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10:30 am.
I stagger out of the classroom, my phone buzzing in my pocket. I run up the stairs, not caring about the person yelling my name behind me, telling me to at least pack up my violin before leaving.
I get to my backpack and pull out my headphones. I’m going to need them.
I put the headphones on, and start to play my music. I let the emotions and melodies of the song wash over me, quieting the brewing storm of anger and pain I feel.
I walk down the hallway, towards a small offshoot that leads to some gym related room. I think there might be a class in there, but I don’t care.
There’s a desk in this hallway, and it’s dark. Thankfully the lights aren’t motion sensors, or I would’ve had to find somewhere else.
I sink to the floor, curling my legs up against my chest.
I grab my phone, and turn the volume to the max possible. I just want to forget, to have a moment of peace.
I rarely get peace these days. For the past three months, both my parents have been in the hospital, and for some ungodly reason, both of them made me their power of attorney. Why in gods name they would leave that up to an eight grader, nobody knows. And it’s not like anyone could ask them, seeing as they are both in a coma.
Around three months ago, my parents got into an uber that had a drunk driver. This driver drove their car into traffic during a red light, and as expected, cars hit them from both sides of the vehicle.
The driver died instantly. Lucky bastard.
Both my parents went into a coma, and have stayed that way for three months.
I’ve gotten used to getting calls from the hospital at random times now. But this call was different.
This was a call telling me that both my siblings were admitted to the hospital. My sister, for a broken femur, and my brother, for some rare disease even they don’t know how to treat.
They called to tell me that my sister will be fine, but I need to go to the hospital to discuss my brother's condition.
The sounds of a Spotify ad stirs me from my thoughts. My parents never bothered to get me Spotify premium, so I'm stuck dealing with ads.
I almost throw my phone at the wall across me, but I stop myself. I need this phone, both for medical updates, and for my music. Without it, I would most likely go insane.
The ads last for what seems like forever switching between multiple versions of ads I've heard before, but my music eventually comes back. I lose myself in the swirling melodies and crescendos, and that helps me calm down.
It’s not until I feel a hand on my shoulder that I look up.
My heart stops.
It takes my brain a moment to catch up.
Once it does, I only feel dread. Oh god, no, no, no! Not now! I think.
I drop my head into my hands. I can’t let these three boys see me like this. I turn down the volume of my music so that I at least hear whatever insults they have to say.
An arm brushes against my left arm. One of them sat down next to me. Shit.
An identical feeling on my right tells me that one of the other two did the same.
I start to panic. It’s bad enough that I’m having a mental breakdown, but the fact that these three are here makes it ten times worse.
I try to stand up, pulling my hood up, but a hand grabs my arm and pulls me back down.
I curl up against myself, trying to make it so they stop touching me.
“Hey, what’s wrong? You’re crying.”
I hadn’t realized I was until I heard that. With shaky hands, I grab my phone and open the messages from Dr. Lakeland. I turn my phone screen to the left, showing Ezra the message.
It reads: Listen, I know you’re going through a lot, and this will only make it worse, but I thought you should know that your brother has been diagnosed with an extremely rare case, one so rare we can’t find any records of it. I will need to meet with you within the next 48 hours so we can decide what the best course of action is.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry,” he says.
He doesn’t understand. People think that saying they’re sorry helps make it better, but it only sounds as though they are apologizing for putting someone’s loved one in the hospital. “Don’t say that,” I whisper.
Breathing deeply, I try to regain control of my emotions. It seems to work, temporarily, until my phone rings.
I glance down at the number calling. Ms. Penelope, the strings teacher.
I don’t answer. I don’t think that I could even be able to form a coherent sentence to talk to her.
The phone’s ringtone slowly fades away. As it does, I get a text.
It’s Ms. Penelope. I put your instrument away and put it back in your cubby in the orchestra room.
Thanks, I type back.
“Why shouldn’t we say sorry? I know for a fact that I'm sorry that’s happening to you?” Another person says, and I feel a rush of anger.
This person could best be described as my . . . frenemy.
“Because it sounds like you’re apologizing for being the one th-, nevermind,” I say. It’s too hard to explain what this feels like to somebody who hasn’t felt or experienced it before.
“Ok geez sorry. Just trying to not seem rude,” Asher says.
“Too late,” I mutter in reply.
As the anger seeps out of me, I feel somebody put an arm around my shoulders. I flinch as they do so.
