Work Experience Diary
Name: Clove Sutcliffe
Form: S5:9
Briefly describe your placement with details of the duties you performed each day as well as any training you were given. Identify any skills you have developed, such as teamwork or independent problem solving.
Day 1:
My placement was in the Physics and Computer Science Department at the University of St Andrews. I was introduced to the time-travel technology in the morning. In the afternoon I was assigned the job of sorting and backing up old student coursework. I also made approximately 50 cups of tea and microwaved 9 frozen pizzas for professors.
Day 2:
56 cups of tea, 7 pizzas, 1 bag of popcorn, defragmented 6 hard drives.
File note: Work experience diary completed by CLOVE SUTCLIFFE from 17–21 July 2056
UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS CAMPUS, SCOTLAND, 2056
Clove spent the entire day filing old coursework in the physics office and waiting for Meg to contact her. She knew she couldn’t fix what she’d done, but she was still hoping that Meg would send her a message − something that would dull the awkwardness and repair the friendship that Clove had ruined. But whenever Clove checked her watch, she had no new notifications. The only message was from Spart.
> CLOVE, we must talk about the Folios, they—
“Not now, Spart,” she said, and flicked away his reply without reading it.
At lunchtime Clove sat in a cafe on campus and stared at her watch, waiting for a message from Meg. After plucking up all her courage, she finally decided to send her own.
LuckyClover 12:09:36 | Are you online? | |
LuckyClover 12:11:58 | Meg? ✓Seen by Nuts_Meg Nuts_Meg logged off |
Spart tried to get her attention again.
> CLOVE? May we discuss—
“Not today, Spart.”
From: Clove <luckyclover@sutcliffe.com>
To: Ella <ella-is-swell@walker.com>
Subject: I’M GOING OUT OF MY MIND
Date: 4 July 2058 22:06:14 GMT
Ella,
I miss you a lot and I wish you were here so I could listen to your unnervingly well-thought-out ideas for perfect murders and snuggle with you under the duvet.
You’re always so good at calming me down when I get a bit angry at everyone and everything. Like today. Without you here I feel like I’m going to snap everyone’s heads off just for existing.
I walked past someone wearing your perfume today at uni and almost started crying. Every time I have a class in the physics lecture theatre where I first saw you (two years ago, can you believe it?!) I remember all that eyeliner you were wearing – way too thick because you hadn’t got the hang of it yet.
St Andrews is full of you, everywhere, but you’re not here. This long-distance thing sucks. Please fix the known laws of time and space so we can make out again sooner.
Clove
P.S. I like you a lot too.
File note: Email from CLOVE SUTCLIFFE to ELENORE WALKER, sent on 4 July 2058
ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND 2056
In the afternoon Clove got into a fight with one of the undergraduates. Clove knew instinctively that Tom and Jen would not be impressed when they found out about it.
She tried to hide in her bedroom after work, but Tom called her downstairs so they could “talk”. Taking her anger out on the stairs, Clove stomped down them and then swung into the living room with a thump of her fist on the door frame. Her parents watched her with identically unhappy expressions.
Clove was practically jumping with nervous energy: her whole body was alight with twitches. She nearly upset her chair with her flailing limbs when she sat down. “What do you want?” she said, moodily.
“Clove,” Tom said in his “Or Else” voice, “I want you to go and drink a glass of water and calm down. Then we’re going to talk.”
Clove rolled her eyes with so much emphasis her whole head tilted towards the ceiling. His comment had annoyed her even more because she realized he was right. She did need to calm down. She cleared her throat and stood up with as much dignity as she could muster.
Once in the kitchen, she poured a glass of water. She couldn’t stop hopping up and down on the spot. It felt like all of her emotions were flowing through her nerve endings, firing up and releasing kinetic energy that she couldn’t control.
She drank the water in one long, ice-cold gulp and then winced, feeling it on the back of her teeth. She’d forgotten to turn on the light, so she watched her reflection in the window, staring until her pupils were almost completely dilated in the dark room. Eventually she felt steady enough to behave normally, and went back into the living room.
