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Which was fine. Me and goodbyes didn’t mesh well. My last goodbye was…not at all something I wanted to remember.
I smiled to myself before standing and grabbing the backpack leaning against the wall near my bedroom door. I was shocked my dad and his annoying new wife hadn’t changed my room after all these years. I was kind of expecting to walk into a gym or a new office, or something. Not my gaudy, nausea-inducing love of all things pink and fluffy when I was younger.
Don’t get me wrong, I love pink and fluffy, but there was a time for it. A place. And a few of my old stuffed animals would probably haunt my dreams for years to come. I’d left them for a reason. Well, mostly because Mom hadn’t given me the time to pack it all up, but still.
Mom.
I froze in the dark hallway, my backpack half slung around my shoulders. I missed her. I missed her so much.
But now wasn’t the time to think about her. Thinking about Mom would only make me sad, and being sad on my first day back at River High was the last thing I needed. Today, I would rock that school, and I would continue to rock it for weeks to come.
Yeah. Confidence. It was something I had now. Usually.
As I finished swinging my backpack around, I went down the stairs. My dad was in the kitchen, making coffee. He was still in his pajamas. He worked as the local orthodontist, so he didn’t have to be in work until eight or nine. He made enough off of insurance companies and the local crooked teeth of nearby kids that Diane didn’t have to work. She was a stay at home wife, and she was still in bed.
It was fine, though—I wasn’t expecting a send-off. In fact, I was shocked my dad was up. I thought I’d just hop out of the door and get going.
My dad had brown hair like me, eyes that were more hazel, flecks of brown littering the color. He was a tall, skinny sort of guy, exactly who you’d imagine when you thought about an orthodontist. Kind of nerdy, kind of weird, but nice.
Nice to everyone except my mother, but that was neither here nor there. If I thought about it, if I really stopped and thought about the past and what he did to her, I’d only get upset, and for this plan to work, for me to rock River High like no one had ever rocked it before, I had to be cool, calm, and collected. The opposite of my real self, basically.
“Have a seat, I’ll make you breakfast,” my dad, Jon, spoke as he gestured to the kitchen table. Sitting and eating was the last thing I felt like doing, so I just shook my head and went for the door. “Where are you going? Isn’t it early? I can drive you.” He set his coffee mug down and went for the keys hanging on the wall.
Spending time alone with my dad in the car? Not an experience I wanted. I didn’t have anything to say to him, nothing beyond the usual, so once again, I shook my head. This time, I met his eyes. “No, I’m going to walk. I want to get there early, see if I can do a run through of my schedule before classes start.” A run through of my schedule meaning: make sure I had enough time to stop at my locker between classes. Truly, it all depended on where my locker was in the school, and whether we had five minutes or three between classes.
My old school had five minutes, so there was always enough time. Plus, I’d had one of the lockers in the main hall, which was nice. I didn’t leave much behind, but I did miss Leah already, and a few of the teachers. Transferring during my senior year would be hard on its own, let alone after you tossed in my revenge scheme against the Dick Squad.
The Dick Squad. Might be immature, but they’d earned their nickname years ago, way back before I knew what a dick even was. As I left the house and waved goodbye to my dad, who still wanted to drive me—or kill me with awkwardness—I couldn’t help but think back.
I shuffled into the classroom, tugging at the bottom of my shirt. To say I felt self-conscious would be the world’s biggest understatement. What I really wanted to do was turn on my heels and run home. The morning announcements hadn’t started yet, so I knew I wasn’t late. Still, I didn’t want to be here, not after what I saw…my mind was still not putting it together. I didn’t understand it.
Neither did Mom, clearly, for she’d forgotten to do laundry again, and it was picture day today. While the rest of the class wore their clean, new clothes, I was stuck in a t-shirt that was a size too big and pants that had mud stains on them. They were the same pants I’d worn that day, when my world started to crumble around me. My hair was an unkempt mess—usually my mom braided it for picture day, but this morning she was passed out. Walking to school had become the norm, because I refused to call dad for help.
I headed straight for my desk, lifting its top to get out my pencil pouch and the notebook I knew I’d need for math. When my eyes landed on the contents of my desk, I felt my skin clam up. Something sat atop everything, something that didn’t belong: a stick of deodorant.
It was something small, something that I knew shouldn’t bother me. It was something Mom would’ve told me was just kids being mean, but my heart turned to ice all the same. I was so tired of kids being mean, mostly because it felt like they were always mean to me.
Me, and only me.
They’d taken to calling me stinky, to holding their noses and waving the air when I walked by them, making comments under their breath that were purposefully meant to hurt me. It wasn’t much, but added onto everything else…I felt like I wanted to die. Not a new feeling for me.
I bit my bottom lip, fighting the urge to cry—I was so tired of this. So tired. Mom said to ignore them, that they’d find a new target eventually, but what if they didn’t? What if it was always me? At eleven years old, I wasn’t sure I could take an entire life like this. No one had ever told me how hard living was.
I pushed the deodorant aside, slowly closing my desk once I’d grabbed my notebook and pencil pouch, hyper aware that in the front corner of the room, a trio of boys were staring at me. The other kids in the class were nice enough to look away and pretend like they weren’t watching, but those three? They stared at me like their lives depended on it.
Alex and Xander stood near Christian’s desk, huddled around it. Their gazes were cruel, and even though it wasn’t true, I felt like they could see into me, peer straight into my soul. Did they know how much their words hurt me? Did they know how badly I wanted school to be the one normal thing in my life? Did they care about me at all?
Probably not. No one would notice if I just stopped existing.
I purposefully ignored the looks the three boys gave me, not wanting to get into it, not wanting to watch them wrinkle their noses and make fun of me. I wished I could say I was good at ignoring kids, but I wasn’t. I might not have been looking at them, but I knew they were staring at me; I could feel their eyes like tiny pinpricks on my skin. My shoulders slumped, and I huddled over my desk as the morning announcements split the air.
My day was long and way too hard, and when I got home—or should I say, the apartment Mom and I were living in while the divorce finalized—I found my mom passed out on the couch, empty bottles scattered around her. Even if she managed to wake, she’d complain about her head hurting; she wouldn’t listen to what I had to say.
Truthfully, it was times like these that made me wish I could call my dad, talk to him. Get his advice. But then, when those thoughts came to me, I remembered what he did, and then those thoughts vanished quickly. After all, it was his fault Mom was like this. It was his fault we were here, living in an apartment and not our house, that we didn’t have our own washing machines.
Everything was his fault. Him and those stupid boys.
I focused on my feet as I walked along the sidewalk to school. River High was ten minutes from my house, so it wasn’t like a super long walk. Plus, I had a lot on my mind.
If I was honest, a big part of me still blamed Dad for all of it. I blamed him for Mom’s drinking, for destroying our family. But kids were cruel by nature; if they wouldn’t have made fun of me for smelling, or the divorce, or the bleeding incident, they would’ve just found other things to mock.
I wondered what kind of people those same kids were now. Alex, Xander, and Christian. When it came down to it, I didn’t care whether they’d changed or not. I didn’t give two shits; they still deserved what I was going to do to them. Every ounce of pain they would feel from now until graduation would be entirely at my hands. Not saying I was going to beat them up physically, but I wasn’t above using every weapon in my arsenal.
Those three…I would destroy them, and only when I was happy with the results would I move on and forget about them. Maybe then I’d turn my focus on Jon and his pretty wife, Diane, the new Mrs. Payne.
I was getting way ahead of myself. The first thing I needed to do was get my schedule, and the second thing…I needed to find a friend with some insider gossip.
