How I Got Here (2 page)

Kim’s eyes locked on mine as I entered, she didn’t smile like she had the last time I’d met her, in fact the smile that had been on her face seconds before, now dropped into a severe frown, she looked me up and down making me feel more than a little awkward. I smiled at her and raised a hand in
greeting; she snapped her gum and slid off the desk that she was perched on, striding across the classroom until she stood in front of my desk.

‘You’re very dry, River isn’t it.’ She smiles at how that sounds, ‘Who would have thought that the river would be dry.’

‘Oh I have a really good coat; it sort of just covered everything and kept the rain off.’ I shrug not really knowing why her voice held an accusatory tone to it.

‘How very fortunate for you,’ she turns back to her group of friends, ‘she had a good coat.’

They all start scowling at me, like it was somehow my fault that they were all soaked through, just because I was still dry. Kim turns back to me with a sweet smile planted on her face, only it didn’t reach her eyes, it was purely a smile put on for show.

‘You know it’s such a shame you couldn’t make it to my party, everybody else had such a blast. I made a lot of friends over the
summer; you could have been one of them.’

‘Sorry, I did send an email explaining, did you get it?’

‘That? Oh yes I got it.’ She shrugs, ‘Still it’s your loss.’ I remember her striding back to her new friends, sitting back on the desk with them stood around her.

Over the next few weeks it became clear somehow she’d gone from being the new girl at the school, to the IT girl. I may need to give a little information here, because you might not understand how girls in high school work, or at least how the girls at my high school work. Once an IT girl has been established, everyone flocks around her, they all want to be part of that little world that she rules, and yet Kim was very selective over who she’d let into her group, and those who were denied a place at her lunch table, became her playthings, she’d use them to write her essays for her and then once it was done, she’d drop them from her group again, or she’d play practical jokes on them, and that’s just how it was, girls can be incredibly catty with one another, and in an all-girls school full of rich girls, it can be even worse.

Kim’s status as an actress was probably the main reason she became the IT girl on campus, because even though it was a small role in a unheard of movie, it was more than any of the other girls had done, and so they asked her constant questions about filming, or the movie business, about actors
she’d met, and how she’d got into acting, and there was nothing Kim loved more than the adoring attention of those around her.

Let me just make one thing clear right now though, I never had anything against Kim, not back then when I barely even knew her. I never did anything to upset her, other than not attending her party, but that was all it
took for her to take a dislike to me, and that was fine, I never craved to have everyone like me, if she didn’t want to be friends with me, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. I’d guessed on that first day of school that we wouldn’t become friends, and that was more than fine by me, she had her own friends and I had mine, but there was far more to it than that, as there usually is. If someone wasn’t friends with Kim, or didn’t follow her around begging to be her friend, then they became her enemy.

For the most part I didn’t pay much attention to Kim and her group, I had always had the tendency to keep my head down, but about a month after school started, she caught my attention again, for the simple reason that she’d decided it was time she pushed me around for a bit.

It started off with small little things that didn’t make much difference to me, she’d play a few little jokes one me, like going into my bag and messing with my fountain pen, so when I started using it, the nib would come off and ink would stain my hands. Once she stole one of my homework assignments from my bag, and set fire to it in front of me so I couldn’t hand it in, but that backfired because I always keep my homework backed up, and I always keep my laptop with me, so I simply emailed a new copy to my teacher, and then printed a new one out in the off chance that the email didn’t go through, and I got it to the teacher before Kim could do anything to the new copy. She didn’t like me beating her like that, so she stepped it up a notch. She started tripping me in the halls, hiding things in my locker or my desk to get me in trouble, but no matter what she did, how relentless she was I put up with it silently.

It wasn’t until November that she did something I couldn’t brush off. I came into school and headed to the library, where I would normally meet my two best friends, Emma and Rose, we’d been friends since we were all seven, and we spent practically every weekend round at each other’s houses, taking it in turns to host the sleepover. We had a lot of routines that we’d stick to, and one of them was meeting in the library before school, unless we were running late. When I arrived in the library that particular morning they weren’t there, I called both of them but got no reply, it wasn’t like them because even when they were running late, they’d always pick up the phone, or send a quick message explaining that they wouldn’t make it. I just shrugged it off though, and made it towards my first class, Russian History, which was one of my favorites. As I walked down the hall I spotted them both, standing in a group with Kim and her friends, I smiled at them and waved, they blanked me. I tried speaking to them at lunch, but they turned their back on me and started laughing about something, then they went to Kim’s table and sat down, all of the girls glanced at me and burst out laughing. I felt so stung, I think that’s the best way to describe it, it was the first time anything Kim had done affected me, but I wasn’t about to let her see that, so I sat down and methodically ate my lunch, once I was done I stood up and walked to the bathrooms, jammed the door closed
, walked into a cubical and burst into tears. You may be thinking that I was a little pathetic, perhaps I was, but they were my best friends and Kim had turned them against me, I didn’t have a clue how she had managed to do it, turning them against a friend they’d known for years, and I still don’t know, all I know is that they never spoke a truly kind word to me again, and from that day onwards I was totally alone in that school.

I went home that night feeling so utterl
y alone, it hadn’t really sunk in and yet there it was, staring me right in the face when I got home, I opened up my laptop and found an email from Kim. I’ll write it out for you here, because this is truly the part where things began to slowly fall apart, piece by piece.

