AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘You just need to do this.’ Sophie took a red and a white pipe cleaner and twizzled them together until they were wound around each other. Then she bent the top over so that they looked like a candy cane and tied a thin piece of silvery thread to the top as a hook.
‘Do you think you can do that?’ she asked, passing her example to Cassie.
Cassie took it and rolled it between her fingers, considering the task. ‘I guess so,’ she mumbled.
Cassie took off her coat and scarf, Sophie was pleased to note. She hoped it was because she felt a bit more relaxed than she’d looked outside on the bench. They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, twisting pipe cleaners together, looping the silver thread and making a pile of completed candy canes.
‘How come you were sitting on the friendship bench today?’ Sophie asked after a while.
Cassie shook her head. ‘No reason.’ She focused intently on the candy cane in her hand, bending the top over so that it curved perfectly.
‘Cassie. Come on, you can tell me.’
‘I’m fed up with everyone in this school, all right?’ She raised her voice and looked down again as soon as her brief outburst was over.
Sophie gave her a second to recover. She could see Cassie’s shoulders were tense and her mind was racing.
‘What do you mean?’ Sophie asked.
‘No one wants to be my friend since we moved back.’ Cassie sighed and took a deep breath. ‘Everyone in our year is scared of Lily. If she doesn’t like someone then everyone stays away from them.’
‘And she doesn’t like you at the moment.’
‘Nope.’ Cassie sighed again and put her finished candy cane in the pile.
Sophie didn’t know what to say. How had Lily come to gain so much power in a primary school playground? And how hadn’t she seen it before?
‘Lily’s the popular one,’ Cassie continued, unprompted. ‘When she says something, everyone does it.’
‘That’s sad,’ Sophie said without thinking. ‘I mean, it’s unacceptable. Leave it with me. I’ll sort everything out, I promise.’ She realised that she’d come across as more emotional than she’d intended. ‘I’ll speak to Lily later today.’
‘I thought someone might come and talk to me if I sat on the friendship bench.’ Cassie bent the candy cane over that she’d just twizzled together. ‘But they didn’t.’
‘Lucky I found you, then,’ Sophie said, smiling at her.
Sophie thought she saw a small smile play at the corner of Cassie’s lips, but it faded as soon as she’d noticed it – if it had ever even been there at all.
They continued to work together in silence. She felt rather than saw Cassie glance in her direction a couple of times. The third time, she said, ‘Lily told everyone that I didn’t have a mum and they all laughed at me.’
Sophie was always caught off guard when a child shared something like this. It always surprised her how cruel the other children could be and how honest they were about things that had happened. Maybe this was her chance to get to the bottom of what on earth was going on with Cassie and why she’d seemed so out of sorts recently.
‘What happened?’
Cassie didn’t respond but continued to wind pipe cleaners around each other in silence.
‘Cassie?’
‘She told everyone Mum died,’ Cassie said finally, putting down her decoration and picking at a fingernail. She wiped a sleeve across her face, and Sophie could see that she’d started to cry.
‘I’m sorry, Cassie.’ For once, Sophie didn’t know what to say, and her throat tightened with emotion. There wasn’t anything in the teacher handbook for how to deal with this. It saddened her to think that both Cassie and Liam had been forced to deal with such a tragic event.
‘It’s OK,’ Cassie said. ‘It happened before we moved away. I don’t know why Lily is being so mean about it, though. I thought everyone would have forgotten. Why does she think it’s funny?’ she asked. Her nose crinkled up with incomprehension.
‘Sometimes people laugh when they don’t really understand something,’ Sophie explained, bending her own candy cane over and cutting a length of the silver thread. ‘It’s because they don’t know how else to react.’
‘But it’s not funny.’
‘I know it’s not, sweetheart. But to everyone else it’s a difficult thing to talk about and so they might laugh to avoid talking about it.’
