Cette année, nous avons participé au concours d’écriture Virgina Woolf.
Nous avons été inscrites à ce concours par notre professeure avec le reste de la classe. Le principe était à
partir du début d’une histoire inventée de créer notre propre nouvelle. Nous avions donc le choix entre 3 débuts de nouvelles imaginées par des auteurs américains. Nous avons donc choisit l’histoire qui parlait d’une jeune fille qui avait fait un voeu lui permettant de changer de corps dès qu’elle mourrait. Or son nombre de « nouvelles » vie était limité.
Nous avons donc commencer par écrire nos premières idées avant de commencer à rédiger. Nous nous sommes inspirés de séries, films et d’ouvrages dans lesquels il y a des voyages temporels. Et nous avons essayé d’inventer pleins de personnages différents avec des vies, des occupations très diverses.
Après avoir terminé la rédaction de l’histoire, notre travail a été échangé avec celui d’une autre classe du lycée. Cette classe a ensuite choisit 3 histoires produites par les élèves de la notre. Comme ils ont choisit notre histoire, elle a été envoyée au jury du concours.
Nous avons ensuite appris que notre histoire faisait partie des 5 finalistes du concours. Nous n’imaginions vraiment pas être aussi bien classées.
Marjorie Blossier, Jeanne Bouquerel (1ère C), Athénaïs Broux et Danaé Pénaguin (1ère B)
Ce concours d’écriture a permis à nos élèves de 1ères LLCE de développer leurs capacités rédactionnelles en langue étrangère tout en collaborant en groupe afin d’échanger et de mutualiser leurs idées en anglais.
Nous avons eu à cœur de travailler ensemble autour d’un projet commun afin de donner du sens à la nouvelle spécialité LLCE.
Les élèves se sont investis et ont montré un réel enthousiasme. Nous pouvons être fiers d’eux, et souligner le fait qu’ils se sont retrouvés finalistes face à des lycées de centre-ville tels que le lycée Joachim du Bellay à Angers, et deux lycées nantais. Par ailleurs, l’écrivain américain, Deek Rhew, a lu chaque nouvelle et a tenu à encourager les élèves, voici ce qu’il a écrit concernant la nouvelle: « I liked that the author gave the Jennifers different ages! I hadn’t even considered that. I also enjoyed that she wound up being friends with her own original body. Talk about having an out of body experience ». Félcitations à tous les élèves pour leur participation.
Mmes Kathleen Bowman et Sylvie Chauveau
Text n°2 by Deek Rhew
Jennifers
I cracked open my eyes. Overhead, vibrant, blue sky seeped between the leaves and pink flowers of a large old cherry tree. My gaze followed a fat white puff ball vaguely resembling Winston Churchill as my mind, cloudy from the transfer, began to clear.
Where and who was I now?
Slowly, I sat up. A lanyard with a slim pouch at the end tumbled from my sweater into my lap. I brushed leaves and grass from my hair as I glanced at the student card identifying me as Jennifer Mills.
Ah, back at school. Again.
This was the third jump that had landed me at this particular campus. It seemed poetic somehow that the place I’d died—the first time—would be my thirteenth and final opportunity to live. Lucky number thirteen.
And really, who would have guessed it would’ve taken me thirteen chances? Six some years ago, when my father won the largest lottery in history using his cat’s birthday, he’d told me I could have anything I wanted. I’d jokingly said I wanted a Life Jump Policy. How many jumps? Well, thirteen, of course, because that had been my age at the time. Then with a media crew in tow, we’d bought the obligatory mansion, driven the obligatory luxury cars, and gone on the obligatory trips around the world. Shortly thereafter, we’d gone obligatorily bankrupt, and I’d forgotten all about the ridiculous policy.
Until the day a lunatic had shown up at my school with an assault rifle and an I’m-angry-at-the-world ax to grind. A stray bullet later, I’d woken up in a different Jennifer—Applegate, if memory serves—in the derelict part of the city.
That Jennifer had lasted all of two hours before she’d been dropped from a thirteen-story window, and I’d transferred to Jennifer Eastman. All in all, if I counted the original model, I’d been fourteen Jennifers. Upon each demise, Life Jump, good to its policy word, had transferred my conscious to another “me” in a parallel universe. But given the range of “mes”—from drug addict to student body president—I’d truly come to appreciate the varying meanings of the word “parallel.”
