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Rose, with her violet eyes and long braids and brown skin, was the class’s defiant beauty, an outright raving scream of delicious difference in this white, white school.
Jenna’s good looks were more subtle. You wouldn’t notice her, behind all that hair, but sometimes, the right lighting, a new angle, and all the awkward facets of her being would collaborate to shock you with their exquisite, pale perfection.
She was beautiful and broken. Immediately I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her everything would be okay.
Though I would’ve been lying.
I waited for the class to fall silent and then pressed play. The gritty, mournful, grating drone of Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ filled the room.
Not all of them would get it. I knew that. Some shuffled. One girl started picking off nail varnish. But Jenna looked up at the blank board, and her eyes began to glisten.
I watched her and I thought about my father, hazy-brained but still nimble-fingered on a piano or guitar. He had given me this: my love of music. And it was so intense that it was hard to untangle the sounds from the feelings.
I think it’s why I felt so close to him when I was little, even though he was hardly there. And why it felt, when I first came back, listening to the Stones with him as he lay in his hospital bed, as though we’d barely been apart. If I could hear music, my dad was there.
Except we had been apart. For years. And now he got muddled putting on his pyjamas.
That first meeting with Jenna, as the song came to an end, I felt tearful myself. But I was worried Jenna might break down completely.
The class was about music and emotion. Even if they thought Radiohead was past it, each student came up with songs to get them in the right mood for a scene. And Jenna’s list for Hamlet was sublime.
So sublime, she started singing it under her breath as she was leaving, and was somewhat distracted as I lifted her phone from the back pocket of her bag. The poor sweet thing used her birthday as her password.
At lunch I read her messages: practical exchanges with Frances and Dan, long discussions of music and books with Rose, and a sordid, heartbreaking, year-long campaign by the rest of her year group to destroy every aspect of Jenna’s being.
The WhatsApp group was called PES6. The profile picture was an oil painting of a man in a high white collar with thick grey mutton chops. It was as though someone had specifically instructed him to try not to look creepy, and God bless him he was trying.
I knew the painting well. It lived in the sixth-form common room.
There were a few sections of chat on school events, but otherwise the group was devoted to the destruction of Jenna. Last year, it had been quite light.
Did anyone see JBB’s epic face plant today?
Does anyone else think JBB’s headphones might actually be hearing aids?
But then it grew an edge.
OMG, Jenna, are you okay? I saw you crying in the toilets.
Complete with a picture of Jenna crying in the toilets.
There was a screenshot of a Google calendar reminder for the event ‘JBB’s Period Starts Today’ that recurred every month, followed by almost every single member posting a picture of a bloody tampon.
Then, in the last few months:
What if her hair is that long EVERYWHERE?
And:
Has anyone noticed that Jenna and Rose never bring packed lunches?
I guess they both like to eat out.
And:
I thought the dinosaurs went extinct?
Beneath it was a picture of Jenna and Rose labelled ‘LICKALOTAPUSS’.
