The Bad Karma Diaries

by Bridget Hourican

  WEDNESDAY 9TH DECEMBER

  Got picture of butterfly and put it up on the blog with:

  animal Hefto resembles.

  The blog has a load more comments all spinning from my last entry:

  Xenawarriorcleaner:

  what’s songing???!!

  (Then I realised that I written in ‘song’ instead of ‘snog’ – didn’t mean to!)

  Pippa wrote:

  Yeah!! Is this some bizarre dating ritual that hasn’t come to Ohio yet?

  CuriousinDenver:

  Don’t worry Demise! I’m sure you would never imply that you’d song. I’m sure you don’t even think about songing!

  ZeeZee:

  Yeah. But bet Bomb songs like crazy!

  Eloise at the Holiday Inn:

  And Hefto heaves ho!

  We all looked at each other. Heeun said, ‘what is songing?’ So we explained about predictive texting. And then we were all laughing but also, you know, kind of alarmed. Well it is alarming having all these strangers commenting on everything you write. I mean suddenly you’ve all these shrieking voices in your living room, all having a laugh and making jokes at your expense.

  I said, ‘God, it’s like giving Renata a portal into your brain.’

  So Anna cracked up, and Heeun too cause now she knows what Renata’s like.

  We confab-ed on what to reply. This is what we posted up:

  Oh ha ha! A song is just a snog is just a French kiss… Sorry, it’s not that bizarre, it’s no ritual and I guess you do it too!

  Demise has so thought about songing …

  Bomb is (quite) liking her new boyfriend.

  Hefto has not pinned herself to anyone yet. She is afraid a lepidopterist will catch her and pin her to a slide!

  God loves every hair on your head!

  THURSDAY 10TH DECEMBER

  You’re coasting along and everything’s okay, and the trouble’s over and you think you’ve learnt something and that’s when – bang! – the real trouble hits.

  This is bad, bad trouble, worse than the racist stickers, and I don’t know what to do.

  I am sitting in my bedroom and I’ve been sitting here twenty minutes looking mindlessly out the window. I am not crying. I am in numbed shock.

  I don’t know what to do.

  I came home – just half an hour ago! Imagine! Thirty-five minutes ago everything was fine – I was a bit late back ’cause I’d gone to Anna’s after school and delayed a bit, but I wasn’t actually late for dinner or anything. The house was quiet, but when I went into the kitchen Mum was sitting at the table, and she was just gazing ahead like me now, and something about the way she was sitting and gazing – because normally she’s always busy – made me say, ‘Are you alright Mum?’

  She said, still gazing ahead, ‘It’s Justine.’

  I said, ‘Justine?’

  She said, ‘She’s––’

  But I can’t write what Mum said Justine is. I can’t! It’s too terrifying. It’s a scary, scary word.

  I said, ‘No, she’s not!’ but in a reflex way. I didn’t even think about it. I just denied it.

  Mum said harshly, ‘You know she is. When did you last see her eat her dinner?’

  I thought about it. I never notice what Justine does, but now Mum said it, it came to me, Justine sitting miserably at dinner turning the food round with her fork on the plate, and all of it staying on the plate, not going to her mouth.

  I said feebly (and desperately), ‘Maybe she fills up before dinner? On cereal! When she gets in from school.’

  Mum said, ‘The cereal’s never touched.’ She was still gazing flatly ahead.

  I said wildly, ‘I’ll – I’ll talk to her, I’ll see what’s going on. I’ll make sure she eats. I’ll–’

  ‘You?’ Mum took her horrible, blank gaze from straight ahead and turned it on me, still blank, but now with a bit of scorn in it, ‘You? What will you do? You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You ignore your sister. You ignore your father and me. You spend every moment you can in Anna’s house. When you do eat here, you make it clear it’s a boring duty imposed on you. You snap and sulk. It’s obvious you consider us dull and unworthy of your wit and humour. You devise complacent, self-congratulatory games with Anna, which involve being cruel to other kids. God help you, but you’re a selfish little monster.’

  I looked at her. A full five seconds we looked straight at each other, then I turned and ran up here.

