Never meet your heroes, and never reread your childhood favourites

Darrell, Sally and Alicia stood together in their North tower dormy, gazing out over the lovely blue sea. Truly, their last day at Malory Towers had been a marvellous one.

“The weather is truly wizard, isn’t it?”, Darrell remarked. “How wonderful to have this kind of weather on our last night here!”

“My, I shall miss it so much”, Sally declared. “I know we’ll have loads of fun at university, but still. Our time here has been wonderful. I really feel this school has transformed me into the paragon of neocolonial Tory virtues I have always strived to be. Aren’t you grateful, Darrell, that your parents sent you here?”

“Yes”, Darrell replied, and she felt her heart soar. “Even though this school has kept me miles away from anything with a penis for six years and I will probably be date-raped as soon as I set foot in my first lecture hall, I really feel prepared to meet my future! I wonder what it will have in store for me. Probably an alcoholic husband and lots of twinsets.”

“I, too, think I shall enjoy university”, Alicia commented. “I’ll finally have an opportunity to let out my repressed character, which I shall express by drinking too much and sleeping around, which will ruin my reputation. I predict I shall be the best pariah the university has ever seen! Deservedly so, of course. By the way, has anyone seen dear Gwendoline Mary?”

“My, I do believe she has hurled herself off the tower onto the lawn”, Sally said. “That is so like her, to commit suicide after six years of relentless bullying justified by an archaic institution that strives to turn us all into identical copies of each other. I do wonder if she’s a lesbian.”

“Don’t be silly”, Alicia commented. “We don’t want to feed into all those boarding school fetishes, now do we? We clearly don’t have a sexuality.”
“Not even the teachers?”, Sally asked, but Alicia shook her head. “Of course not. They’re sexless, characterless and humourless, exactly what we have strived to be. Except for the French ones, though, but everyone knows the French are retarded.”
“Like black people?”, Sally asked again, and Alicia laughed. “Don’t be daft, Sally. Black people don’t exist.” The girls nodded obediently. Alicia had always had a good brain! Below them, on the lawn, the body suddenly began to move into a crawl. Alicia sighed.

“I do wonder if I shall make the tennis team at university”, Sally pondered. “I’ve been practicing frightfully hard, but we’ll be up against people who are so much better than us!”

“Oh, Sally”, Darrell tried to comfort her friend, “as soon as we will have left the infantilising ways of this school we shan’t be allowed to play anymore. It’s indecent to show people your knees if you’re over eighteen and anyway, we’ll worry about our hair getting out of place constantly, I expect.”

“Ah, yes”, Sally sighed. Below them, the body was still making its way through the grass. Alicia wrinkled her nose and said: “that is so like her, to make all these bloodstains across the lawn. My, it’s so sad she never bought into our fat-shaming. I fully expected her to have become a heteronormative anorexic, like the rest of us. Alas, even this wonderful school can’t change everything, I’m afraid.” She yawned and said: “Let’s see what’s for supper, shall we?” Sally looped her arm through hers and gave her a non-sexually threatening hug. She said: “I believe these nameless lower-class drones in the kitchen will have produced a veritable feast. It shall be simply wizard! Darrell, are you coming?”

“Yes, dear friends”, Darrell said. She allowed herself one last look at the sun setting over the Cornwall coast. She tried not to think too hard about the fact that this was her last night, or that in thirty years’ time she would end up as the victim on Midsomer Murders. She cast a final, disdainful glance at the body on the lawn below, then followed her friends downstairs.

The body on the grass ceased to move, leaving a long trail of blood behind itself that spelled out a simple, poignant message that fell entirely on deaf ears. It read:

GO FUCK YOURSELF, ENID BLYTON.