Fleur

Chapter Three

TRIGGER WARNINGS

•

There were many things that made Connor hate being alive. He hated living in the shadows of his sister, never being recognized for his accomplishments. He hated how his father thought he controlled him and how his mother thought she should win
mother-of-the-year award. But what he hated the most was the fact that he was left handed. It was something he couldn't escape, no matter how hard he tried to change the hand he wrote with. It was really a burden being left handed. Scissors were a nightmare for him and every time he was doing something important with ink of any kind, it wouldn't smear everywhere. He couldn't stand it.

"Goddamnit you son of a bitch!" Connor yelled as he threw his pen across the room, hitting a girl in his chemistry class who was busy at work. She glared at him and Connor slyly flipped her off. His paper was covered in streaks of black ink that made his already-messy handwriting even messier. The writing was practically illegible by then, which meant yet another failed assignment. He was failing almost all of his classes but that didn't really matter to him. Giving up on schoolwork, Connor told his teacher he was going to the bathroom and left the classroom.

He locked the door behind him and looked into the cracked mirror that was leaning between the wall and the sink. His reflection looked at him back as if even it was judging him.

"Stop looking at me like that," he said to the mirror. Not surprisingly, it didn't respond. "Are you not going to say anything back? Oh right! You're just a mirror! Ha would you look at that, Connor Murphy talking to a mirror!" He laughed, not caring how crazy he sounded. Upon seeing his reflection again, his "happiness" dramatically decreased. In the mirror he saw the person he hated, which is why he tended to avoid mirrors in the first place.

"Fuck you!" He screamed at the mirror as tears filled the edges of his eyes. He curled his hand into a fist and smashed the mirror into a million tiny shards of glass until his reflection showed what he was inside - broken. Some of the pieces of glass had entered into his knuckles leaving small cuts.

There was silence everywhere and Connor honestly started to wonder if he was going deaf. Maybe this was what the creation of the world was like; a huge bang then silence as humanity started to rebuild itself.

A small piece of glass laid on the floor. He picked it up and stared his reflection in the eye, feeling tears come.

"Real boys don't cry," his father once told him when he was much younger. For some reason he listened to him and ever since, never cried in front of anyone. Especially his father. Even when he would throw rocks at him for being a failure or when his family told him to stop faking his mental illness. He toughed it out and waited until night to cry muffled sobs into his pillow.

Wiping his eyes angrily, Connor unlocked the door and stomped back to the classroom. He went to his desk and slammed his head against the table, attempting to catch up on some
long-needed sleep.

•

The bell rang, letting everyone know that the school day was finally over. You could almost hear every student in the school sigh in relief. The bell awoke Connor who now had a red imprint of the table marked on his forehead. He threw his hair to mostly cover it up but if anyone really cared enough to look closely, they'd see the mark the table left.  Once again, his classmates avoided him in the hallway, creating a "private hallway" for him and some other outcasts and misfits. He recognized a few of them, being shoved into a hallway with them for four years now. There was the short arsonist with the red hair, the chubby girl in the unicorn sweatshirt that was obsessed with The Princess Bride, the boy who listened to Bob Marley loud enough for half of the neighborhood to hear, and the stuttering boy in blue who never made eye contact with anything except the floor.