Countdown

Ten 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 10 days. You only have to keep going for 10 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.

There were ninety-six glowing (well, glowing at night) stars on my bedroom ceiling. I knew this because every night I counted them, to fall asleep. They weren't arranged into any sort of constellations, but that didn't stop me from mentally arranging them into shapes and figures. Skimming my eyes over my ceiling now I saw a woman's face, a sun, and what was maybe a seashell.

I had always been told I was good at reading people. I'd also always hated it. What did it even mean, other than the ability to not be a social pariah. In the past few months, I had began to realize how one of my supposed strengths had been the thing to break me. Most people can have this strange ignorance when it comes to what people think about them. If you're really  unpopular, you obviously know everything they say, but in my earlier days at Dixon, I was about average. I didn't have a girl posse following me around, but the general opinion of me was higher. Basically, in about thirteen or fourteen weeks, I went from "Oh, Grace. Yeah, she's okay" to "Oh my God, Grace. She's so retarded." And I'm fairly sure that most people wouldn't have known that as soon as I did.

You see, I used to be much better at hiding the shadow that followed me around. I could deny it, tell myself that I didn't want to feel it, and I used to think it worked. That I was in full control of myself. But then I realized that I was shaking. The wall that I had built, that I couldn't demolish and didn't know how to rebuild, was in danger of collapsing.