Cliché

I am really unsure of how to begin this, although as I root back through my memories I do believe that it all began the day after that diary entry I already showed you. Waking up, it was the first day back at school and I believed that I was going to change, I was going to have a more exciting and eventful life. Let's revert back to the old me.

"Robyn! Wakey wakey!" Great, Monday morning, 6:40 am sharp, my stepfather turns on my bedroom light and begins to merrily sing to get the rest of the family up and out of their beds. Funnily enough, the rest of the day he is the most miserable man you have ever met, but in the morning when everyone else feels like shooting the person who just stands in front of them in the line for the bathroom, he is stood there singing his little heart out. Unless this is some kind of subconscious plot to result in him annoying me more, I cannot fathom a reason as to why he becomes so happy when I am grouchy and on edge.  

As usual, I take five minutes before I can pull myself away from the warm embrace of my double bed, and place my feet on the cold floor, which somehow causes a wave of cold throughout my entire body. I plod along to the bathroom, after hearing the again irritating and obnoxiously chipper sound of "Wakey wakey!" emitting from my parent's bedroom. I take my morning shower, feeling glorious under the water. I ensure that I take exactly twenty minutes each morning, just to piss off whoever has woke me up that day, as both of my parents tend to need to use the bathroom at about the time that I get up on a Monday.

Once I am dry and dressed, I eat my morning Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and read whatever book I have picked for the morning - today was a childhood favorite, Matilda, a young girl completely underestimated by everyone around her. After this I proceed to doing my makeup, sometimes a little too much foundation but who doesn't have that problem? My hair is straightened and my bag is ready, I check the time 8:02. Two minutes behind. Again. 

I reach the bus just in time (won't be mentioning that to my parents), putting my earphones in and playing Bon Jovi and Imagine Dragons, sat on the third seat from the front on the bus, next to the window. Just as i do every morning. 

Once more I am sat here, doing my mundane routine. I meant what I wrote in my diary last night... I just really do not have a clue what to do about it. How can I at this point in my life? I need to find a job, I can't break up with Darren, and I really don't want to fall out with my parents or my friends. Plus, my exams are in six months, how can I turn my life around so quickly to make me happy again before then? I'm not sure how much more of this I can take from now on, but on the other hand I'm unable to do any of the things i talked about last night. 

I tend to have those thoughts often, the 'what if's and the 'I could's but there is nothing truly motivating for me that makes me take the risks. I used to believe that the things that have led me to become who I am now and how I think were all risks - becoming best friends with the girl I used to hate and allowing her to know my secrets, saying yes when the boy I'm crazy about asked me to be his girlfriend. Things like that have now led me to question my life now, and how legitimate it is, how long this kind of reality is going to last. When is it all going to go down in flames? Will it go down in flames? Which result will make me happier?

The way I see it, I will never find out until I try. It's like Brussels sprouts - you don't know until you try, and when you have tried them you either love them or you apologize to everyone around you for the smell, or sometimes both. The same theory applies to my life now; I can't know if the change will make me happier unless I try, and once I have tried, then I will either apologize to those around me whom I will have hurt in the process of trying, or I will be basking in the glow of freedom. Which will it be?

My main problem, as it is for many people, is my feelings. Feelings are messing with my thought processes, and sometimes clouding my judgement. For example, right now I don't want to change my relationships with those around me for the fear of losing the feeling of being comfortable and not wanting change. This is going to be my problem for a while. 

The bus has stopped at my school. As I get off and the small and rodent-like creatures formally known as the Year Sevens scramble into school, I'm dreading my day. 

I stand with some of my friends and for some reason I didn't speak to any of them more than once during the holidays, and to be honest, we have all kind of drifted since last year, now I'm only close with two of my best friends, one of their boyfriends and my own, Darren. Speak of the devil, his bus just arrived. 

The normal people get off - the same rodents that get on my bus, to me the whole population of the lowest year just mold into one giant yet tiny person with a too-high decibel of speech, followed by the odd goth and chav-like girls, then the 'lads' of my year group, the ones who believe themselves to be untouchable, each and every one of them. Which, to be honest, they are  - I don't know a single person who would touch them. Then, there comes Darren and his brother, always one of the last off the bus as he is one of those rare people who are too courteous to put themselves first, therefore will insist on letting everyone else off the bus before himself. He was like that even before I knew him, so polite and well-mannered, opening doors for those behind him, if that someone was a girl he would hold the door open for them to go through. He really is one of a kind, and it's times like these I regret what I thought about last night. 

Seeing me, he smiles, I turn as I say bye to my friends, feeling his arms wrap around me from behind, one of the sweetest things a boyfriend can do, and again I feel that pang of guilt in my chest. 

