Blue Lavender Girl

by Judy May

  To Susie Hemsworth, so full of love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  DAY 1

  DAY 2

  DAY 3

  DAY 4

  DAY 5

  DAY 6

  DAY 7

  DAY 8

  DAY 9

  DAY 10

  DAY 11

  DAY 12

  DAY 13

  DAY 14

  DAY 15

  DAY 16

  DAY 17

  DAY 18

  DAY 19

  DAY 20

  DAY 21

  DAY 22

  DAY 23

  DAY 24

  DAY 25

  DAY 26

  DAY 27

  DAY 28

  DAY 29

  DAY 30

  DAY 31

  DAY 32

  DAY 33

  DAY 34

  DAY 35

  DAY 36

  DAY 37

  DAY 38

  THE LAST DAY OF THIS JOURNAL, FIRST NEW DAY OF MY FABULOUS LIFE

  MAY 30

  About the Author

  Copyright

  DAY 1

  Oh forget it! Kira has this crazy idea that if you count to five hundred while imagining him kissing you, then the next time it has to happen. Has to. The energy you give it, or whatever, makes it so that the universe must deliver, and if you write it down then it’s even stronger.

  Kira is a bit ‘out there’ thanks to having swum with the dolphins on her holidays and now she fancies herself as a spiritual something-or-other.

  It might work, the five hundred thing. My second cousin Susie tried it and ended up getting this guy called George. Problem is, each time I do it I keep changing my mind and imagining different guys. So by the time the party happens I’ll be either alone, or what Mum would call a ‘young hussy’.

  I’ll take hussy. No, actually, I haven’t the energy, and it’s not how I’d want them to finally notice me.

  Kira and Dee’s mums both went to a self-help seminar last week (my mum would never go to anything new like that) and bought us all these journals ‘For Successful Living’, and I’ve now been writing in mine for a full five minutes and don’t feel any different. I don’t give a crap about successful living, I’m just bored rigid because of this stupid power cut.

  FACT: It takes fifteen candles to make enough light to just about read and write by.

  FACT: Twelve of the candles have religious pictures on them and the others are actually mine. My mother is so embarrassing. She should have just been a nun and had done with it and then my dad could have married someone who would have forced him to be cool, instead of forcing him to go to church every morning. At least they’ve given up on making me go. My mum and dad are older than just about everyone else’s by about, oh, a hundred years. I guess that’s why they don’t mind power cuts, it’s nice and old-fashioned for them. I have just fought Dad off from putting geranium oil in these candles. Geranium oil smells of cat, and not in a good way.

  I have been trying all day to work out how to be sick tomorrow. Problem is how to be sick for the exams and not so sick that I won’t be able to stay over at Kira’s on Friday.

  Wait! Hold on! Just remembered, there’s no way they’ll let me go to Kira’s after last week.

  BACKGROUND: Kira’s mum never got the parent note, or whatever, about how when teenage girls come to visit they are supposed to stay in the house, giggling in their daughter’s bedroom. She also never got the other note about how, ‘going down the road to the corner shop’, secretly means, ‘going into town to hang out for half the night’.

  But then, mine believed me about Kira’s house not having a phone, so for a while we just thought we could do what we wanted, that we were all being dragged up by idiots.

  Then last Saturday night Mum and Dad came out of their big annual ‘all the churches’ meeting, and were walking to the parking garage just as me and the girls and some friends of Dee’s brothers were walking back towards the cinema. Only ten miles from where I said I’d be and with a dozen more people.

  Disaster, total, on so many levels, lots of shouting. Maybe they organised the power cut just to punish me. They were going to think of a big punishment, but then they forgot. I always felt OK about the stuff we did because I figured that I was getting punished already by having freaks for parents. Now the freaks have had a meeting with a counsellor and decided to take an ‘active interest’ in me, which means they ask me how I am all the time and recommend films that they can’t quite remember the title of, but are apparently very good.

  God, this has to end.

  DAY 2

  We have been finding bits of Aidan all over the house. Well, not actual bits of him, arms and ears and eyeballs, but stuff he probably meant to take with him.

  I’m sure his pasta-maker was meant to make the trip with him, there’s no way Mum would make a meal from anything other than a frozen thing. I imagine he will be king of his university because he can cook like on the TV shows where the chefs pile things up and drizzle stuff over it just in time, except he favours normal food over pheasant. It’s a shame he’s doing the summer classes first, otherwise he’d have been here for the holidays. I will now have to eat peanut butter and crackers for the next four years unless something drastic happens.

  God, why am I even writing in this again? I mean, the lights are on today. They discovered a branch had fallen on the wires in front of next door’s house and someone intelligently sent fifteen men in hard hats around to stare at it until a truck arrived.

  It’s a risky thing to do, to write down all the secret bits of you on paper. I’ve decided to write it on the wrong pages so if they find it then I can say, ‘How can it be true? Look, that was the date I went to the dentist and not a mention of that!’ Have to make sure free expression doesn’t turn into damning evidence.

