Chapter 2.2: Pulmonaria Officinalis – Transformation

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A few days after our talk, Father dropped me off at a miniature modelling workshop. He offered to wait for me, in case something went wrong, but I insisted he leave. My stomach was rife with butterflies, and his presence would only worsen the feeling. I kept fiddling with my device, taking it out and putting it back in, hoping it could handle all the sounds from the class.

The teacher, whose name vanished from my mind as soon as she said it, smiled brightly at me and shook my hand vigorously.

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“We’re gonna have to go in right now, I’m afraid”, she informed father as I waved him off. He smiled before he left, yet the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Be careful”, he yelled after me. “If anything happens, call me.”

I didn’t turn around, fearing I would lose my resolve.

The teacher grabbed my hand tightly and squeezed it a little as we walked to the classroom.

“There’s another girl of your age there”, she said. “I bet the two of you will be good friends.”

“Why do you think that?”

I thought back to all the children I had met before. A lot of them were my age and I didn’t like them. I crinkled my nose. Snotty, immature, spoiled children.

“She kept asking me whether another girl enrolled or not. She was very excited when she heard somebody finally did. She’d been waiting for months!”

“Maybe I won’t like her.”

“I think you will. She’s the sweetest girl you’ll ever meet.”

“Maybe”, I said. “Is she smart?”

“See for yourself”, she said and opened the door to the classroom.

It smelled faintly like wood and hot plastic and paint and glue and styrofoam. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the mix of scents, scanning the faces around me. Most of the other students were at least five or six years older than me. The only person my age was a beaming olive-skinned girl, too skittish to sit down for more than a few seconds at a time.

“Good morning”, said the teacher, and a few pupils followed suit. “We have a new colleague starting today!”

A few murmured something and the young girl smiled even wider. I clasped my hands tighter over my brand new supplies, my fingers clammy and cold.

The teacher pointed to a long table in front of the girl. “You can go sit next to Ixora.” The name floated in the air, enigmatic, alluring. Eeks-ora. I murmured it to myself, jealous for a split second that my name was so common while hers was so exotic.

“What if I don’t like her?” I whispered.

Ixora looked loud and exhausting. I mentally compared her to an over-active gerbil. She waved me over from her seat, and a new worry arose into my mind: what if she distracted me from work, and I would be unable to become the best in the class, as I was sure I could become in the proper conditions?

“Tough”, the teacher replied and went on to check a project, without as much as looking back at me, to make sure I made it to the desk.

I made my way through rows of rough-looking wooden tables covered with plastic sheets. As I walked, I tried to steal glances at projects made by the rest of the students. Cottages, villas, and greenhouses, with varying degrees of detail, nestled among swabs of cement and furniture fragments. I smirked, thinking of the beautiful operas I had been designing in my mind for a week.

“Hi!” my promised friend said when I got closer, her voice high and obnoxiously audible. “I’m Ixora!”

“I’m Celia.” I shook her hand weakly. She didn’t look that smart from afar and even less from up close. I was unmeasurably disappointed.

“Miss said you were ten as well”, said Ixora.

“Yeah.”

“That’s so cool! Everybody else is a lot older and they don’t want to work with me.”

Oh, I realised suddenly. I was meant to be her babysitter. I was sure to let father know that I wasn’t treated properly. For now, I needed to put her in her place.

“What if I don’t, either?” I asked, unwrapping the plastic from a new set of pencils bought specifically for this occasion.

“Well, that’s up to you”, she replied with a shrug and finally sat down to work.

I sat as far away from her as I could, shuffling awkwardly on the bench. The wooden slats were tough and unpleasant and I missed the cushioned benches I was used to.

The teacher came after a while to give me some instructions. “Don’t worry about getting too much done today”, she told me. “Just get used to the materials, decide on a project, and make the foundation. Do you know what you want to do?”

I nodded, fingers tingling with anticipation.

“You can ask me for help at any point, ok? And maybe Ixora can also guide you along the way.”

“She doesn’t look like she can help me”, I said, eyeing Ixora. She looked all prim and proper in her perfect golden dress, mixing paints on her little palette, pretending she hadn’t heard me. “No offence.”

