Overwritten

50 : Poker

Sometimes life hands you a hand of cards, and you're not exactly sure how to play them.

Perhaps it might be a queen, king and ace all of them diamonds, and you're wondering whether it would be worth it to try and go for a royal flush. A massive risk, with low chance of winning. Other times, you decide to try and go for just pairs, or even four of a kind, a safe bet, but still there is a chance of someone getting better than you.

And that's if you get a good hand. Other times you don't even know how to play it, wondering if life perhaps didn't shuffle the cards properly, or life was giving you a bad hand because the house always wins. Perhaps you weren't even sure how to play poker, and you were just trying to keep your hand as long as possible.

I never liked poker much anyway. It was too much about chance, hoping that you would get something. Whenever you won, you would still be taking something from someone else. Marie used to love it however, although there were certain restrictions surrounding gambling at school, Marie liked to find loopholes.

She would manage to convince a few other people to play. A quiet girl, named Georgia or Georgina, who never spoke much. It always was curious why Marie invited her, until one day, she put down her deck of cards and revealed she had a straight flush.

"Cheater!" a boy called Tyler with roughed up brown hair had accused her then, claiming she held cards up her sleeve. Georgia had just smiled in response, looking somewhat embarrassed. Marie had seemed somewhat impression too.

"She's just good," another boy called Henry said. He was a little bit like Scott, although definitely more open and extroverted than him. Henry was usually good at playing and he often would call Tyler out for playing poorly.

One Thursday, Marie had brought the usual few around. I still hadn't known them well, although it seemed the only reason Marie liked them was because she didn't have to explain the rules every time. There had also been another girl, Amelia, who always seemed to speak when she wasn't even asked.

I had found her dreadfully annoying. Marie didn't seem to mind, and neither did the boys. Of course, we were all young, so the most important things in everyone's mind was what they thought of you. Amelia always took it a step further, laughing obnoxiously at things that hardly resembled humour.

But Marie liked her, so I had to pretend to like her too.

I had to pretend to like the way she spoke about herself constantly, pretend that her awful attempts at humour were ground-breaking. She always talked to you as if you were a child that didn't understand, a demeaning tone when she explained things to you, even if you didn't ask.

However, on that Thursday, Amelia didn't show up. And then the days after that. Days turned to weeks, which turned to months, which turned to years. Amelia simply disappeared. Marie pretended she never existed, so I had to pretend too.

"Check this out," Marie had said on the Thursday afternoon, unzipping her pencil case which she usually carried to every class. Her hair had been fairly long then, braided back, a strand of hair drifting in front of her eyes. Out of her pencil case, tumbled what seemed to be hundreds of bread ties.

Whenever we played cards, we would all sit down on one of the patios outside our classroom on the outskirts of the school. A sea of maroon uniforms huddled together, roughed up cards on a small plastic lid to stop them from falling down the cracks of the wooden deck.

"We can use betting chips!" Marie had said, equally handing out a few handfuls of bread clips. They had some code on the end, although it seemed to be common things like expiry dates or manufacturing codes, "I'd saved them every time my Mom bought bread,"