Countdown

Fourteen 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 14 days. You only have to keep going for 14 more days. Knowing that any moment, my parents were going to wake me up and bitch at me for lying here so long, when I had already slept at Izzie's, I climbed out of bed, feeling my feet hit the cheap carpet of my bedroom floor.

When I went downstairs to watch televison, I heard a phone ringing. It wasn't mine, because mine was in my room and had a different ringtone. My mom had left her cell phone here when she had gone to work at the shop I realized. I flipped it over and saw that it was the school guidance office. I debated answering, but thought it might be important, so I pressed talk and held the phone to my ear.

"Hello, this is the Archer residence." I quoted from the way I always saw my parents answered Official Phone Calls.

"Oh, hi, Grace. Are your parents home?"

"My dad is, do you want me to wake him up for you?"

"That would be great."

I woke Dad, much to his dismay, and handed him the phone.

"It's the guidance office, any idea what they want?"

He shrugged and accepted the phone.

I closed the door behind him, but stayed there to listen to the call.

"She never said anything about being cyberbullied, what did the kid say happened?"

There was maybe a couple minutes of silence as Ms. Ingrid, I imagined, explained the whole crisis to Dad.

I wondered what the assumptions were. That the entries were real? Fake? That I had released them myself? I couldn't bear to keep thinking about it.

"Wow, that's.... do you know if she wrote them herself? Why were they shared?" he asked, softly. I could hear it in his voice that he was scared for me.

More silence.

"I assume you'll be doing whatever you can to punish these kids, am I correct?"

I was going to kill whoever had told the office. Didn't they just know they were making it worse? That people would think I was the tattletale? My friends always meant well, but they didn't realize that they couldn't stop me? It wasn't their fault I was such a retard. It was mine, and it was almost my responsibility to do what I would.

I guess you could say I had to die.