Meaningful

Chapter Two

"Who knows how long,

I've been awake now?

The shadows on my wall don't sleep.

They keep calling me, beckoning,

Who knows what's right?

The lines keep getting thinner.

My age had never made me wise,

But I keep pushing on and on and on and on."

IMAGINE DRAGONS - NOTHING LEFT TO SAY

I pull to the side of the busy street as carefully as I can on the slippery ice.  

Erica and Johnny stand out front of Wilk's in their heavy winter coats, but still shiver as the cold wind that blew in their faces.  

Erica and Johnny have been my best friends since we were thirteen, three years ago.  I used to go to this one school, Lincoln Prep, before I met the two of them.  Since my dad's not exactly poor, he used to send me there thinking it was a perfect way to make some unique experiences, when in actuality, I hated it there.  Everybody there was rich and spoiled.  They were a bunch of drama starters that for some reason or another hated me with every fiber of their being.  I can't remember what I did to them.  It must have been bad though for them to spend everyday trying to make me feel like life wasn't worth living.  They did a fairly good job at it too.  There were times I would get home, and just go to sleep to escape from the real world. I stopped doing my homework, and I stopped writing.  I would cry every time I was alone.  I'd been going to that school since I was five, and one day I just woke up and everyone hated me.  They'd never treated me so bad before.

Mom was scared for my health.  She tried telling dad to switch me schools, but he was stubborn and said I'd get along fine.  I remember the Incident that changed almost everything.

I came home from school feeling like a complete waste of space, again.

'How could they be so cruel?' I thought.  'What did I ever do to them?'

I'd gone to school that day expecting things to be the regular terrible, but it escalated that day to the point that I had ran out of the school building before school was even over, to come home and land in a heap on my bed.

I had walked through they hallways, completely oblivious to the reason why the others were laughing and pointing.  They did that everyday, why would it be different that time?  When I got to my locker I saw the vicious words they had written about me that day.  The janitor would try to clean them off after school ended,  I'd seen him try to do so, but in the morning the next day they were there again.

Spray painted on the locker in pink was the casual, 'whore', underneath it was the still casual but not as frequent, 'slut', then beside that was the redundant, 'loser', and then there was the new one, 'harlot.'  I knew what a harlot was.  It was another word for prostitute.  I was just surprised that the others did too.  In fact, at that moment, I would have bet anything that they looked up prostitute in the Thesaurus and found that as a synonym.

I dumped all my stuff into the metal cabinet except my notebook.  I took my notebook with me everywhere.  It's where I put all my thoughts.  Everything they did to me, I would put down in this crumbling thing, and then I tried to forget.  It never really worked, but it helped ease my mind during school hours.  

Walking down the hall to my first period class, I was still whispered about, but no one was actually laughing anymore.  They were quiet and tried their best to avoid me, like I had some air borne disease they were afraid to catch.  It scared me they way they had grown quiet all of a sudden.  I kind of wished they go back to their normal routine of spitting on me as I passed them.  You never know how you feel to be spat at until the moment you look down to find your school supplies covered in other people's saliva.