Normals

Being smart wasn’t enough to get me noticed

in a school of fifteen hundred.

For that you needed beauty,

had to be someone with even edges and sleek hair.

Or

if not,

a kid with serious psychological problems –

there were loads of those.

For a while

Sophie, Jacq and I called ourselves

The Normals,

but it was still a way of trying to

stand out.

’Scuse us, The Normals have arrived, Jacq would say,

pushing through an army of girls with smooth legs,

the type of figures

to make grown men look.

We were even invisible to the years below,

although sometimes Sophie

shouldered them out of the way

to prove we weren’t nothing.

Thing was,

Sophie and Jacq really were normal.

At home their mums moaned at them.

At school they got detentions.

At the park boys offered them cider.

They let themselves be seen

and didn’t care about mistakes along the way.

If you aren’t winning, you’re learning,

Jacq said when Sophie

failed a French test, and they high-fived

before heading into Tesco Express

for Meal Deals.

The Normals was a perfect description for them.

My friends.

And even though it didn’t quite fit me –

smart and secretive –

they let me along for the ride.

Until finally the ride ended.