BBA & HBWC Administrator
Andrea Reece
30 Winton Avenue, London, N11 2AT
Tel: 0208 889 1292
Mob: 07807 893369
Email: branford.boase@gmail.com
Press Enquiries
Andrea Reece
Tel: 07807 893369 | Email: branford.boase@gmail.com
Two girls wish for different lives. They tell of the thoughts going through their heads; their frustrations, their abilities to hide how they feel and the unhappiness it all causes. Although they know of each other, they are not friends – but there is a possibility that they might get together.
The judges really liked Chloe’s use of the unreliable narrator, and her choice of split narrative.
Leila
If I could just be more like Zoe everything would be ok. She knows how to be perfect and the stars in her hazelnut eyes shine brighter than mine ever will. When she talks, I want to listen and when she plays the guitar the world around her seems to melt.
I bet she’s never sat in a lonely corner of the canteen at lunch, of course she hasn’t, she’s one of the girls; shimmering, glossy and perfect. She’s probably never gone home to arguing parents, her house probably doesn’t feel like it’s a bomb that’s about to explode (and she probably doesn’t secretly think it would be easier if the bomb did explode). She’s never forced to tiptoe around her home like a mouse to avoid the constant stream of insults and swears that tear through her family. And she definitely doesn’t know what it’s like to feel invisible, like if you disappeared nobody would even notice. Because rainbow girls like her never have anything wrong with their glittering lives.
Zoe
Nobody understands what it’s like to act ok and always be strong when your world is shattered. Or to stand around a group of girls that you call your friends (even though you know nothing about them, and they know nothing about you) and pretend that every day you don’t look at yourself in the mirror, cascades of tears streaming down your face and beg yourself to keep up the act. So, believe me when I say you can hide all your problems behind a perfectly practised fake smile.
There is a girl in my year called Leila, who sits with her head held high in class, but wanders the corridors like a ghost. When I’m talking, she listens with cautious green eyes, eyes wide like mine and cloudy from tears. She doesn’t have it easy, that much is obvious, she seems lost in herself, in her daydreams. I wish I could be like that. I’m so stuck in reality that everyday feels like a dagger.
The only thing that helps is my guitar. Playing it takes away my dad’s muffled sobs at night when he thinks I’m asleep, it takes away all the sorrow that my mum left behind when she went missing three years ago, it takes away all the hoax apologies from people who claimed they knew my mum. Because when the investigation finished at another dead end, we realised that nobody knew her, not her husband, not her daughter, least of all people she’d never mentioned before. In the back of my mind, I know that I am spiralling down the same dark, twisted path as her where nobody knows the real me. But who can I talk to not my “friends” they wouldn’t understand, not my dad he has his own troubles without adding my burden to his back, perhaps the ghost girl Leila would listen, maybe she would even talk back, she could be a companion for a lost rainbow girl like me.