“Celia, if you can’t work with other people, you won’t get anywhere in life”, said the teacher. “So I suggest you drop the attitude, apologise to Ixora, who – by the way – is extremely talented, and get on with your assignment. We don’t have time for divas here, okay?”

My cheeks burned, flush with anger. Some older students seated in front of me sniggered, their shoulders hunched to hide their faces. I was so close to losing my mind. With each breath, I was closer.

“Stop huffing and come pick your materials”, said miss. ”We don’t have all day.”

I closed my eyes and calmed my breath, then followed her to her desk, to pick a small bundle of materials she had prepared in advance.

“I know you’re a sweet girl, Celia, ” miss said while we were out of earshot of anybody else. “Act like it, yeah? Make some friends. Relax! We’re all family here. Ok?”

I loathed her. My revenge would come in the shape of my future success, so tremendous that she would rue the day she berated me and talked down to me. For now, I had to survive, so I could reach my full potential and crush all of them, one by one. I had done it before, I could do it again.

“Sure thing, miss”, I smiled, my lips pressed over clenched teeth.

I grabbed my bungle and returned to the table I was sharing with the other little girl. She was already working, focused on – and I hated to admit it – a very beautiful Chinese roof.

“How did you do that?” I asked matter-of-factly.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t possibly know how to help you.”

“Fine, don’t help me. I’ll tell Miss that you’re mean to me.”

“Please do.”

Obviously, I didn’t. It was okay, however, because I was smart and determined, and I would build a house by myself, without any help whatsoever. In this class, I was alone. As usual.

Ever since I got the idea of designing buildings, I knew I wanted to build an athenaeum. Those sniffling simpletons probably didn’t even know what an athenaeum was.

I drew a large rectangle on the cardboard I found in the bundle, adding details, columns, writing the name on the front in large, looping letters. When I finished, I smiled at the drawing, satisfied with the result.

I licked my lips, momentarily stumped about how to proceed with the foundation. I glanced in Ixora’s direction. She was gently blowing on a portion of the roof she had just painted, fully focused on her project. With a crack of my knuckles, I decided I would figure out the next step myself. I took the plastic sheet I saw everybody used for the base and drew a large rectangle, covering almost the entire surface.

For the remainder of the class, I cut and pasted smaller pieces of plastic on the edges of the larger rectangle, mixing the cement in the laughably small bucket I had been given – I had to mix three different batches so I could have enough! – and pouring the slimy concoction in the rectangular space. It spilt a little in the corners, which caused a wave of stifled laughter from the cretins who didn’t have anything better to do, but I fixed it with adhesive tape. It was perfect.

Only the perfection didn’t last long. The plastic walls caved in, letting the runny cement spill unrestricted over the drawn edges, onto the sheet, onto the table, onto the floor, onto the bench, onto my hands and trousers and Ixora’s dress, and I just snapped, in the middle of the workshop, and screamed in frustration.

It was a disaster. I wasn’t good at this. As I looked down on the mess I had created, wires and brushes and cloths covered in the cement that had a horrible consistency and would dry quickly since it was in such a thin layer and still running on the floor. Although now miss was cleaning it up while yelling at me, I don’t know what, I can’t hear anything but the children laughing, laughing, laughing at me.

I bowed my head down, biting my lips. My clothes were stained, bearing the mark of failure, grey and unbearable. I couldn’t move or think or breathe. I had lost the only thing I would ever be good at and all that was left of me was an empty husk, a shell of a person, who would never experience or bring joy to anybody.

“Get out of the puddle!”

The instruction came to me from a distant plane, as if somebody yelled it from far away. It took me a moment to register the meaning of the words, but by then an older boy had already pushed me to the side and everybody was looming over my bench, cleaning the mess I’d made just minutes – no, seconds, prior. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move, immobilized by shame. Ixora leapt out of her sport and approached me, laughing at me, mocking me, defiant in her cement-stained dress.

“It can happen to anybody”, she told me.

I felt the condescending tone in her voice. It can happen to anybody like me, she had implied. Not to her, because she was cautious and knew what she was doing.

