Missing Time: Chapter Eight

Ever since middle school, I’ve feared every day of that purgatory. Friends that had once been as close as can be were now split up, practically at each other’s throats over small drama. I once saw two girls get into a fight over a boy who couldn’t have cared less about either of them. How did they not see his clear disinterest as they screeched and swung at each other? Then, after a two-week suspension for both of them, they returned to see him with a new girl who’d moved from a neighboring district. From that moment on, the two girls were best friends.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand some people.

For many reasons, my place in the school hierarchy was a low one. To begin, I had no desire to make a name for myself. I didn’t want to be popular, someone whose name was constantly being passed around. I wanted friends and to be liked, but I didn’t need to be someone who constantly had a crowd around them. I hated the idea of people making rumors about me, whispering things I’d never hear, and only speaking to me cause I was labeled ‘cool’. I was also uninterested in changing my interests to fit some standard I didn’t even understand. I didn’t see the appeal in acting like you despised something you secretly enjoyed. I knew many kids who had once been huge fans of fantasy books, but once the hierarchy deemed that something of the lower class, they suddenly hated them. It made no sense. Why seek validation from something that would hate you if they knew the truth? I tried for a few days to reconnect with past friends, though once I was shut down enough times, I gave up. Trying to reconstruct the bridges that had been burned was possibly the worst thing I could’ve done. I was deemed a desperate freak without friends. I was a new subject for the endless torment that some children liked to put others through. Rumors were made of me, even though I’d done everything to try and avoid them.

It sent me into a downward spiral.

I immediately took all my cards off the table, hoping that would get the relentless bullying to stop. If they couldn’t see my hand, they couldn’t make fun of it, right?

Wrong. I was wrong.

I was always wrong.

Right when I thought I was beginning to understand it, the system would flip on its head. Why did everyone have rumors made about them? I thought that was only a popular kid thing. If the high and the low were so different, why were they both subjected to whispers? Did that make them more similar than anything? But then why was only one of them relentlessly bullied while the other was put on a pedestal? 

It was a headache of a system, the kind that made me crazy. After weeks of trying, I finally gave up. I kept my cards to myself, blocked out the noise around me, and put all of my trust in the one kid I could rely on: Leto.

I’d always wondered why Leto wasn’t popular. He possessed great traits: an outgoing personality, a genuine care for those around him, a talkative nature, and fairly good looks. Perhaps that was why he wasn’t popular. He was too good for them. I’ll never know, and while I would say it’s useless to speculate, I’d be a hypocrite. I speculate about everything.

Despite his sociable personality, Leto was the school ghost. No one seemed to know who he was. No one in his Biology class recalled him ever being there (I’d asked a few people before I gave up on socialization), though he swore up and down he attended regularly. I didn’t speak to any teachers—they were much too scary—so I had no idea if they knew who he was either. He was a phantom who only made himself visible to me, and in a way, I was honored. A kid who could have it made for himself socially was deciding to hang out with my wimpy, constantly fidgeting self. It was a medal of such, though I only wished I had my classes with him. We were both in the honors classes, though we’d had the misfortune of being placed in completely different periods. Worst of all, none of our classes were ever remotely near each other. I only saw him at the end of the day, his fluffy blonde head poking out from around the same oak tree each time in an attempt to scare me. Sometimes, I let him have the scare just to be n-

Thump, thump…

I felt my heart stop in my chest. My executioner was here.