  I only stayed for the first half of my last exam today. Anyway, I hate being around after exams, it just ends up with everyone comforting the class genius who thinks she missed one of the hundred questions on the test, and everyone else saying, ‘I’m sure I failed’, when they know they didn’t.

  I’m going to sort my clothes out tonight, maybe even wash some of them. At least I’ll have weeks and weeks of being able to wear what I want and not be told that it is against approved school regulations. Who, tell me, was the smart ass who decided that wearing black all the time meant you were depressed? Imagine I made up a rule that wearing lilac meant you were a big fat liar. The lady two doors down would have to go naked as I’m sure her underwear is as lilac and matchy as her hats and coats. Her name is Mrs Traynor and she stops me every now and then to tell me to stand up straight and smile.

  Now that I think of it, if we are freely giving orders to each other, what’s to stop me telling her to pull the hat down over her face and shut up like a good little woman?

  DAY 3

  Last day of school. Huge relief. Massive.

  This year they appointed a school psychologist so I’ve had to learn to look happy and well adjusted, at least while walking the halls. I know she has a file on me. Everyone who’s been less than angelic in the past has a file on them somewhere.

  It used to be that me, Kira and Dee would all end up in various offices together, because we were all out to do what felt right, not what they told us. But the two of them have gone a bit boring, like they want to fit in and suck up. I’ve got wise and I stay out of everyone’s way, but at least I haven’t given in and started doing what they want. For example, homework was invented so they could control us after school as well as during. Most of the teachers have given up asking me for it. I think they are secretly glad that I just avoid working and that I’m not one of t
he ones who acts up in class and says cheeky stuff.

  I’m so proud of the fact that I have said nothing in any class for at least a month now.

  I mean, look at them! What do they know? If I did what they told me to I would end up like them with their little jobs and little cars or like my parents with their meetings and services. No-one I know is really alive. I would love to know one person who does something amazing in the world.

  It’s me too, I’m as dead as the rest of them.

  I don’t say these things out loud anymore, so it’s nice to write them here. A couple of months ago they sent me to a special Saturday morning Artistic Communication class, which lasted four weeks until some department ran out of money. They called it ‘Artistic Communication’, but we saw the ‘art therapy’ labels on all the boxes of paint supplies. I remember the first class. We had to draw how we feel on one side of the paper, and what we love to do on the other. I felt sort of nothing. I don’t do that much either.

  I remember two or three years ago I would do fun stuff and be really into it; one time I made a light-box out of my old dolls’ house, and I used to love tracing pictures of birds and pop-stars onto typing paper. I also remember being big into a band that is way too embarrassing to write down here, in fact I think the pen would die of shame and I’d have nothing left to write with. I belonged to the fan club and everything, and Aidan would give me money for my birthday so I could get the calendar and photos – which I would carefully hide under my bed, as if anyone on earth would want to steal them! Actually, I’ve just looked and they are still there. Must clean my room. Really. Any year now.

  I wish I was back the way I was then. I was really happy then.

  There’s one OK-ish-I-suppose thing – I’m thrilled they aren’t sending me to an activity camp this summer. I feel that I will be no more employable in a few years for being able to tie-dye scarves, play lacrosse or program a computer in a language that is already out of date. Mum keeps saying we really must sort something out, and then she’s pleased enough that she has said it, like that’s as good as sorting it. It drives me mental when she keeps promising something good, like those boots I’ve been waiting a year for, but it’s perfect in this case because I can sleep late and hang out in town.

  SECRET: Just between me and my last counsellor (and you if you are hideous enough to be reading someone else’s diary – in which case please get your own life and stop right now!!), apparently it is not my mother’s failure to pick up the telephone or get in the car with me that is the problem when it comes to organising my life, it’s my ‘hostile attitude’.

  My ‘hostile attitude’ gets blamed for loads of stuff and lets everyone off the hook, I really don’t know what we’d all do without it. The funny thing is that Mum can spend so much time organising trips to the seaside for sick children and supervising activities for teenagers who seem to be way happier than me.

  I have decided not to dress up for Claire Higgins’ end-of-term party tonight. All her friends look so exaggerated, like they have to wear every accessory ever invented all at the same time, with shoes as high as most scaffolding, and make-up that wouldn’t melt off with a blowtorch. I prefer to go as I am. I’m not out to impress anyone, especially not her lame bunch.

  I would love to go to a party where people actually sat down and talked about real things. Even though I know loads of people I feel really alone, like there’s no-one who really gets me.

  DAY 4

  Well, if watching a skin form on hot milk is boring, then Claire Higgins’ party was like a hundred skins on a hundred old mugs of milk. These girls called Aurora and Bianca were ridiculous, all flirty and dancing together and giggling so the guys would all notice them. What’s worse is that the guys were such deformities that they actually fell for such an obvious act.

