Violet Adrenaline [Watty Awards 2013]

Chapter 1: Boys, Bells and Maine

Travelling around the halls of Redlands East Valley High School, I noticed the differences in my peers, the changes they made over summer. Kaitlyn Harris, the schools head cheerleader had dyed her hair from a beautiful, chocolate brown to a rather trashy looking bleached, blonde. Her hair was longer, her skirt was shorter but that seemed to happen every year. Ashley Samson the schools “nerd” had grown more mature. At the end of last year she had a flat chest, sandy blonde hair and wore large, black rimmed glasses. Now she had average breasts, the size of a normal sixteen year old, dyed brown hair and wore contact lenses. It seemed like the head cheerleader kept getting uglier and the school nerd kept getting more beautiful. I noticed changes in the others too, unlike the normal slagging around people did in the middle of the school year, everybody was alight, excited by the idea of our new school year as Juniors, we were half way through high school.

Clumps of teenagers hung around in the halls and courtyard of Redlands High, mingling and chatting excitedly about the classes they were in and who had which lunch break, it was endearing actually, the excitement on my peers faces. I wish I could be like them, but the cloud of depression that I lived my life in denied me of that opportunity.

I was surrounded in a group of friends, all chatting about what they did during the summer. Ivy Anderson, my best friend was telling me about the camping trip that her family took to Maine over the last two weeks of summer. I wished that I had done something like that over the summer, but with my mum having full blown depression, my dad being always away on “business”- which actually meant cheating on my mother and having sex with random strangers- and my brother being dead, I had nobody to do anything with.

“Hazel, are you even listening to me?” Ivy asked, bringing me back out from my thoughts.

“Yes,” I replied defensively.

“What did I say then?” she snapped, pointing her finger at me.

“You were talking about your family trip to Maine.” I pushed her finger back away from me, and back down to her side.

“Yes I was.” I sighed in relief to know that she wasn’t going to go off on me for not listening to her. “Ten minutes ago!” Ivy slapped me playfully on the shoulder as the bell chimed loudly through the hallways.

“Saved by the bell,” I laughed before giving Ivy a quick hug, a fake smile and running off to my home room.

“You better watch out Nickson!” she shouted as I disappeared in to the room, I laughed it off and took a seat at the front, right of the room, where I sat every year.

I recognised some people in my home class. Samantha Haleron the leader of the drama club, Natasha Allen the happy girl that was content with everything she had, even though she was sort of a social outcast and Nick Rowler the typical high school jock, was hanging around a bunch of girls. Then there were the new kids, people that had moved from different states, towns or countries during the summer and decided to come to Redlands of all the places in America. But one of the newcomers caught my attention. He was sitting in the front row on the far left side. He had his head hidden in a book, although he didn’t look like the reading type, he was muscly, tan and looked like the perfect jock, but there he was nose in a book and reading intently.

That’s when the teacher came in and to my absolute horror it was Mr Jefferson, he was about seventy years old, made the worst jokes in the whole entire world and was the biggest creeper I had ever met. I was in his class in the eighth grade and me and Alaina were swapping notes about how Alaina hooked up with a really cute boy for the first time and he read them allowed, not only that he added in some really creepy remarks like ‘Did this mystery guy feel lucky when you shoved your tongue in his mouth?’, ever since then I tried to avoid him like the plague.