Girl Unnoticed

Girl Unnoticed [5]

Five

My body was sore when I woke up, it felt like my whole stomach was on fire and a knife was stabbing me repeatedly. I had quickly dismissed going to school, even though I woke up in the hours of the afternoon. My parents hadn't spoken to me ever since our discussion the day before and I was glad that there was no more need for yelling. Slowly getting up from the bed, I grabbed handfuls of my sheets in a death grip, pain surged through my whole body and I bit my lip to keep from crying. I turned on the shower as I began stripping out of my clothes only to have the bell ring. Putting on my white plush robe, I cautiously made my way down the stairs.

I opened the door to reveal the mailman who held a boxed package in his hands. After I signed the page he presented to me, he shoved the package in my hands and left in his white truck. The package didn't have any name or address from where it had come from, only my address was written on it. Once I cut the tape off, I opened the lids and dropped the box when I saw what was inside.

Bile rose up in my throat and I ran to the kitchen sink to heave up the small amount of contents in my stomach. I put my mouth below the tap and swallowed water as if I wouldn't drink any more for years. Inside the box was a picture of Danielle and me, which had been photocopied from the yearbook from when I was in fifth grade. The photographer had made us pose in the middle of the playground, our hands over each other's shoulders and beaming at the camera. Written on the backside of the picture were the words: Where are your friends now? It had to be Casey and Kayla's work because from both, only Kayla knew about what had happened to Danielle. The message was as clear as day, I'd had only one friend and she died. All I brought was misery to the people around me but I couldn't do anything to change the past.

Leaving the box on the floor, I ran up the stairs and sat down on the cold bathtub, the steaming hot water running over my body and scalding my skin. I didn’t care to turn the water to a more bearable temperature; I was more interested in the amount of tears that ran down my already wet cheeks. Seeing Danielle’s picture brought back a large amount of memories, ones that I had made sure to lock up in an imaginary drawer in my head. All I wanted was to be in peace and left alone but apparently that was too much to ask for. I couldn’t even remember why the abuse began in the first place.

All I could remember was beginning seventh grade and from then on it was all about tormenting me. Kayla had started verbally abusing me in the middle of the hallways, making others around us stop in their tracks and laugh at the display they were given. She made me cry so many times that I could barely keep count. Most of the time I would hide in an empty bathroom stall, hoping that the end of the day would come soon so I could go home and shed more tears in solitude. After the verbal abuse, Kayla had moved on to physically abusing me by tripping me in the hallways, shutting my locker door so close to my head she could almost decapitate me and shoving me against them afterwards.

Kayla’s way of harming me didn’t involve other people except for her group of friends, even then the only other abusers were girls. Casey had gone overboard by involving two guys to punch me several times until I fainted. She was in a whole different league from where Kayla was and it made me wonder whether Kayla had any sort of control over her. Casey was playing by her own rules even though she gained information from her cousin to hurt me in unspeakable ways.

In my former school, once Kayla’s abuse was over with I would run to the nurse’s office to get my wounds treated. The elderly woman would try and contact my parents but the call was always forwarded to voicemail. The many times when I was bleeding profusely from either my nose or mouth, or almost had a concussion, my parents were absent. At first I tried to reason with them to transfer me to another school but they wouldn’t believe the many accounts I would tell them about Kayla and her posse. They would dismiss me and tell me that I was greatly exaggerating, how I wished I were.