Her parents exchanged another glance. It had always annoyed her how they used their “Couple Bond” like some sort of superpower to win arguments against her. Was that how you knew you had found The One, when you could have a whole conversation with them, without saying a word?
“I got an email from a very upset student today, Clove,” Jen said, flourishing her watch in the air as if it were a rather underwhelming bullfighter’s cape. “What’s going on?”
“I got in an argument.”
Tom sighed heavily. He wasn’t very good at emotional conversations − he was better at distractions. When she’d come out as gay, he’d just hugged her tightly and then bought her a rainbow strap for her watch. “What about?” he asked now.
“Him being an idiot! I was eating lunch in the common room when he started going through a homework problem on the whiteboard with his friend. He was getting it totally wrong, so I just … I just pointed out his mistakes to him! That’s all! And he told me to stop interrupting because I was ‘still a kid’ and didn’t know what I was talking about!”
“Well – that was very rude of him,” Jen said. “But it says here that you said, ‘I don’t know which is more embarrassing, your ignorance or your algebra.’”
Clove smirked at the floor, unrepentant. “Well, it’s true. Mum, he was talking about quantum mechanics and he refused to even mention the Many-Worlds Interpretation. He said it was pure science fiction! He doesn’t know anything and he refused to admit his ignorance. And he’s a fourth year!” Clove took a deep breath. She was getting riled up. She tried to stop herself from emphasizing quite so dramatically.
“Not everyone has parents who are physics professors, you know,” Jen berated her. She folded her arms in a manner that expressed perfectly how completely unimpressed she was with Clove’s behaviour.
“I bet he thinks Schrödinger’s cat is a real cat,” Clove added sulkily, hoping his complete inadequacy would persuade her parents to stop being cross with her. It didn’t work.
“Clove, you can’t keep doing this,” Tom said. “You can’t take your problems out on other people.”
“I know you are frustrated about Meg,” Jen added. “But that’s no reason to abuse the students. That poor boy can’t have known what hit him.”
Clove felt angry suddenly. At her mother, for assuming Meg was the only thing Clove cared about; at Meg, for being the only thing Clove cared about; at everyone, for not living up to her expectations.
“No! No, this isn’t about Meg. This is about me. I’m just— I don’t know.”
“We want to help,” Tom said.
“If you really want to help, you’ll let me use your time machine to stop me ever kissing Meg and destroying my entire life.”
“Clove.” Jen sighed. “Look, maybe you should talk to Meg.”
“Maybe…” Clove agreed sullenly. She was never going to talk to Meg ever again.
“I know it’s hard right now,” Tom said. “You’ve got a lot to deal with, and it’s difficult to know how to handle it. Being rejected hurts, especially the first time. I was a teenager once. I know how awful everything feels, like the world’s going to end. But it isn’t. It’s going to get better, darlin’.”
“Right.” Was he saying that this was her fault? “So the next time I find out I’m adopted, it’ll be easier?”
“You know what I mean. I was talking about Meg.” Tom reached out to run a hand across her hair.
He meant that she was handling this wrong, because she was a “hormonal teenager”. He meant that she needed to calm down and control herself. Clove pulled away. “I don’t want to talk about this any more.”
Tom and Jen exchanged a glance. “Well, if you won’t talk to us, we think you should go to therapy,” Tom said bluntly. “You’re clearly struggling with the adoption, and this Meg thing is just a smokescreen.”
“Tom!” Jen exclaimed. “That’s not how we… Don’t put it like that.” To Clove, she said, “Sweetheart, we know it might sound hard, but plenty of people have counsellors to help them through difficult times. We want to be there for you as much as we can, but there are professionals who’ll understand what you’re going—”
“What? No! I’m not going to a shrink!” Clove said, horrified.
How could they think that she needed therapy? She was fine. Nothing was wrong. They didn’t understand her. They didn’t get what she was going through. This wasn’t about the adoption. This wasn’t about Meg. This was just— She didn’t know what it was.
“We think it’s for the best, love. You won’t talk to us—”
“I’ve got nothing to say! Why can’t you just leave me alone, Jen?”
Jen swayed backwards like she’d been slapped.
