Disclaimer: I don't any of the characters from CSI

Hello... sorry it is a late...again...but this is the last part of 'junk'... it was just a connecting one really...Only a decade and a half to go on the 'Sara Sidle' story... I watched a bit of 'toe tags' and i saw the scene between sara and grissom 'when we first met' and I actually swore at the screen because it meant I had to go change some things. meh... Oh and this chapter is based on the information about Sara from wikipedia so...you know...oh and sorry about any 'american education' things i got wrong.. I really tried to understand it...x

Anyway thank you for reading and any reviews/comments left will be really valued...

thank you soooo much to Lyanna Stark, Dybdahl and MC New York for rewiewing.. it meant load and loads

Lyanna Stark...heya thanks for reviewing. sorry for the lack of updating and I will not be stopping until the end...thank you xx

Dybdahl... yep..hi..i.'m back...with lots of the following chapters pretty written so no more big gaps of blankness...yay... thank for reviewing xxx

MC New York heya sorry that this isn't a really long reply…thank you for reviewing both chapters…

Someone jump her in Chapter 5….have some psycho just go on a chainsaw hacking spree - calls MISTER KRUEGER, MISTER MYERS!! mmm…fire… I was actually playing with fire to day…good fun was had…Liz or Johnny will be returning…Mary is sticking around but is more of a semi-background person.

Though, I won't deny that I would've liked to see Sara in such a prissy little surrounding and knock one of the uppity girls right on their ass for degrading her in some form- I do like this….i think I might to use it somewhere before the end…

Officer Bitches-lol

Thanks for reviewing xxxx

Hope you enjoy, next chapter will be up on sunday (I have presentation i need to work on for eye fopr stupid key skills eyes turn to evils I hate key skills but we have to do them so the college gets more money..)

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It was the start of October and I was bored of the chatter about Halloween costumes from the girls and the boastfulness of the boys of how many things that had done.

I had been requested, much to my dismay, to stay behind by the new physics teacher, Miss Ellen Morrison.

She looked ridiculous but very wise. Today she was wearing a suit jacket over a lilac blouse and a full skirt that was gathered at the waist by a wide black patent leather belt. A set of stylish crescent-shaped spectacles was perched on her nose. Her eyes were a cool deep-sea shade. I thought her skin must be stiff like parchment because I had never seen her thick and pink lips smile or frown. She had pinned imitation lilacs in her knotted and twisted up hair.

She waited until the students filed out of the door before asking me to come sit at the front. She asked if I minded if she had a drink. She offered me one but I declined.

I wondered what she wanted to talk to about. I wondered if she had noticed my blankness in class and had interpreted it as being unintelligent.

She leaned back in to her padded chintz-flowered chair and said to me, "You don't fit in here do you?"

"I don't come to school to fit in. I come here to be educated."

Her face twisted in to a quick smile, which half shocked me, and she reached for a pink, plastic folder. Her fingers flittered through several papers and documents. I sat up a little straighter to see what she was looking for. She pulled out a document and passed it to me.

"Here is the exam from last week."

I was disgusted at the red ink strokes. I snorted.

"You gave me a B."

"I was being generous."

She bent her cup of water to her mouth, never taking her eyes of me as I flipped through my examination, quickly reading over my black barbed wire letters and my mind shut like a clam. I couldn't understand why I had failed.

"I gave you a different exam to other students. "

It was practice S.A.T examination.

"In my class you show outstanding intellectual rigor and I bet in all your lessons, your work exemplifies the highest standard of academic excellence."

I blushed and I lost the eye contact with her as my eyes swivelled to her desk. There were several things scattered about. I noticed a brown folder with 'S. Sidle' printed on it in the top right-hand corner.

"Is that my file?" I was growing interested in spite of myself. "What's it say?"

"Well, let's see." She opened it, her long fingers the folder out.

"You attended St. Francis's Elementary School. Your middle school was The Academy of Science and Mathematics followed by a list high schools that you have attended. Do you move around a lot?"

"I used too," I said dryly.

"It also says you have straight A's."

"Until now."

"President of the Physics society; captain of the girl's lacrosse team; co-captain of the tennis club; member of the Bio-Chemistry club, Jujitsu." Ellen Morrison paused. "Seems like you would rather be at here rather than be anywhere else."

I felt weird, sort of airy and light.

"What are you going to do after high school?" she said mildly.

What I always dreamed about. I had in mind getting some big scholarship to a fancy college or university and then a getting a grant to study all over the world, and I'd be a professor and write books with my own theories or write a book about a book on theories and prove everything to be wrong. Or right. I usually had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

"I don't really know," I heard myself say. I guess after everything, my luck just seemed to be bad and therefore there would no chance for me of getting in to the places I wanted to be, no matter how many ladders and cracks in the pavement I avoided.

"Which college are you going go to?" she assumed.

"I hadn't thought about that." I said hollowly.

"Why not?"

"Well, when I graduate, I'm just going to work."

I realised that I had been subconsciously been shifting throughout the conversation and my pressed my nails in to the backs of my hands.

"And then?"

"And then I'll be working."

She pressed her fingers together, the tips going white.

"Just for fun, if you could go to any college, which would it be?"

I didn't need to think about it.

"Harvard. Does that count? It is classed as a university but-."

"Why?"

"Well, I think it would be a freeing experience because I think I would finally feel as though I would be among my equals."

I smiled and said, "And because it had one of the worlds largest libaries."

