Jenny George

Wrote this when I was 14. Uploaded it for the nostalgia.

Manson Town, November 10th.

"Do you have something you would like to tell me?" Snarled a voice as cold as the frozen water on the sidewalk outside in my ear as I selected the books would need for the day out of my locker. I knew that voice; it was the voice of my girlfriend Jennifer George. I turned to look down into her mutinous blue eyes but immediately regretted it. The second our eyes met I heard a horrible slapping noise followed by a gasp from every eavesdropping student in the hallway. It didn't take me long to work out what had happened, mainly because of the fierce pain searing through the right side of my face. "Well? Do you? Because now would be a really good time to tell me, Thomas." I could still feel the baffled expression her slap had left on my face while I struggled to work out what I had done to provoke such an aggressive reaction from her. But all I could manage was "Huh?"

Jen was a five foot five, slim, blonde cheerleader with a stare that could cut through steel, and true to stereotype I was her six foot two, blonde QB boyfriend.

Before I could come up with another response just as witty as the last she exhaled sharply while ripping out of her handbag a small cell phone that I recognised to be mine.

"You left this at mine last night, and when I picked it up to put it in my bag I noticed you had a message. Can you guess who that message was from?” Immediately continuing “Katie!" She screamed, her little fists clenched at her sides. "You want to know what she said Tom? Yeah? Ok, well she can't make it tonight, and that means you guys will have to re-schedule your little 'rendezvous' for tomorrow", her violent little air quotes cut the air in front of me. "Oh and it also means that you can do whatever the hell you want with her because you are officially single," her voice shook with every syllable as her teeth ground together audibly, and she blinked furiously in an attempt to repress the tears I could see welling in her narrowed eyes. Before I had the chance to even think about explaining the truth to her- which was that Katie (her best friend) and I had been planning a surprise party for her seventeenth birthday on Saturday (tomorrow) - she raised her arm and slammed the phone into the ground at our feet sending pieces like shrapnel across the wet floor and sprinted away down the corridor to the girls' bathroom. I, however remained a participant in the loudest silence in history with the rest of the students present for the scene.

For me, the rest of the day was spent ignoring the stares and the whispers of how Jennifer George had brutally dumped Thomas Marks in front of a large proportion of the student body, and wondering if she was okay.

When school was finally over I decided I couldn't face going home. I drove around aimlessly for a long time trying to be careful on the ice but not caring very much anymore.

After trying to think of somewhere to go that wouldn't remind me of Jen and casting away every option because there was nowhere in the small town that didn't hold some painful memories of her, I gave up. A masochistic voice in the back of my head suggested I take a stroll down by the river. I say masochistic because the river running through the park was the place Jennifer and I would go this time of year, every year to skate on the ice.

That twisted voice must have won the argument because the next thing I knew, I was sat on the banking of the river staring at the place two years ago that Jen had slipped and sprained her ankle on the ice. I carried her home with my jacket around her.

I was still smiling at that memory awhile later when something in my peripheries caught my attention. There was someone on the ice just down the river from me. Not wanting to see anyone I knew, I quietly lifted myself off the solid ground and tried to skirt back around the banking back to my car. I had thought coming here had been sick, like emotional self-harm, but being here had made up my mind; I was getting Jen back if it killed me.

I was a foot from the car when a sound that jarred every bone in my body echoed around me; the blood-churning sound of thin ice cracking and breaking under the pressure of someone's weight, swiftly followed by a nerve shredding scream of panic, fear and pain. Without thinking, I sprinted as fast as was physically possible towards the source of the sound. The horrific noise had brought back a memory. A memory very close to the surface of my mind. Before I knew it I was back on the river's edge staring at a gaping hole in the ice, water gushing out and spilling over the smooth surface of the frozen river. Running out onto the ice I called out to the girl who had been lost under the glass trap. Suddenly I caught sight of something moving quickly in the water, something moving with the current. I was above it immediately trying to smash through the clear prison to free the now drowning girl. I reached out and something hard and jagged. Running, rock in hand, I threw myself down onto the ice and began to crack the surface. This time, when the suffocating girl passed me I caught a glimpse of her face. My heart stopped. The world stopped. Now it all made sense, why the scream had brought back a memory. A memory that I had been thinking about minutes before I heard it. The memory of a girl falling on the ice and spraining her ankle, and the scream that girl had let out when she had fallen. There staring back at me, pleading, were the pleading blue eyes in which I had seen laughter, smiles, rage and tears every day for the last eight years. Blind fear taking over, I hacked my way through the ice just in time to slam my bleeding hand into the freezing water and grab Jen's cold pale wrist. Hope shot through me when I felt her desperate fingers scrabbling at my hand weakly and I shouted her name through the ice begging her to hold on, promising her that she would be okay and that I wouldn't let her drown. I could see her silver blonde hair in the water, wild, around her heart shaped face. Her lips no longer dark red, but almost as white as her skin. My constant stream of reassurances were drowned out by the screaming of the violent winds around me. The groaning trees stretched out, leaning down onto the ice, their fingers scratching helplessly at the cold barrier. When Jen's grip on my hand began to falter, my fruitless cries to her were accompanied by a tearing sound coming from somewhere deep in my chest. I would not let her go. I would not let her leave me here alone. Suddenly the small hole in the ice through which I was holding on caved through due to my relentless smashing on the ice with the rock. A cry of relief burst from me when I wrenched her now limp body through the shards of broken ice. Placing her small frame gently over my knees to shield her from the water spilling over the top, I noticed something chilling. Her eyes were no longer staring at me. Her lips were now the exact same shade of white to blue as her skin and she was not coughing. Or making any noise. Or breathing.

My hands, which were already shaking uncontrollably, were now numb. When I pressed my ear to her chest to listen to her heart I felt my own rip straight down the middle. No breathing. No heartbeat. No. She couldn't be gone. I wouldn't let her be gone. I had made her a promise, and I never broke my promises to Little Jenny George.

After trying to beat the water out of her lungs for what seemed like eternity I gazed down at her still form lying across my drenched knees. Her face was like porcelain. Her eyes were closed. She looked just like she did when she was asleep. Peaceful.

As I leaned over her, barely aware of the tears streaming down my stinging face, the mournful howling of the wind began to die.