It’s a dreary Wednesday afternoon at the library, and I’m due to start an essay based on a question I don’t understand. I take a seat on the fourth floor and just when I pull up my blank word document, I see them.
Garish private school blazers embroidered with titles no one cares about under the school crest. Backpacks hanging down past their arses. Smug, slimy, punchable faces.
They’re here.
They waste no time sitting down and scattering their things about, talking at an absurdly loud volume about how they’re not going to pass English, and how they’re going out tonight when they really shouldn’t be, and other vapid drivel and gossip that not a single person on God’s green earth would ever care about, like how Sophie got completely tragic last Friday night at their pre-exam pissup and vomited in the Uber.
Been there, Sophie.
But apparently, that’s not all. Sophie also hooked up with Serena’s ex, and Serena thought she and Sophie were best friends so that’s like not on, but Sophie didn’t think that they were best friends, just like friends so it was fine for her to hook up with Serena’s ex but that’s still like, pretty dog right?
The council unanimously and quickly decided yes, that is still quite dog. I almost chime in and confirm it myself, but I manage to seal my mouth shut at the last minute.
Occasionally they pause their conversation and look around the room and I have to pretend I’m actually busy, so I start typing in the title of my essay over and over again. As soon as they resume, I lean on the back of my hand and listen closely.
The blonde, wiry girl sitting in the back corner? Her parents are getting a divorce, which would be fine except for the meetings she has to go to where they decide who gets custody. Those are stupid and pointless because she’ll be 18 in February and the divorce probably won’t even be finalised by then, and she gets that they still have to decide who gets custody of her little brothers but why does she have to go to the meetings?
That does sound really dumb. I’m not a lawyer, though. Maybe they have to decide who gets custody of her $14,000 custom-built Victorian dollhouse from like, way back in the day and she’s just a proxy.
As I listen to them talk, I feel the familiar envy of adolescence creep into my consciousness. Maybe that is what I have been feeling the whole time. The long-ago lifetime spent coveting from the corner of the room, wanting to be known more than to be loved. I wasn’t a cool girl, but when they said that didn’t matter when you got to adulthood, they were right.
Right?
I look at the page in front of me:
In Reading as a Writer, we aim to read not as readers, but as writers. We can do this by writing as if we were reading and
I’m going to delete that shit and leave.
Yes, the HSC students are annoying and loud - that’s part of the reason I oppose their use of the UNSW libraries. They also bring all the ghosts of my adolescence with them, which forms an even greater part of my argument. So for the people who have buried their teenage selves and live every day in great fear that the high school girls on the bus will laugh at their outfits, please ban all non-UNSW students and staff from the library.