One way or another, this jump would be my final one. The policy had delivered upon its promises, but the rest had been up to me.
I had one last chance at life, and all I had to do to claim it was survive for twenty-four hours.
I had to be careful if I wanted to survive. I had never survived more than twenty-four hours in the bodies I had been transferred into. Indeed, everytime I woke up I died in the next hours even if the body was healthy.
When I was transferred into Jennifer Eastman, I woke up with the sound of an alarm clock. As always, I tried to pick up some information about my new life by having a look at my new face or my bedroom in this case. Then, I heard a woman shouting « Jen, come down for your breakfast now, or you’ll be late, honey! »
I went downstairs and I greeted « my parents ». But as I was too concentrated on acting normal, I chocked on my cereals. I left Eastman body’s just one hour after being transferred into her body.
I would have loved to live in her body much longer. She was young, around twelve years old I think and her parents seemed very nice and loving. But the worst about that was that after Jennifer Eastman, I was transferred into Jennifer Gomez. She was a forty-year-old woman living alone in her small apartment in Manchester. It was my first time in England but I didn’t really like it. Indeed, I just spent the day in a bed not feeling very well. Plus the apartment was very dark and dirty. After seven hours of boredom, I died.
Well, Jennifer Gomez died of an overdose.
The day had started well with Jennifer Eastman, but with Jennifer Gomez I really understood that this Life Jump Policy was going to be more complicated than funny.
After remembering this story, I got up and picked up « my things » on the ground. Then, I made my way to school. It was not that far and I already had picnic in this sort of park.
I knew this school very well. But for me it was a cursed place. First, it was where I originally died and it was weird to come back here as somebody else. When I woke up into my fourth body, I was in Jennifer Smith’s body. She was a senior in my high school. She was very popular and everyone admired her. Everybody wanted to be her friend and everytime there was a swimming competition all the students were cheering her. Well it was ironic because she was the team captain but the reason I left her body was because I drowned.
But something very disturbing happened that day. I crossed my initial body with my initial friends. That was how I understood that I was going from parallel universes to others. Everytime I was leaving a body I was also leaving a dimension. Therefore, in one dimension my original body was dead but in the others it wasn’t. But since that very day, I had always wondered: what soul was in my first body? Was it a new one or the same as mine?
Maybe thanks to this last chance I would figure that out.
However, there was a problem. I had never heard anything about Jennifer Mills. This high school was small. We almost knew everybody’s name.
So, I entered the school. I was very stressed, I had no idea of what were my class and my group of friends like or if I had one. I sat on a bench next to the reception. After a few minutes a student whom I knew well, Sarah Johnson, came to me.
« Are you Jennifer Mills, the new student? »
« Yes it’s me!», I improvised.
« Great! I’m Sarah Johnson. I will give you a tour. »
« I know…I mean alright!», I said embarrassed.
Sarah made me visit the classrooms, laboratories … I obviously acted as if I did not know the place. Everything was going well until Sarah asked me: « So where are you from? ». I completely panicked and responded: « I just arrived from Tanzania ». She looked very surprised. Well actually it was a bit true. After Jennifer Smith’s drowning, I was transferred to a safari in Tanzania as Jennifer Puth, a thirty-year-old journalist. It was wonderful, it was one of the best moments of my life, well I mean my lives. The thing was that after four hours the car in which I was, was charged by an elephant and I died.
Obviously I was not going to say that to Sarah so I told her my parents owned a restaurant in Tanzania. « Then why did you move to the USA? » Sarah asked me. « We were robbed and my father sent me here for my safety.» I lied.
I was so panicked that I said anything coming to my mind but Sarah seemed to believe it. My past lives were helpful. Actually I was inspired by my seventh life. I was inside Jennifer Houston body. She was a mother of three kids and was killed after going downstairs while two men were robbing her.
After that Sarah changed subject and we headed to the gym. We entered the pool where there was a class. All the students were in the water except one, Jennifer Smith. Sarah saw that I was staring at her and said: « if you want, you can join the high school swimming team unless, like Jennifer, you are afraid of water. »
It was so ironic, in this dimension, the leader of the swimming team was afraid of water.
