Fantasy

• Hayley Clark, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2012

“I love you”
“I love you too”.
They sat happily together in each others arms. Too engrossed in each others grasp to realise anything around them. The park they were in breathed love. It flowed in the breeze that drifted softly around them and appeared in the beauty of the waterlillies floating on the lightly trickling stream.
This was the way Alice’s life was meant to be, this is how she imagined it but of course this fantasy only existed in her over imaginative mind. Every morning she would be woken up to the sound of endless traffic on the highway below her window and the smell of a thousand engines running. She would open the curtain to see a heavy thick grey smoke, enveloping the sky, strangling it’s beauty and hiding the sun in it’s prison. Day after day is the same, the same routine, the same fantasy. Though the thing that bothers her the most, is that every time she looks in the mirror she sees the same thing. A slightly chubby, average sized girl with as many freckles as stars in the Milky Way. A lopsided smile that never showed her crooked teeth underneath the ugly metal wires; that pulled at her teeth as if someone was trying to pull them out one by one without using anesthetic. This girl, the girl she saw in the mirror didn’t have any friends, she had never had friends and she always wondered if she ever would have friends.

School was no fun for Alice, everyday a group of boys, popular, good looking boys would tease her, call her names and pick on her. They would laugh at her and talk about her behind her back but most often they tease her about her wrists. Everyday was a new scar, another lashing out of anger, another hope for a better life gone. Each defaced line was a call for help. No one was there to listen to her problems, her worries. Everyone close to her had left, gone to a better place. She often wondered what that better place was like, would she have friends or would it just be a repeat of this living nightmare. Often she wondered if, one day, she would pinch herself and wake up to see the warm smiles of friends, and the loving faces of a mother and father. Distantly she also wondered if Tyler, the amazing guy at school would notice her and see her for what she really was.

Tyler was part of the group of boys that taunted Alice; but he was different. Whenever the other boys were calling her names he wouldn’t say anything, he almost seemed ashamed of what they were doing. Alice had liked him as long as she could remember. He was tall and muscly and she often imagined being held in his strong arms and looking into his murky turquoise eyes. In her dreams it was him that she imagined sitting with, confining all her worries and sorrows into.

One day he and his friends followed Alice home, all the way they mocked her, throwing things at her, calling her names and running wide circles around her like sharks. Tyler did not join in this. He had finally had enough of his friends games. He was going to apologise for everything he and his mates had ever done to her, apologise for not standing up to them and apologise for never telling her how he really felt about her. Meanwhile, Alice who had put up with this life for far too long opened the door to her home and cried her last cry, shed her last tear and breathed her last breath. When Tyler walked in he found her lying, lifeless on the floor. Tears flooded his eyes and poured down his face. If only she had of put it off another day, another hour, another minute. The next week Tyler did not go to school, he did not answer any of his friends texts nor calls. One cold and stormy night, Tyler decided that he would go and find Alice and he would tell her all the things that he should have told her and they would live together for eternity in a place that knew of no sadness or pain...