She licked her lips, tilted her head and her eyes creased softly in the corners.

"But you haven't really thought about it."

I shuck my head and she reeled in to a speech about me consider doing Advanced Placement courses. I already knew what one was but she told me that they would be a replacement for the typical required courses but they are intended to be the equivalent of the first year of college courses and that by doing the A.P, it would enable me to graduate early.

I stood up, summoning any authority that was left in my bones.

"Look, just because I don't want to go to college doesn't make me any less smart. By not going it doesn't mean that I have no depth, no intellect, no interests."

She stood up too; I was only about an inch and a half shorter than her.

"Your future is right on the horizon and I can't understand why you don't want to go to college and reach your potential."

I picked my bag and swung it over my shoulder.

"The horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it." I gave her a coy, quick and bitchy smile. "I would have thought you would have known that."

And I left.


"Sara! Phone!" Alison shouted.

I was laying on my back in the unstable tree house. It had no windows but one large rectangle hole that always made me afraid that if I got too near its mouth I would be spat out on to the grass, weeds and mud. The hole could be covered up with an old brown sack that had been nailed to the top of the frame.

It was my place of solitude and the boys weren't allowed to enter. There was always a waxy smell. I had a ritual whenever I would enter, I would take up the tin that held the matches and lit the candles that burned yellowly and I would kneel, clenching my hands thinking.

Then, if it was a night, I created a compound of weed-killer and sugar and lit it, making it sizzle and glare.

After that, I could do what I wanted.

Today I had found in a candle, a wasps head poking out of the wax prison. The newly lit candle, blood red and as thick as my wrist, contained a still flame and the tiny head within its caldera of wax like the pieces of an alien. As I watched, the flame, an inch behind the wasp's wax-gummed head, freed the antenna from the grease and then came upright from a while before they frazzled. The head started to smoke as the wax dribbled off it, then the fumes caught light and the wasp body, a second flame with in the crater, flickered and crackled as the fire incinerated the insect from the head down until it was a blistered debris floating in a clear pool.

I had thought about everything today as the candle lights danced on my retina. The conversation with Miss Ellen Morrison had triggered off several things in my mind.

If… if I were to go to college a few years early…graduate as valedictorian at age of sixteen… ace my exams…then maybe I could have something in my life that I wanted. I could end up steering my life as if it were my own private car and not bumping around from one place to the next, like a numb trolley bus. After so many years, maybe I would finally be able to react to life.

For so long I had felt very still, very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

"Sara! There is a gentleman on the phone for you."

Gentleman, as if. Actually, several times when he was on the junk, he had been polite and well mannered.

I threw the core of my apple over the fence; it plopped into the mud with a satisfying slurp. I climbed down the tree and ran up to my room, to the phone. It was hidden under Mary's jacket.

It had only taken Adam several miniets to get me raising my voice.

"Look, you mad man!" I shouted in to the green plastic as I gripped it hard and it sent spears of pain up in to my arm.

"I am getting fed up with you calling me and being deliberately awkward."

I felt my face contort.

"Stop playing games with me. Just stop trying to mess with me, okay?" I gasped from breath.

"Sure, Sara," Adam said, uninterested.

"Well," I started to shout again but I controlled myself and quietened down. "Well…just…just don't do that to me. I'm your sister and I was only asking where you were."

"Yeah, okay Sara. I understand," Adam said carelessly.

"So what did you do today?"

"Made something out of an old chainsaw, some spoons and a duck. That was annoying. They duck didn't stay still and the blood got everywhere and it was just a mess."

I could believe he just said that, he was the only person I knew could say something like that without expressing any emotion. I realised there was a lack of a crackling static echo and I asked him, "Are you in a call box?"

"No. I am in somebody's house."

The way he said it would have made anybody who didn't know him think he was being sarcastic.

"What? Whose?" I said.

"I don't know." I could almost hear him shrug. "If you want I could find out for you if you are really that interested."

"No…it doesn't matter."

"Look, Sara," he said tiredly, "It's just someone's holiday house or weekend retreat place or something. I don't know who's it is but like you said, it doesn't matter."

"You've broken in to someone's house?"

"Yeah, so what? Well I didn't have to break in; there was a key under the flowerpot. It's a nice place."

"Aren't you frightened of being caught?"

"Not really. I've got food and there's a shower and a bed and a massive fridge-freezer thing. You could fit a Labrador in there."

"A Labrador?"I screeched.

"Yes. Well, if I had one. I don't but if I did I could have kept it in there, I suppose."

I closed my eyes.

"My teacher thinks I should go to college."

"Oh."

"She thinks that I could do it a few years early."

I waited for him to say some something but he remained silent.

"She thinks that because I do lots of things and know lots of things, she thinks that I could go somewhere. She thinks-."

"She, she, she," he said like a child's nursery rhyme. "How about what you think, Sara?"


I was looking through my notes. My final role was as the last speaker at the graduation ceremony. I didn't see why being first in the class made a difference to my GPA and ACT and SAT scores.

My speech, it was actually written for me, held the common themes, wishing the graduates well in the "real world," that there's no dress rehearsal, no take-home tests, no rough drafts, followed by a cautioning that the world of academe is a special place where they were taught to turn thought in to a fluent knowledge.

Probably being a valedictorian didn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things.

I thought of all my successes I had gained in the last few years and yet they seemed to add up and fade to nothing.


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