"La situation sociale variait rapidement ..."
It was difficult for Eleanor to concentrate this first morning after summer vacation. She was neither overtired nor had she forgotten to prepare for the lesson. Something different bothered her. And she believed to know what it was. She heard permanent cackling from behind. Preena and her friends seemed to enjoy that they outclassed the rat girl. She dared to turn around. Actually: the girls were tickled pink and flashed her pitiful glances which were meant to say, "Look at that poor wallflower! That laughing stock, that miserable creature!" Celeste imitated Eleanor's scowling facial expression while Preena hastily scribbled something on a sheet of paper. What was that supposed to mean?
"Mademoiselles, attention!" The admonition of her French teacher yielded an immediate result. Eleanor instantly turned back to the blackboard. A last suppressed snort could be heard before calm was restored for the rest of this double period.
During recess, Eleanor pushed her way through the masses of students, along the long corridor up to her locker. In secret, she hoped not to find anything unpleasant inside. Awaiting the worst, she nevertheless closed her eyes tightly while opening the locker door and tried to do the same with her nose. The nasty surprises would mostly wait in the form of a disgusting odor or a slimy something that would slump onto her head. But nothing happened. The surprised Eleanor examined every corner of her locker, but couldn't detect anything alarming. She shrugged and closed the door again. Her heart clearly beat faster. In the afternoon she would recline as a start and do something relaxing. Reading in her Biology book for example.
On her way to the next classroom, all kinds of familiar and detested faces came across her, and in every single case Eleanor waited for the perfectly placed elbow which would bore into her ribs or her shoulder in passing. With her head sunken, clutching her bag protectively like a shield, she blazed her trail. When she alighted on her chair in the Math classroom, she recounted in her head how many bruises she would have to attend today. Little by little, the room filled with students and every now and then a "Hi, Eleanor!" reached her ears. She paid those not very well meant set phrases no further regard. Eleanor focused her gaze onto the big clock over the blackboard. Only a few minutes were left until the beginning of the period. Then the noise level would decline and ease the emerging pulsation in her head.
"Ouch!" She couldn't suppress an expression of a sensation of pain. She rubbed the back of her head and looked around, searching for the item that had hit her. It was a pencil case. The boys in the backmost row began snorting immediately as they caught sight of Eleanor's perturbed face. She had experienced a lot, but nobody had thrown things at her so far. Not so hard things anyway. The rat girl begged the minute hand of the clock to move on in a quicker pace.
"Hey, what ... ?" This time the medium of attack rolled into Eleanor's range of vision. It was an empty plastic bottle. Her reaction evoked new hysterical laughter from behind. Was this the plan of which Preena and her friends had spoken? No, that couldn't be. None of them was in Eleanor's Math course, all of those who currently cracked up were boys. And to her disappointment, there were a few among them whose balanced and calm characters she had always treasured. So now also the last somewhat trustworthy persons of her grade had defected to the opposing side. Eleanor war desperate. What did I do wrong? she asked herself when another item was shot at her head: a pair of scissors. Had those imbeciles now completely gone mad??
When Eleanor hid in her chair to provide a smaller contact surface for the just now set in rain of paper balls, she noticed that a sheet of paper was attached to her back. Of course, those morons needed a written invitation! Unnerved, she ripped the note off her blouse and read, "Help, my brain is stuck in a bench vise called 'hairdo'! Please help me to loosen it!"
"Go and see a hairdresser, you alien!" came the very prudent remark from her classmates. The dull feeling of wrath that had built up in Eleanor unfortunately didn't have the chance to go off. Because that very moment her Math teacher, Mr. Simmons, entered the room. But to be frank: a real emotional release would probably never happen. Eleanor had become – according to her own sensation – emotionally indifferent over the years.
"Miss Johansson, would you please remove the mess in front of your desk?" Mr. Simmons mumbled without looking at his best student. Eleanor nodded silently, stood up and bent down to pick the garbage. She trembled with anger and the palpitation in her head became stronger. Luckily the others had stopped laughing.
The rest of the period went by at a crawl. Also this time was it difficult for Eleanor to attach importance to the written word on the blackboard. This didn't escape Mr. Simmons, since he demanded her by show of hands to stay for a talk after the lesson. When all the other students had left the room, Mr. Simmons closed the door and sat down behind his desk again, the clueless girl in front of him. She looked at him expectantly, but he refused to look back. Was she even repugnant to her own teacher?
"Miss Johansson, do you have any problems? Would you like to talk about something ?" His voice sounded spiritless, almost bored. He didn't seem to want to meet his pedagogic duties even half-heartedly. And that was the reason why Eleanor didn't want to confide in him. So she lied, "No, there are no problems."
"Are you sure?" he dug deeper. For a split second he glanced at Eleanor's face. "I noticed your strained facial expression already last year. Something seems to depress you, and I just would like to offer you some help."
"It's nothing, really," Eleanor affirmed. She doubted, though, that he believed her, as she felt the blood flooding her cheeks. Mr. Simmons' gaze surveyed the desks. He sighed.