“I’m never coming back here”, I whispered, mostly to myself. A calming promise, only partly intended for the others. A plea to just let me go, because I had had enough, and I wouldn’t return to their territory again.

Stop looking at me like that. Keep your laughter for when I’m gone.

But they didn’t understand or were too cruel to care, their rambunctious laughing filling the room, maybe even the building. My hearing device was bursting with it, and I was convinced it would pop from the racket.

I couldn’t stand it.

I plucked the headband it was on from my head and shoved it in my pocket, fumbling to find the OFF button. Then I dashed for the door, leaving behind everything else I had brought in. They could have it. I just needed to get out.

My mad, tearful run came to a halt when I took a left into a dead end, but I didn’t even want to look for the exit anymore. I just wanted to be alone. I dropped on the cold, unfinished floor like a bag of bricks and let everything out, all the tears accumulated within me for the past two (or was it three?) months.

I only snapped out of it when a hand touched my shoulder, like a dream. It was Ixora, carrying a cloth and a bucket, staring at me wide-eyed.

“I don’t need your pity”, I informed her, through my ugly, tear-snot-hiccupy cry.

She said something inaudible and started wiping my jeans with a stained, grey cloth. I fumbled with my pocket until I got my gadget out and turned it back on.

“Geez, you’re so dramatic”, she said, dipping her cloth into a bucket of water and went back to wiping my jeans.

“Leave me alone.”

“Do you want to be a statue from now on? I need to finish wiping you.”

I snorted in laughter, despite myself.

“Come on, it’s not that bad. It happened to one of the boys last month.”

“They were mocking me”, I mumbled.

She shook her head. “No, they were just joking around. They’re always noisy.”

She finished wiping my jeans and dropped the cloth into the bucket of water. Her dress, a gorgeous golden piece, was darkened by a large grey area of dried cement in her lap.

“Sorry I ruined your dress.”

“Yeah, you should be” She looked down at the stain. “I liked it a lot.”

Guilt still gnawed on my insides, but I didn’t appreciate my apology not being accepted more graciously.

“It’s your fault too, you know”, I snapped. “You don’t come to modelling in your best clothes and without an apron or something.”

“That’s true as well”, she said dreamily. “Let’s go back.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Are you gonna live here, in this corner?”

“If I have to.” I was slowly getting back to being myself, the last slivers of shame swallowed.

“You’re funny”, she giggled, getting up. “Shame you don’t want us to be friends.” Ixora picked up the bucket and waved goodbye.

“Maybe before next week’s lesson I’ll come to visit you in your beautiful new home”, she said. “Maybe put a carpet in here or something. Or maybe not, the rats will chew it up anyway.”

I squinted, my teeth clenched.

“Be sure to serve me butter cookies and tea, to make up for my dress.”

“Shut up! Leave me alone!”

“See you later, then.”

“No!” I yelled, but she was already on her way back, hopping and dangling the bucket, staining the cement floor with splashes of water.

I had to return to the classroom, to retrieve my ruined materials and say goodbye to my useless teacher, then wait for father.

“I hate it and I’m never going back there”, I informed him as soon as we walked out the classroom door.

“Ok.”

“You agree with that?” I asked.

“Yes. Anything for my little ray of sunshine.”

The little ray of sunshine looked up, her face scrunched up almost as bad as her t-shirt was. “The kids were mean and stupid.”

“Well, it’s over.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “No use crying over spilt milk. Or cement, in this case.”

“Father!”

In the parking lot, Ixora leaned against the door of a large black car, talking excitedly with who I presumed to be her mother. I quickened my pace, trying to get to our car before she noticed me. She did, however, and waved and I had to wave back because her mother was looking. Jerk.

“Was she one of the mean kids?”

Crap, father had seen me wave.

“Not really”, I mumbled.

“Then how about you spend some more time with her?”

“I said I’m not going back.”

“Not in class, at home. We can invite her in for a play-date.”

And I really wanted to say no, but my mouth didn’t listen to me. “Yeah, we can do that one day. But I’m not going back to that class.”

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