Growing Wings: Write Every Wrong: The Journal

This is a piece of writing that I based off a Writer's Digest prompt.

Clicking her tongue in that annoying way she always did when she was trying to find something, Aubree pushed her glasses up that was slowly falling down her nose whilst her green eyes carried on scanning the shelves in her school library. There was a never ending flow of homework lately; essay after essay just kept coming at her. It seemed as though she was never going to leave this library, whether it would be to pick up books or to do the work there.

The French Revolution was the topic of the week for her work. Mrs Manning could not have picked a more interesting subject! Aubree wasn’t a huge fan of the topic, nor of her history lessons at the moment. What used to be a subject that excited her was now one that made her want to fall asleep in the back of the classroom. She couldn’t afford to do that though. In her last year of Secondary it felt as though missing half an hour of a lesson was enough to put her mark down by a whole grade.

Aub just wanted a few books to help her out on her paper. Mrs Manning had a strict policy of no use of computers. No matter how hard someone tried to get away with it, she always seemed to just know. Aubree didn’t even attempt using a computer, there was no point. Mrs Manning liked all of her papers handwritten and all of the information done from books. It could be worse though, she could have asked them to reference everything that they found.

Venturing further and further into the history section, Aubree was hoping that she would stumble across a book of some use to her soon. It had been a long enough day already and the last thing that she wanted was to have to stay behind any longer than necessary.

As her finger ran across the spines of numerous books, she stopped when she felt the out of place feeling on leather. Curious, she pulled the book out and furrowed her brow. It didn’t look like one of the library books, there wasn’t even a title on the front. Aub opened the book ready to thumb through the page but stopped and looked at the first page.

“Property of Callum Ricks. If lost please return to:
Grange High School,
Reception.
Thank you.”

The ever polite Callum Ricks, even in writing he didn’t find it in his heart to be rude. Callum was one of the quieter boys in Aubree’s year but all the same, he still excelled in school and the teachers loved him. Aub had spoken to him a few times on the way to class and they sometimes partnered up in science but she couldn’t say that she spoke to him loads. The book must have been placed there by one of the librarians by accident.

The better part of Aubree knew that she should take the book back to the reception area, as had been instructed on the first page but there was a niggling feeling inside of her that she was desperately trying to ignore. What was in this book? What could quiet, little Callum Ricks possibly be doing with this book? Aub had never seen him with it before. Biting her lip, she went to go sit in an isolated section of the library that had a few bean bags in a corner. She settled herself down and opened the book up again. Although she did feel horrendously bad about doing this, it couldn’t possible hurt just to have a little look at what was in there. Surely, Callum wouldn’t mind. It wasn’t like she was going to go around school and tell everyone what was in there. Aub just wanted to get rid of that rather annoying, festering feeling and there was only one way to do that. She convinced herself that she wasn’t going to be completely nosey; she would just take a quick flick through the pages and then hand it straight into reception.

Curiosity would not let that happen though. It wanted her to delve deeper and see what else was in there. Aubree didn’t have to will power to go against that and she soon found herself looking at each page slowly and carefully as if there was some hidden message in there. She just couldn’t help herself.

Aubree soon learnt that Callum was a doodler, there was a sketch on every page, whether it just be in the corner or taking up a whole page. By the time she had gotten around about five pages in she started to take more notice of the writing. What she thought looked like a journal seemed like so much more at the moment. He seemed to document more than just what his day was. It was a record of the people he met, the people he had walked past that day, it was the inside of his head all written down. Aubree kept reading and noticed that there were a few times where her name cropped up. Here he wrote about how he enjoyed the chats that he had with her, however short they may be. Aub couldn’t help but smile at that but her smile soon faded as she carried on reading.

He felt alone a lot of the time; like isolation had become his best friend over the years. He tried to make friends but from what Aub had read, she struggled with it. He struggled finding a way to fit in with everything else and all of the things they got involved in. Aubree had always thought that Callum stayed away from people out of choice; that he would rather have time to himself instead of being among the crowd of the rest of the school. Realising that that wasn’t the case made her feel slightly differently. She liked speaking to Callum but didn’t really approach him unless they were outside of class or paired up because she didn’t want to bother him. She wanted to start making more of an effort with him. She wanted to show him that making friends was pretty easy.

Aub didn’t want him to get suspicious though, she didn’t want him to wonder why all of a sudden she had started to speak to him more. She could tell him but she wasn’t sure how he would react and she didn’t want Callum thinking that she was only speaking to him because she felt pity. That wasn’t the reason at all. That was a battle that she was going to have to spend the night thinking about but for now all Aubree wanted to do was to go home and strike up a conversation with Callum online.