Life Sucks, Big Time

I have never had a boyfriend. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I once was asked out by a boy, and I did say yes, but we only went out for a week, and he only asked me out in the first place because his girlfriend was in Canada. We never kissed, we never actually went out on a date, we never even held hands. I was sick for three days and he wasn’t at school the day after that. He broke up with me via txt that afternoon. The next night was the school dance, which he had been going to take me to, and to which I went instead with my parents. Not that that was unusual. It was also the end-of-year prize-giving, so all parents were invited. It was just that my parents were the only ones I went with. I didn’t see much of Harriet that evening. I gather she spent much of the night latched on to one of her poser-emo boyfriends. She goes from one to the other very quickly. Not that Harriet’s a slut. It’s just that boys only want one thing, and she’s not prepared to give it.

I leaned back on the grass. Harriet sighed beside me and did the same. I stared up through the leaves to where a bird was debating whether to sit in the tree or fly as far away as it could from the weird freaks lying below it. Distantly I heard the school bell indicating the end of morning tea.
“Time to go.”
“Nah, I’m staying here.”
Harriet stared at me incredulously.
“Jas, you’re not seriously going to wag, are you?”
I shrugged.
“Why not? It’s only Maths. I’m sick of going over and over everything I already understand while Miss Lychen tries to drill it into the thick skulls of Terri and Sherri.”
Yes, there are two girls in our maths class called Terri and Sherri, and yes, they are identical twins. Oh, my life is just dripping with irony.
Harriet hesitated a moment.
“Listen, Harri, you want to sit there for an hour, be my guest. Mind you, you probably need the extra teaching.”
She dropped back onto the grass.
“I’m just as smart as you. Fine, I’ll stay with you. It’s your fault if we get caught.”
I shrugged.
“We won’t.”
I pulled my sketchbook out of my bag and opened it to my latest project. Harriet peered over my shoulder.
“That’s interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Yeah.”
I sighed. She’ll have a sketchbook of her own tomorrow. Oops, speak of the devil.
Harriet opened her own bag and extracted a sketchbook.
“This is mine.”
She opened it to the first page. I sighed.
“Wow. You drew that?”
She nodded proudly. I took the sketchbook out of her hands the better to examine the badly-drawn person on the page. It was drawn completely front-facing and it looked very two-dimensional. However, it was recognisable as a girl, presumably teenaged judging by the fact that she had a waist and something that might have been cleavage.
“It’s nice.”
She bristled.
“Nice?”
“What? It is. It’s nice. Why, do you want me to say you’re the next Van Gogh?”
“It’s not meant to be nice. She’s emo.”
“She is?”
I examined the picture more carefully.
“She doesn’t look emo.”
“She’s got cuts on her wrists.”
“Oh. I thought that was the cuff of her shirt.”
“And anyway, she’s sad.”
“Right. Harriet, tears do not equal sad. She’s smiling. And her eyes do not look sad.”
“Yeah they do.”
“They do not. Harriet, this is sad.”
I flicked through my sketchbook until I found the picture I wanted. A girl drawn from the torso up, her long hair falling into her large eyes. The eyes were what I had been focussing on, the emotion that they portrayed and the way her mouth curved into a sad smile.
Harriet peered at the page.
“She’s not sad. She’s not even crying.”
“You don’t have to cry to be sad. See, the emotion is coming through in her eyes.”
Harriet snorted.
“And you told me mine wasn’t sad because she was smiling. Yours is smiling!”
“Yes, but you can see it’s a sad smile. I actually took care with mine.”
“I took care with mine!”
“But you don’t understand what you’re drawing. I mean, tell me about the girl in your picture.”
Harriet shrugged.
“I don’t know, she’s emo. That’s all there is to know about her.”
I sighed.
“See? That’s what I mean.”
“Okay then, you tell me about yours.”
“Well, for a start, she’s fourteen. She gets bullied a lot. Her parents are divorced. Her father lives halfway across the country and her mum just doesn’t care about any problems her daughter has. This girl is basically anonymous except when she’s picked on. She tries to keep a brave face but she has no friends and no-one to tell her problems to, and she’s cracking under the strain of trying to keep her grades up while being basically alone in the world.”
Harriet sighed in a way that said quite clearly ‘I’m obviously superior in this situation.’
“But you don’t need to know all that shit about her.”
“Yes, you do, because you need to understand what you’re drawing. If you look at something drawn by someone who doesn’t understand the people they draw, the eyes of the people in the picture will look dead, basically.”
Harriet sighed again as the bell rang. I smiled.
“Okay, well, Maths is over. What you got?”
“French.”
“Right. I’ve got Art. See you at lunch.”
I stood up.
“Wait, you’re not gonna wag Art too?”
“Art? Hell no, I love Art!”
“Oh, right.”
She scrambled to her feet and hurried after me, brushing the dirt off her skirt. I headed off in one direction to the Art building while she went in the opposite direction to the Languages corridor in the main building.
Sometimes Harriet really pisses me off.