Focus of Attention

[Vase with Twelve Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh]

She needn’t be alone any more. She could walk with a companion at any time, but she did not need the sad attentions of the urgent males who came up to her, seemingly, wherever she stood. She did not want to be, did not like being, the focus of all that attention. She wanted silence and her own thoughts. The other girls, she could see, were getting jealous of her, the way the boys would gather in groups to whisper and to stare.

Standing in front of her bedroom mirror one day, she decided to change her hairstyle: the long flowing blonde hair would have to go, she decided. She fancied something stern, efficient. Even then, though, there was nothing she could do about her face; her eyes, her nose, her lips, her bone-structure. She sighed and picked up a book from her bookshelf.

Sitting down on her bed, she began to read.

She could not get comfortable, could not concentrate on the plight of Tess. She looked up from the book as if she saw the posters for the first time. Groups of young men staring at her - like that - again. She jumped up from the bed and tore the posters from the walls, screwing them into tight balls of wrinkled colours before throwing them towards the bin.

By the end, only the poster of Van Gogh's vase of sunflowers remained untouched on her wall.