"I
Monday, May 19th 2003
Brisbane, Australia
2:00 P.M.
It was the day she had been dreading for the past year. She had tried to forget about it, she really had. She had tried plenty of tactics to overlook the coming event but none of them had worked. In hindsight - she realised - none of them ever worked.
Today was Junie Bennett's tenth birthday.
As she trotted home from school, her hands clutching onto the straps of her backpack, a sour expression on her face, Junie found herself cursing the day she was born.
Two days ago. during a rather tedious lesson of English, her teacher had mistakenly asked for Junie's opinion and truthfully she told her that she thought birthdays were pointless. Stupidly, her teacher had told Junie to elaborate, and Junie had told her that the purpose of birthdays was to celebrate the significance of a person, but Junie told her that compared to the vast and endless universe they lived in, people were insignificant, therefore birthdays were futile. Birthdays only got a person closer to their death and death was certainly nothing to celebrate and neither was approaching it.
Ms. Hornsby had pointed out how terribly morbid Junie's outlook on life was for a nine-year-old, and Junie had subsequently pointed how ridiculously naive Ms. Hornsby was for a fifty-year-old woman. This had - unsurprisingly - landed Junie with a two hour long detention afterschool.
School had been dragged, the minutes had slowed, the hours had stretched and she thought that the day would never end. Ms. Hornsby very well knew how Junie felt about her birthdays. Even so, her teacher had still insisted on announcing to the class that it was Junie's birthday. If that had not been aggravating enough, Ms. Hornsby had purposefully taken the largest circular badge from she could find and pinned it onto her shirt. In large, highly noticeable letters, the words 'it's my birthday!' were printed on the ..." http://wattpad.com/story/6395314
