Stereotype by Claire Hennessy Page B

growing up, listen to me! I hurt and I hurt and I don’t know why because there is no why, there’s just me with all these emotions that I don’t understand, me being angry and upset and silent, me wanting attention but not being able to trust anyone enough to let them see the real me, me sitting on my bed with a clump of tissues pressed against my bleeding arm and feeling like I need to cry but not being able to.
    And instead of telling someone about this, I’m just going to sit here and be miserable and feel sorry for myself, because that’s what I do so well.
    I want to scream.
    But I can’t do that. The neighbours might complain. People would think I’m crazy. What’s crazy is that more people don’t go around screaming every so often. It’d solve a lot of problems. Scream and you feel better afterwards. But that wouldn’t be normal, now would it? So instead people find some other way to deal with a surge of emotion, and they punch a pillow or squeeze an ice-cube, or more likely they smash windows or yell at someone or start a fight or pour themselves a drink or light up a joint or pull out their hair.
    And if it’s public enough, or if you’re found out, they do something with you, they send you to jail or therapy or rehab. Then, if you’re lucky, you can emerge with a clean slate. You get a second chance, and it seems like you’ve recovered.
    But you’re not the problem. You’re not the one who couldn’t scream because people might think you were crazy.
     
     

Chapter Forty-Four
     
    It’s so funny to listen to Jess talk to her friends. None of them have a remotely intelligent thought in their heads, the accents are as rough as they come, the amount of curse words per sentence shoots up drastically. All of them trying to be experts on the music industry, as dismissive as possible of everything they consider pop, all trying to impress each other.
    I guess that’s what it’s like being thirteen, always trying to prove that you’re cool enough for the group that you want to hang out with. Conformity in the extreme.
    I was never that bad, was I? I mean, I know I was pretty bad. Desperately wanting to be cool, acting differently around certain friends, avoiding the undesirable unpopular people even if I wanted to be friends with them and felt bad about shunning them. But I was always a little individualistic. Or weird. Whichever word you’d prefer to use.
    She’s worse than I was, right? Or maybe it’s just that she’s succeeded in conforming, whereas I never could.
    But they all think that they’re being different. They’re rebelling against society, blah blah blah. They seem to be under the impression that teenagers being rebellious and unwilling to respect authority is a new idea.
    How sweet.
    Yes, I’m being condescending. What’s the point of being so fixed in your views that you automatically think that anything the older generation says is worthless? You have to pick your fights instead of arguing just for the sake of it.
    Generally speaking, of course.
     
     

Chapter Forty-Five
     
    Wednesday afternoon. Cooking. Caroline and I are making some kind of spicy stir-fry thing. She keeps sneaking in extra ingredients, usually for the purpose of making the dish even spicier than it is. I think we should bring it to the staff-room and offer it round to the teachers. Might be interesting to watch them spontaneously combust. Evacuate the (rare) nice teachers beforehand, though. The ones who treat you like actual human beings. I think we have about three in the entire school, which is probably above the national average. We should feel so privileged.
    And in fairness, very few of the staff are actively evil.
    My right sleeve is pushed up past my elbow; my left sleeve is only pushed up a little. Must hide those nasty marks, after all.
    If she saw them – what would she say? Would I make an excuse, or would I smile enigmatically and say “What do you think happened?” in a semi-regretful tone.