Ezra uses his arm to sort of give me a one armed hug, and it’s that I realize how cold I am.
I shiver, and he rubs my arm with his hand. His hand is freezing, so it only makes it worse.
I shiver again, and I feel the third person put a blanket around my shoulders. They sit in front of me, but I can’t bring myself to look up and acknowledge them.
It makes me feel sick. How much they care hurts. After a lifetime of people just assuming I’m fine because I act happy, people actually caring about how I'm feeling when I'm not feeling fine is such a change of pace that I almost tell them to go away. I go so far to try and open my mouth to speak those words, but none come out.
“You do know that you can tell us what's wrong, right?” Oliver says.
If only they could understand that it’s not that simple. I really do want to tell them, but I just can’t bring myself to. With my luck, they would use it against me in an argument, and that would only end with nothing good.
I close my eyes, and turn up the volume on my music again. I listen to the many different parts of the songs, and I start to feel a bit better. Music is my therapy. Music was always there for me, even when nobody else was.
After a few minutes, I’m more calm. My breathing is much deeper now, and I feel more relaxed than I have in a while.
Of course, all of this is ruined when Skylar walks by.
I look up because I hear his footsteps, and immediately regret it.
I’m pretty sure he was already looking this way, but me looking up at him just gave him all the confirmation he needed to walk over here and make me more miserable.
He walks over, and I try to ignore him.
It doesn’t work as well as I would have hoped.
At first, he tries saying my name to get my attention, but I don’t respond. Partly because I don’t want to, and partly because my music is too loud for me to really hear anything clearly.
But Skylar is feeling persistent today, which is a bad thing.
I keep trying to ignore him, but I sneakily pause my music. What I hear gives me a headache.
“Lilian! I’m trying to talk to you!” Skylar shouts.
“Sorry, I had music on,” I reply quietly.
“Sure you did. Anyway, I’m trying to ask you why you’re so depressed right now?” He says rudely.
“Why do you care?” I retort. Me and Skylar don’t really get along that much, and that is unfortunate on this fine Wednesday morning.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he punches me in the jaw. Hard. So hard that I see stars momentarily, and it takes my brain a moment to process what he just did.
He moves to hit me again, and all the fight just leaves my body at once.
He manages to kick me a few times before Ezra and Asher manage to pull him away. I lay there curled up on the floor, bleeding.
Normally, I would be pissed, but with everything that has been going on the past few months, the pain feels welcoming, like an embrace a mother might give her child after they scraped their knee for the first time.
I start to cry. Not just for me, but for my family, who did nothing wrong but ended up in the hospital, when it should have been me instead. I would have taken their place a million times over, but I was never given the chance.
Then again, they might have just let me die.
I feel a hand on my arm. “I’m going to go find an adult,” Oliver says.
“No,” I manage to say. “Don’t leave me here.”
He seems just as surprised by my words as I am. “Alright then. I’ll just stay here.”
I see a blur of movement out of the corner of my eye. It’s Skylar, trying to get out of Ezra and Asher's grip. He’s unsuccessful, of course.
They drag him out of my vision, and only once I’m sure he won't be back do I let myself relax and let the pain sweep me away into a blissful state of peace.
When I open my eyes again, it’s to an all-too-familiar face in my vision, and a hand tentatively pressing on my jaw. That must be where Skylar punched me.
“How are you feeling?” Ezra asks me.
“Terrifyied, upset, angry, stressed, and in pain, to name a few,” I reply. My throat is really dry, I notice. “Got any water?”
Asher reaches over to grab a bottle, but Ezra stops him. “Wait,” he says.
Asher looks at him, confused. “Why?”
“Nevermind.”
He grabs the bottle of water and hands it to me.
I put my arm out to help myself sit up, but a bolt of pain as sharp as lighting strikes my right wrist, and I see stars.
Ezra reaches out and catches me before I fall back down, and helps me sit up.
I try to take a deep breath to calm myself down, but it feels as though a broken piece of glass has ruptured inside my lungs, and I can’t fully breathe right. Skylar must have kicked my ribs.
Asher hands me a water bottle, and I take a small sip of the water. I’ve had my breath knocked out of me like this before, so by now I've perfected a way to deal with it.
I take small sips of water, breathing as deeply as possible between them.
After a few minutes, I gain control of my breathing enough to where I don’t have to think about it.
“Mind if I look at your arm?” Ezra asks.
“Sure, I guess,” I reply.
