finding lost love

“Well it’s ten to seven, everybody, so I’m going to leave you with a few of my personal favourite classics, but before that, we have a caller … hello, who’s this?” Cherry, the D.J for 95.7FM nattered cheerily, filling the silences in my car as I rapped my knuckles on the steering wheel, waiting for the go. I listened absently as a sound, which sounded suspiciously like sobbing, came onto the line. Cherry usually did not put on air drunks, so it had to be some broken heart. “I need advice,” the girl wailed, “ I’ve never known what love felt like, my parents died when I was young and I’ve lived in some home since, but suddenly this guy comes along, and I’m lost … I’m lost again.” Sure enough, it was a broken heart. But as the light flashed green and I pressed hard on the pedal, I found I was crying along with her, silent, large tears that rolled down my cheeks and left salty wet tracks.

When I was six, my parents died. However, they were no loss to me. My parents were ruthless brutes who ran some factory or other – at six I didn’t know and didn’t care. Why they got married, or even produced me is a thing I’ll never know. They threw me around like a rugby ball and pushed me around with abandoned carelessness. Mostly, I was found dismissed or ignored, at times my existence was forgotten. Those periods I learned to treasure. I grew up with bruises and cuts and what-nots; I grew up believing it was like this in every household. This belief lasted only as long as the day I entered school.

My parents sent me to the nearest school, which happened to be a decent, perhaps a little prestigious one. I was told that school was a place away from home where you learnt things that would help you. The only phrase that entered my tiny, naïve head and stuck there was the phrase ‘away from home’. It sounded like heaven. Soon I got to know that, leastways for me, it wasn’t.

On the first day of Walkman School, I walked there myself. It was about a mile’s distance, and I enjoyed the peace of not hearing my parent’s screaming and crude laughter. Under my parent’s loving guidance I had become independent at a young age. Wearing my best clothes (the ones with only a few tears from small angry outbursts and a browning bloodstain at the edge from a small fight), I trooped along jovially. Upon reaching school, I paused in surprise. There were probably about a hundred children milling around, almost each grappling at a parent’s hand and gazing around fearfully. But what stuck me the most was how each parent was looking at their child affectionately, and how they were even here in the first place. How their grip was so tight sand would have filtered through; how some kids were allowed to cry without being beaten; how they were so well-dressed. I searched anxiously, but no – not a scratch was to be found chubby, still free-from-worries-and-pains cherubic face. Then I looked down at myself, me with my shabby clothes, dowdy shoes, body parts decorated with bruises of different colours and never-healing cuts. Confused and utterly bewildered, I gaped around and met several distasteful and disapproving gazes. It was then I knew I would never be accepted.

School was almost a hell-hole, although I had only been there for several months. Once, we received back our first test papers. The teacher walked along the aisle, putting the papers on each of our desks, alternating between the usual praising and ruffling of hairs, or the tartly put down paper with the tart do-better-you-spoilt-little-scum tap. Whether she was twenty-eight or sixty we did not care; only that perhaps she was so sour-faced because of constant sniffing of her daily perfume. When click-clack of high heels and strong cheesy Eau De Stilton smell neared my desk, the teacher whom I believed despised me and often, like my parents, reprimanded me or ignored me like a pest to be fizzled and flicked away, slapped my paper down on my desk. I jumped, and nearly howled, for on my paper, scrawled in large, red, taunting letters was the word ‘F’! Mortified, I frantically flipped the pages and compared my answers to those on the board for correction in a desperate hope. And the hope did kindle, for I found that my answers matched those on the board perfectly. I shot an ominous gaze at the teacher whom I hated equally with my tight, bitter young heart, and was about to get up and confront her like soldier chest to chest with the enemy, when the students began crowding around me.
“He got an ‘F’”, crowed a triumphed student.
“Looks like you gonna end up stupid like ya daddy, huh Jessie?”
“Jessie the wessie …”
Although I was but a girl, they bullied me like a boy. They surrounded me, jeering at me derisively, looking down at me contemptuously. I clutched the paper with a death-like grip and white knuckles, and with “Jessie the wessie” echoing in my head I gave a strangled sob and broke out of the circle and fled for the park, my safe hide. Humiliated with a hopeless sense of unjust, I viciously willed away the tears, or at least I thought so. I was running so fast the wind would have blown away any evidence of angry tears.

That was the day my parents died.

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I’ll continue next time, I don’t like long passages.
I know I went on a bit, and dragged a little but I was trying to.. oh I don’t know.
just want to hear a bit of comments and see whether I should continue.