The Blackmail Dilemma

Dare Me To Tell

Cold. It was so cold in my room, like the cold from my frostbite heart had seeped into the space around me. Cold, like a winters day when you get home from school, pile up the blankets, and sip on warm cocoa. Except, this time, I didn't crawl under the covers. I didn't make myself a cup of hot cocoa to melt away the cold. Why? Because it didn't matter anymore. I didn't have the energy to move from on top of my sheers back under the blanket. All I had the energy to do was stare at the ceiling.

Every so often, a car would drive by. Light would dance on my ceiling, playing a game, creating a pattern, making my own aurora borealis. It was intoxicating and fun to think of the lights this way, to make something incredible out of something so ordinarily simple and mundane. I wish I could do that with my life; turn it into something bright and shiny and fun. I wanted to be the beautiful, popular girl that turned heads in school. Hell, I would've settled for being the girl everyone gazed at and feared. I wanted to be anything other than the girl who blackmailed people.

I was very few things, and I compiled a list in my mind:

A coward

A blackmailer

A bitch

' A bad friend

I couldn't think of anything nice to say about myself. I didn't think I was nice. I didn't think I was kind. I didn't think that I was even worthy of kindness. I was just someone, somewhere, at some time, and existed for some reason. I existed because a man and a woman wanted a happy, perfect family. But the woman left for another family, and the man worked harder to make up for it, so his children wouldn't grow up underprivileged like he did. But the two children, they were messed up. They grew with twisted thoughts inside their heads, festering as school and life took a toll on them. I existed because a man and a woman wanted a family they could not handle, could not fathom, could not create.

I sighed, my chest heaving, tears streaming down my cheeks. My heart pounded a million miles an hour in my chest, desperate to escape the rest of my body. My heart wanted to leave the cruel mind that told it that it was incapable of love. At 17 years old, not even an adult, my heart was told to give up. It was told that no matter how much longer I lived, I tried to love, tried to thrive, nothing would make the pain go away. No one would.

This wasn't a fairy tale where love saves the girl from herself. This wasn't the book where the loser girl took her revenge and won the hearts of all her classmates and found her best friends for life. This wasn't the movie where the protagonist has a shitty life and all of a sudden she goes through hardships and comes out with a brand new, happy life. Because I wouldn't be the protagonist, maybe I would be the villain. I was the villain in Janessa's story, and Nelson's, and maybe even August's. I was the villain to Stacie and Nina and to my own damn self.

I pushed myself into a sitting position. Forced myself to wipe away the tears that had dried on my cheeks. I had to stop this. I had to stop pitying myself, stop pitying others. I just needed to stop feelings at this point. I needed to compose myself, to be the girl that I had always wanted to be; strong, confident, brave.

But I just couldn't do it.

I couldn't walk into school the next day, face the principal, and tell her the truth. Of course she knew what happened on the worst day of my life. She had to be involved. Paramedics had to be involved. It wasn't like she would suspend me, or I would go to jail. It was about what the others would think, how the word would spread around town. How everyone would think of me differently for a situation that had been kept hush hush. Bad for the school's reputation, bad for mine.

I found myself getting out of bed and walking downstairs to my dad's office. I checked a clock on the way down, the old cuckoo clock that Dad loved so dearly nearly eliciting a scream from me. The clock had struck midnight. If only I was Cinderella, and someone found my glass shoe, and I got a happily ever after. But that just wasn't reality.