  Yes, she said all that, in just those words. I will never forget them. And first I raged and raged and thought, she’s trying to hurt me, she’s just trying to hurt, because she’s upset, but I knew that wasn’t it, I knew she really thought those things because of the dead blank way she said them, not like she planned them, but like they were coming from somewhere very deep inside her. Then I tried to defend myself. In my mind I tried to reject what she said, but I couldn’t. How could I? My little sister is – and I didn’t even know. I hardly even noticed she was miserable. How can I defend myself against that?

  Well then I had evidence. I mean I had this diary, so I read back over all of it, from the beginning, and I burned, burned, burned with shame. Suddenly it was like one of those 3D pictures where you think you’re looking at a load of colourful shapes and then you adjust your eyes and suddenly a man on a horse (or whatever) emerges from the random shapes. Or maybe like when you read a book in English and you like the story but then you go through it with O’Toole and you pick up on all the hidden bits, and the Metaphors and the Allusions, and it seems a different book. I mean I’ve read over this diary before and giggled, because it seemed funny, very entertaining, but now my eyes are adjusted, now I’m looking for the hidden bits, the metaphors and allusions, and all I see is selfishness and me being totally rude and dismissive to my parents, and actually cruel to Justine. It’s horrible. I want to rip the pages up.

  I don’t care about what we did to Jayne O’Keeffe. I said I was sorry but all those accusations of selfishness and bullying, they just bounced right off me, but now mum’s words have slid in like a razor blade.

  I don’t know what to do – to make myself less selfish. Or (more important) to save Justine.

  FRIDAY DECEMBER 11TH

  We are going to speak to Justine. Tomorrow. ‘We’ is me and Anna.

  At break Anna said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She is a noticing kind of person, but also my behaviour was odd. Tense, I mean.

  I said, ‘Nothing,’ in an aggressive, tense voice because I didn’t want to tell her. I thought she was part of the problem. She was part of me being so selfish.

  She said, ‘Come on,’ then to Heeun (in a nice way), ‘Do you mind? There is just something we have to straighten out,’ and she took my arm and walked me down towards the bike sheds. She said, ‘Now what is it?’ in a very firm, direct way, not in a particularly sympathetic way but in a way that needs an answer.

  I said, ‘It’s –’ then I looked away from her, at the sky, and my eyes filled up with tears. I couldn’t look at her. I was embarrassed and angry and ashamed. ‘It’s Justine’ I said, ‘Mum says she’s –’ and I said what Mum said she was.

  Anna said, ‘She’s not!’ in shock, and then I started to shout, totally unreasonably, about what would she know, and what was it to her, and all the rest. She just took it. She didn’t shout back. She put her hand on my arm and said, ‘I know she’s not very happy …’

  I said, ‘… and that’s my fault! I’m a rotten sister!’

  ‘No. You’re just an older sister. Like Renata.’

  ‘Like Renata?’ and I didn’t know whether this was good or bad because Renata is a total bitch to Anna, but on the other hand, she does love her, you can see that.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna, ‘like Renata. Justine annoys you, but you love her.’ I hoped this was true. When I thought about it, I was worse than Renata. At least Renata makes jokes at Anna’s expense. I just ignore Justine.

  Well then Anna had me back on side a bit, so I told her eve
rything, about how selfish I was (although I didn’t say Mum’s exact words, I will never ever repeat them to anyone though I will never ever forget them myself). Anna didn’t say I wasn’t selfish.

  She said, ‘Maybe we get carried away, like with Instruments of Karma, and we think something’s fun when it’s mean …’ And then she said, ‘and I feel bad, cause I’m a younger sister and I knew Justine was miserable.’

  So now everybody’s feeling bad. Which is how it should be. If someone is miserable under your eyes and you do nothing about it, you deserve to feel bad.

  We agreed that we would ask Justine did she want to come for chips and coke with us and we would find out then. We tried to find Justine after school to invite her this afternoon but we couldn’t see her, so it will have to be tomorrow. I should be able to ask Justine alone, but I can’t. Relations between us are so bad, I can’t. I am ashamed of this.

  But Anna is an amazing friend. If I am selfish, it is not her fault.