  Well, there was one nice guy who came into where I was hanging out in the kitchen and he asked me how old I was. I asked him to guess and he said ‘fourteen’, which pissed me off because he was right, but I think I look older. Anyway he asked me my name, but then Claire walks in and goes ‘Oh this is Tia, she’s in my class at school,’ like as if I couldn’t reply on my own. I just felt like I’d been beamed down from some other planet, like everyone else spoke the same language and had the same customs and I was like an ape, an alien ape. I couldn’t be bothered talking to him after that.

  And then they both went back out to dance to that stupid song that everyone is learning the moves to. I would rather die than dance to a song that already had moves. In fact, outside of my bedroom I don’t dance at all.

  Then when I saw Dee kissing this guy as if she was vacuuming something from his mouth, and Kira playing with her dangly earring in that way that signals that some poor victim is about to be targeted, I called my dad for a lift home. I was really glad I had worn my big sweater as it was kind of cold waiting on the corner, even though it’s supposed to be summer already.

  As part of the new caring parent thing Dad was all jolly and asked me how it went.

  I said ‘Fine’, and then said, ‘Thanks for asking’, as my part of the effort. And then because we had both been so amiable we could afford to drive home in silence.

  NOTE TO SELF: No more parties. EVER.

  DAY 5

  Went round to Kira’s in the morning and Dee was there too. It sounded as if they were already on the twentieth telling of what happened last night, because they were getting really detailed like, ‘Did you notice how he looked at me for a split second and then angled his feet in my direction before looking again?’ I have to admit I’d missed all these cool signs and signals.

  They had decided that I’d failed somehow because I hadn’t kissed a guy at the party, and started to lecture me about doing the counting to five hundred thing and asking me why I didn’t wear my red dress because it goes so well with my black hair and why I left when it was just getting good.

  I wish people would stop telling me how pretty I could look, especially Kira going on about wearing my hair out of my eyes, and Dee having this thing about how I stand, it’s like she’s been hypnotised by Mrs Traynor. I don’t go round telling people what to do with themselves so why can’t they just like me as I am? And maybe I didn’t kiss anyone because I’m choosy, not because I’m a backward freak …

  When I didn’t answer back Kira put on her serious ‘goddess’ voice and said, ‘Your aura has been a little yellow these past few days.’ I just stopped myself from saying that I felt the same about her face.

  I was in such a pissy mood that I told them I had to go and meet my mum in town, which they know is a lie because I never meet my mum in town, I only ever see her in the kitchen by the microwave, or in front of a TV programme.

  Sometimes I feel that Kira and Dee wish I didn’t hang out with them. They’re probably having a conversation about me right now, but I don’t care. All this afternoon I stayed in my room and played loads of songs and danced in front of the full length mirror I nicked from Aidan’s room seeing as he’s not here to use it. I would love an electric guitar, but I know that if I asked for one they’d get it wrong and find me a flute or a cello instead, and I’d be stuck having to get lessons.

  I love dancing more than anything and I’m much better than people I’ve seen at parties; sometimes I wish they could see me dance.

  For absolutely no reason I think about Trundle all the time these day. I wish I still had him, I hope his new owners know he prefers beef to chicken. I’m too scared to ask for a new dog in case Dad feels bad again, or in case they get it wrong and get me the dog version of a cello, like a poodle.

  Kira called me in the afternoon to check on me, and to tell me she and Dee were meeting the guys from the party whose names I can’t remember. She said that she’s worried about me and I told her I’m fine. I told her about my plan for tidying and decorating my bedroom and she said great, but she’s been hearing it for years so I can’t expect excitement.

  Mum and Dad were both home before bedtime so we ate
a meal. Very good, nice family event. I’d already eaten a bag of crisps earlier but I pretended I was still hungry just in case Mum was going to order Chinese food. Unfortunately she was in an optimistic mood and got three ready-meals from the freezer. I totally understand why we say a prayer before eating – protection. I made a joke about how maybe Mum should throw out the contents and nuke the box, which didn’t go down all that terribly well and now I am in charge of cooking dinner tomorrow night. I called Aidan and he gave me this recipe for fish pie, but I have decided to cook beans on toast or something similar, just so they don’t get any ideas about me doing things on a regular basis.

  I really miss my chats with Aidan, even though it was usually just ten minutes whenever he came in from somewhere better. Going upstairs without those chats I sort of feel like I haven’t spoken to anyone all day, even though I have.

  DAY 6

  This morning the post arrived after Mum and Dad had left for work. I read my end-of-year report and binned it. I know they won’t ask. I used to get really good grades, As and Bs, and now I do really badly. I just can’t be bothered. Anyway, don’t need to think about it for another six months at least.

  Parent-teacher meetings are in the bag. When my folks get the letter from the school asking why they weren’t there, I say that I definitely told them about it last week. They know they forget about a lot of things when it comes to me and they feel guilty. They say they’ll call in and talk to my teachers at some other time, but they never do (luckily for me!)

  I think they peaked with my brother Aidan, I’m like that second Mars Bar when you are full from the first one – OK, but not really worth it.

  LATER

  Mum and Dad have either

  a) found my report in the bin

  b) had a phone call