This Was A Bad Idea

Chapter 2 - what am i even doing here?

The air is tinged with the edges of sunlight, the steady glow illuminating the fiery leaves still clinging to their skeletal branches. I pass the dead ones laying sodden on the sidewalk, their crumbling husks nothing more than the usual changing of the seasons.

I live only a brisk ten minute walk from the local high school here. Stoneridge is wreathed in suburbs, the identical houses crowned by strips of faded front yards and mailboxes with peeling red paint.

All two stories, with dark walls and wooden floors, brown trim encasing the outside. The roads are flat, the streets quiet. I always love my morning walks to school. It's weird, but it's soothing to me. The wave of sound coming from my headphones, the synchronous rhythm of my footsteps on the same unchanging sidewalk. It's calming, the absence of noise.

No tires crunching the asphalt in the rush of morning traffic, there's only the occasional glide of a car. I could walk through the entire town I'm sure in around an hour flat.

There's a main street with faded shops, a pizza restaurant, and a grocery store. A small bookshop, crowned by a faded mahogany couch resting near the window out front. There's even a small thrift shop, which I had eagerly rushed into at first. But there weren't vintage band shirts or cool jeans, there were only crumpled castoffs from forty year old white women.

The schools are all squished together- all taking up one huge area. There's two buildings and a parking lot in front of each. One for the combined K-8 school- the elementary and middle school. Then there's a seperate building for the high school. The buildings are all plain, nondescript. Beige and boring.

We officially moved here a few weeks before school started, in order to get situated. School's been starting for almost two weeks now.

I've hardly met anyone aside from tight-lipped adults and their occasional harlot children who run screaming down the pockmarked streets. Sure, there are the kids in my classes but I've merely exchanged a few words with them. I spent most of the time before school started inside. Watching videos, reading fanfiction.

Occasionally, I would go explore the faded edges of this desolate place, looking for anything that I might find joy in. A faded strip of metal fencing. A rotting wood bridge, the planks saturated with runoff water from a nearby creek. Old metal spikes ground into the earth from when the town was part of a huge mining-industry. There wasn't much.

It's small, but not completely closed off. It's progressive, accepting- or so my dad said. Small, but not suffocating. The supposed perfect place for a kid like me, where no one even knows my name. I'm sure thousands of kids would kill for something like this- a fresh start, a clean slate.

A place where no one's ever heard of you. A quiet town in the middle of Pennsylvania somewhere.

The first week or so was halting, tentative. I figured out the labyrinth of hallways, got a feel for what my classes were like. The second week was only slightly better. I'm not technically out to anyone. I let them all make their quiet assumptions about me and leave it at that. The less anyone knows, the better.

But you can't exactly go stealth when you're nonbinary. You just have to let people silently pigeonhole you as one or the other and hope they don't say anything about it. You have to ignore it despite the bile-like sense of discomfort that slithers over my skin each time I get misgendered. It's like my skin feels too tight, like a mask of hot iron pressing against my bones. Like I'm being suffocated under sheets of heavy plastic.

My shoulders rise and fall with the slight exhale of discomfort. My shoes skim across the smooth intersections of sidewalk as music surges through my headphones, a steady wave that I can coast in.