Lisa Clark - Livin’ la Vida Lola

Well, I am three whole weeks into the summer holiday, a time that is meant to be filled with fun, adventure and memory-makin’ moments, yet my life, as I know it, is still very much the same old, lame old.

I have no friends and I have no ‘thing’.

I want friends and I want a ‘thing’.

My ‘something’. At this point, my anything.

Lullah, I am beyond frustrated.

I’d also really like Mum to cheer up, Cat to stop chewing everything in sight and to move to NY. Like, this afternoon, if possible.

Until then, please provide me with tales of your muchos glammy life so that I can feel even more sorry for myself, take to my bed and watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the 127th time.

Miss you. A lot.

L oxoxox

Hmpph.

I really do want a ‘thing’.

Something that makes people go ‘Wow, Lola Love is cool’ because cool and Lola Love are words that are never, ever mentioned in the same sentence.

Weirdo, loser girl and Lola Love however, are mentioned on a near daily basis, thanks to Eva Satine.

Eva Satine is a toxic girl.

Oh, there’s no doubting the girl’s ability to throw an outfit together or her ‘just-stepped-out-of-a-salon’ silky soft blonde hair, but with all that superficial stuff comes the most horrible of insides, all knotty, angry and self-obsessed.

She’s very clever though.

Eva has fooled the entire school with her butter-wouldn’t-melt, snake-like charm and has won herself the much coveted, Miss I-am-Popularity-Personfied title.

I, on the other hand, have become her very own official torment toy. And it’s not as though Eva is not alone in her quest to make my life considerably difficult on a daily basis. Nope, because like every popular-girl-in-the-playground before her, she has the obligatory, plastic-looking hair-flickin’ clique. Me and Angel call them ‘The Negative Ninas’ (but I don’t think they’re losing any sleep over it) who are the girls at school who arrive everywhere in a stinky mist of Eau Du Nasty, have the same outline as Eva but fade into insignificance compared to the real thing. If they weren’t so rude and obnoxious I might even feel sorry for them.

But ‘The Negative Ninas’ are rude and obnoxious.

They use cuss words that would make a trucker blush and they have a never-ending supply of put-downs.

So I don’t feel sorry for them. Not one little bit.

And just in case you were worried that they weren’t super mean enough, they don’t just stop at name-calling either. Oh no, these girls are premier league. They’ve read every script of every high school teen movie ever made and are completely up to date with their roles as popular-girls-who-make-lonely-weirdo-girl-feel-really-bad.

Now, before I press play on this particular scene of shame straight from the life of me, you absolutely need to know that if I had my way, for the sake of self-preservation, it’d be on the cutting room floor.

Deleted.

Forever.

But for some reason the delete button won’t work and this scene is on constant rewind, play and repeat in my mind.

You will soon see why…

It was about six months ago, it was PE and I had no kit.

This was bad.

Really bad.

At our school you don’t forget your kit. Not ever. Because only a fool would risk the utter shame and humiliation that comes with forgetting your kit–wearing The Spare Kit.

Except I hadn’t forgotten my kit.

My kit had been stolen.

Which is why I was stood in Miss Appleby, the gym teacher’s office, while she rummaged around in a spectacularly stinky box, looking for a suitable ensemble. An active source of embarrassment since the 1970’s, the Spare Kit box is home to the most hideous of ill-fitting, never-been-washed items of clothing known to mankind.

“You can wear these,” Miss Appleby, the sadistic (aren’t they all?) gym teacher barked. (I should point out that as a gym teacher, she is almost as evil as Eva.)

I could have wept. The shorts were navy blue with off-white piping. Now, navy is a great colour if you can wear it, but against my milky whiter than white complexion, it was just rude and really, really wrong.

They were also a size too small.

Of course they were.

I had barely left the changing rooms when before Miss Appleby, in true Terminator-esque style, decided today was the day she would push me over the edge.

“Lola Love, you’re late. Five laps of the playing field, NOW.”

Now, I don’t do sports.

In fact, I’d even resort to eating my own toenails if it meant I could refrain from physical activity indefinitely.

Running is by far the most unpleasant experience I haved ever endured. That includes the time I cut a frog wide open in biology and its frog-inside juice got me right in the eye. And the time I didn’t eat chocolate for an entire week. Oh, and that oh-so-shameful moment I left the toilets in town with my flowy, flower girl skirt tucked in my knickers and a trail of white toilet paper blowing behind me. It wasn’t until some random dude asked ‘where are the puppies?’ that I realised he thought I was filming an advert for Andrex.

Basically, I don’t run unless I’m being chased.

Mortification x 100.

On the fifth and final lap, having been pushed to, and through, the pain barrier, I began to hallucinate. And for a minute, just a tiny, teeny minute, I thought that I’d seen the toned and honed athletic body of the beautiful Jake Farrell standing on the sideline, waving to me.

Jake is the stuff of candy-covered dreams. His bee stung lips and blonde locks are completely reminiscent of a painted cherub boy. He is the heir to my heart, my number one boy crush.

Sigh.

He’s also captain of the football team but totally not a jock-ass, Jake is funny and looks super cute when he has to wear his thick-rimmed glasses to see the maths board. In Lola Land, he is absolutely the biggest glass of chocolate milkshake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

J’adore him mostest.

Anyway, back to my torture. It turnsed out I wasn’t hallucinating. It was him. He was on the sideline and he was with Eva.

Whenever I see Jake everything is thrown into soft focus and the sound of violins fill my fit-to-burst heart. I’ve imagined what it might be like for him to notice me at least a hundred times, but I have to say, in all the scenarios I’ve ever imagined, this one had never popped up.

Funny that.

Not really knowing what else to do, I kept on running. As I got closer, I could see that his face was struggling to make an expression. as I got closer. It considered both embarrassment and shock, before finally settling on a combination of vacant and confused. Bless.

I diverted my eyes to avoid his glance, hoping that if I couldn’t see him, there might have been a teeny chance that he couldn’t see me. Unfortunately, that particular method of hiding had one major flaw, it didn’t work.

He looked all awkward and even a little bit pitiful as Eva and the Negative Ninas-pepper-sprayed ‘loser-girl’ taunts in my direction.

Heroically, I ignored them.

Well actually, I tried to, but whoever said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ was obviously a popular kid from the right side of town with nice hair and lots of friends.

Seriously though, Why me?

More importantly, why in these shorts?

“You looking for this, Lardy Lo?” Eva was swinging my school bag, avec PE kit, from her manicured finger.

She was positively heaving with pride at her badness.

I was so surprised (this was super mean, even for her) that I wobbled off course and tried to grab it from her, but my legs didn’t get the memo about the change of direction and collapsed with a thump so hard I just knew it was going to cause not-at-all-fashionable purple bruising.