When I was in Year 4 (that's Grade 3 for you 'mericans, so I was about eight), my best friend's name was Samantha. I was also friends with her twin sister, Bethan, and our parents were also friends which was useful. They had a lot of money and their father, now I think back or just listen to my parents talk about them, was very, very right-wing. This doesn't really come into the story, because I was nine, and all that I cared about was that I had some close friends whom I liked even though they bossed me around a little.
One day, at school, Samantha told us all a story which rocketed throughout my primary school and became known as "Dolly On The First Step" - you probably heard it at some point in your childhood. I was a fragile little girl, an only child with too much of an imagination, and it stayed with me for days. I couldn't sleep alone. I would come to my parents room at night crying and trembling because at the time, it was the most terrifying thing I could imagine, and they were patient at first but lost it. Because after two or three days, gave up on letting me sleep at the end of their bed and I lay in my room alone, and it was quiet and I kept on hearing noises and it ruined me for about a month.
Another traumatising experience I've had as a child was a couple of years later. I was about ten or eleven when my cousins, Sam and Annie, came to my house. Annie was about seventeen at the time and my dad was helping her write a CV I think, so they were upstairs in the study.
Let's back up slightly. I have no siblings but my cousins were kind of the equivalent of that, when I was growing up. Aside from Annie, who was a teenager when I was younger and wasn't around as much as she is nowadays, I have four cousins, a set of two sisters and two brothers, and when we were together a strange kind of politics went on between us all; we had an age range of four years I think. There's a time every year, a little before my birthday in February when Sam is 16, Kate 15, onwards until Jake, the youngest, is 12. I'm the middle one.
Sam was always sort of a leader for us; he came up with the dares, decided which games we were going to play and, in this case, he picked the movie.
The movie was The Others and he reassured me it wasn't scary, because it was rated a twelve and, of course, it couldn't be.
I didn't want Sam and my dad to think I was being a winp, and I watched it just because of the pressure, because, even though we were at my house there wasn't much else to do and because even though I didn't believe him my cousin said it wouldn't be scary.
He lied. At the time, it was firetrucking terrifying.
This led, of course, to another period of over dramatisation and of lost sleep. There were never nightmares, I was just scared that they'd happen. Instead of shutting my eyes and letting it be dark, I'd turn my bedside lamp on and simply stare at the wall whilst I was falling asleep, until my eyes shut themselves because I was too tired.
And I was probably angry at my cousin and my dad at the time, but now I'm not because I'm generally a hard-ass when it comes to scary movies.
Apart from a few things, the only thing nowadays most of all which can keep me awake for a while, fictionwise, is the idea of rape. I don't want to go into detail because it makes me shudder and my head hurt, but a part of "The Kite Runner", and one particular scene in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" involving an anal plug (at this in the movie adaptation, I even cried a little) left me lying in bed afterwards in foetal position, gripping a duvet protectively around me and shaking slightly. I don't know why I'm such a wimp when it comes to that, it's like some people get with blood or needles or vomit.
So that's just a thing. But then recently, something happened which set this off.
It was last week and I was leaving French class, moving down the stairs to Catering when I noticed straight away the yelling, the signs of excitement, a crowd and the grumpy school receptionist frantically trying to block off a certain area of the corridor.
I only ever heard it second hand, from several people, but what had happened was that in a kind of relaxed lesson, two guys my age had been messing around, and thought it'd be a good idea to sit on a pencil. Whilst his friend held it still, he sat on the pencil and myehhidontwanttotalkaboutitbutyougetthegist. He left the classroom, quite calmly, and didn't come back, so the teacher sent his friend to find him and they did, in pain and rapidly bleeding. They carried him off on a stretcher, his face covered with blankets because he was embarassed. Everyone seemed to think it was pretty funny, I suppose it is slightly, and I tried to laugh too because I don't like talking about my weird hysterical fear of anal pains, so I was sort of quietly choking in my throat and crossing and uncrossing my legs and wanting to vomit the whole time my Catering teacher was talking about how serious it was, what the consequences could be, the parts of his body it's affected and how it must have felt....
fpskhgjhoishejgp0ishg.
Let's back up a little. Another thing that day, was that that morning we'd been potting plants in Biology and following the recent death of my desk cactus due to running cats, my friend Poppy decided that it was important that I take this geranium home to replace it and I agreed, thought I think that both of us were mainly doing it for the thrill of stealing a plant from school.
That night I was with my friends at our favourite coffee shop, where I took the plant out of my pocket and put it on the table.
When we left, I realised I'd left it on the table.
I wasn't so worried that I'd lost the plant, but that our Biology teacher would get them out again and spot ours was missing or why the people working at Costa would think we'd left a plant there.
Anyways, that's a secret: I worry a lot. I know it isn't very badass.
The combination of the two, the guilt and the panic and the imagination of all the surgery and the skin and just that moment of shock and slow, slow pain left my lying awake in bed. My muscles were twitching, I gasped for breath and rolled to a different side every time I imagined the pain again.
And that's how a pencil and a potplant lost me an entire night's sleep.
For once, I'll be back tomorrow. I'm sorry that it was probably sort of a waste of time reading that. I do try to be interesting.
- Lizzie
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