Green Dot by Madeleine Gray EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Madeleine Gray
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
In high school, my classmates would often speculate about their dream jobs,
and about which degree they should pursue to attain that dream job. In our
final year of school, we would sit around on the deck at lunchtime, girls
from different social groups and hierarchies, girls with different skirt
lengths, all of us united in filling in the blanks of this vague hypothetical
time of ‘when school is over’. As I was one of the highest achieving in our
grade, the ball was inevitably lobbed my way. I was supposed to say a
dream job that required a high leaving certificate mark, and an exclusive
university degree, and then everyone would nod because the things that I
said would have made sense.
Although I was clever, I had never conquered my times tables or
evidenced any aptitude as a woman in STEM, so my options included
lawyer, journalist and academic. Lawyer: money. Journalist: exciting.
Academic: worthy. I just had to pick one, I knew this, and then the
conversation would flow on like a bounce pass from a wing defence to a
nimble centre.
But I couldn’t do it. I fobbed the pass. I intercepted my own shot. (This
is something I have made quite a habit of, as you’ll see.) In a
condescending monotone I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do anything
but learn or, like, read because everything else seems kind of tragically
depressing and meaningless and on the way to school I see people on the
bus who are going to work and they look fucking devo.’
My friend Soph was on the deck with me, and I looked to her for
support. She gave an encouraging grimace; I read this as her giving me the
go-ahead to dig in, dig deeper.
I have a habit of scratching my neck when I am nervous to feign
casualness and what I imagine to look like cool impropriety, and I certainly
did this then. Attention was on me. I was aware of my body, my pose –
which I’ve been told can read as defensive. Holding myself in, using my
arms as a cage. But what is defensiveness if not a waving hand above a
drowning body? It seemed to me that surely, any day now, I would be
caught out. I used my words, my wit, to deflect from my trembling fingers,
to divert attention from the fact that my thighs chafed as I walked, no matter
how little I ate, no matter how far I ran.
Outside the school walls I struggled
to retain agency – my lack of confidence in engaging with members of the
opposite sex correlated to a direct deflation of my human capital out there.
Inside the school walls, however, with words, and with girls, I could do it, I
could direct the play.
At this moment I had not entirely lost the crowd. I could see others
thinking back to their own morning commutes, I could see them reflecting
on the dejected faces of those wearing skirt suits with trainers and running
miserably for the bus. But then one of the boarders, sounding exasperated
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB