Being Miss Nobody Read online

  I have not been a very nice person.

  I have done some bad things.

  I have lied to a lot of people I know.

  All of these things I have done pretty much deliberately.

  …I am Miss Nobody.

  Rosalind hates her new secondary school. She’s the weird girl who can’t speak. The Mute-ant. And it’s easy to pick on someone who can’t fight back. So Rosalind starts a blog – Miss Nobody; a place to speak up, a place where she has a voice. But there’s a problem…

  Is Miss Nobody becoming a bully herself?

  This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever found it difficult to speak up. And to my son, for helping me find my voice.

  CONTENTS

  About this Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: #awkwardsilence

  Chapter 2: #brickwall

  Chapter 3: #tellmeaboutyourself

  Chapter 4: #whatif

  Chapter 5: #badintro

  Chapter 6: #voicemail

  Chapter 7: #whatdidyousay

  Chapter 8: #tinysound

  Chapter 9: #answerme

  Chapter 10: #whisperit

  Chapter 11: #speakup

  Chapter 12: #saysomething

  Chapter 13: #callinsick

  Chapter 14: #tune

  Chapter 15: #whitelie

  Chapter 16: #serioustalk

  Chapter 17: #alittlebirdietoldme

  Chapter 18: #sayalittleprayer

  Chapter 19: #quickword

  Chapter 20: #tellmeaboutit

  Chapter 21: #greywords

  Chapter 22: #shoutout

  Chapter 23: #everybodystalkingaboutit

  Chapter 24: #strangeword

  Chapter 25: #justask

  Chapter 26: #iswear

  Chapter 27: #whatdoyouthink

  Chapter 28: #waitingtohear

  Chapter 29: #tellingstories

  Chapter 30: #lookwhostalking

  Chapter 31: #dontaskme

  Chapter 32: #thatsyourcue

  Chapter 33: #hearttoheart

  Chapter 34: #newsflash

  Chapter 35: #tellyoulater

  Chapter 36: #promise

  Chapter 37: #idontknowwhattosay

  Chapter 38: #tellthetruth

  Chapter 39: #shutup

  Chapter 40: #saywhat

  Chapter 41: #peptalk

  Chapter 42: #toolatetoapologize

  Chapter 43: #badjoke

  Chapter 44: #emergency

  Chapter 45: #timetosaygoodbye

  Chapter 46: #youshouldhavetoldme

  Chapter 47: #letstalk

  Chapter 48: #canyouhearme

  Chapter 49: #lastwords

  Chapter 50: #ablastfromthepast

  Chapter 51: #beingquietandspeakingup

  The story behind Being Miss Nobody

  Look out for another incredible book from Tamsin Winter in 2018…

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Before I start, here are some things you should know about me:

  I have not been a very nice person. You are probably not going to like me very much.

  I have done some bad things. Some really bad things.

  I have lied to a lot of people I know. In fact, everyone I know.

  All of the above I have done pretty much deliberately.

  I am Miss Nobody.

  I was first diagnosed as Officially Weird two years ago, when I was nine years old. But actually, I had been Unofficially Weird for a long time before that. My parents must have suspected it too, because we were all in Dr Langley’s surgery and everyone was staring at me. Dr Langley said, “I would just like you to say your name,” which I thought was extremely weird considering she had been our family doctor since like for ever, and if she didn’t know my name by now then who did she think it was showing up to my appointments?

  So Dr Langley was staring at me and my parents were staring at me too and even though I can speak, something always happens to the words in my head in Certain Situations Like This One, which is sometimes they Disappear Completely, so what I can say is this:

  Or too many words come into my head at once and they get into a Massive Muddle so I can’t say any of them, like this:

  Or sometimes I know exactly what I want to say, but the words get stuck somewhere and I can’t get them out, like this:

  And when it’s Really Bad, it feels like my lips have actually been superglued together.

  So when these things happen (and they happen a lot) I can’t speak. Not even one word.

