Hey! Here is a snippet of my NaNoWriMo novel Snapshots of Sophie - enjoy!!
“There was nothing
more she could do. She had done it all before. Nothing worked - at least not
for her anyway. No matter how hard she tried or how industrious she was there
was no denying it. Things had gotten so bad that she felt she was a total failure.
Only one possible solution lay before her now – one possible way out of her
current crisis and onto a calm and peaceful future.
Death was her only
option. Her friend, confidante and soul mate. She felt it now more than ever before
– this was in fact the way, the truth, the light. There was nothing anyone
could do to stop her.
It was already done
anyway – too late for even her to interfere. Nobody could get in the way of
this now. The deed was done. The outcome set in stone. Finally, she would be
free of everything that was troubling her, everything that kept her awake at
night and kept her from getting a good night’s rest. Everything. It would all
be over once and for all.”
Sophie sat perfectly still gazing into her bedroom mirror in
an absorbed but also slightly bored manner. She took in her pale and
interesting skin, her deep blue eyes outlined dramatically with the blackest
eyeliner, mascara and shadow she could find. Her stare lingered on her pale
pink lips and on the black velvet choker encircling her delicate neck. Not a
bad look over all – pale and interesting, distant and aloof. She felt she had a
regal air to her that could rival even the snootiest of girls. She lifted her
chin experimentally, practicing looking down her little button nose. Yes, she
felt she did that well and that she could easily be a high society lady if only
she had been born into that life.
As it was, she had been born into the most ordinary and dull
life imaginable. The feeling of clanging disappointment she felt with each and
every day was almost nauseating at times. Why should she have been born into
this mind numbing dullness? Why should she have to continue her life this way
when every fibre of her being was telling her it was all wrong?
Sophie sighed and put down her little silver fountain pen.
She looked at the words she had written with a cool detachment. They weren’t
bad she supposed. They pretty much summed up the typical teenage cry for help –
the mention of death and the hint of suicide. This should keep her teachers
occupied worrying about her so that she could focus on more important things
herself. Like how she was going to change her life into what she knew it should
be. She could feel the impatience eating away at her. The need and urgent
desire to get things moving in the right direction were too much to bear. She
wanted to be here perfecting her look and writing her heart out. But the world
(and by the world she meant her mother) dictated that she had to go to school
instead. As if somehow that was way more important.
As she worked her way around her room, pulling on the
tortuous uniform she was forced wear (blazer, tie, skirt – all in the most
awful of colours) she thought of how different her life would be if she had
been born a high society lady. If she had no school to go to but a governess to
teach her singing, art and sewing. How very much more at home she would be
under those circumstances. Staying at home in the country manor house, having
lessons alone each day, learning to sit and stand and walk correctly. How to
enter a room and command attention from the right people. Not how to do
equations and how to boil an egg on a Bunsen burner. The mind boggled for her –
it really did to be honest. How could she expect to grow up a lady when she was
learning things that really were for boys to know not for a young woman of
substance.
She pulled on her clunky school shoes – which had to be that
way for health and safety reasons her teachers told her. She just looked so
very ugly to her eyes. Not at all the way she wanted to look and be perceived.
Sophie sighed once more. She felt that she was putting on her armour ready to
face the world. That she had to pretend to be someone she really wasn’t just in
order to fit in and be accepted and most of all left alone.
She hadn’t always done such a good job of hiding things. She
had at one time been very open about how she felt with everyone. She told her
mother, her friends and anyone who would listen how she felt. How much of an
outsider she felt. That way just seemed to lead to inquisitions and questions
and nag nag nagging. She soon learned that if she kept things to herself a
little more then she was able to spend more time in her own little world
undisturbed and uninterrupted. She could spend most of her time pottering
around through her own ideas and fantasies without people constantly asking her
how she felt and trying to get her to interact and connect with other girls her
own age. She shuddered at the memory of those times. She had really hated the
other girls in her school and felt as though she had nothing at all whatsoever
in common with them at all. And yet she was forced to go through wit all of
these little gatherings and get togethers. She had hated every minute of it.
Now she kept up the pretence pretty well. She stayed behind
after school each day, telling her mother that she was with friends (so her
mother didn’t worry that she wasn’t mixing properly) when in fact she was alone
in the library with her favourite books. She was entirely lost in the worlds of
the characters there and at her absolute happiest. She revelled in the lives of
her favourite characters and imagined herself vividly living scenes from those
lives. Right down the to tiniest details – the jewellery and it’s feel on her
skin, the weight of her hair all piled up on the top of her head for a special
event or the feel of a silk slipper on her foot. She loved the attention to
detail the girls showed towards every aspect of their looks. She imagined that
getting themselves ready for a social event was a mammoth affair involving not
just her own hard work but that of many others in her fathers’ employ.
