We didn’t meet again until after school started.
My life for the next two weeks was tremendously boring. My mother was trying to keep me home to prepare for the upcoming school year, though what she failed to realize was that this was the absolute worst course of action she could have chosen. If she paid any attention to how I truly felt, instead of projecting what she wanted me to feel, she’d know that sitting in my room with only my mind to keep me company was the ultimate form of torture. She wouldn’t let me go to the park, claiming that I needed to stay home and focus on preparing myself for my first year of high school.
It was important, she said.
I would make friends, she said.
I wouldn’t need Leto anymore, she said.
She said, she said, she said…Agh, she said a lot of things. I couldn’t keep up with all the things she said. I only knew that I had to stay home.
So for two weeks, I stayed inside. I’m not sure the precise reasons behind why being outside for a few hours was suddenly so sinful, but with her already constantly being upset with my father, I didn’t want to provoke her further. Keeping my mouth shut, I simply followed her instructions.
I didn’t do much for those two weeks other than read. I read some books I’d bought not long ago, novels of wizards, elves, magical adventures, and all that jazz. I’d always liked to read, something that some kids thought was quite odd when I was younger. I never quite understood why that was considered some unforgivable wrongdoing in the child world, but I never understood a lot of things. I still don’t.
It was the night before school started when everything hit rock bottom.
I couldn’t sleep for the life of me. My hands were shaking against the sheets, overwhelmed by two straight weeks of uninterrupted worry. There was sweat beading along my back, seeping through the fabric of my gray t-shirt. The room was spinning, the dark blue walls merging into a large current. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of pure despair and misery. I could feel my breath hitching, the air entering my lungs only to be spat out in a violent huff only milliseconds later. The floodwater was moving up to tickle my eyes as my fingers grasped desperately at the polyester beneath me. I’d been worked up all day as the clock slowly ticked closer and closer to ten, the time I was supposed to go to sleep. It only got worse as that then blended into one, then four, then, now, five. My mother would barge in any minute to wake me up for the first day preparations, expecting me to be asleep. I’d have to fake it once I heard the footsteps of my executioner creak down the hallway.
She was sentencing me to death by making me go.
What if something happened?
What if I was beaten up? Robbed? Kidnapped?
What if I made an embarrassment of myself, something no one would ever forget?
What if it ended up online?
What if…
What if…
What if…
My eyes were stinging, my head was throbbing, my pulse was rushing. I felt like I was dying, and soon, I was certain I would be.
School hadn’t always been a deathly fear of mine. When I was younger, I had no problem with it. I had friends, people who would play tag with me at recess and sit with me at lunch. Elementary school was almost heaven. I never wanted to leave.
Once sixth grade ended, it was like a switch had been flipped.
Suddenly, there was a social hierarchy. People cared how you looked, how you dressed, who you were friends with, what you liked…Every single aspect of your being was suddenly put under a microscope, examined at a molecular level for any flaw. The only people who somehow avoided this inspection were those at the top of the hierarchy, those deemed perfect. In reality, I’m sure everyone but themselves saw that they were the ones with screws loose, with issues they refused to fix. Perhaps they judged us so they could spend less time judging themselves. I’ll never know.
This sudden change was a slap in the face for me. It was like everyone understood and fit into a system that had never existed before. Everyone just slid into place, accepting their roles in whatever layer of hierarchy they were forcibly put in. No one seemed shaken or fazed by this sudden shift. No one was asking the questions I was.
Why did it matter what you wore?
Why did it matter how you looked?
Weren’t we all weird in our own way?
It was a system everyone else but me understood. I was an outcast, alone.
And that was scarier than anything.
