Taming Life

Worrying

I felt bad for walking home so quickly when Alex could be in trouble, but what could I have done? I imagined that if I'd have walked back into the house, Alex would have screamed at me. And I didn't entirely know what I would have been walking in on, either. It sounded like her parents were screaming at her, but what if that wasn't it? What if they did more than that, what if they abused her? Alex wasn't the kind of person who would talk about this kind of thing; I worried that I would never find out. I knew it was none of my business, but I couldn't help wondering. Something from the sounds of everything made me think that it wasn't just a normal argument between parents and their daughter; it was something more than that. Scarier than that. Maybe I'd been a coward in leaving like that. But what choice had I had? I felt bad. When I got through the door my mum asked me how tutoring was and I just told her that it was fine in a small voice and headed upstairs to my room. My brother was playing music loudly so I sighed and went to knock on his door. I had to bang on it loudly and he finally came to the door after a few minutes.

"Turn it down Michael I do not need this right now." I yelled.

"Why don't you make me?" He asked, smirking. I just sighed; my brother could be such a pain in the ass sometimes. We constantly had arguments over what was the right level for his music to be. I didn't want to hear it, whereas he wanted to blow the house down with it. There were a few times when he had actually made the walls of my room vibrate because he'd played his music so loudly, it really was ridiculous.

"Michael this is the last thing I need, will you please just turn the fucking music down and be a decent human being?!" I asked, and he closed the door on me. I was mad but I didn't have the energy to bang on the door again and have to have the same argument. I headed back to my room, and luckily Michael had decided to be a decent human being for once; he'd turned the music down. I flopped down on my bed, and I couldn't get the whole situation out of my head. What if this was actually nothing and I was just overthinking all of this? I could have heard anything. It could have just been the TV on really loud. They were the kind of family to have about 5 TV's, and not small ones either. They would have good sound quality surely; it could sound like a real conversation. They had money to spare. I probably was overthinking this, that easily could have been the explanation to all of this.

I had a tendency to overthink a lot of things, and most of the time it was pointless because they ended up being nothing. That was probably what this was, I thought to myself as I went to have a shower. But it didn't stop me thinking about Alex and her parents as I washed myself or as I shampooed and conditioned my hair. It didn't stop me thinking about Alex and her parents as I put on a vest top and shorts, wrapping a towel around my hair, or as I brushed my teeth. And it didn't stop me thinking about Alex and her parents as I lay in bed.

Was Alex okay, or not? Should I try and do something about it, or would I just get myself into trouble? And what about the next time I saw her? Would I be good at pretending I hadn't heard a thing, or would I say something stupid and make Alex scream at me? The whole thing kept spinning around in my head and I felt sick. Every time I tried to fall asleep a new worry popped into my head about everything, it was driving me crazy. I didn't even know why it mattered so much. A normal person would have forgotten about the whole thing. Whoever said that being original is better was lying. Being original sucked. It meant that you just worried about everything. Well, at least in my case it did. I eventually fell asleep, absolutely exhausted and stressed out, two hours later.

We had English the next day, Friday. And Alex wasn't in school. When Mrs Newman reached her name on the register Sophia, Alex's friend who sat behind us, told her that Alex was ill. That made sense, didn't it? Alex was probably just ill, and I should have stopped thinking about it. But I didn't. That lunchtime I went to the toilets before I went to the library, and I used my phone to check Alex's social media. She hadn't posted anything on Facebook or Twitter. I didn't know why it would have mattered if she had, but I felt like I should check anyway. I was distracted all afternoon. I felt like I never should have started to tutor Alex. I didn't need to know anything about her; I preferred knowing her as above everyone else, the girl who said "like" in almost every sentence. I didn't want to know what was going on at home with her, it was selfish but it was stressing me out. I didn't want to worry like this. And I was almost certain that I was the only person who knew that she had issues with her parents, none of her friends seemed bothered or worried in the slightest. I could have been wrong, of course. But I just had a feeling that I really wasn't. And when I left the library to buy a brownie, I noticed that at the table where Alex usually sat, her boyfriend had her arm around Sophia. He didn't seem worried either as he laughed with the rest of the people at that table, or when Sophia was feeding him chips.