Hi, again. So... first story. Can you not feel the tension?! Me neither. Shouldn't there be some kind of tension at this point? Anyway... just thought I'd give you a little bit of background to this "story", if you can call it that. Its about something that actually happened to me in Year 7, with all the names changed obviously. I'll talk to you again at the end. Bye!

Georgina's New Folder

I went into Year 7 with every intention to work – it was just, hard. I'd never had so much homework. We always used to get 10 minutes, tops, then I could just have a laugh with my best friend Georgina. We did everything together. Sat together in class. Played together at break. Even when the teacher split us up for being "silly", we would just send notes to each other. In fact, that made it even more fun. Like we were spies having to send secret messages across the border, watching out for double agents like Josh Lawson and Kat Cook, who would hand us over to the fiendish Mr. Scott or the maniacal Mrs. James. There were other good agents like us though. Bex Hall and Billy Thompson were the best. After Georgina, Bex and Billy were the people I hung around with the most.

Towards the end of Year 6 though, things changed. Georgina and I started growing further and further apart. It was like, when we were together; it was because we had to be, because we'd been so close for so long that we couldn't hang around with anyone else. My mind drifted more and more into the future, to secondary school. I didn't want to be one of those sad people who fall out with their best friend from primary school just because they've made new friends. And the awkward silences that were normally filled with playful laughter were killing me. So I reached out to other people in the form. The boys always accepted me, because as bad as it sounds, I was more like them than the girls. All that dolls and make-up stuff never did it for me. Give me a muddy football or a frog any day! But as I got to talking with the girls more, we had more in common than I thought. A couple of other girls liked playing football too, and some of them even liked frogs.

Even Kat Cook, my arch enemy in my spy fantasies became my close friend when we were learning how to swim. We were both afraid of jumping in at the deep end. I'm not sure what it was, but some how fear brought us closer, enough that she became my friend in normal lessons as well. Another agent for the forces of good! But I felt I was also losing an agent too. While I had been socializing properly with people my age for the first time, and being good at it, Georgina had almost alienated herself completely. Our weekly sleepovers had stopped. Our pranks on Mr. Kirch had ceased. My border-crossing messages, got lost in the mail.

At the beginning of summer term, I expected Georgina to come back as miserable as she went two weeks ago at the beginning of half term. But to everyone's amazement, she came back looking as if she had never been sad a day in her life. It was actually a little creepy. It was like that alien sci-fi movie when the aliens clone the humans and take over their bodies, and they seem like completely different people. I wasn't supposed to see that movie – mum said I was too young. But dad said it was alright, and let me watch it when mum went out with her friends.

Georgina talked to me for the first time in what seemed like forever. As she was walking round the class greeting everyone, it dawned on me. The 11+ results came halfway through the holidays. She must have passed. Georgina had always had an insane need to be the best. My mum said it was because of her big sister. She went to High Croft Grammar School, and did all these great things like become captain of the netball team and house captain. I guess Georgina's parents expected the same of her. Or she expected it of herself. I don't think she ever really realised that she was a different person to her sister with different abilities and interests. I'm not sure she ever will. She might always be living in her sister's shadow.

All the girls in my form passed, and over half of them were coming to HCGS with me and Georgina. A week later, Dr. Freeman, a teacher from High Croft, came to ask us who we wanted to go with in our new forms. By that time Georgina and I were good friends again, and wrote each others name down first. I wrote down Bex, Sophie and Kat down too. When we all did go to our new form rooms in Year 7 I saw that it was only me and Georgina from our old school in our new form. That's also when I saw Georgina's new file. It was a bright pink play boy file. Hearts and bunnies galore.

I found out later that the reason I was alone with Georgina, was that on the acceptance letter to HCGS, along with the "Any special dietary requirements?" sheet, was another preference question as to who we wanted to go with. My mum put down Georgina's name, only because Georgina's mum had rung her and begged her to put Georgina's name down. Because my mum only told me about this later, I couldn't tell her about Bex and Sophie and Kat. I was so angry at her for not telling me! It was like my feelings and requests were forgotten completely. I'm not saying that I didn't want to go with Georgina, but I was so rubbish when it came to socialising with my peer group, I had wanted a few people I knew, just to feel comfortable, you know?

Georgina and I weren't together in the register, so in a lot of lessons we had to sit on opposite sides of the room. I became good friends with the people on either side of me, to my great surprise. It was such a euphoric feeling. I had never made friends with anyone that quickly. I always had to know them for ages and have a few casual greetings before talking to them properly, but everything had changed. People were so friendly to me. I felt as though I could relax and be myself - and people liked it. They liked me. I couldn't believe it.

But all this was in the beginning. As the weeks went by, the smiling faces in my class that greeted me every morning when I came in were replaced by sneering glares. It felt like I was the black sheep that all the other sheep shunned. Or like in the movies when everyone knows that you've done something wrong and they look down their noses at you. But I hadn't done anything.

