by Marie Yates
I’m being sidetracked by the driving lesson too. That’s not a bad thing, I’ll enjoy the lessons, but as soon as there’s something new and exciting to concentrate on, I forget about everything else. I’ve even chosen to read the driving theory book rather than practicing for my grading or starting some of the essay I’ve been trying to ignore. Actually, I’ve also done some hoovering today rather than working on that essay.
If I can pass my driving test, I can save myself lots of time and drive to places, which means I’ll have lots more time to study and practice for my taekwondo gradings. Ah, who am I kidding, I’ll just be driving around with my friends and wasting even more time. That’s if I’m ever allowed to borrow the car. I think Mum had her eyes closed as she waved me off for that first lesson.
My next driving lesson isn’t going to be for a few days and I have another couple of days before I need to totally panic about the essay. I have about three days before I need to panic about all of the other essays, so my aim is to only panic about taekwondo. I just need to stay away from YouTube.
There’s a beep from my phone. It’s Mum. ‘Sorry, hun, I’ve got to work late as there’s a drama here. ‘Can you take Reggie and feed yourselves before you go out training? Make sure you eat properly x.’
Mum’s given me the perfect excuse to ditch all of my plans to practice before training. I’m not even grumpy about it.
‘Walkies? x,’ I text Katie. She often comes out with us and brings her dog, Bailey. He’s Reggie’s BFF and they have more fun than we do racing around the park and doing their best to check every single tree for squirrels. Bailey is better than Reggie at this. Reggie has been known to just stand at the bottom of the biggest tree, look up and cry while Bailey checks on behalf of them both. They have never caught anything, but that doesn’t stop them being just as excited and enthusiastic, every single time. Maybe I should be more like that, not worry so much about the end result but just enjoy the process.
‘Yeah, see you in 20, usual place x,’ Katie replies. Brilliant, that means Reggie will be extra tired so won’t mind when I go training as he can sleep until Mum gets home. It also means an hour of listening to the tales of Cal and whatever he’s done lately to annoy Katie, but I don’t mind as it means she won’t be asking me anything. Once Katie starts on her ‘Cal Monologue’, there’s no stopping her. It’s exactly what I need, some company without any pressure and some fresh air.
So, this is another day where I haven’t caught up on any of the work I need to do, haven’t practiced for my grading and definitely haven’t done anything about whether I’m going to apply to go to Uni or not. It’s not all bad though because it has been a day where I have managed to listen in lessons, have had a break from my brain permanently thinking about Frankie and have spent some time with my friends. That’s slightly more productive than the last few weeks but I have a long way to go if I’m going to leave Sixth Form with decent grades and not have to retake anything.
At the sound of the lead jangling, Reggie is ready. I wish I could be that enthusiastic about the simple things in life.
Eleven
This is silly now. I’ve spent time tidying up my bedroom, clearing my desk and preparing to work and haven’t started actually doing any.
I told my friends yesterday that I’m staying in this weekend because I’m so behind and getting scared.
‘You’ll spend all weekend doing everything except your assignments and then write a crap one whilst crying on Sunday night,’ said the wise, yet annoying Maya. ‘You might as well plan to do something fun and then just doing the crying on Sunday night.’
‘I won’t,’ I replied, more to try to convince myself than Maya. ‘I’m going to get myself back on track and caught up so that I can try to stop panicking.’
‘Good luck,’ she scoffed.
It turns out that either Maya knows me better than I thought, or she can see into the future. The only thing she got wrong is that I feel like crying now rather than waiting until tomorrow evening, there’s just so much I need to do.
I can’t really blame everything that happened over the summer. It’s not like I’m a superstar at keeping to deadlines and wouldn’t have spent the summer sitting at my desk working hard and loving every minute. I’d have done what I’m doing now on the last day of the holiday. Who knows how I would have been spending the summer if I hadn’t raced out of the cinema that night.
Would things be different with Frankie now? I do wish I had stayed until the end of the film, it’s not like racing home changed anything. We couldn’t have got to Grandma before she died anyway.
Things are kind of back to normal now. Mum still gets upset, but she’s fine and helping Grandpa with stuff over the phone. It sounds like Grandma did everything for him. Last night, I was laughing as I could hear Mum’s half of the conversation.
‘Dad, it’s the knob on the left. Turn it to 220 and let the oven heat up before you put your chips in. On the left, left, 220. Go and get your glasses.’ She rolled her eyes as I walked past.
I thought about recording the conversations and doing a comedy vlog, until I realised that would keep me occupied for days and probably wasn’t the most productive way to spend the weekend. It would be funny, until Mum found out.
Things feel like they’re getting back to normal, while not feeling normal at all. Mum’s doing okay and Sammy has been great at supporting her. I haven’t seen much of him and he was weirdly ‘away with work’ when Grandpa came to stay so he’s smarter than he looks! Being back at Sixth Form and being around the girls is great, although it reminds me of how behind I am. That in itself is quite normal. Katie and Maya are always on top of their work. It comes more naturally to Katie and she seems to get good grades regardless of how much time she spends on an assignment.