The bell rang. Sarah told me to join her with her friends in the stand of the stadium. That was where I used to go during every break with my « original friends ». There were the same students who were playing football on the pitch and the same who were talking in the stand.
I sat down with Sarah and her friends but someone screamed « Jennifer! Be careful! ». The ball was coming very fast in my direction. But something plastered me on the ground, I was knocked out for a second. Indeed, I had already died that way: sixteen hours after I was transferred into Jennifer Morris – the manager of a library in Brussels – a shelf full of books fell on me.
But this time someone saved me. But this person was Jennifer McQueen, me. Well my first body, the body I was born into, the body I grew up into. I had just saved my life. I thought going from bodies to bodies was strange but this was above all.
« Are you ok? »
« Yes I’m fine. Thank you so much! »
« You’re welcome, I had to! No one moved. They just looked like they were having heart attacks. »
Heart attack. I already had that. I meant Jennifer Andrew. She was an eighty-six-year-old lady who died of a heart attack while gardening. It happened thirteen hours after my soul arrived in her body.
The bell rang again. It was the end of the break. I thanked Jennifer one last time and followed Sarah for our Maths lesson. The lesson was going well until a fire alarm went on. It was the same fire alarm I heard when I was in Jennifer Lee’s body. I was a waitress around thirty years old. A few hours after the beginning of my service, the kitchen was in fire. Then the whole restaurant was in fire and I died.
Again.
I left the class with all the other students. As it was just an exercise, we waited a few minutes in the lobby before returning to class.
The other classes ran normally. I had only two hours left and I had to attend extracurricular activities. On my schedule it was written circus. I was finally going to have fun. It was also what I had chosen in my first life. Plus in my eleventh life I was a trapeze artist. I was working in a French circus. But I died in the middle of the show because my partner could not catch my hands and I landed on the ground.
Sadly the class was cancelled because the teacher was sick. Well with hindsight I thought it was a good thing.
The day was over and I survived it. Now, how was I suppose to go back home? I didn’t know anyone here, I mean no one knew me. After a few minutes a car approached me and the driver opened the window. « Jen come in! » I was relieved, it was my father, well I thought so. I entered the car and the man asked me a lot of questions about my day, the teachers, the students…he was definitely my father. I answered him briefly. I was mostly focused on the road. I was a few hours away from twenty-four hours as Jennifer Mills, I couldn’t die right now.
Except that I already died in a car accident. I was in the body of Jennifer Beckett, a fifth grade student in Toronto. My dad had picked me up at the end of the day and we had a fatal accident.
Fortunately, this time everything went well. A few minutes later, we had arrived in front of a house that I knew well. It was the one where I grew up, Jennifer McQueen’s house. My father saw that something was bothering me and told me: « Sorry Jen, I forgot to tell you that we were invited for dinner by our new neighbors. »
Now, it was going to get very weird. I was going to eat with me and my original parents. I didn’t even have the time to say anything that my father was at the entrance of the house. Then a man that I knew since he was my birth father, greeted us. We entered and a woman, my birth mother, welcomed us followed by Jennifer McQueen.
I tried to act as if everything was normal, when really it couldn’t get more awkward. My birth parents were telling stories about all the trips we did after we won the lottery. I knew these stories. But the girl in front of me knew them as well.
Even though the evening was peculiar, it was a good time. I was happy to see my parents again. And then Jennifer and I were really similar. Almost twins like my father said.
We talked so much that time flew very quickly.
I was almost there.
It was almost midnight and I was not dead. My biological father brought the dessert. It was a chocolate cake. I couldn’t run the risk of eating it. The last time I died I was in Jennifer Wise’s body. She died because of an allergic reaction to chocolate.
I politely refused it. And Jennifer asked me if we could go to her room. As it was Friday night, my mother, well her mother, suggested that I should sleep there.
Jennifer and I talked until 3 a.m. and I didn’t realise that it was it.
I didn’t die.
It took me thirteen bodies. I went through the body of fourteen people, all different and I survived in Jennifer Mills, the daughter of the neighbors of my original body and family.