The characters in her favourite novel could while away a
whole day in the most rigorous preparation for an important event. They could
in fact spend more like weeks preparing other aspects of themselves and the
impression they want to give to the other attendees of the do. Clothes had to
be researched, colours and matching trims painstakingly put together. The best
designers from London would need to be visited to ensure her dresses were most
definitely up to the minute in terms of cut and neckline. The bodices would
need to be adorned with the finest beadwork and lace that money could buy. And
then the accessories would need to be chosen with great care. Slippers, jewels,
handbags and silks for her hair. It was disturbing how quickly Sophie went from
describing her characters to relating their lives to hers. She talked as though
she was the character she was reading about and her imagination really ran wild
a lot of the time.
She would often read only one short chapter of a book then
spend the following hour drifting away on a sea of her imaginings into a time
when she could have been one of those young ladies. Imagining that she was
anywhere in fact but right where she was in her real life. She really wanted
nothing at all to do with this so called real life. She wanted to live within
the kinds of worlds she read about. She wanted to find herself living the life
of a lady in high society.
This was her fantasy world. Her escape. Her way to feel
happy and exactly the way she longed to be. Her source of inspiration for how
to dress, how to act and how she would like to be able to live her life. She
knew she didn’t have the amount of choice over her own life and her appearance
as she would like at the moment but she was preparing for a time when this
wouldn’t be the case. She could not wait until the day she shook off the
constraints of school life and exchanged them s=first of all for the easier and
more accommodating life of a college student. The part of her life she was
really looking forward to the most was her university years. She felt that she
would be much more able to be herself then. She wouldn’t have her mother
checking up on her every move and she would (she felt sure) find solace amongst
her fellow literature students. She would find like minded souls who understood
her. Not stupid people who just saw her as strange and funny and someone to be
pitied and mocked.
Those were the days that kept her going. The thought of
living a fuller and more fulfilling life made her life at the present time much
more bearable. Still her most favourite of pastimes was to read the books of
her favourite characters and to let her imagination carry her away on a wave of
dresses, manners, meetings and high society excitement. She revelled in the
drama of it all. The chance encounters, the longing looks from suitors and the
excitement of each and every ball and event.
This was the stuff of dreams for Sophie. Her ideal life if
truth be told was one of a lady living in wealth and luxury in a country manor
house or estate. The only pressure on her would be to behave always as a lady
should and to achieve a good match when the time came. In the meantime she
would focus on learning to sing, to sew and to laugh prettily. She would have
no need of cares or worries or problems. No reason to be a realist, to prepare
for a life of hard work and sacrifice. She would be pampered, cared for and
treated as though she was a precious gem and something to be cherished and
shielded from all things difficult and potentially harmful to her delicate
constitution. That idea seemed to Sophie like such a wonderful notion. Such a
romantic ideal. Never mind being equal partners in a relationship. Never mind
having to share one another’s burdens and woes. She wanted to be kept safe and
warm, like a pearl in a shell being cushioned and protected comfortably and
constantly. That was the life she longed for. Not this life that seemed so very
difficult and stressful.
Her life hadn’t always seemed this way. She could remember
when she was much younger feeling as though her world was the happiest one on
the earth. She had enjoyed every minute of her childhood and had never imagined
a day when she would feel as she felt right then. She thought the long sunny
afternoons with the wind in her hair and the feel of the sun on her back would
go on forever.
She had loved spending her days making up stories for her dolls
and other toys to act out. She would give each of them their own parts and
would imagine to the best of her ability that they really were those
characters. She would have these very vivid pictures in her mind of exactly
what her characters did day by day and she fell asleep at night imagining that
they came to life when she wasn’t looking.
She dreamed and dared to dream that her life would be happy
forever. That nothing could possibly shatter the feelings of peace and serenity
that surrounded her. She felt alive and full of fun and adventure. She didn’t
even feel she had to shut herself away each day with her books just in order to
get by. She felt she was happy just as she was. There needed to be no
pretending of any kind. The dreams and stories and the fantasies were just
that: fantasies. She indulged in them for fun and fun only. She was happy with
her day to day reality and just allowed herself these moments of fancy as part
of what was a very rich and rewarding life in fact.
