searching for a fallen star

Chapter 6: Back to school

Getting ready for school the next morning seems almost too ordinary after all that had happened yesterday: meeting Oliver, the house ‘incident’, running away from Oliver and that blasted house only to end up on that blasted bridge, my first ‘date’… As I let out another yawn and stretch my aching shoulders, I realise that to say I am simply exhausted would be a huge understatement. Suddenly I understand what people mean by ‘feeling like a zombie’.

Yet strangely, I feel liberated at the same time, as if overnight, someone had gone and temporarily lifted the Stone Henge from my shoulders. Maybe choosing to stop running away had been a good idea.

I can hear a drunken man’s loud snores from all the way across the living room, and I know I have to be out of the house before he wakes up. Groaning, I run my brush several times through my tangled bed hair and tie it up in a high ponytail, before throwing on my uniform, grabbing my bag and carefully pushing open the back door. It creaks but the drunken man doesn’t stir.

It’s odd how he never thought to lock up the back door even after I yelled at him and stormed out through that very door last night. It's almost as if he wanted me to come back.

I laugh bitterly at the thought. He was probably just too drunk to even care about locking the back door. Excessive alcohol consumption does have the tendency to fuck up your brain and take away your ability to think clearly – to think at all.

Shaking my head in disgust, I kick at a tiny pebble and take the road to the train station.

*** *** ***

I step into the train that arrives on platform two (oh, how I wish it is platform nine-and-three-quarters instead!). I glance around. Nearly all the seats are empty. To my east, a clean-shaven man with a silver watch, flips loudly through his newspaper. To my west, a little boy wearing a backpack kneels on a seat, jabs at the window and calls at his mother to look! And to the far right, a girl in uniform leans into the seat, headphones over her ears, bobbing to the music of her own little world.

I take a random seat and find myself wondering whether that girl goes to school so early for the same reason that I do.

I wonder, but I don’t ask.

*** *** ***

*Intermission: an excerpt of Anna’s thoughts* (read A/N at the end)

In general, I find cliché to be irritating but tolerable, but there is something about high school clichés that just gets on my nerves. The idea of students being categorised into jocks, cheerleaders, nerds, goth and so on and so forth has never ceased to annoy the hell out of me. Which is why I thank the few lucky stars I have that the school I go to has no such stereotypes.

Sure, some students are sportier; some are smarter and work harder; some get into trouble more often than others. But most of the cliques at school aren’t limited to just one ‘type’ of personality.

In some ways though, this ‘difference’ makes no difference to me, because at school, I am somewhat a loner. Sure, over the years I’ve joined various groups, becoming very much like a nomad, travelling from one group to the next, always on the move, because – as clichéd as it sounds – I never truly found my place among any group. Not that the other students weren’t nice, but because they were too nice, too polite, as if their only reason for letting me join in the first place was because they pitied me.