I'm Fine

Chapter 5 Nora

A/N sorry this is a bit late this week, I've been busy... anyways enjoy : D

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When I got home, I was soaking wet, water was dripping from my clothes when I had stepped inside.

    "Dry off first!" My mother's voice descended from the depths of our house, moms have that ability to know what's going on without seeing what's going on. I stepped outside and began to wriggle around like a dog drying off, after it got out of water. I swing the front door back open and inform my mom that I was now dry.

    I didn't wait for her voice when I reentered my house, I darted straight up the stairs and into my room. My bedroom was minimalistic, I had a single poster with aesthetic line art hung up on my wall, but that's as far as decoration went. The mess inside my room was hidden in my desk, drawers and closet. The only thing that was always dependable to stay where I left it was my camera, which sat on my bedside table, It was the only reason I even entered my room.
    I abandoned my backpack on my bed and retreated to my window with my camera, I fidgeted with the lenses until I could see one last poem for the day; a raindrop on glass. I looked down at the screen, cleaned on the daily, and smiled at the arrangement of grey's and blue's but an overwhelming sense of entitlement that the dark gave.

    I allowed the blackness to swallow me for a second, I allowed it  be pulled over my head and eyes, and I felt it engulf me. The blackness sang me it's lullabies, that turned my heart to glass and slowly made spider-web-like cracks through it. How is it that I'm only appreciated when I'm not myself? Why do I only matter at my most vulnerable state? Why can people just walk over me? Why has nobody ever cared to get to know me? The question's felt as if they would never end, but then as suddenly and spontaneously as it had begun, it began to fade, And like everyone else did, the black rejected me and spewed me out of it, and the comforting warmth of the dark was no more.    

I didn't need to look like the idea of black had me contemplating, I just needed to be doing my homework.

                        ...

    "Nora! Dinner!" I dropped my pencil onto the packet that I had been working on for the past two hours- staring at for the past two hours to be more accurate. Homework used to be easier, not necessarily the level of it, but the task of doing homework, but I can't sit down anymore without my mind reminding me how screwed I am. The worst of all, is that I don't even care enough, that I am screwed. I care about the fact that I am a joke to people, I care about the fact that nobody would notice if I disappeared, I care about the fact that all my problems are caused by what people think of me.

    But dinner interrupts my process of self-detonation. The scent of steamy meatloaf drags me downstairs.

    "Where's McKenzie?" The table was set for three, my sister's spot however was vacant, which meant she was either eating at a friends house or-

    "She's upstairs" My Father said flatly, confirming the most likely of the two. My parents served me a chunk of meatloaf doused in ketchup, I broke off a bite with my fork and held it up to my mouth, I felt it's steam tickling my nose. Something stopped me from eating, something that sounded like Whitney, stopped me from eating. I dropped my fork which splashed in ketchup.

    I excused myself and walked upstairs outside of McKenzie's room. My parents used to enforce the 'eat dinner at the table rule' yet somehow the rule crumbled when McKenzie started 3rd grade.

    "Hey" I knocked softly on her door.

    "Hi" her voice sounded the same, more cheerful maybe.

    "Can I come in?" there was a brief silence before she opened the door, revealing a huge explosion of gears, and pulleys, and string, and duct tape spanning across her room.

    "What's going on in here?"

    "I'm trying to make a machine that opens the door for me!" she explained, "come in, I'll show you how it works!" I shut the door and awkwardly stepped over the tracks and domino's snaked through her room.

    "Wouldn't it be easier to just open the door yourself?"

    "That's what Rube Goldberg's started as" she explained "when the industrial revolution began a cartoonist named Rube Goldberg drew cartoons of complex and often unrealistic machines that do simple everyday tasks," she paused for air, she talked a lot like Whitney, but in a different way. She valued words, she could just arm herself with them faster. I looked around her room and saw drawings of Rube Goldberg's taped around her room, some of them were veterans of the walls, some of them were new.

    "Want to see the machine run? I just finished making adjustments, this is test run 36" There was a twinkle in her eye as she dropped a marble on a track. The marble ran down to greet some dominoes, which fell in effect until the last one pushed a pink pearl eraser onto an unbalanced scale, lifted a string on a pulley that leads to another thing which leads to another thing until I watched as the door swung open. We booth cheered at the simple reveal of the hallway.

    "Yes! It worked!" she cried "it finally worked!"

    "Now that you've finished would you like to come down to dinner?" I saw the cold plate of meatloaf on her bed.

    "Okay" she triumphantly stepped through the open door.

    "Don't close it!" I held the cool metal doorknob behind me ready to close it , but McKenzie was quick to react "please, I want to keep it as evidence" I smiled, McKenzie was less than half  my age and she was somehow twice as smart as me.

    "Never lose it" I wanted to tell her, "never change" that's what they said to me, maybe it would curse it, if I told her.