Then there’s Frankie. It’s all okay and we’re texting but something is weird. I know it’s probably me and I should make a decision, but I don’t know what’s stopping me. Thinking about it all the time isn’t helping as I keep going around in circles.
Do I like her? What am I scared of? Am I feeling this because I’m scared of being with a guy? I’ve never actually liked a guy, have I? How do I know what’s real? Should I tell her the truth about what’s going on in my head? Will she think I’m too much hassle and not want to be with me? If we’re not together, will she still want to be friends?
The thought of not being friends with Frankie is too much.
Once my head gets full of these questions – it happens about two minutes after I wake up – it’s too full to fit anything else in and I’m totally overwhelmed.
‘You don’t have this problem, do you?’ Reggie is lying in the middle of my bedroom, making it as difficult as possible for me to tidy up. He ‘helped’ by emptying the rubbish bin onto the floor after I had screwed up lots of pieces of paper in order to make my final, colour-coded, to-do list and then bounced around the room with one of those paper balls trying to get me to play, which I did, obviously.
‘It sounds like you’re going to fall through the ceiling,’ Mum had shouted upstairs, which meant ‘pack it in, now,’ in Mum code. ‘I didn’t realise you had a dance module to complete.’ Another code that had been easy to decipher.
‘What would Jane tell me to do?’ I ask Reggie. He’s drifting off to sleep, which I wish was the answer to my question. ‘No, she won’t tell me to do that.’
She’ll tell me to do my journal stuff, the goals and stuff that she’s always banging on about. Then we’ll get a plan sorted out so that I can stick to it and make sure I’m able to reach the deadlines, and then she’ll say, ‘Nobody’s going to do this for you, so now you’ll just have to follow the plan.’
I don’t have time to plan because the deadline for the big assignment is Monday. I just have to get that one done first. I can write my goals though and know that Jane would say that it’s a good use of time. So, well done me!
Goals
It’s November and I have my red belt in taek
wondo
It’s Monday and I have handed in my essay!
That’s enough right now. If I can practice, it’ll help clear my head and then I need to just write the freaking essay.
Success
I haven’t cried yet! I know that’s not what Jane means about listing things I’m proud of each day, but actually, that’s an achievement.
I haven’t crashed during a driving lesson!
Okay, I’ll stop with that now. I definitely need to do some things that I can call a success as not crying and not crashing aren’t really game-changers.
Gratitude
I’m grateful that Frankie is still talking to me.
I’m definitely grateful that I have my best mate with me to help me focus while I work, or just make me laugh when I’m supposed to be working. He’s probably the reason I haven’t cried about how behind I am, yet!
Now, I need to get a drink and some snacks to help me through the rest of the day.
Twelve
What a full on, crappy week. I’ve managed to get three assignments done but I’ll be lucky if I pass. I apologised as I handed them in. I know that they’re rubbish and I’m embarrassed that the teachers will be reading them.
‘Done is better than perfect,’ Jane has said to me loads of times when I have been stressed out about work. In this case, I think even she would question that philosophy.
I am so tired I want to sleep for a week. It’s a good job it’s half-term! Sorting myself out is the priority for today. I don’t want another week like that – late nights, crying, constant tiredness, feeling grumpy and knowing that I was handing in crap and I could have done loads better if I’d tried.
‘Competition for Uni is tough, so you need to be making this year count.’ One of my teachers advised as I apologised for what she was about to read. I didn’t know whether to be worried that she’d noticed I was doing badly or pleased that she’d thought I could go to Uni.
So, I ‘m starting to question whether I’m up to it. If I can’t handle Sixth Form, how am I going to handle Uni?
I’ve got about eight weeks until the end of the year. I know how many assignments I need to do and I know that I might need to plan to re-do some of the ones I’ve just handed in. I have a couple of exams and I have a lot of revision to do for them. I also want to pass my grading and my driving test.
That’s not much, is it? I’m not sure I’ll pass my driving test before the end of the year, but I’ll need to plan in time for lessons.
How am I going to do all of that in eight weeks? I also want to see my friends and I have to get things sorted properly with Frankie. I have no idea how, but I can’t carry on like this. So, by Christmas, things will be sorted, one way or the other.
As I think about it, I know that there is only one option. I just can’t figure out how to make that option happen and not totally freak out. Still, that’s progress, even if it’s only in my head.
I keep thinking out leaving Sixth Form, about going to collect my results and not having a clue what I’m going to do next. At least with the GCSEs, I was pretty sure that I’d get to go to Sixth Form. I didn’t admit it at the time, but looking back that was a different sort of pressure to what I’m feeling now. If I don’t pass my A Levels, my options don’t look great. I also have to figure out where I’m going to live. If I go to Uni away from home, I’ll have to move out.
No, no, no. I can’t think about that. It’s not that I want to stay here, living with Mum forever, but I can’t think about leaving. Not right now.
I don’t have to decide my whole future today, only what I’m going to do in the next eight weeks. That’s fifty-six days. When I put it like that, it sounds like quite a long time.
