Running late
17th of February
As Marlene’s alarm clock rang she reluctantly pushed herself up and tapped out of bed. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor of her room as she made her way over to her bookshelf. The schedule on her desk told her what to pack for the day. Still sleepy she stuffed her undone maths homework as well as her essay for German class into the backpack. It had taken her ages to find a topic to write about.
Write a letter to a) your favourite book character or b) your favourite author, expressing your liking of them through adjectives. It should follow the general structure of a letter. had the assignment been. In the beginning Marlenedidn’t know whether she should work on assignment a or b and when she had finally decided to write to a character, half of the time they had been given was already over. After a few difficult decisions Marlene had settled on writing to George from the Famous Five, even though Michael had repeatedly tried to convince her to write to Dick instead.
“If he’s your favourite character, then why don’t you write him a letter?”, she had asked and he hadn’t answered and that was that.
Quickly scanning through the essay she wasn’t all to proud of it, the whole letter basically consisted of random compliments and greetings to Julian, Dick and Anne. It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, but good enough for an okay-ish mark.
Trotting downstairs, backpack slung over one shoulder, Marlene kept her eyes on the floor. For one because she wasn’t sure she could look into her parents eyes without crying and for another because she still had her “problem-chart”, telling her to be as inconspicuous as possible, in the back of her head and that little spark of hope hadn’t been lost just yet.
At the breakfast table Michael stared at his buttered bread, not saying a word, and Marlene followed his example. Dad had left for work early, but after yesterday evening neither of them felt like talking to Mum. She on the other hand seemed to hate the silence and tried to start up conversations multiple times:
“What are you reading right now?” - “How’s school going?” and stuff like that, but Marlene kept her answers short and Michael didn’t say a single word the entire time. As soon as he finished his breakfast he stood up, grabbed his backpack and walked towards the front door. Marlene certainly didn’t want to be alone with Mum, she didn’t know why or what, but something about her made Marlene angry and sad at the same time, so she quickly stuffed the rest of her her bread into her mouth, mumbled a quick good-bye and joined Michael by the front door. They quickly put on their shoes and Marlene had to hurry up, because unlike usual Michael didn’t wait for her and instead left the house as soon as he was ready. Both of her shoelaces untied and a mouth still full of food, Marlene hurried out the door with him.
“Wait.”, she said, but it was pretty much unintelligible and crumbs of bread flew out of her mouth as she spoke. Michael didn’t even turn around, he simplyunlocked his bike chain, swung himself over the saddle and rode off, his hair blowing in the wind. He had always been the faster biker, it probably had to do with him being the older one, so Marlene didn’t even try to catch up. Instead she slowly chewed up her bread and then leisurely unlocked her own bike.
She didn’t have it far to school, so she wasn’t in any particular hurry and rather rode her bike just fast enough, so that she wouldn’t fall over. Lots of other bikers overtook her and every time one of them passed Marlene she felt a wave of something undefinable wash over her. Wasn’t it weird that out of all the people she saw rushing past her, none of them knew about everything that had happened at home? They all just lived their normal lives. Marlene wondered whether any of the people she passed on a regular basis on her way to school, had ever had any important life events that she didn’t know about. Surely they did, but it still was a weird feeling to think about that. Everyone around her had a different story to tell. She wondered how she had never thought about that before and came to the conclusion that it was probably because of the maturity you gained when you turned nine. At least Michael always used to say, that after eleven and ten, nine was the third most important birthday.
But that would mean that Michael and even Mum and Dad had thought exactly this before and that didn’t make any sense, Marlene thought. After all, how could you decide to ruin someone else’s life because you felt like it, if you knew all of this? If Mum really knew that everyone around her had the exact same feelings as she did, she surely wouldn’t force them to move to England, would she?
No, it didn’t make any sense. So, the only conclusion Marlene could pull from that was that she was one of the only people to have this knowledge. It kind of made her feel special. Normally she was not the one to know things, neither at home, where Michael obviously had more experience, nor in school. It felt good, Marlene thought, knowing that you had special information. I felt great, even.