“Mum,” Clove corrected quickly. “Mum. Why can’t you just leave me alone, Mum?”
Jen had turned away, and Clove was horrified to see that she was crying. The sight of it crawled somewhere deep inside her chest and started tearing at her insides.
“Mum. I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean it.”
Now Clove was crying, again, and Jen was curled in on herself as if she was in physical pain. Tom wrapped a hand around Jen’s shoulders. Jen turned her face into him, away from Clove.
“Clove, you can’t take this out on your mother,” Tom said.
Clove looked at them, her parents, and didn’t know what to do.
“I didn’t mean to—” she said, voice cracking. “I—”
“You need to talk to someone about this, and if you can’t talk to us, then it will have to be a therapist.”
“What I need,” Clove burst out, angry again, “is my real parents back − the ones you left for dead!”
The only sound that followed her words was the clock ticking, louder than it had any right to do. When Tom spoke, it was in a hard voice she’d never heard before. “Go to your room.”
She ran upstairs in tears.
* * *
Friday was Clove’s last day of work experience. She was sad to be leaving, despite everything that was happening. She had enjoyed her time at the university, not only because the campus seemed to be entirely filled with complete babes. There was one girl in particular whom she kept seeing around. Clove would look up from the queue in a cafe at lunch to find her watching her, and it always made Clove’s heart skip a beat because she was gorgeous, all long violently curled hair and thick black eyeliner. But then the girl would turn away and not look back, and Clove’s pulse would settle in her chest.
Clove was spending her last day shadowing one of the physics professors, who Clove was 86% certain was the teacher that Jen had kissed as a student. She was glad not to be working with either of her parents. Things had been strained between them since their arguement the night before.
The professor was teaching the undergraduates, which meant that Clove got to listen to lectures about the time machine. This class was going to be learning about the possible commercial uses of time travel, and specifically how it could be useful in rescuing lives in disaster zones. During the lecture, though, all Clove could think about was her argument with Jen and Tom. She hadn’t meant to upset them. It was just all so difficult.
The list of things Clove wasn’t letting herself think about – Meg, the adoption – was getting longer every day. Her heart panged.
She tried to concentrate on the lecture, telling herself that she wasn’t thinking about Meg, who had been so disgusted by Clove’s kiss that she had cut off all contact with her. She wasn’t thinking about her parents, who had lied to her for years, never trusting her enough to tell her the truth. She definitely wasn’t thinking about how she didn’t really know who she was any more. She wasn’t thinking about any of that.
She wasn’t.
In the last lecture of the day, Clove burst into tears in front of a hall full of students. She had been helping the professor to project her watch screen onto the wall, so she could give a presentation. It should only have taken a few minutes to set up, but first the software needed updating, and then a plug-in crashed, and then the watch turned out to be low on battery. Clove could feel the students watching her – and to make it worse, that girl was in the audience, the cute eyeliner-wearing one − and this wasn’t even Clove’s job, why were they making her do this?
Suddenly it was all too much. She found herself in tears.
The professor blinked at her. “Oh no, why don’t you go on back to the office? I can sort this.”
“But—” Clove said, frantically brushing tears off her face, as even more appeared.
“Let me call your mum,” she said, not quite sure how to deal with a weeping sixteen year old.
“She’s not my mum,” Clove said, and then let out another loud sob.
“I’ll … I’ll call her anyway,” the professor said, and patted her gently on the shoulder.
Keeping her head turned away from the class, Clove ducked out of the lecture theatre. The students were sitting in a terrible, horrified silence, which was somehow worse than laughter.
I’m clever, Clove wanted to shout. She wasn’t just a stupid kid. She’d been waiting her whole life to come to the university. She was meant to be here. So why was this happening?
She leant her head on the wall outside the hall, trying to stop the tears. She didn’t even know what she was crying about. What was wrong with her? She never used to be this crazy.
The professor must have called Jen straight away, because she arrived only a few minutes later.
“Clove,” she said. “Let’s get you home.”
Clove followed her in silence.
When they got home, Clove could tell Jen wanted to talk, but Clove didn’t feel ready, so she bolted upstairs to her room.