My Brilliant Life and Other Disasters

by Catherine Wilkins

  “Don’t be like this, Jessica,” implores Lewis.

  “Look, we’re not going to be blackmailed by you, Jess,” says Joshua. “We all contribute loads to this comic. It wouldn’t be nothing without you.”

  “Fine then. I’ll just go, shall I?”

  “It’s up to you, but we’re not backing down from a democracy just because you’ve had a jealousy fit,” he says. Harsh!

  Don’t cry, don’t cry, I tell myself. I have to get out of here. I don’t even do up my bag, I just run off, carrying it awkwardly. It doesn’t make for the classiest getaway but that’s the least of my problems now.

  I manage to make it into a toilet cubicle before I start howling tears of rage and sadness. How am I back here again? In a toilet, crying? How has this happened? Eventually my sobs subside, and I start trying to calm down.

  How has Scarlett got this far into destroying the glorious cartoon comic I was a part of, that made me think anything in the world was possible? You know what? She’s not worth it, I sniff to myself.

  But somehow she’s succeeded. Despite not deserving to. This thought nearly makes me start crying again. No. I’m going to rise above it all. Somehow. Eventually. I blow my nose and wash my face.

  Maybe Natalie’s right and the comic had started to go to my head a bit. Well, I don’t need people laughing at my cartoons to feel good about myself, like Scarlett obviously does. I’ve got real friends. Non “showbiz” ones, like Natalie, who like me for who I am. I wait a few more minutes till my face looks more normal and head back to my form room.

  “Hey, Jess,” says Nat happily. Yay! Someone’s pleased to see me!

  “I want a word with you,” says Amelia.

  “Hey!” I smile at Natalie. I forget I still haven’t done up my bag, so as I heave it on to my desk the contents go everywhere. Natalie and Amelia help me pick everything up. It’s mainly paper. Amelia seems distracted by some of it, then remembers she’s annoyed with me.

  “Natalie tells me you don’t believe we’re going to get the Cool For Cats team to write back to us,” she says.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So how dare you call my cousin Scarlett a liar!” she says. “My cousin is amazing and you owe her an apology.”

  HA! Amazing. Even if Scarlett apologised to me right now, that wouldn’t change anything. “Well, it will be a cold day in hell before that happens,” I tell her. “Your cousin Scarlett is one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life. And I was trying to do you a favour, but whatever.”

  “Oh?” Amelia is incensed. “You were doing me a favour, were you? You think honesty is so important? Well, maybe I’ll do you a favour right now, shall I? Help you stop being such a hypocrite?”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, confused.

  Amelia suddenly flings a piece of paper under Nat’s nose. “Here you go, Jessica. Let’s show Natalie this letter that just fell out of your bag, shall we? Perhaps you can explain that for us?”

  “What the––” begins Nat. I look at the piece of paper. It’s the letter I wrote to the official wildlife person and then never posted – because I had a brilliant secret surprise idea instead.

  “You didn’t post your letter?” cries Nat. “Were you ever going to tell me?” Her voice rises, sounding hurt. “We’re waiting for someone to write back, who is never going to?”

  “It’s not what you think,” I say. But I sort of don’t have the energy to deal with this right now. “Look, Nat, I’ve had a really bad day, I can explain exactly what––”

  “Did you send another letter to this guy then? Was this just a practice?” Nat interrupts.

  “Well, no, but––”

  “I rest my case,” says Amelia smugly.

  “You can’t rest your case. You don’t know anything about the case,” I snap, annoyed.

  “I knew this would happen,” says Nat. (What did she know would happen?) “You’re slack and make loads of mistakes because you’re too distracted by your stupid ego-trip comic.”

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about that any more,” I murmur.

  “Yeah, you’re right. I should just give up now and resign myself to this F, shouldn’t I?” says Nat sarcastically.

  “No, look, Nat, I have a secret surprise about this.” I’m just going to have to tell her and hope for the best.

  “What secret surprise?”

  “OK. I didn’t want to tell you until … OK. I did send a letter.”