"Hey you," he says, kissing my cheek and I feel his smile, picturing his dimples in my head. 

"Hey you." I say back, smiling without effort. He takes my hand and my geography file to carry in for me, something I always protest against but he insists on; I just hate the thought of people looking at us and thinking "Wow she has him whipped", when in fact no 'whipping' is needed, he does this nice stuff naturally and without encouragement or hints from me. See what I mean by perfect?

Darren and I walk hand in hand into school, past all of the increasing number of supposed preteens and into the year area. In my school, even though everyone, even the teachers, say this school is clique-free, it really isn't. We enter through the double doors into the maths department, and immediately the cliques are blatantly obvious; on your left there are the biggest group in the whole of Year 11, the 'popular' and somewhat cliche boys and girls. What do I mean by that? Well, all the girls have perfect hair, have amazing makeup that lasts all day (unlike mine), always look gorgeous when going out, and still look more attractive than me with no makeup and a messy bun, with the same high-pitched laugh and expressions. Next to them is the model guys, those who think they're God's gift, almost every single one styles their hair in the exact same way, they all talk about the game FIFA like it is the best thing ever invented, they go to parties and kiss more than one girl, and they all dress in designer Hollister clothes - basically your stereotypical guys. I had gone out with one and liked another, but that's what helped me see what is so good about Darren; he's not the norm. 

Then further along in the gap between the laptop cases and the copier is me and my friends, more commonly labelled as 'the weird geeky ones', but to be totally honest, I'd rather belong to this group than any other. Although we still have our flaws.

Moving along there is the group that are intimidating in some ways, annoying in others, plain stupid in some situations and the basic bad influence group, the ones who for a joke send someone to sit with us to get a pound, the ones who sneak weed into school, and the ones who have no respect for teachers and couldn't care less about their work. Everyone else in my year just really circulates around the rest of the school, but those of us in the year area are there everyday, showing a clear massive division. Don't get me wrong, there are people in each group who are more than what they seem and some I like, one of my best friends is part of the biggest clique, but they exist.

Same as every morning, the group walks into school and sits down, laughing and joking. Next to me is the other couple in the group - one of my best friends Sammy and one of Darren's best friends, Jasper. Every morning all four of us joke around and call each other names, me and Sammy call the two guys gay, that it is so obvious they are in a secret relationship behind our backs. But even that is the same almost every day. Five minutes later, my friend Charlotte, or Lottie as we all call her, arrives always a little late, and forever has an expression she just opens up with. Today, it was "oh my god I could KILL my mother".

I laugh, because she is just so crazy sometimes and with her, she never becomes boring. She got into this elaborate story about how she got up late and was running around trying to get ready, standing outside of the bathroom almost peeing herself, yelling at her little sister behind the bathroom door, only to find out that her mum was inside, saving her legs on the side of the bath and has been ignoring her for fifteen minutes and that her sister was actually still in bed. This all resulted in them all being late this morning, and her mum nearly crashing with multiple cars on the A19. 

Our weird bell goes just as she is finishing her story, so we all get up and get ready to go, except we don't actually go anywhere, we just spread out a little more. Darren and I are left at the wall and standing together.

"Hey, I...I bought you something this morning," he says, rooting through his bag and pulling out my all time favorite snack, a huge pack of cool original Doritos. I didn't even ask for them and he did that anyway. "Do I get a kiss for that?" he asks me after I'm done jumping up and down whilst hugging him - I'm a food loving girl. I smile and kiss him quickly, just in case one of the teachers walks past and have a whole moment because we're touching. Despite the brief contact between us,butterflies flutter in my tummy for a second. Looking up to him as he grins down at me my thoughts from last night drift away for a while.This guy is perfect, why do I want to ruin that?

The bell sounds again, and this time we have to go. 

That was just the morning, but the only reason I believe that it began to go downhill from there is because I was finding and identifying too many normal things that would happen - what my best friends would do on the mornings, how the different groups would act, what my boyfriend would do for me. When I do look back and think about how I was and who I was I wished I hadn't cared about the normality of my days, because when you care too much about little things like that, it just makes you subconsciously want to destroy what has been bothering you so much. And that is what I did.

Before I get totally into my past and my story, I feel that for you to completely understand those people surrounding me, who they were, why they were important to me, and how it was all going to go completely wrong. 

