I am taking part this year.
On Nov 1, I started a story. It turned out to be horrible, I hated it. So, tonight, I started a new story. It has a more personal relationship to me, and it is much easier to write.
Please note, this is totally unedited. On 1 Nove, I turned off the red and green squiggly lines, and will be just writing with no editing as I go until I'm done. This means that there will be spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm not going to apologize, because I'm a writer, damnit!
Sarah had always been a reasonably plain girl. Not boring, but there was nothing about her that was truly outstanding. This was a blessing in some ways; when she was 11 and had terrible, terrible acne, nobody noticed. She was just a boring, ordinary girl, who didn’t make waves. When she was at high school, she was a good student; she paid attention in class and turned in her homework and passed her exams. She was never top of the class in anything, but she never fell behind either. She was, simply put, average. It would be wrong to say that she was unpopular as she had a great group of friends who she valued, and who valued her in return. The only thing about Sarah that was a tiny bit out of the ordinary was that while all of her friends were wearing make up and dating and drinking themselves through university, Sarah had a secret. It all started the week she started high school.
Sarah was 13, bold and confident, and very excited about beginning high school. She knew nobody at her new school, and she quite liked the idea of being able to reinvent herself. She had a challenging 8 years at primary school and intermediate; she began school when she was 4 rather than 5 because she was a distraction at kindergarten. When she started school, she was already able to read, so from day 1, she was also somewhat of a distraction to the other children who hadn’t had the advantage of tough but devoted parents who insisted that she would be successful. She had gone through primary school as a troublemaker; outspoken, opinionated and bold. Her plan was to reinvent herself at her brand new school, into a more demure, sophisticated version of herself. It took her until about 15 minutes into the first school day to realise that changing was going to be impossible. Her personality dictated that she was loud, brazen and sometimes more up front than was strictly necessary. A private girls’ school was very different to where she had grown up; a small primary school where kids smoked drugs and played tackle rugby. Sarah had even burned down the trees at the back of the field once; which accidentally encroached to the fence and a nearby house. That behaviour was so out of line with what was acceptable at her new school. By the end of the first day, she was beginning to regret her decision. Her parents had allowed her to choose the high school she went to; money was not an object, they simply wanted her to be happy with the place she would be spending the next 5 years of her education. Sarah had read lots of prospectus; but in the end, only visited one school, the one that would be her home away from home for 8 hours a day, 9 days a week for the following 4 years. On the school’s open day, as soon as she walked inside the front doors into the entrance, she felt at home. The entrance had beautiful polished wooden floors, double height ceilings and intricate detailing on the walls. The focal point was a beautiful sweeping staircase that gently wound it’s way up to the mezzanine. A wide, blood red plush carpets lead the way up the stairs. Sarah knew from the research she had done with her family that all private single sex schools had very similar teaching philosophies and visions; for this school, their catch phrase was ‘empowering’. They wanted to empower the girls that went to their school into becoming strong women; this idea appealed to Sarah. She was only 13, but already had learned the hard way that some people expected women to fall into a steryotype; that is, to mother, to cook, to clean, to wait on their husbands. To get married. Sarah did not necessarily want that life for herself; she wanted to be a strong, independent woman. She wanted to be empowered. She was impressed with the school, so much so that she decided to take her chances and not apply to any others. Her parents were, of course, somewhat concerned by this and tried to convince her otherwise, but she insisted. At 12, of course she knew best. It was just as well that she was accepted into the school as she had no plan B. The school was elite, it required pre-entry exams, tests, scholarship examinations, booking fees, even compulsory insurance as part of the fees. It seemed, at the time, to be a fairytale; the beginning of her new life.
On her first day of school, Sarah realised that the school was not necessarily what she had imagined. She realized that she had romanticised it; and never once given a moment of thought to how she would make friends. When she walked in the gate on her first morning, she was taken aback to see girls walking around in small groups, chatting excitedly amongst themselves. She had never been particularly great at meeting people and fitting in, and she had never even considered that being a full school from kindergarten to year 13 would mean that peer groups would have already formed; she would be trying to force her way into groups that had already been established; in some cases, for a number of years. The act of making friends intimidated her and forced her back into her old habits. It was not going to be as easy to reinvent herself as she thought; nobody had ever told her that a person’s personality is something that grows with them rather than just appears one day. On that very first moment inside the gates, Sarah saw one girl who stood out. Emma was everything Sarah imagined that she would have turned into at day one of her new school. She was tall, thin, self-assured and exotic looking. She moved with a grace and confidence that Sarah couldn’t pinpoint. Emma looked aloof, calm, and totally unconcerned with everything doing on around her. She looked like she belonged. Sarah felt even more out of place upon seeing Emma. Her uniform, which she thought suited her this morning, suddenly looked puckered and too long. Sarah imagined that Emma was at least 15; that confidence could surely only come with age.
Sarah entered the old hall. It was just as beautiful as she remembered from the open day. The energy in the hall today was different; it was buzzing with an excited by nervous energy. You didn’t have to look very closely to tell that this group represented all of the new comers. All of their uniforms looked slightly awkward, too crisp, and everyone looked uncomfortable, yet excited. She saw signs for every year level, each with confident looking older teenagers standing nearby. Sarah has no doubt that these were year 13 students; they looked at home here, they spoke freely with the teachers and interacted with a calm air towards the new students. Sarah finally spotted the sign for year nines, and made her way through the mob of people to it. It was the second largest group after the year 7s, and seeing this helped ease her nerves; there would be other people in her situation, there was no need to feel so alone and scared. Attendance was called, and the year nines were split into smaller groups and shuttled to their classes by the year 13 prefects. The corridors seemed like a maze to Sarah; even though there were only two stories, each wing looked the same, and there were shortcuts all over the place. On the way to her homeroom alone, Sarah counted 4 different flights of stairs. As they were walking, the prefect explained that her name was Lara, she was 17 years old and had started 5 years ago in year nine, just like them. She pointed out classrooms and teachers and bathrooms and fire escapes. The collective group looked slightly shell shocked, and Lara answered their unasked question. She explained that they would be given a full tour of the school every morning for the rest of the week, and that they would be paired with a buddy in their homeroom who had been at the school for more than a year. This person would teach them about the seven day timetable and bells and assembly times, and take them to all their classes for the first few weeks. Lara’s cheerful voice recounted how she first met her year nine buddy and explained that they had become best of friends, and planned to go to Otago University next year to flat together. She assured them that they’d get the hang of the school in no time, and explained that all of the girls and teachers were very kind and supportive.
Sarah had no idea how long it took to get to their homeroom, but suddenly, Lara stopped, gesturing to a doorway. She wished them luck, and disappeared. The girls all looked at each other, exchanging nervous smiles. None of them had any idea what to expect for the rest of the day; or the next 5 years of their life. The first day passed in a blur. They played named games, had a full school assembly, a chapel service, a senior school assembly. They were sorted into houses, and had house meetings. They met their form teacher, their deans and took tours around the school. Before Sarah knew it, the final bell rang and the class was dismissed. Sarah was grateful that she had already arranged walking to the train station with a girl she had met that day, Rebekah. Rebekah had just started at QMC today as well, but her mother was an ‘old girl’. Girls’ whos mothers, grandmothers or other family members had attended QMC were daughters of old girls. They were afforded a special, higher status at the school, presumably because of the amount of money that had collectively been spent at the school.
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