100 Days of April-May by Edyth Bulbring

me.
    They shout things at me phrased as questions that are meant to make me feel like a flat-chested, polony-sandwich-guzzling bursary kid who gets a ride to school in the dead people’s car. I’m all of these things. And I’ve heard it all a million times. The mean-girl gang has never scored high on originality: ‘What car does your dad drive?’, ‘What bra size do you wear?’, ‘Who pays your school fees?’.
    If we were on
The Weakest Link
I would have walked off with the jackpot, but it’s not that sort of a game and I can feel the circle of kids closing in on me. I need to get away. To get some air. To breathe. White dots are dancing at the back of my eyes, forming a pattern in which I slowly recognise two words: Walk Away.
    I do the elbow walk through the crowd again. As I walk away I hear them start on Fatty for a second time: ‘Tell the truth. Tell the truth. Tell the truth.’
    I walk away from the mean-girl circle and find some silence in the Lost Property Room with the manky socks and the spare shoes and the lunch boxes of forgotten cheese sandwiches.
    I breathe and breathe until I can’t hear the chants in my head any more. Then I get my satchel and cut school. I run from that red-brick building with its blind clock tower that tells me that people like Fatty and me will never belong. I go home and sit on the couch with Nameless Dog. We watch reruns of
Big Brother
and
Idols
and
Survivor
and
The Weakest Link
. And none of it seems very real.
    Before I go to bed I phone Groote Schuur Hospital and speak to a cross nurse in Ward Seven. She says that information about Melanie can only be divulged to family members and she knows for a fact that I am not Mara Louw, nor am I Melanie’s mother, because Melanie’s mother is sitting outside the intensive care ward.
Click
.
    There is another thing that I have learned in my short time in this world. This other thing is that if my friend Melly had been on the soccer field she wouldn’t have stood by and watched Fatty being bullied. No. She would have shouted out for it to stop with all the breath in her chopped-up little lungs. But she couldn’t, because she’s lying in intensive care. And I didn’t. I walked away and left him. I know that by taking that walk of shame I am guilty of being the weakest link.
    And I’m not sure who I hate more for making me a coward. The mean-girl gang, Fatty or me.
    Soccer World Cup Update –
    Days to Kick-off: 55
    Match of the Day –
    Fluffy
vs
The Builders

Eight
    Dodgy Dreams
    Fluffy says he’s exhausted. He’s been having problems falling asleep of late, and when he does finally drop off he has bad dreams.
    I ask him what he’s dreaming about.
    Fluffy says it’s the same dream. He’s running. Someone or something is chasing him. But as he runs, his feet get heavier and heavier. Then they get sucked into a muddy bog – or is it cement? And he can’t move his feet any more. He’s frozen to the spot. He wakes up just as someone or something catches him.
    I tell Fluffy that his dream is possibly the second most unoriginal dream since the falling-off-a-tall-building-and-waking-up-just-before-you-hit-the-ground dream. It’s text-book Freud.
    Fluffy says, ‘But what does it all mean, April?’
    I tell Fluffy that he’s running away from something and he is terrified of getting caught – which is the textbook Freudian explanation for the run-away dream.
    Fluffy says, ‘Ah, yes, Julia and Sam are going out for the morning.’
    I can see that Fluffy is still in denial. Still running in the hope of getting away. It’s not who is going out this morning, it’s who is coming in. ‘It’s the showdown with the builders today,’ I say gently, and watch Fluffy’s face collapse into a puddle of tired lines as he feels the concrete sucking away at his ankles.
    The builders are having a crisis