But now, her fantasies were the only things keeping her
going. They were the moments of her day that she looked forward to the most.
The moments when she felt truly alive. When she felt like her life was exactly
as it should be. She had no fears, no qualms, no dread or despair. She just
focussed on her ideal life and her ideal self. That way she could shut out all
of the other things which blighted her day.
Sophie was finally ready for school. She looked at herself
in the mirror. She felt that every trace of her individuality had been drained
away. She had to remove her makeup and her choker (not becoming of a young
school girl apparently) and stared at her tiny little eyes (or so they seemed
when they were so uncovered). She had also shrugged into her horrible school
shirt (which looked so much like a man’s shirt on account of the tie she had to
wear). The tie itself was so very ugly: a really sickly combination of yellow
and brown that just made her feel horrible whenever she looked at it. It matched
the badge on her blazer perfectly – two yellow and brown design disasters
staring back at her from the mirror. The blazer was just an ordinary black and
it hung from her petite frame, engulfing her in a sea of black polyester. It
was itchy and uncomfortable too. Coupled with her awful matching black
polyester skirt and those clunky shoes she felt like a monster. A big, clumsy,
heavy, clunky monster. A million miles away from the delicate, pale and
interesting young lady she had seen in her mirror earlier that morning. She had
been happy then looking at her reflection. She tried that look she had
practiced. Raising her chin and looking down her button nose at herself she
realised that the look (although she had it down to a tee) just didn’t work at
all well when she was dressed as her ordinary boring day to day self. She
sighed once more. Nothing really suited her well at the moment.
She picked up her bulging school bag, placing into the
compartments her notebook and silver fountain pen. She checked for extra ink
cartridges (she really hated to have to write in biro) and shrugged the bag
over her shoulder. It was so very heavy – so many subjects and each one
requiring it’s very own book plus textbook and other sheets of paper. No wonder
the rainforests were dying out really. Teachers she was sure were the main
culprits for this. If they didn’t spend all of their time photocopying handouts
and insisting on everything being written down then she felt sure the world
would not be in the mess it currently was. In fact, teachers had a lot to
answer for really. A lot of things would not be as they were currently without
the influence of teachers. Some of the kids at school who didn’t want to be
there (such as Sophie herself) would be able to organise their own education
and choose their own path in life.
Of course, teachers always tried to make you feel as though
you had your own choices to make and that you could feel confident enough to
make those choices yourself. After all, you get to choose your own GCSE subjects
(well, some of them anyway. And of course only from a list of approved topics
that the teachers provide). There really was so little choice available at all.
There also were the compulsory subjects which were forced upon every student no
matter what their preferences. Which was very frustrating. But it was always
sold as though students had all the choices in the world to contend with and as
though they should be very happy and grateful to have those. The worst teachers
were the ones who went on and on about how much choice kids have these days
compared to when they were at school. It that really supposed to make us feel
more grateful about our choices Sophie wondered? Because it really didn’t. Not
at all. Not even a little bit in fact. In fact, it only really served to wind
her up more and more. In fact, thinking about it now was getting her more and
more angry by the second.
She had to take a moment to compose herself. She could hear
her mother downstairs pottering around in the kitchen with the breakfast things
and she knew that she had to have her face straight ready for then. Her mother
was always on the lookout these days for any emotions or anything appearing
different or wrong with Sophie. The slightest change in her glance or her
posture would unleash a whole world of fuss from her mother and would make for
some very uncomfortable times for Sophie. She had learned to operate a little
more under the radar really in order to avoid all of this fuss and worry. It
only served to limit her freedoms and meant that she couldn’t escape into her
literary world as much as she liked. Her mother would want to sit down and talk
about it all and check in with her and make sure she was alright. And that was
definitely the last thing she wanted.
Sophie took one last look at herself in the mirror, checking
for any clue as to her mood or feelings deep down inside. She felt she had
hidden them sufficiently away from prying eyes and so headed down to face the
day. It wouldn’t be long she reasoned until the school day was over and she
could immerse herself in the library once again. Those were the hours of the
day she really lived for. The hours that made the rest bearable.
She headed down the stairs and towards the kitchen. Her face
was already prepared with a half happy half sleepy look to it and she felt the
minor spring in her step she was cultivating as part of her jolly façade which
was constantly presented to the world outside. This was the kind of Sophie that
people wanted to see after all. So she was only giving them what they wanted
from her.
*
