With that concept in mind, I quickly blinked away the tears, shook my wet hair out of my face and ran inside out of the rain that I hadn’t even noticed was there.
I was now officially on my own. Slowly sitting down at the seat nearest the window, I looked out, wiping the condensation from the glass with my sleeve.
There was one thing I still didn’t understand. How can one day change everything so much? One day. 24 hours. 1440 minutes…
“Hey Em,” said Sam. I questioned her about the whole two weeks she’d been off school and it turned out she’d had the flu.
One by one, the people in our class turned up in the corridor, waiting for 8:35 when we could go in to our form room. For some reason, every new person who walked in contributed to the crowd around Sam. It was big news as fair as we were all concerned. It was a whole two weeks that she was off for; we weren’t talking just a day here.
I loved Sam’s braces. She’d got coloured elastics put on them, so it was orange and purple alternate. Every time she went to the orthodontist she got a new set of colours, and she made me want braces myself. I complimented hers and she told me about how she couldn’t kiss any boys who also had braces, due to the fact they’d get stuck, which was unfortunate because the boy down the road had braces. She joked about how she could imagine me coming into school dragging some poor boy along by his teeth because we couldn’t get unstuck. In a strange way I’d missed Sam, like how you miss wearing a certain outfit when every time you want to wear it, it’s in the wash.
We all filed in to the classroom like we’d been instructed to so many times, sat in the same places as we had every other day this year and talked to the same people. I turned to speak to Francesca while Sam leant across to hand over her Geography book to the monitor. I was going to hand mine in tomorrow. After all, I did have a whole 24 hours to do half an hours worth of research on the Brazilian rainforest. It can’t be too much of a challenge when nothing interesting happens to me anyway.
The rest of the day was spent following my class, as we had been trained to do, to each lesson. Finally, my circle of friends were all together. It was great to have Sam back at school, which was why I was slightly disappointed when she didn’t turn up the next day. I’d rung her that night and she’d told me she thought she still and the flu because her headache had come back, so I informed the teacher when she read out Sam’s name in the register that that was probably the reason she was away.
I felt like I’d lived three days through by the time the final bell went. I raced home, and raced back to school again the next morning.
I paused at the end of every sentence I was scribbling down in my geography book to look up and down the corridor for someone I knew.
“I’m so sorry.” I span round and raised my eyebrows at a girl I recognised but didn’t know the name of. I figured she must be in year 8. I stared at her blankly for about 5 seconds before she carried on. “Don’t worry. I heard about that girl in your class.” I continued staring. “You are in 7.4, aren’t you?” I nodded. “Then, that girl was in you form. She died. I though you would know, sorry.” she said, almost regretfully, and with that she walked off, turning round to look at me sympathetically once she got to the stairs.
I shrugged that girls comment off. She’d obviously heard wrong. A few people from my form walked over to me, and just as we were about to say ‘Hi, how are you?’ another older girl, this time from the upper school, came over.
“Did you know her?” We all replied at the same time saying how we didn’t know who she was talking about. She gave us some useless facts about how she found out as she tried to remember the name, and ended up saying, “Well it’s something like Samantha…or Susan…Do you have a Susan in your class? Oh. It must have been Samantha then.”
Panic stricken, we all ran upstairs to the payphone and contemplated ringing her home to prove to all these stupid people they were wrong. Things like this don’t happen to me. We were quickly ushered back down the stairs by the Head of year 8 who was obviously not interested in our reasons for trying to use the phone before break time. The idea seemed rather silly anyway.
I sat motionless as our Head of Year talked me through my worst nightmare. I didn’t want to hear the words. I knew what had happened, but I could still convince myself that it wasn’t true and Sam was going to walk through the door any second and laugh at all these people crying.
“Samantha Lovell was rushed into hospital yesterday, and the doctors did all they can, but it wasn’t enough. Samantha died of Class C Meningitis.” I aged 10 years and shrunk 3 foot. The world suddenly looked very big and there was nothing I could do except sit back and watch it fold in on me.
I shook away the memories of the 3rd of February as I knew so many people had done already. The shock of the whole concept had initially washed over the school and letters of condolences had flooded into our form room, but the memory was easily forgotten when the next cake sale had been arranged. The people outside in the rain were the only people that even cared about remembering her.
Sam’s gone, the funeral is forgotten and all that’s left standing is a neglected tree and a small plaque that no one looks at anymore, saying the simple, standard words: Samantha Lovell, 1986 – 1999.
