Fiction: Group 4
Why did those things matter? In her stories, they wouldn’t. Belle looked past Beast's appearance.
Mulan
disguised herself as a boy to fight for her country.
Mum had taught her how to be nice. Didn't
their
mothers teach them that?
But…
She stared blankly at the cold tile floor.
Her fairytales weren’t real.
She turned and walked in the opposite direction, her steps sounding down the hall.
That was the day Sophie learnt that not all mean people were misunderstood.
People were mean to misunderstood people.
~~~
Money is a powerful thing.
There's something strange about it - how pieces of paper or chunks of metal
can be turned into value.
How they have the ability to determine someone's future.
Someone's
status.
Someone's life.
Now the power was in those who had the most money and went about with their
privileges and words of how the poor could not rule. They were stripped of their voice, abandoned and
forgotten.
Ten years is a lot of time for change.
Child into teenager.
Teenager into adult.
That is what growing up is
- years flying by quickly.
So quickly, they passed before you could tell them to wait.
"Hey Sophie, how come we never get to come to your place?"
Sophie smiled hesitantly at her classmates.
"It's messy."
"I don't think we even know where you live," one of them laughed.
They prodded her. She simply answered, "At home."
It wasn't as if she didn't know what they said.
She preferred not to know what others said of her, even if she
heard it anyway.
How they whispered. How they mocked her because her mum washed dishes at a
restaurant and how her hand-me-down clothes were two sizes too large.
How her hair was choppy
because she'd cut it herself.
"What's your number, Soph?" they asked.
She told them her home phone.
They always asked why she didn't have a mobile.
She brushed things off.
Turned a blind eye.
Sitting cross-legged on the upper bunk in the flat where she had lived ever since she was a kid, Sophie
stared at her Biology textbook. She'd been on the same page for the last ten minutes.
"Sophie?
What's wrong?"
Her mum peered at her from below but the teenager remained stony-faced.
"Nothing."
The room was so small.
As she grew up, the walls seemed to press in like they were trying to suffocate
her.
A jail cell.
The dark corridors outside became never-ending mazes of claustrophobia with monsters
