Won't Let You See Me Another Literary Work by Katherine Chan

The little girl - youngest of two children - stumbles and falls to the ground, grazing her knee. She staggers to the closest teacher, with a few tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

Two years later, the girl sits on the fringes of the class' "parade" carpet, waiting eagerly for her name to be called. ".top score in Queensland, Katherine Chan!" A medal, flashes of cameras, and then the girl returns to obscurity - envied, yes, hated even, at the extreme, but obscurity in that few people actually put the name and the face together. Her brother sits somewhere in the middle of the melting crowd of faces, and he also is awarded a High Distinction, but no medal for him, no.

Another four years, and the girl cries bittersweet tears. The end of the world she knows, but a new beginning, elsewhere far enough from home that no-one will know her parents, so that she will not go home to find her parents already know about what she did at school. Her friends, she lets go easily, perhaps calling upon her experience from eight years ago, when her first set of friends were forcibly released by the separation of the India- Australia Ocean, or perhaps she does not know what she is doing, that she will never ever see them again.

First day at high school - her mother reprimands her for wanting to go and explore this new school with the only person she knows, who is also starting today - and already, more homework than was given in a month of primary school was handed out in the course of 7 hours and 5 minutes.

The girl, a grade nine student, sits next to her father, who is explaining to her as patiently as he can a complex - or so she thinks - mathematical function, one of many required to finish several definitely complex problems from a Mathematics Extension booklet. She is still as cocky as ever, believing that she really doesn't need to work hard to get good grades and that things are still the same as they were two years ago.

Grade 10, and the girl realizes that she doesn't seem to be learning anything in class - not that the teachers have nothing to teach her but that she isn't learning. A heavy sort of melancholy descends, and finally, all of her ghosts surround her. In the words of Kishimoto Masashi, "Because their fate is surrounded by darkness, they are shining." For the girl, however, she can't even see past the transparent ghosts that everyone else can see straight through and look right at her.

The girl goes home, shuts her door under the pretence that she is changing - her parents do not permit her to have her door closed under any other circumstance - and watches silently as her shell formed from tears and anguish cracks and shatters into pieces on the ground, skittering to the far corners of the room. All the other girls put on makeup in the morning; this girl wears a mask, a mask that covers her entire personality and being. No-one has seen the real her in years.

People say, 'Aim for the stars; even if you miss, you'll still land among the clouds.' I never believed them, and obviously, Isobelle Carmody doesn't either. "You were born with the yearning arrow. it points to the stars and when it cannot reach them it falls back to pierce your heart." Don't they say that what goes up must come down? And yet people believe, want to believe all that airy fairy cr. airy fairy nonsense, I mean.

Do you believe everything you are told?