If I’m going to turn up on results day feeling like I did when I handed my assignments in, that’s a total waste of a year. At least with the GCSEs, I felt like I worked hard in the face of the worst year ever and I was happy with the grades. I want to be happy that I’ve given this my best shot and, at the moment, there’s no way I can say that. I’m not doing my best at anything and that’s a feeling I don’t like at all. I haven’t been a good friend, I haven’t been fair to Frankie, I haven’t been practicing for my grading and Sixth Form is a joke.
I need to sort this out. Eight weeks and then I can enjoy New Year’s Eve. Who will I be seeing in the New Year with? That’s probably not a question to deal with as a priority.
It’s time to make a list, prioritise and then plan what I need to do each week. The dog-training books say that we should set dogs up to succeed and not expect them to learn everything all at once. That keeps coming into my head as there’s a cool little table that helps to plan out how to teach a trick. It’s in tiny stages. With Reggie at each stage he got a treat so he knew that he was doing well.
‘If only getting you to learn something new was that easy,’ Mum said as I was teaching Reggie to take a bow. ‘You’ve never been that happy to do your homework.’
‘You’ve never given me treats after each paragraph,’ I replied.
I wonder if that will work. If I have a list of the things I love doing, I could have them as a reward for when I’ve done some work. I definitely don’t want the sweaty cheese rewards that Reggie gets so excited about, but I could definitely work for Maltesers. One paragraph = one Malteser. That’s got to be worth a try.
Thirteen
I tried so hard to make Operation Malteser Reward work for me. It was going well until I became stuck on a question, started to research the answer and finished off the entire box without even thinking about it. It was like my hand was working independently to my body and feeding my face while my eyes were frantically searching for an answer that made sense.
‘You’ve finished your essay then?’ Mum said as she brought me a drink.
‘Not exactly, I might need to rethink the reward system,’ I admitted, and felt the need to add, ‘I actually feel a bit sick.’
‘I’ll take the box away and you can reward yourself with a salad when you finish that one.’
‘Yum.’ A salad didn’t sound too bad in all honesty. Not necessarily as a reward but even I couldn’t face the thought of eating anything else sweet.
‘Remember that we have to be ready to leave to see Amie soon, so get writing, come down for lunch in an hour or so and we’ll head off.’
As soon as I had a deadline of an hour, I felt like I had been turbocharged into getting the essay finished. It was weird, but when I had loads of time, I didn’t get much done, but once the time was limited, I was on a mission. My fingers were racing over the keys, I had more ideas than I knew what to do with, and when I read through it, I was quite proud of myself. It made sense, it answered the question and it had a decent conclusion. Maybe having a time limit needed to feature in my plans to get back on track, as that had worked better than stuffing my face with chocolate.
Because I ticked off one of my major headaches on my to-do list, I enjoyed spending time with Amie and her mum. I can’t say I enjoyed the salad very much, but it balanced out the box of Maltesers and made me feel slightly less guilty about the amount of crap I’d eaten.
Seeing Amie always left me with mixed feelings. We were only friends because we had the monumentally shitty shared experience of being rape survivors. If it wasn’t for that, we’d never have met. Our Mums had become really close friends and I guessed Amie and I were close, but there was an age gap of a couple of years which meant I sometimes found her quite annoying. Being older, I felt like I should be the one that was helping her and offering her words of wisdom. It had started out that way when we had first met, as it had been so soon after she had been attacked. I had been the person who had genuinely been able to say that things would get better. She hadn’t believed me at the time, but that had been fair enough, I hadn’t believed anyone when they’d said that to me in the early days either. We had both felt that nothing would ever be okay again, ever. We were both wrong and on days like today, we proved to ourselves and to eac
h other that life didn’t just become bearable, but could actually be pretty awesome.
We hadn’t seen each other since early on in the summer holidays because of all the stuff that had been going on with Grandma and being busy at weekends. Well, supposedly being busy, but it was mainly just procrastinating and crying over my hundredth to-do list without actually ticking anything off it.
Amie was doing well and, as usual, she inspired me. For someone who struggled so much in those early days, understandably so, she had totally turned things around. She bragged about getting so many As that she’d lost count, and she also told me she was on the student mentoring programme where she was helping the younger kids in school.
‘I bet you’re awesome at that,’ I said, honestly. ‘I could have done with a mentor like you when I was at school.’
‘Yeah, I’m all right I suppose, and I do love it.’
‘It’s okay to say that you’re good at something, Amie,’ I told her, immediately feeling like a fraud.
‘Okay, I’m freaking awesome at mentoring and I’m totally helping those kids change their lives.’
‘WOW, you’re buzzing about this. What are you doing with them?’ As Amie came to life explaining about the kids, I felt a bit emotional. It was obvious that being a mentor wasn’t just helping change the lives of the younger kids, but it was changing Amie’s too.
‘One lad, Ayo, told me that his name means “full of joy” and he literally is. He’s the happiest kid I’ve ever met.’