You Don't Know Me

Fifteen Minutes:Part 1

It's funny how fifteen minutes can change your life. 

  Sometimes people ask me: would you do it again, knowing what happened? I've thought about it a lot and I suppose the answer is yes, despite everything. Fifteen minutes can be golden. They're all you need  to make something beautiful, or save someone from disaster. They can also be black. Either way, fifteen minutes is all it takes to find out who you really are.

***

We were in Rose's bedroom, at the end of the summer holiday. I was sitting on her window seat, watching a common harvester in the fields outside and idly scrolling through celebrity news websites on the phone my dad had just given me. School was about to start: GCSE year, where everything matters and teachers keep asking you what do you want to do with your life. These were are last few minutes of peace. Well, relative peace, anyway. As peaceful as you can get with one girl- Rose- was making a mournful tune on her guitar, another girl-Jodie- was moaning about her ex-boyfriend and the third one- Nell- was trying to calm her down. 

"He's evil and I hate him with passion." Jodie announced, slumping against the wall next to me with an angry scowl.

"Well, not evil exactly," Nell pointed out. Nell is calm yin to Jodie's ranty yang. Together they make a normal girl. "I mean he only changed his status in Interface." 

"In public!" Jodie complained. "Without consulting me! Just because I was going to France. He said he wasn't sure he could manage long-distance relationship. It was TWO WEEKS. Kyle Stanley is a scumbag and that's all there is to it." 

I was our first time back together after weeks away. I'd been visiting my dad in America, and Nell and Jodie had only recently come back from family trips. Rose had been stuck at home all the time, helping on her grandparent's farm. She was still quiet and gloomy, making up sad songs on her guitar.

I looked across to where she sat on her bad with the guitar, and caught her eye. We shared a private smile about Jodie's ranting. Rose changed from the sombre , folky melody she'd been working on to something Spanish and angsty. It involved lots of fast strumming and dramatic crescendos. You could imagine a Latin Singer wailing her distress. Jodie outed at her.

"Shut up, Rose. I'm not that bad." 

Rose merely raised an eyebrow at her and smiled.

"You need something to take your mind off him," Nell said. She was on the floor, sorting out the pile of junk that had accumulated at the bottom of Rose's wardrobe. "You can't let a boy like that get to you. Oh look!  Wow! Rose, d'you remember these?"

She pulled out a pair of scratched yellow plastic sunglasses with frames in the shape of flowers. Rose has a very eclectic dress sense, which means it come from a variety of sources. 'Eclectic'- a Rose word. She collects them, like I I'd started collecting apps for my new phone. 

"Oh, I wondered where those had got to," Rose said, looking up  for a moment.

Nell took her smart red specs and replaced them with yellow flowers. "Where did you get them?" 

"Can't remember," Rose said absently, looking back at her guitar. "I think it was the Bigelow Festival." 

Lukily nobody was watching me at that point, so nobody saw the colour in my cheeks.

Nell went over to the mirror to admire herself. She looked great in the glasses, even though they were probably designed for ten-year-old's.  Nell has a small, pretty face and wavy blonde hair that looks good with anything. Peering closely, because she's practically blind without her glasses, she grinned.