A thought strikes me as he takes my right arm into his hands. My whole family is in the hospital except for me, and of course I’ve gone and gotten myself injured.
I start to feel overwhelming anxiety, probably coming from the fact that I don’t know what's going to happen to both me and my whole family.
I reach for my phone and headphones, and as I do I get a text from Dr. Lakeland.
I don’t read the whole thing because I don’t have to, not that I could, even if I wanted to.
To summarize, both my brother and my sisters' conditions have gotten worse. My brother's sickness seems to be getting worse, and they still can't explain it, and my sister's bike crash had caused a brain injury they didn’t see.
Oh no Oh no Oh no Oh no Oh no Oh no
I drop my head, and start to cry for what seems like the billionth time today.
I cry for not just me and my misfortune, but for my family, and also in anger, directed towards the fact that somebody made me the decision maker for my family.
The tears are falling faster now, and my vision is going blurry. It feels as though I could drown in my tears, and I have half the mind to attempt to do so.
The burden of these past few months has been so heavy, and there’s nobody out there that I know of who could even begin to understand and it's not like I even try to communicate with anyone because it feels like trauma dumping and I know that nobody would care and I just feel so stupid and I-
I’m broken from my tornado of thoughts by a voice saying “Hey, it’s ok. You’re gonna be alright.”
I can’t reply because I’m still crying and trying to breathe at the same time.
“Hey, can you look at me?” Ezra asks as he puts my arm down.
I shake my head. I’ve seen what I look like crying before, and it’s not pretty. Well, you could argue that my eyes look slightly prettier than normally. Whenever I cry, the whites of my eyes get bloodshot, and for some reason that makes my eyes look very green. Other than that however, I look like a hot mess.
He doesn’t give me a choice though. He tilts my chin up so I'm forced to meet his gaze.
I want to shrink into a shell, one that a hermit crab might live in, and never come out.
He wraps both his arms around me, and hugs me tightly against his chest. “You’re safe now, it’s ok to be upset.”
I completely break.
I cry so hard that it feels as though my entire soul is fighting to leave my body, and it can only leave through my tears.
I cry so hard that I have to pause to breathe.
I feel a hand comfortingly rub my back, and for some reason, that helps me calm down. I’ve never been comforted like this before, so feeling safe in this way is foreign to me.
After a while, I finally breathe without being interrupted every few seconds by sobs. I try to pull away from the person holding me, but they don’t let me go.
I realize something. By now, there has got to be other kids walking down the hallway that would see . . . whatever you call this, and would most definitely say something. “D-don’t you think w-we should m-move somewhere else?” I ask, my voice small and quiet.
“Why would you ask that?” Asher asks.
“Because kids are assholes,” I reply, and that makes him laugh.
“Well, those assholes can go fuck themselves. You’re so much better than them, and you don't deserve to care what they think,” Ezra says.
“If only that were true,” I mutter under my breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.” They wouldn’t get it. All three of these people, while not necessarily being the most popular out there, have never had to know what it’s like for people to not like you, or be rude to you. For even your own friends to insult you daily, and you just have to put up with it because you have nobody else.
“No, what were you going to say?” Oliver asks.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I say back as I shake my head.
“Well, maybe you could let us try,” Ezra says.
“I said, it doesn’t matter,” I say more angrily this time. I’m not exactly in the mood to bother explaining how friends can be bitches in disguise, and I doubt that I could even explain without getting upset again.
“No, it does matter,” Asher says. “But we understand if you don’t want to tell us,” he says as he glares at Ezra and Oliver.
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it right now anyway,” I mutter under my breath.
I pull down the left sleeve of my hoodie to look at my watch. 11:25 am.
After I do that, I stretch my arms up towards the ceiling, and move a little bit so my back is against the wall again, and I’m sitting on the floor. Despite the pain in both my arms, it feels nice to stretch my limbs after a long time of keeping them small and cramped.
I’m about to pull my sleeve back down when I feel a hand grab my left arm and pull it towards whoever grabbed it.
I try to pull my arm back, but I can’t.
“What. Is. This?” Ezra asks angrily.
“What?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about,” he says.
“I really don't, so I'm gonna need you to be a little less cryptic,” I reply. I genuinely have no clue what he’s talking about, but from his tone of voice, I should.
“This.” he says as his thumb brushes over the inside of my left wrist, and a bolt of pain shoots up my arm.
Fuck. My. Life.
“U-um, I don’t know how that got there,” I say sheepishly. “Never seen that before.”