It happened gradually at first. Just a few people did it. Then it spread to half a dozen, and so on, till the whole class bar two or three did it. They always seemed to do it more after lunch time as well. When I walked in from lunch, everyone went quiet and looked down, as if they were trying to burn a hole in the floor with their eyes, throwing shifty glances at me as I passed to my desk. It felt horrible. It always does, when you walk into a room and you know people have been talking about you behind you back. It made me want to throw up.

I didn't know where to turn to with it. Mum and the teacher said to ignore them, dad said to deck them, and every teen advice site I looked at said to call their teen advice hotline at rates of £2 per minute, approximate holding time: five minutes. Every time I tried to ask Georgina she said she had to finish some homework for art, but I knew we didn't have art homework. Not so much to do it every lunch time any way. And since when did we do our art homework in pink files with gel pens? She seemed to show it off to everyone else too. But when ever I asked to see it she said she didn't want me to copy. I knew from the first time she said I couldn't see it that something was deeply, deeply wrong. I had known Georgina for seven years, over half my life at the time, and I could tell when she was lying and hiding something from me.

In the lunchtime of the 29th of October, I snapped. The looks and the sniggering whispers behind me were too much. I was going to find out what was in that folder or get expelled trying. I sat on the desk in front of Georgina, facing her. She was once again drawing in that stupid file, with that gross, fluffy, pink, glittery, strawberry smelling, gel pen. People were behind her, watching as she drew, glancing between the pictures and me, and sometimes at Georgina. At first their faces were grinning, but as I saw their eyes scan across the pages, their faces fell into those of a mix of disgust, horror and disbelief. As these faces formed, they ceased glancing at me, and glanced more at Georgina, like they couldn't believe what she was drawing or writing. Georgina looked up at me occasionally, with no real identifiable expression, but as she looked down to her file I could clearly see an undertone of malicious glee on her face. It made my blood boil. I never thought I could hate some one I was once best friends with so much. That in itself was painful enough to make me want to cry. But I had to know what was in that file.

I knew it was something about me. Not just from the looks. People whose conscience had eaten away at them had told me snippets of information. They didn't want to tell me everything she had written and I didn't want them to. I wanted to see it for myself. But I wouldn't put them in the position of having to get it off Georgina to show me, even though some of them offered. That was my responsibility.

Standing in front of her, I waited till it looked like she had relaxed her grip on the file. I had an image in my mind of what I was going to do. It had 4 simple, idiot-proof steps. Lunge forward; grab the folder by one of the middle rings; yank it out of Georgina's hands; run to the toilets to read it in the safety of a locked stall (Georgina could be very aggressive with her long nails). But like a lot of my so called "simple" and "idiot-proof" plans, it went wrong in a big way.

Georgina was appreciably faster than I anticipated, easily fast enough to pull the file closer to her, so I only caught the top of the file. I swung my other arm round to yank it out of the grasp, but she had both hands, one with her pen in, on the bunny covered file as well. I conceded defeat, thinking that if I stopped early I could shrug it off as a joke and try again another day. But it's never that simple. In the struggle, Georgina had gripped the file so tightly that she had snapped the shaft of her pen. Now covered in oozing pink gel, she screamed that I had broken her pen on purpose and ran out of the room to the toilets, with her file.

I was so consumed with waiting for Georgina to drop her guard that I hadn't noticed the people filming and taking pictures of the book on their phones. They came forward to me just after Georgina had rushed out of the room. She had clearly crossed a line with her latest drawings, because people were more than willing to show me what they had caught on their phones. As I looked through the pictures I felt my heart beat rising and the blood drain from my face. She had called me so many awful names that I wouldn't call my worst enemy. The pictures she had of me were so much worse. They were like demonic caricatures, highlighting my genetically thin hair and glasses, and saying that I was obsessed with Power Rangers and Pokemon. She was telling the most disgusting lies about me. I couldn't read them all. Not because there were too many, but because I had broken down in tears.

I couldn't feel my fingers or toes, my vision was closing in on either side of me, and my stomach was in huge knots. I couldn't believe she could do something like that to me. I was numb for weeks after. I felt I would never be able to trust any one ever again. I had trusted Georgina, and she had completely and totally disowned me and betrayed me. To this day, I don't know why she really did it. She's made up a few excuses, but as I said, I know Georgina better than she thinks. We don't talk much any more. A civil hello now and again, but nothing more. It still hurts though, to talk about it. Even thinking and writing about it now I feel a lump in my throat. I used to think I could get past it and forget it. But I know now that this scar is never going to fade away. It's always going to be there. It's always going to hurt.

O.K. I do know it got kinda angsty towards the end, but apart from that, what did you think?
On an unrelated subject, next time you have a chance, get some steel/iron wool and touch it with a 9V battery (the ones with the 2 terminals at one end). Just try it and you'll see what I mean.