  And that’s what happened in the doctor’s with everybody staring at me, but also it happens when I’m around people I don’t know (and a lot of the people I do know) even if they aren’t all staring at me. And up until this appointment with Dr Langley, my parents thought I was just Painfully Shy and would grow out of it. In fact, that’s what everyone thought.

  (Apart from me.)

  Because I had known for a long time – pretty much my whole life actually – that if I can only speak normally to about four people in the whole entire world, that’s not being Painfully Shy, that’s being Something Else.

  So there I was, nine years old, feeling like I must be from another planet or something because I wanted to tell Dr Langley everything, but I couldn’t say even one word. And everything I wanted to tell her got stuck inside my head. Like how I’d never spoken normally in front of anyone apart from my parents and my little brother and our next-door neighbour Mrs Quinney. And how much I hated school because I couldn’t speak to anyone, apart from sometimes very quietly to the teaching assistant Mrs Palmer (but only if no one else was there). And how my teacher Mrs Long used to roll her eyes whenever I couldn’t get my words out. And how she would put a big list of questions on the board and go round the class one by one, and before she even said my name a massive ball of panic would rise up from my tummy to my throat to inside my head. How she would point at me and say, “What’s the answer to number three, please?” And even though I knew the answer, I could never say it because it was like someone had taken a pair of scissors from the wooden block on the window sill and chopped my voice out. So I would sit there, petrified, looking at the floor, with Mrs Long repeating my name and clicking her fingers saying, “I know you know the answer! Just say it!” And I wished there was some way for me to disappear like Alice down the rabbit hole. But classrooms don’t have rabbit holes, so I had to sit there with the ball of panic inside my head, wondering why I can’t be like everybody else and Just Say It.

  Whenever my parents went into school, all my teachers would say the exact same thing: “I’m afraid she is just so Painfully Shy!” But then Mrs Long retired and we got Miss Castillo. On her first day she took the register, and when she called my name Phillip Day shouted out, “She doesn’t speak, Miss,” like it was The Most Normal Weird Thing in our class ever. Only clearly Miss Castillo didn’t think so, because she called my parents in for a special meeting. And after that they took me to see Dr Langley.

  So that’s why I was sitting in her room not able to say anything, not even an easy thing like my own name. (Which is Rosalind, by the way, but obviously everyone already knew that.) And my little brother, Seb, kept wandering around pulling his pants down and up (which I thought was a much weirder thing to do in front of people than not speak). But Mum said nothing about that and said, “Why is she so shy, doctor? Why won’t she speak to people?”

  And everyone stared at me again, puzzled, like they were sharing the room with some kind of alien species. I just went bright red and stared at my shoes. (I do this a lot.)

  So it was me who got the “I’m afraid there is Definitely Something Wrong With Her” diagnosis,
and my little brother who got the I’m Brave! sticker. It turns out that if you can’t even say your own name in front of Dr Langley then you haven’t been brave enough to get a sticker, but repeatedly flashing your six-year-old bare bum at everyone seems to nail it. If Dr Langley had I’m Weird! stickers, she would probably have given me one of those. But considering I already felt like I’d been wearing one my whole life, I didn’t exactly need it.

  She didn’t say what was wrong with me, only that it wasn’t Painful Shyness and if I was going to grow out of it I would have done it already. A bit like Seb always talking about dinosaurs and poo (which he’s never grown out of actually, but Dad said that’s more of a personality issue). My weirdness is more serious, apparently.

  So we left Dr Langley’s room that day in a Totally Awkward Silence, and maybe all a bit disappointed that she didn’t have some kind of special medicine to make my voice appear whenever I wanted it to. But Dad held my hand, and I carried on staring at my shoes the whole way out.

  In the car on the way home Seb was going on about the biggest-ever dinosaur fossil that had just been discovered in Argentina. It had a special name but I can’t remember what it was. I was too busy worrying about other words I’d heard for the first time that morning that I didn’t understand, like disorder and hyper-sensitivity and psychologist and anxiety. They flickered in my head as trees and houses and pavements scrolled past the window, and big raindrops ran down distorting everything. And I wondered, if I’m not Just Painfully Shy, or Totally Weird, or An Actual Alien –

  What am I?

