Sonia’s trainers scuffed along cracked paving stones as the school gate faded into a distant scream. She’d read that scientists didn’t really understand black holes. It wasn’t that complicated: all her boyfriends had disappeared down one, and no one ever missed them.
She wondered what the big deal was with being perfect. She kicked a pebble at a looming rubbish bin. It missed but skipped down the street with a pleasing rattle. A cat screeched and ran off into a dark alley. She paused at the bus stop. She could walk, but desperately had to sit, her fifteen years winding her thoughts into a stone ball around her ankle. The hard, green plastic was pockmarked and wet, but she didn’t care; she let the cold, murky dampness seep through her jeans and poked long curly hair underneath her hood with a well-practised flick of irritated patience. A bus shuffled by, staining her shoes with a lash of rainwater that smelt like an open sewer. Diesel fumes bit the air as she clenched her teeth and shivered. Her fist crumpled another failed report. Maths pretty much a zero. They said she wasn't much good at numbers, or logic, or consequences, but she calculated she’d be grounded for at least another two weekends with those results. She let the paper slip down the drain and watched it grow soggy, curl sullenly, then stick to the dark grey grating. Her mother would be waiting, her food growing cold, her younger sister glowing in her absence. She fiddled with the wild strands of purple hair sticking to damp cheeks as busses wheezed past, one by one, sometimes in bundles of two or three. She stopped counting as evening deepened and a dark, wintry wind swept her out into the receding skyline.
She’d read no one really knew how many stars there were, and how easy it was to be lost in space. It didn’t seem right that she was the only failure in the class. They weren’t looking carefully enough. She didn’t know how to tell them she knew all the answers; they just wouldn’t come out. She was like the scientists, probing in the dark, a star waiting to be identified, an asteroid tumbling earthwards. She stood up suddenly and looked down the street at the line of limp, yellow streetlamps flickering steadily into the distance. Her trainers caught in a crack, she slipped, her legs ached under her bag of schoolbooks, but she plodded on persistently. She counted out the lights as they passed overhead and waited for them to fade into the horizon and become stars. She would tick them off, one by one, until she lost herself in the sparkling melee of the night sky and slipped into a hole black enough to make her shine.
She wasn’t going home. Not tonight.
BIOGRAPHY: E.F.S. Byrne works in education and writes when his teenage kids allow it. He blogs a regular micro flash story. Links to this and over fifty published pieces can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @efsbyrne
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