Woman Walks into a Bar Read Online Free PDF

at lunch because Keisha fancies this lad in the year above so we spent all break trying to find him so she could ask him out and then when we did she totally bottled it! And Miss Childs said we’re going to be doing Grease as the school play—but, Mum, it’s not fair because all the sixth formers get the best parts, right? And all we’ll get to do is paint scenery or something, so I said . . .”
    I let Beth’s words wash over me, as warm and as comforting as the bath water. Everything she was telling me now she had told me before in one way or another. It was normal for her. It was amazing to me.
    My average day at school had not been the same, at least from the year I turned thirteen. That’s when the bullying started.
    I didn’t notice it at first. It took me until break to realize that no one was talking to me. When I went up to Christine Parker and Hannah Milton as usual, both of them turned their backs on me and walked away without saying a word. I wanted to run after them and ask them what I’d done wrong. But I didn’t. I wasn’t the sort of person to be pushy. I thought I’d wait until they were OK with me again, then say sorry for whatever it was. But at lunch they ignored me again. At the end of the day I didn’t bother trying to talk to them. I just walked right past them toward the school gate.
    â€œStuck-up bitch thinks she’s too good for us,” Hannah said. I stopped in my tracks.
    â€œI don’t !” I said, smiling. “I just thought you didn’t want to talk to me . . .”
    â€œWe don’t want to talk to you, bitch,” Christine said. “Who’d want to talk to a stinking fat bitch like you?” And they walked off, laughing and nudging each other. A couple of other kids who had heard them were laughing too.
    I didn’t say anything to Mum when I got home. We had fallen out before, the three of us. Sometimes it was me and Christine against Hannah. Sometimes me and Hannah against Christine. Now it was those two against me. I told myself everything would be back to normal in a couple of days, like always.
    But it wasn’t. It was the same for the rest of the week. And by the beginning of the next week it wasn’t only Christine and Hannah that were saying things, calling me a bitch or telling me I stank. It was my whole class. The week after that it seemed like it was everyone in my year. I would be walking down a corridor and someone would shove me against a wall, but when I looked round everyone was acting like nothing had happened. Little things like that, every day.
    There was one time when we were getting changed for PE. Someone squeezed a packet of tomato ketchup all over my white shorts. Our PE teacher was a hard old cow. She didn’t like excuses. I had to do cross-country in my pants.
    I had to tell my mum about that. She was livid, because the shorts were ruined. As she scrubbed at them in the sink she told me that the girls that were picking on me were just jealous of me because I was growing up so good-looking. She told me to ignore them and they’d soon get bored.
    But they didn’t get bored. For the rest of that year they found new names to call me, new ways to torment me. And it wasn’t just the girls, it was the boys too. I was one of the first in my year to wear a bra. The boys were always trying to ping the straps or grab my top and yank it down. They thought that because I was quite big up top I should be up for it. Like the size of my chest made me a tart all by itself.
    And I never really knew why it happened. I never knew if I’d done anything wrong or offended someone so badly that the rest of my year slowly turned against me one by one. It felt like a tide of hate slowly building and rolling toward me day after day, a little bigger each time. And there was nothing I could do. I had no idea why they had decided to hate me, single me out. And sometimes