and sport, all the way to lunch. She was growing even more impatient however and she wondered if she could possibly make it to the forest and back without missing class. Not that it really mattered if she did. She changed clothes and walked across the oval. Walking silently and carefully through the forest to find her way to her tree she could hear snippets of crying, carried through the breeze. The sun warmed her back slightly as she tried walking towards the sound.