She was ripped out of her thoughts when that church bells rang for the full hour. 8am.
Great, now she was going to be late. Pedalling faster and faster, Marlene made it to school at about ten past eight. After she had locked her bike and entered the building it was 8:15. Immediately she made her way over to the secretary, to get herself a slip. Ms. Baker seemed heavily annoyed as she handed Marlene the piece of paper and muttered something about “lack of discipline”, but Marlene didn’t really listen, rather quickly excusing herself and rushing to her class. When she finally reached her classroom in the third floor she was out of breath and her face a bright red colour. Knocking on the door she tried to calm her breath and waited for Ms. Mayer to open the door. When she did the face she made at Marlene was more than disapproving and as she stepped aside and gestured for Marlene to enter, her eyes lingered on the girl in front of her before she pursed her lips: “Do you have your slip?” Marlene silently handed her the piece of paper. “And now, why are you late?” Ms. Mayer hated unpunctuality more than anything and to all of her students dismay she insisted on taking as many first periods as possible.
“No reason. I overslept.”, Marlene quickly lied, as she wasn’t about to tell her whole class about the mind blowing thought she had gotten on her ride to school.
“Very well then. You came at the perfect time. We were just about to compare the homework. Would you mind going up front and presenting yours?”
Oh no. Marlene didn’t move and just stared at the floor.
“Go on.” Ms. Mayer gestured for Marlene to go up to the blackboard, but she continued looking at your feet. She had hoped she could get away with not doing her homework simply by not raising her hand to present it, but now she was pretty much stuck.
“I didn’t do it.”, she mumbled.
“What? I didn’t hear you, could you repeat that please and this time so that everyone in this room can understand you?” Ms. Mayer still stared at her with that disapproving look on her face. Oh, how Marlene wished she could just disappear right now. If only she could use magic, but for one was that simply not allowed and for another how would she explain it to any of her classmates? So she just sighed and repeated her words, this time a bit louder:
“I didn’t do it.” She didn’t even have to look up to know that the other students looked at her with pity.
Breathing in loudly, Ms. Mayer took a seat behind her desk.
“Okay then. You can sit down. But you do understand I’ll have to write you up twice today, no?” Marlene nodded before sitting down in the back of the class, where she immediately wrote a note to pass to her friends.
I’ve got to talk to you at break. It’s really important., it said. She had decided to tell them about moving away rather now and if it didn’t happen tell them the good news, than hope for the best and in case she couldn’t change Mum’s mind deliver the bad news only days before it was going to happen. After she had received their answers Marlene leaned back in her chair and zoned out for the rest of the lesson, thinking mostly about other ways she could maybe still fix Mum and Dad’s relationship.
After an excruciatingly long time the bell finally rang, releasing them into the school yard. Marlene led Andrea and Gabrielle into a corner of the yard, where both of them seemed to be nearly exploding from curiosity.
“Well, what is it?” Gabrielle raised an eyebrow at Marlene, who took a deep breath before she cleared her throat. What she was going to say now should by all means sound important.
“In a month I’ll be moving to England and I don’t know if there’s much I can do to convince Mum to stay here, so I thought it’s be best if I just told you directly.”
“You’ll be what?” Andrea looked horrified. “You can’t just move.”
“Yeah, HHS without you is like... unimaginable.” Gabrielle agreed.
Marlene smiled slightly.
“I’m doing everything I can, but Mum said the decision is final, so … you know.”
All three of them were looking at the floor now, minds running, searching for a solution to their problem. When the bell rang, ordering them back to class, still none of them had any functional ideas.
The next lesson they had was a double-period German class. A few of Marlene’s classmates read their essays to the class before the teacher collected them from every student. After that they spent the rest of the lesson completing a few tasks about proper sentence building, though Marlene didn’t really pay attention to any of it. She rather looked out the window, studying the passing cars and people. At one point a man wearing a rather nice looking suit, a tie and a bowler passed by the school. He had a pipe in his mouth, blowing huge smoke clouds, which formed fantastical shapes in the air. One of them looked like a dog, another resembled the rough outline of a car and the third even seemed a bit like a face, or at least Marlene thought so. The man was already around the corner when the clouds of smoke disappeared into the air. Every once in a while Marlene looked back at her teacher to not seem to uninterested, it wasn’t like she didn’t want to learn anything, just that there were far more important things she needed to think about. Still she made an effort to pay attention for at least a few minutes of the lesson, just so she would be able to get her homework done sufficiently enough.
