Countdown

Twelve 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 12 days. You only have to keep going for 12 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.

I had a new habit in the morning, ever since my journal had been shared. I had disabled texting notifications on my phone, and now I only answered it when I had a call from my family, Izzie, Conrad, or Brendan. All of the texts were the same anyways, and I didn't need to read any more of them to get the point. But I couldn't stop myself from looking at the petition. It was addictive, somehow. Looking at all of these people who genuinely hated me made me feel like I wasn't a bad person for killing myself. Like my suffering was valid.

I was up to 176 signatures. What was weird was that most of these people didn't even know me. My bad reputation, I guessed, preceded me. People were told that I was retarded. Crazy. Not right in the head. And so they bought it without even getting to know me.

It hurt a little, too. None of these people knew who I was. Half of them probably couldn't recognize me by how I looked. They were perfect kids with charmed lives and nothing better to do but make fun of a girl who was admittedly stupid, but didn't do anything to them but take up space. They complained about not having the latest, perfect PINK, Aero, or Juicy sweats and hoodies, with no regard to the girls like me who slept in men's tees and frayed blue sweats. (What was, incidentally, what I wore now.)

I threw my black hair back into a ponytail, and opened up the first shared journal entry. To my surprise, one of the most recent commenters was Conrad.

Seeing his name was the final straw. I had thought, misguided as they were, that I could trust my friends not to betray me outright. I was wrong.

I got up from my bed, grabbed my speaker, and hooked up my MP3 player. Then, I turned up Fall Out Boy's "The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes" as high as the dial would go.

I was angry. So, so pissed off. My friends didn't have to stand up for me. I didn't deserve it, really. But at the very least, I at least wanted them to not participate in the teasing.

Maybe my expectations were too high. They had the right to choose who they were friends with, and I couldn't blame them for not choosing me. I came with too much drama. I couldn't let go of my stupid first world problems and have any fun. I realized then that this was supposed to be high school. It was supposed to be fun. But it wasn't.

After doing a lot of thinking, I realized that I wanted to see what he had said. I needed to know, if only to face the realities that my friends were turning against me.

With a deep breath and a hard, long blink, I opened it up. He had been responding to a vicious debate about the true author of the documents, most people appeared to think I had written and shared them myself to get attention.

Whether or not Grace wrote the entries herself isn't the issue. Neither is whether she's mentally ill. The real problem is that you're turning a girl who didn't really do anything to you into an object for you to ridicule and bully. Honestly, you should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's pathetic that you have nothing better to do than make someone feel bad about themselves. I'm telling the school and God can only hope they'll do something about it.

I sank backwards into my forest green desk chair and opened up the replies. Immediately, I wished I hadn't.

Why did people think being gay was a moral defect? Oh, right, well, we were in high school. But still. I had never understood why people used gay as a synonym for stupid. And I definitely didn't understand why being a guy who likes guys had so much bullshit attached to it. Why did being gay, or camp, or not conforming at all to perfect male gender roles get you called 'fairy', 'fag', and all sorts of fucked up shit? What the hell?