KY$ ✓

Two | This Is Not A Drill

SOTC: Glory And Gore by Lorde

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"Now kill yourself, Clara," I whispered again.

My fingers constricted against the base of the pill bottle like a snake around its prey.

If I overdosed in this school bathroom, a Freshman girl sick of the Renegade who never had a class with me could make a five-part TikTok called, "How A Girl Died On Her Meds At My School!" And she'd do a cute little peace sign as she goes, "Part One!" Then she'd rant about 'how a bitch went to sleep for good'.

Sure, there will be paragraph comments about how insensitive she was before they're all drowned by skull emojis by usernames revolving around kinkyvinny_1 or iatebillieellishballsbye with a profile picture of sobbing Kim Kardashian. That's when she'd know that her creation went viral and she could become rich off her ass from brand deals funding the life of her Pinterest boards.

That way the ending of my life could gift someone spikes of dopamine because its state of affairs wasn't enough to do it.

Now do it, Clara.

Knuckles went white around the orange bottle as my hand seized.

Do it, Clara.

Suddenly, my hand was too numb to pop the cap open.

RI-AN-NG!

It was the bell announcing the start of second period, and another failed attempt to leave this world.

Jolting my free hand forward, I chucked the bottle against the metal stall with a BANG! Causing the white cap to burst open and its precious little circles to splatter all over the floor in front of me.

I slowly bent to my knees and picked those little spheres up one by one.

No tears.

No sorrow.

Only a numbing disappointment I knew too well.

Eventually every last one of them was in the orange capsule I gave back to my bag with the softness of tucking a child into bed.

The trailer park dumpster might be a legit discarding point for these now...

Because hell no, you feral goose, I won't use pills that have contacted the floor I watched the Naruto kids lick. I have that shred of my dignity left.

I caught sight of the bandage across my wrist when I did. No, I didn't slit it, although I've tried to bring a knife to it multiple times. It was one to cover up a small imprint of a black swan every human had.

The Soulmate Scar.

Since the beginning of humanity, everyone was born with only one soulmate. One of them could be in the tropics of Rio De Janeiro and another could be in the blizzard of St. Petersburg, but they always managed to find each other by an unexplained fate. Your soulmate was the only one that could make you happiest. No one loved you as much as them, not even family or your own children.

Suddenly, around fifty years ago, the rate at which people found their soulmate plummeted. No scientist could explain why a monstrously increasing number of people started dying without even a glimpse of their other half. Eventually, everyone got married to the person they knew they tolerated most or worked themselves to death. So everyone began to cover it from sight and consider the hearing of it a national insult.

For it was a constant reminder that no one will ever be their happiest.

I came out of the stall, adjusted my ten dollar red ditsy dress (budget gets tight when you live in a rental car), and fixed up my nearly white hair down to my rib cage. It framed my sharp facial structure which earned me the nickname fox-face in second grade. Both my milk complexion including my hair were a stark contrast to seemingly noir eyes.