Gut Churning

3 - Scrape

The day had blurred by and she sat peacefully at the kitchen counter in her home, after she had driven back from school with her younger brother.

She completed her work and looked up, she locked her eyes on the amazon echo dot sitting diagonally across from her on the kitchen table.

In a rush she unplugged it, and all the other electronics programmed to listen to them. Then she grabbed her phone and called her mom.

"April?" Her mom's calming voice answered the phone.

"Hi Mom, when you get home we need to talk about something important.. oh! and don't be alarmed if I shut off my phone, just hurry home okay?" April rushes out.

"Oh honey, I'm not going to be home before you go to sleep, I am being held for an overnight shift.. Sorry, we'll talk tomorrow after school okay? And don't worry about taking your brother to school tomorrow he has an appointment. Okay? Bye honey, love you, I gotta go."

"No wai-" The phone hung up.

"Shit." April cursed aloud. She decided to not shut her phone off and she plugged all the devices back in.

A feeling of exhaustion overrode her senses, and she went into her bathroom, dealt with her business, and dragged herself to her bed to sleep.

***

The next morning, April threw herself out of bed, and her cat sprang up yowling with surprise. April scurried about collecting everything she needed for school, what happened freaked her out but she couldn't afford to miss school, what if she missed something extremely vital during a lesson that would save her sorry ass during a test? She knew her teachers would laugh at her if they could hear her thoughts, she knew they would say something like, "Oh April, you need to take care of yourself, you're a straight A student you're doing fine! Just give yourself a break and take care of your mental health." She sighed, they didn't understand, they are only teachers, they didn't understand that she wanted to immediately join a nursing program as soon as she graduated. She was a sixteen year old junior, and she already had all the credits she needed to graduate, and she had completed all the prerequisites needed to join the nursing program, the only thing that kept her at her high school was the "great high school experience" that she left homeschool in eighth grade for.

But it seemed she never experienced it, because she never had the friends to complete the image. She's a cheerleader, a gymnast, a thespian, she's in student body council, she runs her own club for conservatism, and she is involved in a numerous amount of other school related activities.

Her 'friends' come and go, they stay for a fleeting moment and then quickly flit away. The one person she felt was her close friend slowly began to reject her, with April only realizing later it was because she was being replaced by someone deemed more 'suitable' for Paige.

April shook her self pity away, she hated feeling that way. She thought if she let's that get to her she will be just like the rest of society, full of fake depression, ignorant, without happiness, and downright stupid.

It was odd, she thought of herself as social and a people person, but she slowly began to hate others more and more, she started slowly recognizing she was more advanced than her peers. But even if that was the case she still accepted those around her, she just hated that she couldn't just be accepted by someone her age and have a friend she could be close with.

April pulled a white ribbed long sleeve shirt off of the rack in her walk in closet. She walked back into her room and picked some ripped light blue jeans out of a drawer in her white bureau. She looked down at the jeans in her hands.