The rest of
Charmaine’s fifteenth year went by quietly. She still wrote about Carlton in her diary. She kept wishing he would visit his uncle so that she would see him again just to tell him exactly how she felt. A couple of the pages in the diary had watermarks which I suspected were from the tears that she cried in frustration. After a while she stopped writing about him. I guess she must have accepted the fact that
she would never see him again. Anyway, it was coming up to her sixteenth
birthday and
she was not looking forward to the celebration of it! Grandpa Wharbucks was
concerned about Charmaine's disinterest in having a party and he told her he was going to talk to Florence to see if she could get her to change her mind.
Charmaine was in the garden reading when Florence came and sat beside her and
asked her what was the matter. “Why don’t you want to celebrate your birthday?”
she asked. “It’s your sweet sixteen! This is the birthday that all young
ladies look forward to! This is like the Queen of England
giving birth to the heir to the throne!” said Florence. She kept talking and talking but Charmaine was just not interested in
having a sweet sixteen birthday party and she told Florence that nothing she said would change
her mind. The real reason, however, for her not wanting to have a party was that Charmaine
did not have any friends. Charmaine said that she no longer spoke to the girls who lived on the estate because of the
way they treated her when Carlton was around the previous summer. I laughed when she said that she avoided them like the plague! As to the
girls in her class at school, she would never ever invite them to the
estate again! Charmaine said that she had a habit of sitting on top of the toilet tank in the bathroom
with her feet on the covered seat while she read her book so that even if someone looked
under the door to the stall they could not see that someone was inside there. She said she could write a book
about the many stories she had overheard while she was in the bathroom! One day while she was in the bathroom stall reading her book she heard her girlfriends enter the bathroom talking loudly. She was about to leave the stall when she heard her name mentioned so she kept quiet and listened to what they were saying. She was shocked to hear the girls,
whom she thought were her best friends discussing her in a derogatory manner, because
they were all friends from they were six years old!
It was all because of that new boy
that had started attending the school in the middle of the term. He was very handsome and charming and he
did not hide the fact that he liked Charmaine. Charmaine tried her best
not to encourage him because she was still in love with Carlton. One of her girlfriends, who was a bit more brazen than the others had a crush on the new boy and
decided to tell him how much she, the girlfriend, liked him and wanted to be his girlfriend. To her dismay, the new boy, Cedric
was his name, told her he was not interested in having a girlfriend at this time as he
wanted to focus on his lessons. She was fine with that until she overheard
Cedric telling another boy that he liked Charmaine and wanted her for his
girlfriend. The girl was livid! She kept saying that the only reason why Cedric
liked Charmaine was because she was the great Stanley Wharbucks granddaughter
and because they were rich! What hurt Charmaine most of all was that all the other girls
agreed with her. One of them even remarked, “Yes, he only likes her because her hair is long!”
Another of them said that she did not like Charmaine because she thought she knew everything. There was the sound of footsteps approaching and the girls hurriedly left the
bathroom. Charmaine was relieved that they left when they did because she was worried that one
of them would want to use the toilet in the stall where she was hiding and realize that the door was bolted on
the inside. Charmaine said she cried as she could not believe that the girls were only pretending to like her all this time. She waited until she knew that no one else was in the bathroom before she
came out of the stall. She washed her face, combed her hair, said a
prayer and walked out of the bathroom. On the way back to her classroom she saw
Cedric with a group of boys under the huge acacia tree near the school canteen.
He waved to her but she pretended not to see him. The girls, the ones whom were
discussing her in the bathroom, were standing by the door to the classroom. She
walk passed them and went and sat in her seat. They had a puzzled look on their
faces and one of them asked her if she was okay. Charmaine said she smiled and
nodded, indicating that she was fine, but from that day she kept them all at a
distance. Poor Charmaine, I said to myself, you are going to learn the hard way
that women will always be jealous of you. My Grandmother, when she was in her
sixties, was a beautiful woman so I can easily imagine how pretty she was at
sixteen. I had come to the end of that chapter in the diary so I closed it. I
was putting it in my bag when I heard a loud wailing coming from the Maternity
Ward. I jumped to my feet, grabbed my bag and said, “Here we go again!”
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