When your alarm goes off, it plays an awful, high pitched sound that is so annoying that it forces you to open your eyes and reach over to somehow make it stop. That day, I decided to just let it play. I was wide awake and had been for a few hours. I just laid there staring at my ceiling. The sun rose, the bird outside my window chirped for a while, but then eventually stopped. And then, my alarm went off…great.
I assumed my mother would then enter the room eventually to turn it off. She’d ask if I was feeling up to going to school today. My answer would be ‘no’ and then the flood of questions, all pertaining to an event in my more recent past, would follow. This would determine my sanity in her eyes. My mother’s name was Amy and she was no psychiatrist but sometimes, she’d like to think she was. She cared. She was a loving mother, comma who only wanted what was best for me. Can’t say I blame her; it’s in her nature. I loved her, too. Before said event, we were really close and I told her everything. I didn’t think that would really change. It was too soon to tell
Unexpectedly, it was not my mother who walks through my door exactly twenty-five minutes after my alarm disturbed the silence in my peaceful abode. It was my father. I could already assume that it meant that my mother was just about fed up with my behavior and so she sent in the big guns. He meant business.
“Good morning, Sleepy Butt.”
I grumbled something along the lines of, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
My father sat on the side of my bed causing me to roll into the dip in my mattress. My comforter had been tossed on the floor during my restless tossing throughout the night, exposing my pale, pink sheets.
“How are we feeling today?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“That’s too bad. But you’re going to school.”
I asked in a flat, not-really-caring-about-the-answer tone, “Why?”
“Do you really want me to pull the ‘because I said so’ bit on you? Besides, it gives you something to do. Your friends must miss you. Your grades are going to suffer. Your mom and I will continue bugging you about it. You’ll have to start pulling your weight around here if you won’t go to school. There’s laundry to be done. Oh! You could always clean your brother’s room. Benny likes to keep it nice and stinky just for occasions like this.”
I hold my hand up to make him stop talking. “I’m up! I’m up!”
He laughed. “Mom made some extra coffee if you’re interested.”
I don’t have any time to answer before he starts to walk out of my room, giving me privacy. He had said the magic word. Coffee.
I was hoping to zip straight to my locker, grab my things for first period and go directly to class. Any hope of such a peaceful morning was obliterated the moment the group of people standing by the door to the school, caught sight of my little, white Mazda. That group of teenagers was slightly smaller than it used to be. Before, it was difficult for someone to fish their way through the crowd towards the door to enter the school. What was once twenty-five kids morphed into only eight people, none of which were expecting me to show up.
I decided that five more minutes of careful breathing in my car before I faced them was a necessity to my mental health. It was just school; a world which I had conquered, I told myself over and over trying to relax. But it wasn’t the classwork that intimidated me. It was the faces of the several hundred students that I had to pass by in the hallways.
I could already picture it in my head. All of them. Staring at me; mouths hanging wide open. They’d see how scared and nervous I was, sniffing out the fear in me. They’d notice my hands balled into fists, perspiration puddling in the crevices of my palms, just to keep from breaking into hysterics. It’s what they crave. They’d stare expecting this from me. They want me to make a scene. It’d give them something else to gossip their asses off about.
The breathing wasn’t helping me, so I just got out of my safe little car to face them.
The first one to say anything to me was the only person to speak to me all day. Being one of the eight standing in front of the only entrance on that side of the building, Jenna was the first to spot me. As she half ran to meet me, her dark brown curls bounced in her shoulders and her Louis Vuitton handbag jingled around her wrist.
“Kami!” Jenna smiled. “I didn’t think you’d come back so soon.” She turned to walk in the same direction as me.
I shrugged. “Gives me something to do, I guess,” I said, using the same excuse my father used.
Jenna smiled again but it wasn’t a joy-filled smile at all. She didn’t say anything else as she slipped her arm around mine and escorted me to class. She had no idea how much I needed that tiny gesture to keep me together.
The silence was nice, but I could have done without all the stares from other students. They gawked at me as I took my seat next to Jenna in the back of the classroom. They all probably blamed me for what happened. In some ways, they’d be right.
