All I want is a smile.
People walk by you, they look at you, they look away. They don’t mean to, it’s not their fault… but they never smile.
It’s not because you’re weird, or different, or ugly. It’s just because people don’t like to smile. Even the nice ones, the girls that say thank you and how are you? Or the boys that open car doors for their girlfriends: they don’t care about an individual in the hallway.
They could be smiling, but they’re not smiling at you.
They’re smiling about something a friend just told them, an old inside joke they just remembered, a kiss last night. But they’re never smiling genuinely at you.
Every day I’m jostled in the hallways like a bug that you don’t want to kill but you want out of your face. Sometimes I see Kate, but we don’t have any classes near each other. She usually smiles. But even then, it’s a halfhearted smile. I know she’s afraid of people seeing, afraid they’ll figure out that we used to be best friends.
Kate is a nice girl. Pretty, smart, skinny. She dresses well, has a lot of friends. Boys like her.
I don’t know what she thinks of me anymore. Kate will always be Kate, and there will always be something between us. I don’t even know when it ended. She just changed. And one summer she didn’t want to hang out with me as much. She’d make excuses for all the things she had to do, but I’d see her hanging out at the beach with all her other friends, giggling over boys.
I missed Kate. She was the one person I could always count on.
I went home Monday afternoon with a plan. It was a stupid plan, really it was. I don’t really know how I thought it up. But I figured if you don’t have anyone to smile at you… what’s the point of being you? Much as we’d like to think otherwise, who we are is shaped by who other people are. Even those people that claim to be “individuals” that are different from everybody else… who are they so different from? They’re different from other people. Other people are who make them different.
I sat down on my bed. Kicked off my shoes. Watched the clock on the opposite side of the wall ticking round and round. I thought about what was going to happen tomorrow. And I wasn’t sure which way I wanted it to go.
---
The alarm clock buzzed and I could hear my mother yelling downstairs. Our dog had probably gone to the bathroom on the carpet again. It wasn’t his fault, nobody walked him. I didn’t walk him either. I don’t know why we’d even gotten a dog, the entire family ignored him.
When I had pulled on clothes and splashed my face with water, I checked myself in the mirror.
You’re not bad looking, I told myself. So why could Kate barely even look at me?
I stopped myself from thinking about Kate. This isn’t a love story. It isn’t even a friendship story. I’m not sure what kind of story it was, but Kate was in no way the antagonist, nor was I the protagonist. That’s the way it was with the world. It wasn’t clear cut between good and evil, and that’s why politicians are so fucked up. They keep trying to separate good things from bad things, and kill the bad things and water the good things until they grow. But the good things don’t grow like flowers, and the bad things don’t die like diseases. The good things grow like vines, shooting up and cutting and scratching whatever they touch until there’s no stopping them. And the bad things die like people. Maybe they were meant to die, but they ruin other things without meaning to. Like when my grandfather died… he was old, he wasn’t meant to live any longer. But it changed my mother for the worse.
Maybe I wanted to die all the time. I suppose if there was any time for me to die, it would be when no one would really care one way or the other. Why do people have to become so entwined with other people?
Matt, my mother called. You’ll be late.
I walked into the kitchen, figuring that maybe I could just end the plan right then and there. But she didn’t smile. She didn’t so much as look at me.
I went through the motions of the day. I kept waiting for someone to look my way. I smiled at them; I smiled at everyone who looked at me. But they just gave me funny looks and turned away.
Kate wasn’t in school.
I walked home. There was still the evening, I told myself. You haven’t seen dad yet today.
I took the long way home so I could pass Kate’s house.
She was sitting on the front porch, elbows on her knees, chin resting in her hands. She looked up at me. I waited. She stared. Her eyes narrowed, but not in an angry way. It was as if she was trying to see through me to the other side of the sidewalk. As if she was trying to figure out what her life would be like if I didn’t exist. I smiled at her. She seemed so sad, so lonely. Smiling seemed to be the only thing I could do for her.
She didn’t smile back.
I trudged home, kicking pebbles gently out of my way. It was no one’s fault; I wasn’t angry. It wasn’t Kate’s fault, it wasn’t my mom’s fault, it wasn’t anybody at school’s fault. It was just the way things were.
When I got home, I decided not to even wait. I had realized that Kate was the only smile I truly cared about, the only smile I thought I had a chance of getting. And if Kate’s smile was the most likely one and she hadn’t smiled at me, then why the heck should I expect anyone else to?
I headed up to my parent’s bathroom. The front of their medicine cabinet was a mirror. I smiled at my own reflection.
How pathetic was that? Smiling at your own reflection.
That’s why I have to die, I told myself, pulling sleeping pills from the cabinet with newly shaking hands.
