Broken

As I have said in my last essay, I had been rummaging in the boxroom until I came up with a load of school textbooks and essays. I have saved the best pieces of writing to type them all here. The following essay is a short story about a bullied child, written for some school competiton when I was fifteen. The theme was 'Bullying' of course and you had to write at least 300 words whcih I had exceeded.Oh this was so long ago!

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Chloe was ten when she first arrived in Britain, from America. After settling in her new home, her parents sent her to the nearest school. Chloe was very excited on her first day in a British school, full of children she did not know. However, she was determined to impress everyone and make a lot of friends.

At school she made out she was at home, and even if she felt rather lost, she pretended to be quite comfortable in the school. In class she tried to shine, wrote extra long essays, didgreat effort in maths and worked hard at all the subjects. However her classmates didn't seem to like her. Especially Mandy and her lot.

Chloe did not have anything wrong with her appearance. She was tall and slim, she had long, wavy red hair and big blue eyes, a small nose covered with freckles and always carried a warm smile. However, Chloe was born to have a slight speech defect. She wasn't able to speak the 's' and 'z' clearly. Mandy and her giggling chums follow Chloe everywhere, imitating her lisp, pushing her satchel off her back, sticking silly notes on the back of her shirt and telling everyone she was not worth making friends with.

Chloe felt very sad of course. The girls in her class laugh and giggle together when she enters a class. The boys poke fun at her. All in all, school life for young Chloe was quite the same as Hell.

Once, while everyone was outside the school, waiting for the bus to come, a big cloud cam by and with it a torent of showers. The children were ushered in the school hall. The lightning flashed over the skies and thunder gave a terrible rumbling noise to follow. Chloe found a lonely corner where she threw her school bag down, opened it, took out a book and found the marked page to continue reading. She barley finished the first sentence, when Mandy and her gang found her. They cornered her and Mandy menacingly smiled at her and in a mocking voice said,"It's just so nice to see you, Chloe! I wonder what you're reading."

Chloe looked at the bullies unsure. Mandy spoke to Chloe in a kind voice, but still, imitating her lisp. Had she been doing that just to kid her a little? Chloe didn't know. She smiled back at Mandy and said politley,"I am reading the book 'Nancy Drew, The Case of the Lost Song' by Carolyn Keene."

Unfortunatley for Chloe, the title of the book had many 's' sounds and pronounced it quite comically. Mandy and her pals threw themselves back laughing evilly.

Someone from the front called out that the bus arrived and everyone tried pushing his way out of the narrow door. Mandy went out just behind Chloe. When Chloe was going up the bus, Mandy grabbed her jersey and threw her down. When Chloe came to, she found her self covered in mud, slime and wet with the pouring rain. The bus had gone and Chloe knew very well she had to walk four miles towards home in the rain. She looked at her dirty clothes, her trodden on satchel which burst open. She knelt to pick up her soggy copybooks, tears rolling down her cheeks. Suddenly she noticed that instead of just her two pale hands collecting the runaway pens and pencils, there was also a pair of strong, rough hands helping. She looked up and infront of her was one of the few people in the school who never jeered at her. It was Ethan, one of the boys in her class. Her mother usually forbid her to speak to boys but she felt that Ethan was not a bad kind.

"Thank you for helping me," said Chloe shyly.

"It's all right. I have been bullied by Mandy myself because of my hair. Thinks all she does is right and others are always wrong. Come on let's walk home together," he said.

Chloe smiled at him and he returned her smile. They walked home together and from then on, Chloe never felt alone and unprotected when Mandy attempted bullying her.