  “Oh no.” Some kind of penny drops inside Nat’s head. “To who?”

  “To Horace King, the wildlife bird guy,” I say.

  Natalie does a dramatic yet sarcastic face-palm movement.

  I continue anyway. “I figured no one else would write to him, so there was a good chance he’d reply.” (And I wanted to cheer my dad up into the bargain.) “I didn’t tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise when a cool letter just showed up.” (Also, I thought there was a chance you’d react like this, I don’t add.) “So … uh … surprise!” I finish dejectedly.

  “And has he written back?” asks Amelia cruelly.

  “Not yet,” I reply defiantly.

  “Oh, Jessica,” says Nat sadly. “He’s never going to write back! What were you thinking? You’ve ruined our project!”

  “Well, you weren’t letting me make any of the decisions!” I fire back spontaneously. (Where’s this coming from?) “Everything’s on your terms. We’ve done the whole project how you wanted it. I can’t even tell you anything without you getting angry. What about what I want?”

  Then suddenly Nat looks really angry. “I wish I’d never gone with you!” And she storms out of the form room. For the second time in two days.

  “Favour repaid,” smiles Amelia.

  Amazingly, I don’t burst into tears.

  I’m not saying it’s the worst Tuesday anyone’s ever had, but–– No, wait, actually I am saying that. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Worst Tuesday EVER. Officially. I hate everyone and everything.

  I kick stones aggressively down the path as I mooch my way home after school. The frustrating thing is, I don’t actually feel like I’ve done anything that wrong, so I don’t know what I can change to make it better.

  Normally I can at least formulate a plan. This time I’ve got nothing. I mean, OK, I didn’t send that letter to the official person but I did it for the right reasons. I’m still brilliant, and even brilliant people make mistakes. In a way Natalie is lucky I’m so brilliant I can admit this. Ohhhh.

  Is it true? Have I become unbearably arrogant? Did I overreact to the whole Scarlett cartoon thing? I mean, if I had less ego I could have just graciously let her be on the cover and I’d still be in the comic … ohhhhh. No, there’s a principle at stake. She’s evil. They’ll learn.

  I wish I had a time machine. Then I could go back in time and post that letter. And not go to Amelia’s sleepover, so that I’d never meet Scarlett. I wonder how far off time travel is? I doubt it will be ready in time to help me with this.

  “Here’s your capitalist washing,” says my mum, handing Tammy a neatly folded pile of clothes. “Muggins here finished it off for you.”

  “And muggins here made cauliflower cheese,” my dad pipes up, putting a sizzling dish in the centre of the table.

  “And muggings here laid the table,” adds Ryan, sitting down.

  Really, I think we need to eradicate the nickname muggins, not spread it round further. I sit down. Mind you, if everyone uses it like this, maybe it will lose all sense of meaning and my mum will have to think of something else to call herself.

  I mean, if my mum is just trying out the nickname muggins, that’s fine. It’s her business. As long as she eventually realises it’s annoying and stops. But I still think it’s attention-seeking behaviour.

  “This looks pretty good, Bert,” says my aunt, in a rare moment of praise for my dad, also sitting down at the table.

  Once all the food is dished up, Ryan clears his throat, a bit dramat
ically. “I have an announcement,” he says.

  “Well, don’t let your food get cold,” says my dad.

  Ryan ignores this lacklustre response, pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it for everyone to see. “This is very serious,” he says. “Mummy, please take this and read it aloud,” he instructs pompously.

  Curiously, my mum starts reading. “Petishon?” She raises an eyebrow at his spelling. “We the undersigned… What is this, Ryan?”

  “It’s a petition,” says Ryan. “You have to read it, Mummy.”

  My mum dutifully starts to read. “We the undersigned hereby declare that the policy of purchasing only Value food should be amended to allow for the inclusion of real Kit Kats. As you can see, 50% of the household disagree with the current policy and demand CHANGE.”