  SATURDAY DECEMBER 12TH

  So, Justine is NOT anorexic.

  Now she is not, I can write it. (Though it is still a horrible word – just look at it. Look at that evil x and the sick kick of the ic).

  She is being bullied. Being bullied stresses her so she loses her appetite, but she isn’t actually trying to control her food intake or get thinner. This is how we found out:

  Anna came round ours at lunchtime and we asked Justine did she want to come up to the shopping centre for chips and burgers. She looked amazed and suspicious, but she came.

  I didn’t know how we were going to approach this, what roundabout way we were going to lead up to it, but Anna is not roundabout, she is straight to the chase. Over the chips and burgers we just chatted about general things, then we got some sundaes and Justine seemed more relaxed.

  Then Anna said, ‘The reason we invited you out is that we’re afraid something’s bothering you.’

  Justine said, ‘Bothering me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘Look, I’m a younger sister so I kind of know how younger sisters feel and it seems to me something’s bothering you. Before I came to this school, I was miserable.’

  ‘You were?’ said me and Justine at the same time.

  ‘Yeah, because there was this bitch in my class, and she was just bullying me …’

  ‘You too?’ said Justine, and that was it. I wanted to exchange a look with Anna, but I didn’t, we both just looked at Justine, but in a casual, relaxed way because we didn’t want to scare her off. It was like trying to get a cat to take food from your fingers. But then it all came out, in kind of fits and jerks, like Justine was embarrassed about it (which of course she is).

  Who is mostly bullying her is Jayne O’Keeffe.

  When I heard that I went nuts. I forgot about being relaxed and not insistent. I shouted,

  ‘That little cow!’ and then, ‘I can’t believe we apologised to her! I’m gonna wring her neck!’

  So then Anna and Justine exchanged a look and Anna said, ‘Calm down Denise,’ but Justine looked quite pleased. Then Anna said, ‘Did that make it worse for you, when we apologised?’

  Justine looked at her plate, she said, ‘Yeah, well it did, she said I had to be punished for my sister spreading lies about her … She didn’t dare say anything to Gita after all the fuss, so she just took it out on me …’

  I let out an awful groan, and Anna grabbed Justine’s arm and said, ‘Oh no! Sorry!’

  Then I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ and Justine said, ‘Because …’ So I didn’t press her because there were only two possible answers and both of them were equally depressing – she didn’t tell me because a) we weren’t speaking to each other, and/or b) she thought I wouldn’t care.

  Well then we had an emotional time. We ordered more sundaes and we all exchanged stories about Bad Times. Anna said about the girl who was bullying her in primary school – it all started because Anna didn’t have a TV so she didn’t know what were the programmes everyone was talking about. So I said shouldn’t she have told her mum and forced her to get a TV, and Anna said she was too embarrassed to tell her. Then Justine said exactly, that’s why she never said … (But all the same I can’t imagine anyone bullying Anna and I think that maybe she is exaggerating this story in order to relate to Justine’s problems). So then I said how I didn’t have real friends, just virtual and default friends, until I met Anna (which was not entirely true either because in kindergarten I was fixated on a girl called Siobhan MacMahon, but it was true enough, and helped me to relate). And then we started thinking what to do about the bullying, and I was all for just bashing Jayne O’Keeffe, but Justine said No-oo! and by that time we were emotionally wrecked, like someone had squeezed us in the middle, so we agreed to all have a think and come back to it tomorrow.

  And then as we were getting up to go, I said awkwardly, ‘Sorry Justine, sorry I wasn’t there for you.’ I don’t at all like saying sorry, but it had to be done.

  She said (also awkwardly), ‘Oh, that’s ok …’ and Anna beamed on us.

  SUNDAY DECEMBER 13TH

  It isn’t okay though, it’s awful. Yesterday I was so relieved about the anorexia that bullying seemed quite minor, but then I had a horrible dream with people jeering at me all the way through it, and then I remembered how miserable I was when I fought with Anna and that only lasted a few days. Justine’s been going months and months – not just without a friend, but with actual enemies.

  I really do want to kill Jayne O’Keeffe. It is only Anna and Justine restraining me.

