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Chapter 1

Phil turned fifteen just last month. She didn't feel any different. It was just another year added to her currently miserable life. Miserable cause she had no idea what was going on around her. She'd always had a wild imagination. That was it! She must be imagining things. I mean, who'd believe her if she told them she'd seen her principal sneak out of school and suddenly disappear? Well, not disappear exactly. She'd seen him transfigure into some black winged creature. And certainly no one was going to listen to her talk about how her class teacher seemed to have voids for eyes without looking at her like she was crazy; eyes resembling black pits, bottomless holes, black dots with no white whatsoever. There had been more such incidents, when she saw things that simply could not be. Maybe she was hallucinating. But she was neither on drugs nor sleep deprived. In fact she had started sleeping more than usual, being unusually exhausted everyday. Moreover it had started only after she had turned fifteen. Maybe this was why becoming a teen was hyped, she thought to herself. She strongly suspected she was wrong.

Phil had trust issues, among many others. She always tried to look for hidden meanings in what people were saying, even when there wasn't any. She had started second guessing everything she said or did. She always heard voices whispering about her behind her back, even when there were none. She constantly felt sad, and after enough time, even smiling, which used to come naturally to her, became painful to do. But she didn't stop smiling, however pain it might have brought her. Most nights she cried herself to sleep. Most days she didn't feel like going out or going to school. She had almost lost the will to breathe a couple of times, even googled the least painful methods. But she could never bring herself to actually do it. 

Phil hadn't told anyone about it, but she was depressed. She wasn't completely sure of it, but nowadays she was so unsure of her own self, that she couldn't be sure of anything really. She kept chalking it down to her being way in over her head, or it just being a phase, or it just being something that everyone went through but no one talked about, but she knew better. She was confused when people were genuinely nice to her, and felt like it either wasn't possible or they were making sure she owed them something. She had lost all confidence in herself and her ability to do things. She was yelled at by her mum every day on her way to school about how her grades were dipping, and how she needed to pull herself together if she hoped to achieve something in life, which only served to make things worse. She looked in the mirror only to see her ugly self- all the excess fat on her belly, her uneven teeth, her thin hair, her thick glasses, all exaggerated of course, by her distraught mind. She felt like all her friends were fake, and started distancing herself from them, and as a result they stopped talking to her too, leaving her feeling excluded, hated and just generally more distressed.

She couldn't pinpoint exactly when her depression had started, it had just happened. Maybe it was the stress from school, maybe it was the constant fights between her parents, maybe it was her own ugly appearance, maybe it was nothing, or maybe it was everything. She honestly didn't know. The worst part was that no one noticed. No one cared enough to notice how she'd changed, or even that she'd changed at all. No one noticed how terribly alone she was.