Bad Day

Annabel Rose dragged her tattered payless school shoes along the cracked and, altogether too dry, footpath of Marrickville Rd. It had been a very bad day and it had all started with Ms Riley in first period. Ms Riley took English and she hated it when students didn't do their homework. She took it as a personal insult and would spend most of the lesson trying to think up the best possible punishment for each poor student whose dog got a little to hungry or whose calendars got a little to full for them to handle. Annabel had always had this idea that Ms Riley had had no friends in high school and had only become a teacher to make the children of the next generation suffer as much as she had.

Anyway, Annabel had been looking forward to lunch all week because she was supposed to be going to America on student exchange for three months and her friends were throwing her a goodbye party. Therefore, the night before, she had been so busy planning, how she was going to wear her hair and what makeup she was going to put on, that she had completely forgotten about the large, rather weighty, assessment task due the next day.

When it came time to hand in the assessments, she had panicked and made some feeble excuse involving basket ball, a hospital and a broken nose. She might have pulled it off except for the fact that, not only did she not have a broken nose, but they had been given the assessment task a month ago, which, according to Ms Riley, was plenty of time to complete a "measly Feature article on the prosecution of black people in America in the 1950s"

As per usual Ms Riley decided to spend as long as possible choosing a punishment and probably would have settled to make Annabel stay and do her assessment task after school only to get zero anyway, if, just before she left for recess, her best friend, Julia hadn't run in the room yelling for all to hear,

"Annabel don't forget lunch, we don't want to have to eat all that food on our own".

Ms Riley, ever in search of the perfect punishment, looked at Annabel with a truly evil look in her eyes and asked what it was that was happening at lunch that desperately required her attention. Knowing what was coming, Annabel prepared herself to make up a truly believable story which would stop Ms Riley from giving her lunch detention, but Julia beat her to the punch.

"We're throwing her a goodbye party because she's going to America for three months". Julia, who had been too excited to take a breath through her short, life ruining speech, gulped for air.

The gleam in Ms Riley's eyes got even brighter as she put together her plan to make Annabel's life a living hell.

"Well, well, well. Looks like I've just found the perfect punishment for your assessment task. Or should I say, lack there of".

Julia looker at her with utter horror.

"You're going to keep her in at lunch?"

"Yes", she replied shortly, "I will see you at one Miss Rose". She turned on her heal and strode out of the room with a big smirk on her face.

Annabel's shoulders curled, her eyes dropped, and she looked utterly defeated. She looked up at Julia and glared at her. As far as she was concerned it was all her fault and nothing Julia said or did would help her.

"Great going genius, just what I needed." And she stalked out of the room.

It had all gone down hill from there.

In third period she got told off by her Italian teacher, Mr. Genoble, for talking during the lesson, in forth she was told off by her textiles teacher for breaking a needle on the sewing machine and of course she had also got told off by her friends' because of the party.

By the end of the day Annabel felt like dirt. Worse then dirt even, if there was such a thing, and all she wanted was to go home. She couldn't go home though because she knew that Ms Riley would have phoned home and her mother would be waiting for her in her bright orange interrogation seat at the kitchen table, arms crossed, ready for an argument. Annabel didn't think she could face that right now. So, instead of facing her mother, her father, and even her brother she decided to take the long way home and stop at Macca's on Marrickville Road.

She didn't much like the food there; it always made her feel horribly fat and quite sick afterwards, but it had a great atmosphere if she was feeling blue. Probably because she went there with her friends a lot as a child and it still held a lot of good memories.

She walked slowly across the sticky tiled floor, pretending to try and decide what to get, but she already knew. She had ordered the same thing as long as she could remember coming here, a medium big Mac meal, with diet coke and a hot apple pie.She got her money out and walked towards the counter, going for the skinniest, quickest, male server she could. She did this because, after many years of trial and error, she had discovered that the thinner the person the more chips they put in the cup. The fat ones usually only half filled it because they were worried about their own body image and didn't like to watch others pig out when they knew they couldn't. Most of them didn't even realise they did it, but they all did. This went for most girls as well.

After ordering from acute boy, of about 17, Annabel found a lone table in the upstairs area and ate away her sorrows. The food tasted like cardboard in her mouth but at the moment she didn't care. She wasn't even thinking about her food, she just wanted tochew on something as she drowned herself in self pity.

She left five minutes later, still depressed; the only difference was, now she felt sick and fat as well. She looked at all the beautiful clothes in the shop windows and dreamed of herself in them somewhere spectacular. The shops on Marrickville Rd were all Vietnamese, and, though she knew she wasn't fat by any means, she knew she would not be able to squeeze into anything here.

She turned off Marrickville Rd and into Illawarra Rd. Illawarra Rd had a great number of employment help places, supporting names like "work solutions" and "employment plus", and shoddy furniture shops that displayed boxes of do it yourself chairs and tables. Annabel prayed that she would never end up there.

She got off Illawarra Rd as fast as possible and moved into Tunchy Ln. a squashy back lane that, even though it looked like all those ally ways in horror films, felt like home to Annabel. She walked up past the large green commercial rubbish bins. The tall, dirty buildings looming on either side.

That was when it happened!