new

I don’t say a word now – not a word – but I know everyone hates me
I can see the hatred streaming at me like a river of darkness on my social media pages. Sharp words scream silently into my silent online world. The only world I live in. Every now and then I post a picture of my favourite tree. It is a low branched spreading oak that I sometimes walk to from my gate.

It starts at my new school. I don’t know any of the girls that pitch and toss around me in the swirling sea of new faces. The first thing that happens is a girl says
‘We’re sending you to Coventry!’
I don’t really pay attention but as my day unfolds get it.
A whole week where no one in my year speaks to me.
If I ask if I can play with them I get no reply. They just turn away as if I don’t exist.
I am shunned by 75 girls. There were two other classes in my year-no one speaks so I stop speaking.
One girl from another class says as looked over my head
‘You suck up to teachers and walks away.’
At 11 years I don’t understand why talking to teachers is a bad thing. I like my teachers.
I begin to sit on a low wall and hope that some one will ask me to join them.
I watch others as I eat my school bun as slowly as possible. These days it could be taken for eating mindfully.

My most vivid memory is after morning assembly everyone in our year is asked to stay in the hall. The teachers leave us on our own. It is most mysterious. Gradually we realise there is no one in charge while we wait to be given the reason we have been kept back from class.
I begin to realise as the benches on my side of the hall are getting empty
All the girls on my side of the hall have moved to the benches on the other side.
Perhaps, I think, we are all meant to sit on one side so I move over too.
At which point in ones and twos and threes and fours they all migrate to the other side.
So I move over too and they do it all over again.
Two teachers arrive and move my fellow pupils to be more evenly distributed in the hall.
We were all asked if we have ordered some maths books on a school order form. No one says a word as the illegibly signed form is passed from hand to hand. No one admits anything and we are told that the person who did this will be found. Nothing further happens about the maths books form but I am for ever haunted by the social dislocation I feel that morning.
As I go to school put on invisible armour. Sometimes I practice swinging from the oak tree.
As soon as I leave school I dye my hair and have it chopped.
Looking as unlike myself as possible I start my new blog influencer page.
My Appslyblog does funky fake advertising for fake apps.
I have plastic surgery on my jaw line and get some apple size Dolly Parton boobs.
My online TV my audience grows. Anna Appsly becomes a media sensation!
Until the online world puts me right back in that hall as the vitriol of the troll feeds keep coming.
These days I never leave my bedroom except to walk to the oak tree.