(죄송하지만 끝난건 아닙니다)

July 9th, 1954.
I am Tamara Forest. I live in a family of 6, and our family is quite rich. I am the oldest of the 4 kids that our family has. As our everyday routine, both my parents leave for their jobs at the exact same time. But before that, they always prepare a wonderful breakfast, beans on toast, which may sound weird, but our family takes them graciously, and of course, they always leave with a kiss, before they leave. I am the oldest, and I think I am blessed to be able to enroll into Grammar School, but my family is worried the other 3 will not be able to qualify. Of course, we leave our home as late as we can, because that’s how humans work. I go out earlier than the rest, as the Grammar School is quite far away, I hope I am not late.

Never mind, this feels ominous. I might have to just run as fast as I can. Mr. Moore is strict about being on time, and I once got suspended for being late by 10 minutes, so I don’t want that to happen again. As I grasp through the roads, I see the relaxed faces of people, where I again, regret getting out late to get 5 more minutes of sleep. I still feel like it was worth it. As I dash through, I see my school, and I think I am not late. As I exhausted at the front gate, I suddenly realized I forgot to pack lunch for one of my younger brothers, Mitchell. Great, I will feel bad about this for the whole day. School went normally, there was the assembly, where the principal, Mr. Green is making announcements while I just gossiped with the other girls. After this, I headed back to my classroom for first period. Gush, the first period is math. I get out my textbook, and I was greeted with symbols that looked like scribbles, and where the teacher speaks something that did not feel like English. Thankfully, my friend Natalie is one of the best math exemplars in the entirety of our grade, so really, she explained most of the stuff to me. Alright, next class we have science, I cannot wait for the lab. Never mind, we are learning the history of some scientist in the 1870’s which I genuinely don’t care about. I took some notes as there is no genuine part of understanding in here, as it is just a memory test. Me and my friend, Rosemary, were debating over whether a boy next school that she has a crush on also had a crush on her the whole period. That was fun. Next came along was Latin, where I thrived, as my family had a tradition of teaching Latin in the early years. All my siblings speak fluent Latin, but my family does too, so it's no secret keeping, I guess. We do make up words though, and that sometimes confuses with the words we learn in this class. Even though I excel at this, I still must be careful to not write the wrong definition in tests, so I take a bit of notes on that too. This is one of the only classes I do focus, because it is fun to see others struggle. After that, we had lunch, when Mr. Green suddenly gave a speech as to how the orchestra performance the school presented a day ago was wonderful, which had no visitors other than the performer’s parents. I sat together with Natalie, Liona and Rosemary, all of them are old friends of mine. We rant about how the education system is flawed, not knowing that we are privileged. Apparently, there were some girl dramas, where Liona was bullied by some older girls, but she does not seem to be damaged much by their insults. Everyone at our table brings packed lunches, and after about 20 minutes of munching, the teachers tell everyone to go back to their classrooms. Oh boy, we have gym class now, and as you can imagine, some sports are very hard to do for a slim girl. Thankfully, the things we did were not one of them, but I was still exhausted. I think I am starting to get used to it. After this, I have the final class of the day, English. I was sleeping the whole time, as I knew all the material even before the class started, and because I was a bit tired. I went back home, where I hung around with my friends, ate some dessert along the walk back home, talking about how we should plan a party at one of our houses. We were talking about the board games we should play at the party, or the type of clothes we should wear. All of them were happy with this decision, but none were sure their parents would approve of such an event. We got back a bit later than promised, but my parents are quite chill about it. We ate dinner as usual, but we were not aware of what would happen next. Dinner went normally, with my parents asking how school life went, and it is always the same story. But I am glad they are interested to hear such stories. We turned on the TV, which other friends of mine did not have. There was a news reporter that is reporting a story about the chancellor of Poland, Jacob Forest, is making movements against Hispanic people in his country, and from what I learned from history, that could potentially be a sign of genocide, oh no. Everyone in my family, except for my mother is having the same thought. Why does it have to be a person with the same last name as ours? He said he’s planning to give a speech as of why Hispanic people are inferior in 30 days. I am not looking forward to this. My parents put all of us to sleep, but I was able to hear the loud argument as if we should change last names or not. My mother took the side to change, because ‘a lot of people with your last name would change, and it’s now a good time to blend in’. I could tell that no one was sleeping. Meanwhile, my father has proclaimed that he is proud of the ancestry of this name, and it sounds good. I was not able to hear the rest of it, as I was starting to get sleepy. I am still glad it is Friday.
August 8th, 1954.
A month has passed, and a lot of stuff happened. The crush between Rosemary and the boy I mentioned, Stewart broke after he stopped talking to her when Rosemary repeatedly approached him. My thesis is that Stewart was not happy to talk with someone he doesn’t know much about. She was sad about it during lunch break, and I just said he doesn’t know your worth. That comment did not have my heart. Some random senior got suspended for quite a bit after bringing cheat sheets on a multiple-choice exam. But that is not why I wrote this. Remember Jacob Forest made an announcement about a speech? Here we go.
‘Welcome to BBC News. Here we are broadcasting the speech live, I am news reporter Willis Hatheway, thanks for watching this.’
‘Hello, I am Jacob Forest, and I will not stall any longer. Hispanic people are parasites in the world that feed from other’s inventions and have stolen several cultures around the world. They are also people that have committed many crimes throughout the world, and we shall start a movement to discriminate against them. I do not like them, and no one should.’
This sounded wild, and even abhorrent to my father, but our family believed that these words could easily be tackled with logic, a Hispanic he knows at work is a nice dude in terms of personality. but oh boy he was wrong. Because of the post-war effects Poland had, the citizens needed something for them to be patriotic about. One thankful thing about Jacob Forest is that he had successfully transformed Poland to a better place, by offering better transportation. How do I know this? Because we learned this in history class about a year back. My family froze whilst listening to this. I support him for now, as his dislike towards other races could be justified, and how he did a lot of good stuff, showing himself to be a good chancellor. My family really did not like how this conversation was going, so my dad pulled out a game of Pit, and the topic instantly reversed. I cornered Wheat 2 times, and because we only play up to 200 points in house rules, I had a perfect win, thankfully nullifying the topic of Jacob Forest, for now. That was for Sunday evening, I could not wait to go to school!

