My family doesn't know what school is like for me. According to them, I have a couple girls who don't like me very much but nothing major.
Maybe it's because I kept fake smiling and laughed off their concerns when I first told them. My mum knows who the main trio are, she even has a nickname for the so-called leader. On parents evening she kept cussing the girl out in Italian when she walked past. In some ways, the girl deserved it, in some ways she didn't. She'd said so many of those same insults to me before. Some even worse. I'm not justifying it, the way I think of her and the way we treated her but I'm not against it either. I've never actually offended her to her face anyway.
At least, not in a language that she understands.
When the majority dislike you for your looks, you know you can't help it, that it's not your fault. But when it comes to your personality, it hurts so much more. Because you know that if you really tried, you could change it. So you wish so so hard that you could adjust it. Adjust it to fit their standards.
But what's even worse?
When they hate both. And that no matter how hard you try, you can't please them. You can't change.
At school, people think that what they say doesn't affect me. When they say harsh or rude things, I fake a laugh and shrug it off. And I've done this so many times that I can barely tell my real laugh from my fake one. They both sound exactly the same to me, to everyone. But the truth is, when you say those things to me: I'm really hurt. On the inside, I feel like digging a hole and burying myself alive because I feel like that would be much less painful than having to live another day on this earth.
But they don't know that. And they never will.
Because everyday I walk into that godforsaken school building with a huge fake smile plastered on my face, all the while wondering 'what the fuck is wrong with me?' and what I did for everyone to dislike me so much.
I don't voice these thoughts. Instead I talk. All day. About stuff that couldn't mean shit to me. Because I'm trying to hide how I really feel and that's the only way I know how to do it.
-💀
YOU ARE READING
Faking Smiles
Short StoryI'm depressed. I'm unhappy. I want to die. The only thing stopping me from ending it all is pretending I'm okay until even I think it's true. But you wouldn't know that. Because you never bothered to ask. *Trigger Warning*