“- so, if you want to avoid making sentence construction mistakes in the future you can always think of these three steps. Also for the upcoming test I’d strongly recommend, that everyone with a C or worse on the last onetakes a good look at it and writes down all their mistakes on a fresh piece of paper. Then you can memorize them and not make them in the future. That way you won’t have to repeat everything you already know and rather just study the things you actually can’t do yet. It’s way less work that way! Learning from your previous mistakes is the most important thing you’ll ever learn in school. You can even use that technique in real life, when you want to achieve something but don’t know how, don’t just change everything about you and how you act, only change what you have to change to solve the problem. Now, the next thing I wanted to show you-” Her teacher started talking about frequent mistakes she had seen in the last test, but Marlene wasn’t listening any more. Yes! That was it! Through mere coincidence her German teacher of all people had found a solution to her problem. If she found out what exactly she had been doing wrong, then maybe she could actually do something about it. Of course, she had the chart, but that was more of a general “change-everything-about-you” list, what Marlene needed was a specific list of things she had to do. With only 10 minutes left before the break she decided it was best to push the list-making off to the next lesson and resumed to looking out of the window.
The whole break Marlene and her friends spend playing It! with a few of their classmates and she was quite happy for the distraction. Completely out of breath for the second time that day she spend the whole next lesson listing all the things that annoyed people about her in her head. It was the only start she could think of, although she soon realized it was a more depressing matter, than she had originally thought it would be. Everyone was at least a bit annoying, she knew that much, but she hadn’t known she was this insufferable. Though she supposed it made sense now that her parents were so stressed because of her.
When school was finally over, Marlene quickly said good-bye to Gabrielle and Andrea and made her way home. After lunch, which was as quiet as breakfast had been that morning, she hurried up the stairs closing the door to her room. For some reason the familiarity made her tear up, as normal as the room looked, everything else in their house was the just opposite. Her bed was unmade and the sheets weren’t tucked in properly dangling down at the side of the bed frame. It was a wonder that Mum hadn’t scolded and immediately sent her upstairs to fix her bed the moment she had arrived. Throwing herself onto it and curling up Marlene immediately felt better, the tears still came flowing eventually but it was more of a comforting silent cry, than violent sobbing. She wasn’t shaking or anything, just laying there, eyes half-closed and if she was honest with herself she kind of liked it. It was like a warm blanket spreading over her in form of tears. When she was done crying her head felt heavy and she could barely keep her eyelids open. It was a weirdly relaxing feeling, that scratchy throat, her wet cheeks and the slight headache. It was only just afternoon but she suddenly felt like sleeping more than ever. Curling up even more she put a blanket over her feet and closed her eyes.
When Marlene woke up the only thing she could remember was that her dream had been really weird, though all the details were a bit washy. After a quick glance at her alarm clock she got up to look at herself in the mirror, it was nearly supper time and she didn’t want to seem disrespectful and appear completely filthy. Mum would send her back upstairs to change and brush her hair anyway so she could just do it now and spare herself the scolding.
As she looked at her image in the mirror Marlene could see her eyes and nose were still red-ish around the edges and her hair stood up in every direction. Rubbing her hands over her face, not being all to gentle, she tried to get her thoughts clear. There was a lot going on after all and sorting her mind was the best idea she had, to deal with it all. Deep into her thoughts she grabbed her hair brush and as soon as she was finished combing through the mess her hair was Mum called Michael and her down for Supper. Marlene breathed in deeply before she turned to go downstairs, it appalled her that she was so reluctant to eat with her family. It shouldn’t be that way and she knew it. It definitely had to change, so much was clear, the only problem was Marlene didn’t know whether she could actually provoke that change or if it was already to late.