Countdown

Twenty Days Left

I stared at the navy blue,starry ceiling above me, trying to coax myself into getting up and joining my family for breakfast. Come on, Grace, I thought. Just 20 more days. You only have to keep going for 20 more days. Knowing that any moment, my parents were going to wake me up and bitch at me for lying here so long, I climbed out of bed, feeling my feet hit the cheap carpet of my bedroom floor.

"Hi, sweetie," said my mom, the only parent currently awake as I entered the dining room where we ate. I didn't respond.

"Here's your breakfast!"

She handed me a steaming plateful of pancakes doused with syrup. As much as I didn't want to eat, those hot pancakes did look pretty damn good. Begrudgingly, I accepted the plate.

"Did you finish your math homework?" Mom asked Hope, my eight year old bratty kid sister.

"Of course I did, mom. I always do my homework." she said, shooting me a smug look.

My grades weren't exactly stellar. I was getting Cs and Bs, sure. And l wasn't near failing any classes and losing my scholarship to Dixon Prep. But my average scores weren't near Hope's, and we all knew it.

"Hope, don't  be mean to Grace. You may have better grades than her, but she has talent in other places you don't. " said Mom, like a kindergarten teacher talking to a toy thief.

Yeah, right. I didn't have any talent, and she knew it. The only reason I ended up at Dixon was because of some stupid IQ tests my parents made me take last summer. Apparently my scores were through the freaking roof or something, because all of a sudden poshie Dixon was all over me. I knew it was only to boost their rep, because most of the students there were slacker rich kids who didn't give a shit about their futures. Their daddies could pay for everything, of course.

I didn't give much of a shit anymore, either. I had a plan. On my fifteenth birthday, also known as January 26th,  I was going to kill myself.  I had it all figured out- I read a thing where a guy did it by drinking drain cleaner. I just had 20 days left to say my goodbyes, not that anyone I knew deserved it.

After I choked down most of my breakfast, I hurriedly excused myself and went to my room. Reaching into my closet, I found and put on my forest green blazer, skirt and tie that was the mandatory uniform for Dixon girls.

And then there was my little bit of rebellion - my scruffy black Converse. I had better shoes, but I didn't want to wear them. Maybe it was my brain secretly plotting against me, hoping I'd look in the mirror and see how awful and wasted I looked and promise to get better.

Without even acknowledging anyone else, not even my newly alive from his coma dad, I walked into the chilly Wisconsim air. The bus stop was about three blocks away from our house, and that route was the farthest south the bus went. As I went, I could see the kids I used to be friends with at Oakdale Middle School shooting me dagger eyes. They thought I wasn't part of their world anymore, I guess. I wasn't part of anyone's world.

I hated the bus. It was loud, rowdy, and bully central. And to make matters worse, I had to spend my ride defending Conrad Avery, my incredibly gay best friend. He was amazing, don't get me wrong, but it got pretty tiring having to fight his battles.

"Hey, Archer." he said as I climbed into his seat.

"What's up?" I responded.

"My cat hates me. This morning she decided to bite my arm off and I don't know why." he said, angrily.

That was another thing about Conrad. He was hyperemotional about everything. You couldn't say a word to him without it striking some sort of nerve. As he continued to complain about his finicky cat, our other friend, Izzie Davison crammed herself into the seat, so she was basically falling off it. There was a perfectly open seat in the other aisle, but then again Izzie was never the straightest thinker. Give her two points and instead of going straight she'd find the most complicated way between them she could. It was like a sort of reverse Arkham's Razor.

"What are y'all talking about?" she said in an exaggerated southern accent. We all laughed, but only Conrad's was half-real.

"Conrad's stupid cat, what were you expecting?"

The rest of the bus ride was uneventful. Conrad and Izzie did most of the talking, like they always did, and soon we were at school. We went our separate ways, Izzie to English and me and Conrad to math.

"Oh, look, it's the emo and the fag." said Ivy Andrews stage-whispered to her friends, who came from one of the best families in town, and, by extension, was only allowed to talk to us to make fun of us. It was part of the code that seemed to govern our school, and our lives. I never thought bullies actually acted like that until I started here; I thought they'd at least have some sense of subtlety about them.

"Ivy, don't you have something better to do with your life than make fun of people like that?" I asked, realizing I was about to make a huge scene. It was strange how...well, brave was the wrong word, I had gotten lately. I felt my survival instinct erode away. 

"At least I know where I stand around here."

"You really are a pathetic little bitch, aren't you?" I whispered into Ivy's ear.

Apparently, I didn't whisper quietly enough. As soon as the words left my lips, Mr. Isaac, who had a strange aversion to last names, stomped up to me, his face glowing red with misplaced rage that really should, I thought, have been directed towards his wife in the arts department who, rumor had it, had left him for Mrs. (Yes, I know) Adderson, the gym teacher who, in all her years at Dixon, looked exactly the same as she did in 1991.

"LANGUAGE, Miss Archer!"

"I'm sorry, okay? But Ivy should be the - "

"One more disruption in this class and you'll be going straight to the office."

And that was how my fabulous day started.

After first period ended and I was free from Mr. Isaac's piercing gaze, I went to music, where our teacher decided to make us play something she claimed was by some famous Serbian composer but sounded suspiciously like the Dora theme song. Then it was time for lunch, where I had to smile again, and it sucked because you can get away with looking sad in class because sadness looks just like like boredom, but come lunch and you have to pretend again.

"I don't understand what I ever did to Ivy. Why does she hate me so much?" said Conrad, clenching his fists.

"Ivy's a bitch, that's why!" I said, a little more forcefully than I had intended.

"Grace is right. Stop being such a wimp, Connie." said Izzie, rolling her eyes dramatically.

Connie was what we called him when he was being pathetic, which was most of the time. We sat down at our table, which only contained us because nobody wanted to sit with the kids from South Oaksdale.

I had mastered the art of pretending at lunch. My mind was in so many places at once, and I found myself wondering why I didn't decide to just end it three weeks ago, and I wanted to feel something. Anything. I was alternating between soul-crushing existential misery and feeling like a computer, and it was hard to say which setting I preferred.

I had always wanted to feel nothing; you know, like those "strong independent women" from movies trying too hard to be feminist whose emotions seemed to consist of stoic confidence and nothing else. But then I remembered that even in those movies, the ice would thaw with the help of a love interest or something. I was just frozen.

I remembered when this had all started. I'd go up online and take tests- so many goddamn tests that told me with varying degrees of sensationalism that I had to see a "qualified mental health professional" now, and that I posed a grave risk to myself if I kept driving down this road. Every midnight, I had a new excuse- I'll just take a few more quizzes for a ninth, tenth, eleventh opinion, the recession, my friends, my parents.

So I smiled, even though it felt like my face would crack if I did. And I tried to laugh at things I knew were supposed to be funny, but I couldn't seem to figure out how to manipulate my vocal chords into something resembling it. This was what my life had turned into. A charade of fakeness. And I couldn't wait for it to be over.