Dirt

 the fire was there uninvited. the fire barged in and took things that were mine. the fire took me.

i write. i write because it heals me. i write because i have to write.




Dirt


Marla Holiday was one of those girls who was so awful that she had to get up early just to maintain her level of awful, and Rani knew it. Rani knew it because she had to wake up earlier to try and avoid Marla Holiday’s wrath reign of awful.

Today it was a mud-smeared sanitary pad stuck to the door of her locker. Rani carefully peeled it off and walked the ten terrible feet to the trash can to dispose of it. James Prentice and Stevie Gregson snickered and pointed, but it was no matter, Rani had become accustomed to her current life at St John’s college; the days passed, the fires were lit, they burned, and when there was nothing left but ash, Marla Holiday started another fire.

Rani supposed the bitch just simply wanted to watch the world burn.

And so it did. Like a phoenix. Over and over, and Rani was the one who felt the heat most of all. She returned to her locker, stashed her lunch, retrieved her poetry notes for English and kept her head low on the way to form class — a muddy pad was going to be hilarious for the rest of the school and she hadn’t washed her hair in two days, so the whole dirty thing was bound to show up again.

Rani didn’t wish to be popular, or even liked. Rani wished to be like the nerds, that she could fit in with them, but the books she liked were mostly horror comics and obscure essays or monologues in third person. The nerds seemed to think she was so backwards that she was mainstream. She had tried but the  wall was apparently too high for her to get inside Nerd World.

Form was chaos as usual. Mr Harrington was a drunk (Rani assumed) and he always turned up late and dishevelled looking like he could use a gallon of cool water and a full English breakfast. He was also, ironically, British. Just like every other day, today was the same. Rani took her seat up the front — she prayed every night for a back-of-the-room seat but it never presented itself — and tried to get herself in order. The day was going to be rough; back to back physics followed by a calculus class that would most likely break her.

Rani watched the class and Mr Harrington but no one spoke to her and no one even seemed to look at her, and that was the gruesome beauty of being an invisible beacon. She was hidden until she was seen, and when she was seen, everyone saw.

Marla Holiday sat up the back of form and always spoke at the top of her voice. She was the too-loud blonde-coloured mean-girl centre of her posse. She was everything that Rani didn’t like about high school, but what was there to be done about that? The conversation was audible from here to there. The weekend and the parties and the oh my god how gross is Mr Harrington, and then —

“It’s like she lives in a fucking forest though, right?”

Marla Holiday’s band of bitches cawed their agreement and Rani could feel her oily teenager face growing a warm scarlet.

“I mean, does she even shower? It’s as if she wants to look like that.”

Rani did her best to not listen and started going over her poetry notes with her head down.

“You’d think her parents would do the kind thing and just take her outside and hose her down.”

There was another wave of approving caws from the bitch-band and then Mr Harrington called form class to attention. “Another great week ahead of us ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a rough voice as he dropped an aspirin into his tea cup. It fizzed and Rani watched him rubbing his temples.

The response was muffled disagreement. No one really wanted to be there — especially not Harrington — but they endured it together and Rani watched as he sat down to ignore them like he did each morning.

Marla Holiday wasn’t done though. “I hope she cleans it.”

Rani stopped writing and closed her eyes. She had the sick feeling she knew where this was going.

From the back of the room, everyone could hear Marla Holiday. “I bet it’s all hairy and wild. I bet it fucking stinks.”

The snickering erupted into laughter from more people than Rani cared to notice. This seemed to rouse Mr Harrington from his haze.

“Calm down, calm down ladies. Sit down and please, prep for your classes. Ms Holiday, I have no doubt that your weekend anecdotes are nothing but inspiring, but could you keep the noise to a minimum?”

“That’s not my main concern, Mr H. I mean the weekend. I’m just worried that some people in our form are really letting their standards of personal hygiene slip to an all time low.”

Mr Harrington frowned, looked around, and then looked down at his suit and vest ensemble. It was crumpled but clean. He looked back up, confused.