  Auntie Joan and Tammy look like they are trying not to laugh. My mum hands the paper to my dad. Ryan looks at them expectantly. “I’m effecting action, like Tammy, and just doing it, like Auntie Joan,” he explains.

  “And Nike,” I can’t help but add.

  “This is what we anti-capitalists call ‘Fat Cats marketing to children so that they recognise branding and pester their parents for it’,” says Tammy smugly. “They actually do call it pester power. Looks like there’s a downside to mass corporations after all. Who knew?”

  I suppose Tammy must have been finding it difficult to keep up her various campaigns and maintain access to the washing machine, so this is a nice little gift for her.

  “Please can we have Kit Kats now?” asks Ryan.

  “Well, Ryan.” My dad is the first to find his voice. “Your mother and I will review the current policy and get back to you. How about that?”

  “Spoken like a true politician,” remarks Tammy.

  “What does that mean?” asks Ryan.

  “They’ll think about it,” I say.

  “Nooo, now,” whines Ryan, but wisely sensing this particular battle is over, he starts eating his dinner.

  I’m moping in my room when Ryan comes in later, wanting to play Lego pirates again. I couldn’t be less in the mood, but I’m aware I turned him down last time he wanted to play, so I say yes and then slump on to the floor while he goes and gets them all.

  It’s a continuation of the same story with the first mate Clyde being kidnapped, but now someone else – an impostor – has pretended to be Clyde, so he can infiltrate the gang and mess things up.

  I start to get quite interested in this storyline. “What’s going to happen, Ryan?” I ask, slightly more on the edge of my seat than I realised.

  “There’ll be an ambush here, and then we fire these cannon here, and—”

  “No, I mean with Clyde and the impostor. Does it have a happy ending?”

  “Oh,” Ryan shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What happens?” I demand, a tiny bit too intensely, now I think about it. But how can he be so callous about these Lego pirates’ lives?

  “Oh, well, Calzo the impostor gives himself away,” explains Ryan. “Not yet though. But he’s bad at pretending, so he ruins it. First we need to do this ambush––”

  “I love you, Ryan,” I blurt out. I can’t express better than that how this Lego pirate storyline is music to my ears.

  Seriously, considering how Ryan spends most of his time behaving like a hyperactive hooligan, his moments of quiet wisdom are all the more amazing.

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Ryan dismissively, as if that goes without saying.

  We play Lego pirates and I take particular delight when Calzo is finally made to walk the plank. Ha! Yeah, take that, Scarlett/Calzo, I think.

  I haven’t gone insane, honest. But there’s just something very calming about a story where a bad guy gets their comeuppance (and is eaten by Lego sharks) when a similar (more cartoon and less Lego-based) thing has happened to you.

  I just feel better. I feel like I have things in perspective more. Let them all follow Scarlett to this shop. Let her carry on. She’ll blow her cover and accidentally reveal all the lies she’s been telling sooner or later. She’s not even a particularly good liar. Give her enough rope to hang herself and let her get on with it. I’ll be fine.

  When Ryan leaves to get ready for bed, and I’m no longer distracted by pirate vengeance, I realise I’m still upset about Natalie though. And I don’t think Ryan will have any good solutions to that problem. Hmmm, I sigh.

  I sit at my desk and go through all the work we’ve done so far. I feel sad as I look at the pages of all the leaves we correctly identified, and the things we did well together. How did it come to this?

  Finally I come to the chapter in the book on wildlife animals. There’s a picture of a badger. I like this badger for some reason. It looks quite cute, and yet kind of serious. I start reading the chapter.

  Wow, it turns out that badgers are really cool. Well, you know, maybe not cosmic exactly, but certainly not to be messed with. When protecting their young, badgers can fight off much larger animals, like wolves and bears! And they can run at nearly twenty miles per hour for short periods of time. That’s really quite fast.

  There’s been debate about hunting badgers over the years. They’ve been protected by the 1935 Cruelty To Animals Act and the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act, but now the book says something about how that might change again. I can’t believe anyone would want to hurt these little creatures. I wish they could always be protected by some laws.