  And I got worried in school.

  I asked Anna, ‘How do we know she’s not anorexic? Maybe she’s been bullied and is anorexic.’

  Anna said, ‘No, because she ate her ice-cream. She didn’t finish her burger, but she ate both ice-creams. And they’re very fattening. And she ate her second ice-cream very fast and with relief because by then we’d started discussing bullying which meant everything was out in the open and she was relaxing. That’s why – when I saw her eating ice-cream, I thought probably she isn’t anorexic because an anorexic person wouldn’t wolf down something so fattening. When Renata’s stressed, she doesn’t eat, so I thought it might be the same with Justine, that she’s stressed, not anorexic …’

  This was very observant of Anna.

  It also explains why Renata is so thin.

  We still haven’t decided what to do about Jayne O’Keeffe. We had all kinds of ideas. Then Anna said we should ask her mum. I think she’s right. I mean her mum can psycho-analyse the situation.

  But that will have to wait till tomorrow, because first I had to get back home to my mum. I needed to get her alone. I had to do one nice thing and one hard thing. First (nice thing) explain that Justine is not anorexic, but bullied; and second (hard thing) say sorry for being so selfish.

  Well if you think my mum said, oh thank you darling, and you’re not really selfish, then you don’t know my mum. She just said all right, and she was sure I’d try harder. But she was very very relieved about Justine, although she said we needed to keep an eye on her eating anyway. And then we had a hug.

  But of course now she is thinking what to do about the bullying. She wants to tell the teachers. I guess that is the typical parent reaction. Telling the teachers is not what came into my head.

  MONDAY DECEMBER 14TH

  Round to Anna’s with Heeun. We decided to let Heeun in on this because a) to leave her out would be hurtful and actually quite like bullying and b) she is very discreet and is definitely not going to tell anyone.

  So we began to tell Anna’s mum in the kitchen, and when we got to the bit about who was doing the bullying, I said, ‘Jayne O’Keeffe!’ and Anna’s mum said, ‘The girl whose back you stuck the sticker on?’ and I said, ‘yes!’ and she just said, ‘oh dear’ quietly, but Renata said ‘Jesus! You two are like the government – lurching from one crisis to another.’ Anna’s mum said, ‘Renata!’ (much quicker than usual), and then, ‘If you can’t say anything hel
pful you’d better leave.’

  So Renata said, ‘Sorry,’ and Anna and me looked at each other, amazed, because this was a first, but actually I didn’t mind Renata being snide. It made me feel more normal.

  So then we all started on what to do. Surprisingly Renata agreed with me – she said a good thump was what Jayne O’Keeffe needed.

  Her mother said, ye-es, but that Anna and I had to be careful, we were already in trouble over Jayne O’Keeffe once. If we went and thumped her, and she told a teacher, then we’d be in serious trouble. This is a Good Point. In fact, unfortunately, it is an Indisputable Point. Anna’s mum, like my mum, thinks bullying is something teachers have to sort out, but Renata said, ‘Oh mum! But they never can sort it out. I mean she’ll just get the silent treatment.’

  Her mum said that was better than being actually mocked, but that yes of course, being ostracised was no solution really. Then she said what she was concerned about was Justine’s self-esteem, and Heeun said in her earnest way, ‘Yes, most important is for her to feel good about herself.’

  Anna’s mum said in a kind of teacher-y way, ‘Exactly. And what are the ways we feel good about ourselves?’

  And I said, ‘When we have real friends, not just default friends.’

  Renata murmured, ‘Default friends’ in an appreciating voice (which means she thinks that’s a clever concept!) and Anna’s mum said kindly, ‘Yes, exactly, but unfortunately, we cannot just produce real friends for her, that is something she’ll have to do herself.’

  Then Heeun said, ‘If she did something very well, she’d feel good about herself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Anna, ‘but she has to be seen to be doing it very well and it has to be a cool thing – I mean there’s no point her being very good at … chopping carrots if nobody sees her doing it, and nobody thinks it’s a cool thing to be good at.’ So we all laughed, especially me, cause Anna got chopping carrots from my soup kitchen for sure.