Firstly, allow me to introduce my best friends at the time - we have Sammy, my oldest friend out of everybody in our little group and by far the craziest one. She has always has been someone who is like me, more in the background of the major people who are the center of the year group. We became friends because when I first arrived at my school, I was the only one who came from my primary school, apart from some boy I had never spoken to and still haven't to this day. On the first morning of 'big' school. regardless of how many times all of the teachers told us we wouldn't get lost, myself and Sammy met in the corridor of the school trying to find our way to the art classroom we were supposed to be in ten minutes ago. Us and two other boys in our year group ended up wandering the halls and peeking into the classrooms searching for one that looked like it could be ours. Since then, we just really stuck by each other and have more or less laughed our way into Year 11, ready to leave. Although, unlike me, Sammy wanted to stay and continue onto the college above the school, but I wanted to start somewhere else, new and different. She was just as crazy and immature as myself at those ages, and we got along like a house on fire most of the time.  Her and Jasper got together just slightly after myself and Darren did, and its like we're the exact same couple, only Darren and I are two months ahead.

Next, there is my other best friend, Charlotte. Ours is a funny story, as it began with the two of us rather blatantly hating the other, I found her bossy and far too two-faced,she saw me as stuck-up, posh and as someone who was lazy and didn't want to work. We never really became friends until the third year of secondary school, as she used to be a part of the biggest and 'girly' clique that younger me described, but they all somehow turned against her and did what girls do at that age, they began rumors to the others about the supposed things that Charlotte had said about different girls within the group. This resulted in her being deserted and having virtually no one there for her as a friend. She had been completely isolated, I remember her having to sit with that one guy in the class who picks his nose in front of everyone and is obsessed with getting to class two minutes before the bell had even signaled us to go to lessons.  Despite my hate for her, I felt sorry for her and the way she had been treated. One day she approached me and my friends and asked if she could sit with us so she could stay away from the girls who now hated her and wanted nothing to do with her. We all said it was fine, we were fairly happy to accept the outcasts because we had all been treated as such at one time or another. Everything was fine until five of the fake-tanned, make-uped and perfect haired girls came up to Charlotte and began accusing her of anything and everything they could think of. She stood her ground and didn't back down, which as fourteen takes some bravery; eventually they all walked away, their bags on their right arms as they muttered about what just happened. From that point on, all of us were friends and Charlotte was accepted as one of us. Since then we discovered the other sides to one another and now I barely have a day go by wherein we don't speak to each other, and it's impossible to imagine hating her like I used to. 

Finally, my Darren. His story may sound cheesy and slightly cliche but when I fell for him, the position I was in, cliche was the best thing that ever happened to me. Our story is the perfect (almost) high school sweethearts story, although I felt guilty a lot of the time about the whole thing and how it happened. On my first day of school, despite the teachers of the new terrifying maze of a school promising I wouldn't get lost...I got lost on the way to my first lesson. Poor mini-me, running around with her over-sized colourful backpack (when she saw it in Argos it was cool, however years later I greatly regret the decision), no makeup with her hair back in a butterfly clip she thought was 'cool', all flustered and panicking because it was her first day at 'big school' and she was already lost. On the way of running around corridors. I bumped into Sammy and a small bespectacled boy, both in the same position as I was. We all banded together, our own little trio of uncertainty, nerves and terror and took haste to the next corridor; it was an enveloping maze of walls and doors, a constant battle against the fresh meat into the school and the beaten down pathways. Finally, our Pastoral Manager found all three of us, flustered and petrified we were going to get a detention for being lost. She gave us a warm smile, laughing at us being lost on the first day, before guiding us like a mother hen to our classroom, literally just up the stairs from where we were standing. 

We entered the room, and of the three of us I was eye-signal voted the one to go first. Everything was explained to the teacher as twenty-seven eyes full of light and innocence peered at us, all thinking, "how did you get lost? We were lead to our lessons". At such a young age, during moments of embarrassment or exercise, my face would go bright pink...unfortunately for me, the running made me out of breath and pink already, but then when everyone in a room turns and stares at you for being stupidly lost, it's pretty embarrassing.

So, there I was - tiny, heavily-breathing, an almost fluorescent shade of pink and utterly humiliated, and he was there too, my Darren. He had been one of the twenty-seven eyes peering at me, although perhaps not in  the same way - all of the times I asked him what his thoughts were he just said, "Wow.". The first time he told me that I was clueless for a moment as to what he meant, until he went on to tell me I was the first girl he ever saw in a way that wasn't 'gross, you're a girl, you have girl-disease', he said he honestly thought I was beautiful. In my head, all of the times I have thought about this scenario in my head I have come to two conclusions - one, either he is completely making it up, because who could be attracted to a pink faced girl who got lost on her first day? Or two... It's true that some guys aren't as shallow as they are defined to be.