Chapter Ten: Halloween

                                    

                                          
Halloween came sooner than expected. With huge amounts of revision and work one month flew by.
                          
After that horrid day at the park and seeing Anna puking up her own blood, I made a decision to try not to start arguments with Anna anymore. She still commented and snapped at me like usual, and I'd stick up for myself, but I no longer was the one starting the fighting. I didn't have the energy.
                          
Although, Anna didn't seem quite as intimidating as she was before since she was apparently homeless. I still didn't know whether that was true or not but by the way Zoe had switched seats with another girl on the bus, I guessed it was.
                          
Anna had a rough background, that I knew as much. I'd experienced it myself. Her parents were either dead or addicted. The area where she lived was not somewhere you'd want to visit, which explained the reason for why she was infamous as the 'bad girl' of the school.
                          
I would feel sympathy for someone like her but circumstances had changed my opinion. Anna Brooks was too much of a bitch to feel sorry for and maybe if she hadn't done what she did three years ago, I would have tried to help her get out of the place she lived. It wasn't safe there and soon she'd become one of them.
                          
All in all, I was trying to veer myself away from Anna. This year's exams were too important to fuck up and be distracted.
                          
As for George well that was a different story.
                          
He was constantly on my mind, no matter how hard I tried to get rid of him. I avoided all eye contact with him in maths to escape from his prisoner gaze. He'd texted me a few times to see how I was or if I wanted to go round his house but I'd made up excuses or declined.
                          
A few times I almost did go, but I knew if I did I'd regret it. That boy made me feel too much comfort and warmth for me to indulge in. I had never really felt that sort of thing before, and it terrified me. 
                          
I'd spent so long knowing that I did not function normally that I'd resigned myself to the fact that I could never have anything normal at all in my life. Emotions were artificially constructed, I'd lost my childhood and I no longer knew how to have fun. My personality was so devoid of humour or charm that I was disgusted at myself. I was an empty person. 
                          
And yet, I couldn't motive myself to change. 
                          
The sadness and the past couldn't let me move on. I was stuck. And in a way, I didn't want to try to be normal. 
                          
And so, for that reason, everytime I almost texted George back saying yes I'll come over, I'd go for a booty call elsewhere instead. 
                          
But the image of the midnight blue eyed boy never faded.
                          
No one — ever — had helped me through a flashback before. Not my mother, she was never home, not my siblings, I didn't want them to worry, nor any of my friends. As far as they knew I was always happy and bubbly and there if they needed someone to listen to them. 
                          
I was thankful for George that day, he stopped me from falling to pieces, but I didn't want to have him do that again. My problems were too taxing for someone else to deal with. 
                          
I'd been blanking him in school and I think he seemed to accept and respect that. Almost every maths lesson he tried to make a joke about something with me, but I shook him off with an uninterested laughing. Even with my cold treatment, he offered to look over my paper, or go through a mock test with me, when heaps of low graded homework in preparation for my resits were dropped on my desk. 
                          
I felt it was all getting a bit too much. I was going to fail. 
                          
And it wasn't just maths. I was working so hard on trying to understand where I was going wrong with first year content that I was losing time focusing on my other subjects. Thankfully, I was putting in so many hours that I was maintaining top grades in biology and chemistry.