August 13th, 1954.
In the next few days, nothing really happened. Do you really expect any dynamic actions in an all-girl school? You really should not. The first class was history, where we learned about the glory of Great Britain. We learnt stuff like how our country had once conquered a large portion of the world, for spices and for stuff. My teacher, Mr. Willford, has said that this is going to be a long lesson, which was never a good thing as things quickly get repetitive. It’s still a Friday; nothing can really go wrong. Never mind, the next 2 classes are math. We follow a complicated schedule, so this sometimes happens. One time I had 3 consecutive classes of Latin, where I was the only one who kept her sanity. Thankfully, my savior Natalie helped me a lot, as I kind of lack math skills, but I am improving slowly, as the math we learn here is still quite easy. Every class is about 70 minutes long, so I still had to endure 140 minutes, with a 10-minute break in between. Natalie still seems energetic, but no one else in the classroom is. Eventually, me and Natalie just gossiped about how Mr. Moore is an idiot and has no flexibility on being like 2 minutes late into school.
After what my classmates Natalie and Liona described as a ‘tormenting session of alien language’, wait no, Natalie was just bored because it was all stuff she already knew. We headed to lunch, where as usual, everyone brings their packed lunches. My mom said she would pack extra because there will be a Scrabble tournament that will be at home today. It is a family tradition at this point to host a Scrabble tournament once every month, preferably on a Friday. The winner out of the 6 gets a coupon to not do the dishes for a day, that can be accumulated. The 6th place does the dishes instead. I usually tend to do pretty well. At our lunch tables, we talked about how Mr. Green does nothing but make random announcements. No one disagrees with this statement. The teachers tell the students to go back to their classrooms, as always. I really like how we have a nice cafeteria. I went back to learn about the Periodic Table in science class, which was pretty fun. The biggest takeaway was you can make diamonds out of your bones. Last class was English, where we learn about writing techniques and stuff. I don’t understand the reason for this class to exist. Rosemary agrees with this one too, mainly because every single person in the room is a fluent English speaker. Class ended, and I dashed home because this week is finally over, and it means it’s closer and closer to the end of the year.

As the Scrabble tournament initiates, there is a hexagon, which has the first names of everyone in the family. And whenever someone wins a game, an arrow is drawn towards the winner. Draws never happened once in the tournament. The first game starts off with my father playing against Jocelyn, my younger sister. Jocelyn played bingo ‘parasite’, scoring 74 moves. No one spoke a word here, unlike the usual shouts when someone plays a bingo. I think it is because of the usage of the word parasite in Jacob’s speech, and we are especially sensitive to it because we have the same last name. We played all 9 games of the tourney, and surprisingly, Mitchell came first, and I came last. Oh gosh, I do not want to do the dishes. Of course, the name Jacob Smith sparked another argument about whether we should change our last names or not, to my mother’s last name, Anderson. All my siblings, including me, are all having the same thought, we will not accept such a change.

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