  A few weeks later, I had my first appointment with a psychologist. I didn’t even know what a psychologist was, so when Dad told me it was a special doctor for your brain, I pictured someone chopping the top of my head off and peering inside, or poking a tiny camera into my ear hole, or searching for my voice somewhere inside my brain with a special microscope. And I was Totally Terrified about it.

  Dad suggested looking up psychologist in the encyclopedia, which is like a way slower, really heavy, old-fashioned book version of Google that he’s addicted to making us read. Like if you say you need to google something he points to it and says, “This was googling stuff before googling stuff was even invented!” or “This is Google without the adverts!” or something else that makes the Encyclopedia Britannica sound much better than Google, when actually it totally isn’t. And no matter how many times I tell him not letting me just google something is So Weird And Annoying, he always says, “You will thank me later!” Which I definitely won’t because looking anything up always takes so much longer than it’s supposed to.

  The encyclopedia said a psychologist is someone who studies the human mind and uses therapy to help people with their problems, which sounded okay, but when I looked up therapy and it said it involves people talking about their problems, I actually felt sick. I didn’t tell Mum and Dad, but I knew therapy was something I wouldn’t be able to do. Even the thought of it made my throat feel weird, like it does when no words will come out of it. So all the way there I prayed for God to make me temporarily disappear. And when we got there I felt like I kind of had.

  The therapy room was like an office on one side, with a wooden desk and black leather chairs, but the other side looked like a mini version of this soft-play area called The Fun Zone (which I never liked going to when I was little because it was always too crowded and too noisy). There were red and yellow cushions on a big blue sofa, different toy boxes all stacked up, and black-framed pictures of jumbled up shapes. The only thing I liked was the big white rug on the floor in the shape of a cloud, which was good because I spent a lot of time staring at it.

  When I first walked in the psychologist made this joke which was, “I’m Dr Peak, so don’t ask me to play hide-and-seek!” Which I didn’t understand at first because obviously I couldn’t ask him to play hide-and-seek otherwise I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Then I realized he was making one of those jokes that adults make when they are trying to let you know they are Not Like Other Normal Adults because they are fun and understand kids, but to me it just made him seem Even More Scary And Weird. Plus it was a doubly stupid joke because his name was spelled Peak not Peek, but obviously I couldn’t tell him that.

  I sat down and he switched on this little grey box which he said was going to record everything. And that’s when I knew for one hundred per cent sure I was going to say Nothing At All Ever to Dr Peak Not Peek. I was already scared of talking to him, but getting my voice recorded was A Million Times Worse than anything I had imagined. (I would have preferred having a camera poked in my ear.) I must have been staring at it because he said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, just try to ignore it.” Which for Someone Like Me is a bit like someone putting a hungry lion in your bedroom and saying, “Just try to ignore it!”

  Dr Peak Not Peek told me to think of the first time I could remember not being able to speak. He gave me a yellow notebook with my name on, which was good because I like written projects, and I wrote about the first birthday party I ever went to when I was about five.

  Lauren’s Party

  It was Lauren’s birthday and she told everyone in our class she was having a magician. I really didn’t want to go because I always feel very nervous and scared if I have to go anywhere there will be lots of people (like basically everywhere). Also because the day before my dad had told me that sometimes magicians chop people in half. I cried a lot when we got there so Mum said I could stay next to her. But when the magician got there we all had to go and sit down on the floor to watch the magic. He said, “HELLO, BOYS AND GIRLS! I’M MAGIC ANDY!” in the loudest voice ever. Then he made everyone shout “HELLO, MAGIC ANDY!” at him again and again, louder and louder, only I couldn’t open my mouth to say anything so I couldn’t join in. And then he told us to shout “ABRACADABRA!” at him. I can remember not wanting anyone to hear my voice.