River,

So now you know what it means when you cross me, I warned you that we couldn’t be friends because you never turned up to my party, you shouldn’t ever dismiss me River, because when you do you make me angry
,
I don’t like being refused. It was so easy for me to convince your friends to stay away from you, in the end they were just like the other girls at the school, wrapped around my little finger, and all it took were a few little stories. Oh and by the way I wouldn’t bother showing anyone this email, because I’m not stupid, I’ve already covered that, I told them all that you hacked my account. I put on such a good performance, crying that you had been so very cruel to me, you should have seen it! I am an actress after all, and I play my part so very well.

I know you think I’ve done you wrong, that I’m overreacting, all you ever did was refuse to attend a party, and you hardly even know me so can I really blame you? The answer of course is yes, you see I really don’t like rejection, never have and I don’t think I ever will, and those who reject me get what’s coming to them.

You need to keep in mind though, all I’ve done so far is show you for your true self, which is nothing; you are nothing and never will be. You are less than nothing. There are some people who are so extraordinary, the shining stars that people long to be around, that is where I slot into things, and then at the other end of there are the nothings, the people who don’t matter, the ones who are so easily left behind, that’s you darling, the forgettable one, the invisible one, the plain one.

Yes I like that, that works rather perfectly for you darling girl, you’re plain.

Kim.

That was the first time the word plain became shattering to me, on its own it didn’t mean anything at all to me, so what if this girl thought I was plain? Did I really care what she thought of me? Well, however stupid it may sound to you, I did care. Not because I wanted her to like me, not even because I was offended that she said I was plain, or that I was nothing, but because of the power she held over me. With a few sweet smiles, some softly spoken lies and her impeccable acting skills, she’d managed to take away my friends, she’d managed to get everyone in that school sending me emails, which were all lined up in my mailbox along with hers, that’s what I found when I got home. 93 emails telling me I was plain, that I was nothing, you hear something enough and you start to believe it, and 93 people telling you that you are plain is quite persuasive. Tell me doctor, how would that make you feel?

So there it is just as you asked, all written down neatly in black and white for your consideration, what do you think of me now? Do you pity me? I do hope that you won’t pity me, because that isn’t what this is about, I don’t want your pity or your concern, I don’t want your soothing words of comfort, I want to get this over with, so tell me what you think and then I’ll share with you the next part of this story. Then maybe, just maybe you’ll understand how I got here. Maybe, I’ll understand it as well.

River

Chapter Two

Session 1

He lays the pages down on his lap making sure not to crease them, River’s neat curling words are scribbled across each page, in places the black ink is slightly smudged, he can tell that the marks were made by her tears as she wrote this down, the thought of her sitting alone crying over this letter, is almost more than he can handle, but he has to be professional and not let it bother him.

When he’d first met River on the ward at the private hospital that he works in, she’d been nothing more than another patient, another girl who needed to be treated for some illness, but that hadn
’t lasted long and over the weeks he’d seen that there was more to her, she wasn’t just a symptom that needed to be treated, she was a girl who was clearly struggling to handle what had happened to her, and despite several therapy sessions with the hospitals best psychiatrists, she refused to speak, in fact she hardly spoke a word to anyone, she just sat there in her bed staring out of the window, getting paler by the day and the dark circles growing darker each time he saw her. He had seen her on several occasions since he’d started at the hospital, and in that time he had seen her pull out a leather bound notebook from under her pillow, more times than he could count, and he would watch her as she scribbled away in it for hours. He had always been an observant guy, and he had noticed a lot about her, he knew there was so much that she was locking up, and that it was tearing her apart, and so because he wanted to find a way to help her, he had started sitting with her. He wouldn’t talk to her, or push her to talk, but he would just sit there and let her know that he was there for her, if she needed to talk to anybody then he would listen. A few times she had spoken, not ever about herself, but the first time she’d spoken to him it was because he was having a bad day, and she was worried about him. In that moment he knew that all the other staff were wrong, she wasn’t a lost cause, and he wouldn’t ever give up on her.

Two weeks after she had first spoken to him, with her kind concern for his wellbeing, she had looked over to him with tears glistening in her eyes, and behind the tears he saw something which brought hope to his heart, he saw trust. Then with a voice that was shaking, one that was a little out of practice from her silence, she had said the words he longed to hear.

‘What do you want me to do?’ She had curled her legs up to her chest, holding them tightly as she waited for him to respond, it was a gesture that he’d seen her do a lot, whenever she was feeling particularly vulnerable, or when she was scared about something, she would curl her legs up. It was then that he had told her that he would like her to tell him what happened to her, how she got to this point of being in the hospital, refusing to talk, and battling with her physical and emotional problems alone. He had seen the fear creep into her face, so he had spoken quickly to reassure her, telling her that she didn’t have to talk to him if she didn’t want to, he still wasn’t going to push her into talking, but she could write it all down for him, tell him in her own words, with the chance to cross it out if she changed her mind, he’d told her that she could tell him as much or as little as she felt comfortable with. She had hesitated for longer than he thought he could cope with, the only thing stopping him from worrying too much, was the fact that she had lost the scared look from her eyes, and eventually she had faced him, nodding her head slowly to show him that she would do it.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Then tell it to me in separate parts, write me a series of letters and bit by bit we’ll find out what happened, would that work for you?’ He had spoken with gentle kindness, drawing her in and earning her respect and trust.

‘I – yes I think – I’ll write it in parts.’ She offered him a tiny weak smile, then stopped talking and went back to looking out the window.