"Well, if you don't want to tell me, I can't help you either. All I can do is to wish you that you'll look a little more on the bright side in your future life."
Had Eleanor misheard him? She, looking a little more on the bright side? That must have been supposed to be a bad joke! If it didn't catch any teacher's eye that she was incredibly mistreated since years, then this school really was a morbid institution that didn't have to be surprised at the number of melancholy figures it created. Grave problems were willingly disregarded. But why did Eleanor complain at all? She didn't accept the "help" that was offered to her.
"You may go," Mr. Simmons ended the conversation and added a gesture that pointed to the door. Eleanor accepted this offer thankfully and left the room without further ado.
The rest of the day came up with more unpleasant events. Several times Eleanor was tripped up and she successfully stumbled each time, she was jostled deliberately and it was clear to her that fingers were permanently pointed at her behind her back. Shortly before the end of the school day, when she located her locker again to store some books in it, she found the surprise inside that she had "waited" for the whole day: a torrent of paper balls, probably the leftovers from Math. Every time Eleanor asked herself how the others managed to lodge the whole stuff in her locker. They must have gotten a spare key from somewhere.
--
When she opened the front door of her parents' house, the mucosa-corrosive odor that her mother called "perfume" engulfed her. Eleanor held her breath and hurried to open the windows.
"Mom?" she called, but there was no answer. She could have foreseen that. Her mother hang around again, either at one of her friends or at some dubious guy she had met at the nearby bowling center. Eased, the girl let her bag sink to the floor. She hadn't been on good terms with her mother for years, therefore she didn't care for her absence. For quite some time Eleanor had the feeling that her genitor didn't give a damn about her only child any more. And she didn't seem to care a fig for her husband either.
Eleanor's father was a highly endowed professor at St. Canard University and a very successful scientist on the field of molecular biology. She had looked up to him ever since she could remember: for his great intellect, for the sacrificially devotion he showed to his work as well as for his amazingly warm-hearted manner to deal with people. And exactly this seemed to be her mother's reason for avoiding her own house. Her husband had become a bore, he worked incessantly and couldn't give her what she needed (except for financial security): undivided attention. Because there was Eleanor after all.
In her mother's opinion, she had been quite sweet as a child, but as the years had passed she had turned into a similarly uptight bourgeois like her father. And now Eleanor's mother unashamedly ripped him and his good-natured character off. The rat girl knew that she had come into existence unintentionally and that her mother had wanted to perform abortion at first, but this realization didn't sadden her any longer. Ever and anon, the bigger part of this world would show her that she was undesirable. Since her father was away on business a lot and since Eleanor had nobody that she could refer to as a "friend", she couldn't confide in anybody.
Eleanor had absolutely needed her mother's advice, though, especially in recent years. Because there was so much that thitherto kept her racking her brains as she was lying awake at nights. For example the boys issue: how do you act appropriately when you are confronted with a male?
Eleanor recalled a "conversation" between her and her mother when she had doted on someone for the very first time. She had been 14 back then and had adored the captain of the basketball team, Anthony Mitchell.
"Mom," she had said, „there's something I'd like to talk to you about."
"Not now, I'm busy," her mother had tried to rebuff her. She had been occupied with running over the pages of several fashion magazines and filling out mail-orders.
"But Mom, this is really important to me!" Eleanor had insisted. Her mother had looked up from the pile of magazines, had gazed at her daughter with an irritated look and had answered, "Don't you have any friends that you can talk to about your so-called 'problems'?"
This answer had touched Eleanor to the quick, and so she had only managed to reply a very puny "no". Of course her mother was aware of the fact that her daughter didn't "hang out" with other girls, and so she just snorted scornfully. Finally she had brought herself to a bored "What is it?".
"I-it ... ," Eleanor had stuttered, "well, there ... eh ... there is ... a c-certain boy ..."
Her mother had promptly choked on the coffee she had been about to drink. She had coughed noisily, had beat her chest repeatedly and had looked at her daughter with a mixture of amusement and distrust.
"I beg your pardon?! My dear missy, aren't you still a little too young for that? And besides: you should first of all undertake some basic changes before you set sail into such dangerous areas!"
"But that's exactly what I want to talk to you about!" It had always been incomprehensible to Eleanor how unconcerned her mother had been towards the sorrows of her child.
"What do you want to know?" Eleanor's mother had smirked asking that. Again and again she enjoyed being superior to her daughter when this issue came up.
"Well ... how you call that special someone's attention to yourself..."
"Well," Eleanor's mother had writhed on the couch with pleasure to make herself a little more comfortable, "you should first of all dress differently. You look like your grandmother!"
When it came to boys, such comments and likewise constructive tips would always come when Eleanor asked her mother for advice. For the most part, it aimed at Eleanor descending to her mother's level – which meant acting like an alley cat. After some time, she'd leave the living room in disgust while her mother would exaggerate her explanations, until she'd finally end them with always the same sentence, "That's life, baby girl!"