Marla laughed mockingly. “Not you, Mr H.”

Rani froze. Was Marla Fucking Holiday going to actually call her out and name her in front of the whole form?

Rani gripped her pen and stared straight ahead at Mr Harrington. She didn’t trust herself to look back at Marla Holiday without bursting into tears.

“It just makes me a bit uncomfortable when certain students don’t have the decency to turn up to school in a satisfactory state. I mean, a little bit of coverall can go a long way, do you know what I mean Mr H?”

Rani felt the world tighten around her. Her already fast heartbeat was speeding up.

The rock was small, but it shot up from the turtle tank in the corner of the classroom and hurtled with surprising speed towards Marla Holiday’s left cheek. She shrieked as she fell back and her band of bitches sprung out away from her, as if they didn’t want to get any scream on them.

Rani watched as Marla scrambled awkwardly back to her feet, holding a hand to her face. “What the fuck was that?”

A couple of the boys laughed. “Maybe it came from the dirty fish market up front.”

Rani felt the pen in her hand snap, just as the turtle tank exploded in a burst of glass that shot out in all directions. The dirt and rocks from it’s bottom rained down on the surprised class of students. Utter panic set in. Girls were screaming, boys were yelling, Rani herself closed her eyes against the flying dirt and, along with a few others, made for the door. Out in the hall, and to her relief, the bell rang and the rest of the school bustled her along as she attempted to brush dirt out of her hair and simultaneously disappear.

Half way through her physics double, the school secretary came and called her to the nurses station. Rani apparently didn’t have a choice — all students from her form were being medically assessed and sent home. Rani found herself in the small group whose parents weren’t home and so when called, hadn’t given permission; they were to stay at school, safe and sound.

Mr Harrington didn’t seem too pleased to be out in the sunshine — he had his wayfarers on and was greedily sucking on an iced latte from the caf — but after several cawing protests from Marla Holiday, he had agreed to let them sit out on the bleachers to study. Principal Carter had insisted that they not return to classes due to their traumatisation, as he called it.

Rani watched my Harrington lounging on the bench just down from her, with one leg crossed over the other. In a strange way, he was perhaps the only thing closest to a friend that she had at school. Of course they didn’t talk or bond or anything, but he was her English teacher as well as her form teacher and he always graded her fairly, leaving helpful and insightful notes on her work in scratchy fountain-pen ink. Rani pretended to study, but she watched Mr Harrington and the sweat that slowly started to bead on his face while she took a rare moment of enjoyment from not having to be on the look out for the next bitch attack.

That was until she remembered she was on a forced study break with Marla Holiday, James Prentice, and a few other not so influential kids — Courtney da Silva was a quiet bookworm, but so detached there wasn’t a way in hell she was going to talk to Rani or Marla Holiday or anyone else who even looked in her direction. Toby Carter was the Principal’s son and he was kind of an odd case in Rani’s opinion. The kid was (obviously) never caught doing anything wrong, but at the same time Rani suspected that he quite often was doing the wrong thing.

He seemed intelligent and wary but he hardly ever spoke or interacted, despite his father’s enthusiasm regarding his potential to be registered into the study body council. Toby seemed to have no intention of joining the council, but there didn’t appear to be a rift between he and his father about it. Rani wondered if that was perhaps merely the facade they had created/built up. If so, they had done a fucking good job.

Toby had a novel open on his lap on the other side of the bleachers and he was pretending to read it, a mirror of her own pretence. She watched him, and he watched Marla Holiday flirt unabashedly with James Prentice down on the grass. Marla Holiday’s cheek was cut a little from the rock and there was bruising starting to purple the surrounding skin. Mr Harrington sipped his iced latte now, and Courtney da Silva was genuinely reading her H.P. Lovecraft (Rani had noted it’s black and gold cover earlier and made a promise to herself to buy a copy just because it looked so damn cool). It felt like the six of them were in a bubble, at the school, but not really there — they had created their own little reality.

