Null Pointer

Loquacious Lumberings

July - Di

July Crawl - 1192 words

Sprint to 200 words – 4:45

Sprint for 5 minutes – 192 words.

>150: Write 25 words – 0:31.

Write for 10 minutes – 404 words.

Flip a coin. Heads: Write 100 words – 3:05.

Do a fifty-headed hydra – 226 words.

1192 words.

Diana Lynch traced a spiral on her desk with on finger, unable to concentrate on whatever the teacher was droning on about at the front of the room. It all seemed the same: history, mathematics – Di looked down at the textbook open on her desk, evidence of a student who had at least come prepared to learn something – English Literature. It bored her, all of it, and it was all the same. Some bubbly teacher up at the chalkboard droning on for most of an hour, assigning homework that Di would try to do well on, or not, and she would get barely passing grades whether she tried or half-heartedly muddled her way through the assignment, so what was the point of trying? Art class was the only bright point in her school days.

She heard rustling around her, the shifting of students watching the clock and willing time to go faster, willing the bell to ring, because the bell would signal not just the end of the period, but the end of the day, and the end of the week. Her classmates were eager for that; they would pour out of the building to their homes, or their friends’ homes, and fool around with each other or their siblings or their families. Some would go off to various afterschool activities and clubs. In a few weeks, when the Drama Club started up, Di would share their enthusiasm for the end of the day. Until then, nothing good was signaled by the end of day bell. She was merely trading one monotonous drudgery for another.

When that end of day bell rang, as it was destined to do very soon, Di would not go home, nor to a friend’s house. She would go to the estate. She hated it. The servants said to give it time; it would get a lived-in feel to it soon enough. Di didn’t want lived-in. She wanted home. Home was the apartment on Main Street. The place she could bring friends. The place she could play with the twinnies. The place where her mother smiled when she came in the door and waved her to fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies. Home. The estate would never be home.

People made a game of it: what would you do if you suddenly became fabulously wealthy? There were all sorts of ideas, and plans people came up with in answer to the question, but the reality, as far as Diana was concerned, was that becoming suddenly wealthy was just awful. The estate had a butler, of all things, and even her parents seemed to defer to Harrison. When Di had tried to have friends over, he was always about. Some of her friends had spent the visits to the estate talking about how wonderful it would be if their families were rich. Diana wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy. Other friends, even intrepid Trixie Belden, who could usually be counted on to make any situation lively and interesting, had no idea what to make of Harrison, the lace dollies, and multiple spoons and forks. It was supposed to be cookies and milk – not a four-course affair at a formal table! Invariablely, a friend’s first visit to the estate was also their last. Diana often wanted to yell at Harrison and tell the butler to butt out! However, her parents had raised her to respect her elders and to set a good example for the twinnies. She couldn’t see how screaming at Harrison would accomplish either objective. So Di didn’t invited friends over, and they, one by one, stopped inviting her over.

Moving to a bigger house had immediately appealed to Diana. She’d have her own room for the first time in her life! Nurses would care for the twinnies, leaving Di with more time for her artwork. The novelty had worn off almost immediately, and in its wake loneliness had become Di’s sworn companion. When she got home from school, Harrison would be waiting with his dollies and three types of forks. She would scramble up the stairs to avoid him, dropping her bookbag on her bed and proceeding to the nursery to see her younger siblings. The nurses would invariably turn her away with talk of schedules and lessons. Di wanted to yell at them, too. The boys were barely in kindergarten, the girls that much younger. How much of a schedule, how many lessons, could they possibly have that there was no time for Di to play with them, as she had played with them in the cramped living room of the Main Street apartment?

Diana sighed, hearing the bell ring. It was time to go. Unenthusiastically, Di shoved her textbook into her bag and joined the flood of students tumbling first out of the classroom and then out of the building. One type of drudgery was over for the day and she was off to the next.

The weekend stretched interminably before her, made worse by the newest addition to the misery of the estate. Her mother’s long lost brother, Montague Wilson. Uncle Monty. If anyone wanted to know Di’s opinion, she’d just as soon he stayed long-lost. He was always trying to persuade her to wear these unbearably formal party gowns to completely informal events like simple dinner with her own family in her own house. Her mother was so pleased to have found her brother that she always sided with him. Her father tried to interfere, but her mother would just say “doesn’t she look beautiful?” The look her father gave her suggested he understood that she might look beautiful, but all she felt was incredibly uncomfortable. She was thirteen, not seventeen! The gowns were completely out of place, in her candied opinion. And Uncle Monty was forever gifting them with things or forcing them to do activities that none of them cared for. Diana couldn’t decide whether he just wasn’t making much effort to actually get to know them, or whether he was trying to make them all miserable on purpose. Since the whole point of him staying with them was for him and Mummy, at least, to reconnect and get to know each other, either possibility suggested to Di that Uncle Monty just wasn’t a very nice person. Of course, it would make her an even less nice person to say such a thing, so she held her silence. At first, she’d taken comfort in knowing her father agreed. She’d thought he’d get rid of Uncle Monty somehow. But Mummy was enthralled and Daddy had just taken to going into work earlier and coming home later. Di had no such escape. Another thing to hate about the estate. When they’d lived in town she could come and go almost as she pleased. Now she had to get a ride anywhere she wanted to go, unless she could get there on Sunny. She’d thought about riding him to town, but she couldn’t exactly leave him to graze on the soccer field while she was at school, or send him to Wimpy’s for a burger and a milkshake while she played with her friends. So she was stuck.