November 4th

Chapter One The Figg

"sink or swim, what's your game?"I eyed Billy Figgle with a narrowed grey lens,christ I hated this ginger bastard. What was his problem?With me, with humans, with life?

"It's a toy Billy," I groaned letting my jet black hair spool over my shoulder. It was my pride and joy my hair, mother said we originated from the first Cherokees, and my hair made me look lean and gamely long as it was. I wasn't wearing no weave like the other black girls,i may not have their features but when I run my hands through my hair in Jermaine Clarkson's class him and his friend Claudelle are simply hypnotised. I pretend like I don't see then start doing all these things in the loreal advert I saw, you know, " because I'm worth it," then I look at billy whose cracking up, make a fart noise and say in a really masculine voice," can I go to the bathroom please miss?" Those idiots fall for it each time, and look at each other in confusion. I love head fuckin people like this. Last year I was really popular, then Sheila Madsen started this rumour that I was a transgender girl who had been abused. 

The whole school went wild with it, she also put in,"and she smells as well." After six months of being avoided, ignored, and the object of ridicule I realised what a tough place the world was. How nobody was your puppet like you think when your popular, in fact most of them secretly resent you. The only kid that would talk to me for miles was this fat kid, Billy Figgle. The same thing had happened to him kind of with Roger fenis, the worst player on the rugby team.Word was Billy's dad was the complete opposite of Billy, his parents were divorced and lived two completely opposite lives. His dad was some hot shot sports agent who had refused to sign ' the Fenis," who to his face they called him terminator of the pitch, and behind his back...they called him crap. There's strategy in the good old game, to win you have to be a tactician,but poor old Rodge hadn't been born with any of that. The boy could run I kid you not my friend,first one in the dinner line every time. Yet on the field when he was dragged down....It....was.....merciless. 

The more people talked about Rogers failures, the more he resented Billy...and made his life as unbearable as it could get.

Anyway I miss my point,im always missing my point.Me and Billy are circling the pool in the sports gym after sneaking out of double science watching the teddy bear with the spliff in its mouth, to see if it sinks or swims.

" Sink or swim Dick sponge,"

"It'll float, or you'll have to put your lifeguard costume and jump in to save it."He smiles sheepishly. " Tranny I don't have a baywatch bod like you." I guess this is what my life has come too,i am defending my sister's Teddy Bear Albert. Shit I had no one else to defend anymore,dad was gone , "Olivia your mother and I are taking a little sabbatical from one another," translation DIVORCE.

"Were different people," and I wonder if he says that to convince himself when his sleeping with the tea lady at his job as a Market research team leader, or one of those stupid title jobs your supposed to grow out of when you finish uni. Funny that, how Dad doesn't think I know stuff, maybe it's the way I write things down, all those letters I sent him when he'd been inside. I wish they'd been neater, trimmed like a haircut, perched neatly on the page like an egg lined with soldiers, instead they were wild and erratic, panicked, with words like We need you, and Why did you do this, at the time I needed to understand.Now I know that things are charcoal and grey, or blurred in between watercolours. Mum made me understand as best as I could,ive found it hard to meet my fathers true gaze since then. Billy says a true gaze is when you see right through someone, like you trust them. " You should know what some grownups get up to,"my mother lied,her pencil frame almost a strand in the wind.I wiped the tears from her cheeks as she cuddled me on the landing, where the rats had half eaten her fake Persian rug.

I hang out with William Figgle because I guess mum and dad's divorce really messed me up,mum says figgs is messed up too.