  Then Magic Andy said, “NOW, WHO WOULD LIKE TO BE MY SPECIAL MAGICAL ASSISTANT?” And straight away I thought, Not Me. I don’t like standing up in front of people, I don’t like anyone looking at me, and I had decided by then that I didn’t like magicians very much either. So everyone put their hands up apart from me and this boy called Charlie Hooper, who at that exact moment had his fingers up his nostrils. And it was a bit like being in An Actual Nightmare because Magic Andy (which is a very un-magical sounding name anyway) did something I thought was against the law – he picked me to be his volunteer. The only person without their hand up who really did not want to be his volunteer. (I’m still not sure about Charlie because of the nose picking.)

  Everyone turned and stared, and I felt like they were playing a trick on me or something, because I had accidentally volunteered myself by Definitely Not Volunteering. I felt hot and dizzy and I couldn’t move my head to see if Mum was behind me. I was frozen to the spot but someone helped me up to the front and everyone was clapping.

  I couldn’t say my name when Magic Andy asked me, then I couldn’t say the magic word and I looked for my mum but I couldn’t see her. I started crying so Lauren’s mum came up and put her arm around me and took me to sit in the kitchen and I heard Lauren’s gran say, “It doesn’t pay to be sensitive in this world!” Then Mum came in and took me home.

  After that I didn’t want to go to any more birthday parties in case it happened again. Dad would always try to make me, but I would get upset so Mum would say I didn’t have to go. Then after a while people stopped inviting me anyway.

  After I’d finished writing, Dr Peak Not Peek read it, then asked me some questions I couldn’t answer because my words got in a Massive Muddle and my throat was closed up. Then he said, “Okay,” and wrote down loads of stuff on his clipboard.

  And that is what Dr Peak Not Peek’s monthly therapy sessions were like. With the little grey box on his desk recording me not saying anything. Not even one word. Just long Awkward Silences where my voice should have been.

  I wished it could record the Massive Muddle of w
ords in my head, or the words stuck in my throat, or how hard I was trying, or how bad I felt about not answering his questions. Because then maybe he could have seen how much I wanted him to help me. But little grey boxes don’t record stuff like that. So I spent every therapy session not answering his questions, writing about Other Awkward Silence Scenarios in my yellow notebook, looking down at the white cloud rug wishing it would turn into a real cloud and float me away.

  The only thing I liked about Dr Peak Not Peek was that he told me the name for my condition, which is Selective Mutism (SM for short). And I liked having an Official Name for it, because it meant that clearly I wasn’t The Only Person In The World who had this particular type of weirdness, even though it feels like that sometimes.

  Dad said out of all the Possible Weirdness Scenarios he rated it 7/10 weird, which to be honest I was completely disappointed with. I think it rates at least 9/10 just for the Awkward Silence factor alone. But Dad said he thought Tourette’s syndrome was a worse thing to have and if I wanted my weirdness rating to be higher then I’d better hurry up and get something else because he suspected Seb might overtake me on the weirdness scale pretty soon. Anytime I get upset about it now he always says, “Rozzie, whatever weirdness you have, it is still one hundred per cent better than being Completely Normal.” But that’s my dad for you. And he wouldn’t say that if he was the one who had to go to my school.

  Because the main problem about having my type of weirdness is that for as long as I can remember, I have never had any friends. (Brothers don’t count.) Some people (I see them all the time) can go up to someone and say “Hi!” then the other person says “Hi!” and they start talking and everything is just normal. But if you go up to people and say nothing most people will tell you to go away, or that speaking to you is like Speaking To A Brick Wall. And I have found that in general people do not want to be friends with a brick wall.

  If you feel sorry for me at this point then you probably shouldn’t. You see, it is all my own fault. It’s like Mrs Long always used to say, “You can’t expect to have any friends if you won’t speak to people!” And unfortunately she was right. But to me, being in a situation where I’m expected to speak to someone is actually less appealing than sticking my head down the toilet. Even after Seb’s done one of his “poosplosions”.