Ripped [TO BE PUBLISHED 2016]

2

I am stone. My heart is encased in liquid nitrogen, my eyes glued shut. I am not here, not alive. I am solid and stable, but unnoticed. Undisturbed.

On the outside, I am girl. I am long hair and clean cut nails and homework. I am boys and first times and late nights.

But on the inside I am petrified, frozen solid. Dead in the world of the dying.

Glamour girls with their snake tongues and yellow eyes cast flickering glances my way, judging my clothes, my face, my hair, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Boys with twelve-year-old minds and big-boy whoremones slither in the hallways, their damp, meaty hands touching, always touching, like they own every fucking body in that goddamn prison.

I am ghost. I will not be owned. I will not be cliqued. I will be girl on the outside, but I can never be one of them.

Smooth painted metal brushes against my fingertips. These are practice lockers. We are in between high school and children, old enough to try but not old enough to need.

Everyone around me is touching, feeling. Skin on muscle, tendon connecting to bones. Fingernails scrape against goosebumps.

It is the beginning stages. Kids learning how to corrupt themselves, boys being taught how to treat little girls as fresh meat and trophies, girls thinking they know what love is.

I cannot be touched. I do not want to learn.

The word "sex" floats over to me.

I shiver, a chill running down my spine.

I shut my locker and go to sixth period.