Rani was relaxing, she was drifting, watching her peers and her teacher and the glistening summer-day world. She felt as good as she could remember feeling for a solid year and that was exactly the moment that Marla Holiday’s echoing taunt rang out across the football field, across the bleachers, across the calm that had fallen — the lovely calm that Rani had almost fallen right down into.

“She’s just so fucking dirty. Dirty Rani. I mean look at the bitch, she’s dirt!”

It was loud. Too loud.

Mr Harrington hadn’t really stirred, but Courtney da Silva had looked up from her novel with wide eyes and James Prentice appeared red faced and embarrassed next to Marla Holiday. Rani didn’t look at Toby Carter — her eyes were fixed on the small sunlit vision of Marla Holiday out on the perfect green grass, dancing and twirling under the perfect blue sky.

Marla Holiday was laughing.

She was laughing and it was echoing around the football field and Rani was feeling that thing again. Her heartbeat hastening, he blood pumping hard and hot, the world tightening around her.

The dust from between the blades of grass on the field drifted up. Rani watched them, perplexed as the other kids and Mr Harrington up on the bleachers, but Marla Holiday and James Prentice were less perplexed than they were scared. James called out. It was a kind of shout-scream, but the dust was thick in the air almost immediately and it sounded like he was choking.

Rani wanted to be calm but everything around her was buzzing. The air, the feelings, the earth. The dust in the air, the rocks from between the blades of grass — she could feel them — she was reaching out and touching them. She was inside James Prentice’s throat, she was swarming around Marla Holiday’s perfect blonde hair.

Marla Holiday was screaming now. What the fuck. What the fuck. But Rani didn’t care. She was standing up, but the people on the bleachers — Mr Harrington and Courtney da Silver and Toby Carter, they were standing up, backing away from her — Rani felt something rising up inside her. She closed her eyes and felt it hot and brewing, coming from a place she hadn’t known was inside of her.

The mud came then, from out on the edge of the lake that sat alongside St John’s College. Rani felt it thick and wet and coming like a wave. It was heavy, but when she lifted her hands into the air it came more easily — she called it her. The mud hit Marla Holiday and James Prentice from behind and they didn’t have a chance. The two of them fell forward, slicked with mud and dirt. They were no longer laughing. Rani wondered if maybe she was laughing.

There was a shadow next to her and she knew it was Mr Harrington. Stop, he was saying. Stop, please. And Rani could hear it, she could feel him approaching her, but she lifted her hand again and the dust and mud flew up between them and he was gone.

Dirty Rani.

Rani was immense. She was indestructible.

She lifted both her hands and felt the world break open underneath her. The rocks and dirt and mud flew upward and Marla Holiday was still screaming through the mess of it. All Rani had to do was tilt her head and the mess started to swirl around. It was becoming a storm. A dirty brown storm.

Dirty Rani.
She brought her hands down with force and everything, every rock and stone and fragment of earth, everything hit the football field and the bleachers. For once Rani felt louder than Marla Holiday. It wasn’t her voice; it was her bidding.

Toby Carter and Courtney da Silva were trying to run away with Mr Harrington. To get as far as they could from Rani. She turned to look at them and through the thick brown air she was sure that they were laughing. She would stop them laughing. She would stop them forever.

Dirty Rani.

She lifted her hands again and Marla Holiday continued to scream through the thicket of dust and rocks and dirt.

Rani thought of Moses as she brought her hands together and then separated them again, calling the earth to her, calling it back away.

Everyone was shouting. James Prentice had his hands over his eyes and was scrambling away, back towards the bleachers. Marla Holiday was still on the ground, face down, screaming into the dirt. Rani laughed.

She had a clear line of sight to Marla Holiday and so she walked slowly towards her. The far off voices of Mr Harrington and Toby Carter and Courtney da Silva were telling her to stop and please no and no don’t. Rani heard them but all she could do was laugh at how small they were; how weak and behind her they were.

Marla Holiday lifted her dirt-caked face from the ground and let out a pitiful sob.

Rani smiled.

Dirty Rani.