  I look at the picture again. The badger is looking at the camera. This might sound weird, but it’s kind of like the badger is looking at me. I start feeling like I have some kind of connection with it. Like I, too, have been hunted for sport, by Amelia and, to a lesser extent, Scarlett. (Maybe I have gone mad after all?)

  We haven’t drawn any pictures at all yet for the project, under Natalie’s strict instructions. I could always draw this badger. I mean, we are going to need some pictures. I know my reputation is that I get carried away with stuff and do too much drawing before we’ve finished the proper work (or in my case usually before I’ve really started the actual work). But we’ve kind of done quite a lot of the work this time.

  Also, Natalie isn’t talking to me, so it’s not like I can ask her opinion on it anyway. Ohhh. She said she wished she’d never gone with me. Well, you know what? I wish I’d never gone with her. I had other offers (admittedly from people that I’ve now also fallen out with). Hmmm. Maybe the problem is me.

  No. It isn’t. I’m nice and brilliant, and I mean well. And if other people can’t see it, that’s their problem. I suddenly feel angry and vindicated. Picturing Natalie telling me not to do this for some reason spurs me on further.

  And you know what else? Natalie was so worried about “pulling something out of the bag” to compete with Amelia, some kind of big finish. Well, I am going to make this really big. Yeah. I’m going to draw a sarcastically big badger. That’ll show her.

  I open my new giant pad of paper, the same size as the one I used to draw the giant Easter bonnet last term. I sit and look at the badger a bit longer, soaking in every detail. And then I start drawing.

  An hour later, I realise that it’s going to take longer than I thought. Because I want to do the badger picture so carefully it ends up taking me a really long time to just sketch out the shape with my pencil. I want it to be really good. I’m not going to finish this tonight. My hand is starting to hurt. I’ll have to finish it tomorrow.

  But as I sit back and look at what I’ve done I feel really pleased. It’s the most accurately-like-the-thing-I’m-trying-to-draw thing I have ever succeeded in drawing. I don’t want to rush it and ruin it. I want it to be as brilliant as it can be.

  Then it dawns on me that this picture is no longer an attempt to get revenge on Natalie. That might have been how it started, and that energy might have fuelled it in the beginning, but somewhere along the way I started caring about making a brilliant picture for the sake of it.

  I’m not even completely sure what I was think
ing about when I was doing some of it. But I feel a lot calmer and happier and more complete now that I have finished half of it. I feel lighter. Like a weight has been lifted. Maybe I’m not mad after all. This really is how drawing makes me feel.

  I’m so glad drawing is my secret super-power. And Scarlett can never take that away from me. Maybe it’s time to put operation-calm-down-and-stop-overreacting into motion. Maybe.

  Wednesday is pretty uneventful. Natalie ignores me and I hang out with Cherry and Shantair at break time and lunch. I avoid everyone from the comic and they avoid me. I assume. I mean, I’m not looking for them, so it’s hard to tell for sure.

  I can’t help but think that not speaking is unhelpful when you need to get a wildlife project done though. So I decide to ignore Nat ignoring me, and at the end of lunch I go up to her and ask how we are going to divide up the remaining chapters in our finished project book (and also how we are going to work on the presentation if we aren’t even speaking).

  She just gives me this look and says, “Do whatever you want. You will anyway.” Which is even more unhelpful in some ways.

  But at least it gives me some annoyance to channel when I get home from chess club and finish my badger picture. It looks amazing now. I think it might be the best picture I’ve ever drawn.

  I even start wondering if maybe it is a valid contribution to the project after all. Part of me thinks that by doing this (and doing it well) maybe I am helping rectify the damage I caused. Maybe Natalie will even be slightly impressed. It makes me feel better, like I am contributing in some way, and making the project less of a disaster.

  I’m more nervous as I enter school on Thursday, because I know today is when the second issue of the comic is published. I assume everyone went round to Lewis’s last night to help fold all the printouts in half. I kind of don’t want to see this issue of my ex-comic.