I had time today to put together another tutorial for you.

Instead I stared at my naked face for a quarter of an hour. My bags are dark; darker than the inside veins of my wrist. I don’t remember my cheeks being this hollow, though I must admit that it looks striking and I like it. My eyes are so bloodshot it stings; looking at them, it’s hard to look away.

The rest of my spare time was spent curled up on my bed, and I watched the wall until it blinked.

I’ve been talking to another girl who, coincidentally, has my nickname as her actual name. At first I was so jealous – I saw her as what I could have been. On face level she’s me, but her huge eyes and full mouth make her exceedingly prettier. Her friend group is swarming; they’re the “popular Asians”, the pretty ones that always look like they’re having so much fun. She’s on the Students Union and seems so loud, so clever, so funny.

Her brother has down syndrome; he’s eight. She looks so lost in space when her friends aren’t distracting her; sometimes she’s in so much pain that you can see it (if you look.) Her parents want her to be a 90 student; a nurse. But that’s not her.

We sit next to each other in French; a fluke by all means. My seat partner dropped the class and she came too late to sit next to her friends. Every two weeks we have a French verb test, out of fifty.

The first one she barely scraped by; the next few she managed seventies. I told her that she could manage fifty, easy – she just needed to study the formations. For me, that’s normal – nothing above or beyond.

Today, she got a 49, plus a bonus mark – an even fifty out of fifty.

What upsets me is that she turns to me and starts thanking me profusely; this has made her more emotional than I’ve ever seen her. She hugs me and I’m wondering why – all I said was a basic “you can do it”, because I knew she could.

And she says:

No one’s ever told me that before.