“So you’re telling me that you’ve never seen these suspiciously straight scars on your wrist before, and that you haven’t even noticed that some are still bleeding?” he says in a tone that makes me flinch.
“Well, maybe my . . . cat scratched-" I start to say, but I'm cut off.
“Oh please. You and I both know you don’t have a cat. Now, tell me how the fuck these got there. Because it clearly wasn’t an animal, and you have most definitely seen these before.” Ezra says.
What he doesn’t get is that I most definitely know how those got there. I did it, with a pencil sharpener blade and eraser for crying out loud, but I would never say that. Not with all the people that could hear.
“I-um,” I start to say, but I can’t finish the thought. I can’t tell them why I did that. They wouldn’t understand that I deserve that for being such a terrible person. I couldn’t explain that in a coherent way anyways.
“Please, just tell us,” Asher says.
“Would it be so far-fetched to assume that I physically can’t find words to tell you how that got there?” I say slightly angrily. “I understand that you want to know, but what if I just can’t tell you?”
“I would say that’s bullshit, and that you absolutely can tell us, you just choose not to, for some reason,” Ezra says.
“Ok, well, if you want me to, you’re gonna have to give me a hot minute to think about how I want to tell you,” I reply.
“Fine,” Ezra replies.
“Fine,” I say.
I start to attempt to phrase words in my head, but none of them sound right. The only one that seems even slightly easy to say is to just be as blunt as possible, and say:
“I did it with a pencil sharpener blade I unscrewed from the sharpener, mixed with an eraser.”
Silence.
I look down at the floor.
“There. I said it. Happy now?” I say sarcastically. “Or was that not good enough of an answer for you?”
Silence.
“Why?” he asks.
One word. A thousand meanings. None of which I can fully answer.
“I deserve it,” I say quietly. “I’m a waste of a human being, and everyone would be better off with me dead anyway.”
I feel something wet fall down my cheek.
Then another.
And another.
Until I lose count, and I’m crying again.
God, I'm so stupid. I can’t even keep myself from crying for more than ten minutes in a row! Jesus. Why can’t I just be more normal? I just want to not feel depressed all the time, or think about wanting to die! Is it really so hard for that to happen?
“Look at me,” Asher says.
I shake my head.
“I’ve been . . . where you are right now, before. And let me tell you, that keeping it all bottled up makes it worse. It may seem hard right now, but if you even try to tell somebody, it makes a big difference in a good way. For example, telling us about what’s been going on, so that we could try and help you find a way to get better. It’s gonna take a long time and a lot of hard work, but the sooner you get help, the sooner you’re gonna be okay again,” he says.
I hug my knees to my chest. While I don’t want to realize it, Asher is right. The sooner I talk to somebody, the sooner that I can start working on getting better again.
“You may think it seems easier to just stay like this, instead of trying to get better, but trust me, it’s not,” Asher says.
“No shit Sherlock,” I mutter under my breath.
“Ah, there's the angry person I know,” Oliver says.
“Can you like, shut up?” I snap.
“Nope. You are forbidden from telling us what to do right now. Just . . . let us try to help you,” Oliver says.
“Ugh, fine,” I say.
“Okay, well, when was the last time you ate something?” Ezra asks.
Crap. Shit. FUCK.
“Um, I ate a bit of bread . . . when was it? Last night? Or maybe a little after lunch yesterday,” I say.
“That doesn’t count. When was the last time you actually ate a normal amount of food, I don’t know how to describe it, you know what I mean though, right?” Ezra says.
I roll my eyes. “Of course, I'm not stupid.”
I know what he means, but there's a slight problem. I don’t have an answer. And that’s just going to result in me getting yelled at.
“Okay then, so answer the question,” Oliver says.
“Um, so, about that. I, I can’t remember,” I say quietly. “Please don’t get mad.”
“Why would we be mad at you?” Asher asks.
“Because I didn’t eat anything,” I say. I don’t know why they aren’t mad yet. They’re probably just saving it for later.
“That's no reason for us to get mad at you! If anything, I feel angry that you would think that we would react like that!” Ezra says.
There he goes, proving my point, and getting mad. “You’re mad right now,” I say.
“Fair point,” He says as he takes a deep breath in through his nose, out through his mouth.
“Ok, well, you need food,” Asher says as he stands up. “And probably medical attention.”
“Mhm. Sure,” I say. “You do you.”
[End of story this took legit months to finish. I'm not even joking but yeah!]