Seventeen years old
Daisy’s wrong though. The school doesn’t forget. Although the taunts slow a bit, for the next few months, the life I already thought was hell, is even worse. Notes are slipped into my locker calling me an “incest whore”. One day, I came to find that someone had plastered pictures in the hallway of me getting out of the pool that night, and you can see almost every inch of my body through my waterlogged clothes. Guys and girls cough ‘slut’ as I walk by, and I’m sure that I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.
Soon, the taunts get so bad that I can’t take it anymore. I leave school in the middle of the day and take a cab to the ferry. I get on, no one questioning why a high schooler isn’t in class, and I take it all the way across the bay.
When I get there, it only makes me feel worse. Because unlike Daisy, who would have a million people to call when she visited home, I have no one. Just a few acquaintances that certainly wouldn’t leave school to come get me. I take another cab to the mall and walk aimlessly around the stores, remembering the day I bought my homecoming dress. More despair floods my veins, because I can’t even call my dad. He’s disappeared again, on some trip, somewhere. No surprise there. He’s never been around when I needed him. Except for my sister, no one ever is.
I’ve never felt so alone.
I decide to catch a movie even as my phone rings with a call from Daisy.
I don’t pick up.
I buy a ticket to whatever movie is next, and then a large popcorn, and then I sit in the theater for the next hour and a half, staring blankly at the screen as tears stream down my face. There’s only a couple of other people there, some alone, some with one other person. There’s a woman in her fifties a few rows down from me. She’s calmly drinking her soda as she watches the show. She’s drab, dressed in a pair of oversized gray sweats, her mousy chestnut hair in a ponytail. Like me, she’s also alone but she looks like she’s okay with that. Content even.
Is that my future, I wonder. Am I going to find myself alone? Always going to the movies alone, going out to eat alone, sitting at home with my cat alone.
It all feels…hopeless.
Someone’s head explodes on the screen, and I think, for the first time, that maybe…the world would be better off without me.
My mind starts to spiral. I start to think about how I could do it. I could slip away like this, take some prescription drugs and then let myself sink into the water. Just drift away like I feel I’m drifting through life.
But then Daisy’s face fills my head, and I see her standing at my grave side, tears streaming down her face, her spirit broken. I see my mother sobbing into Curt’s chest. A snarky voice inside tells me ‘they’ll recover, maybe they’d be even better off without my baggage”, but I try to push the thought away.
By the end of the movie, I’m disgusted with myself…and I’ve realized…I might need some help.
It’s midnight by the time I get home. I’ve walked all the way from the ferry stop in the rain, and I’m completely soaked. There’s a police car in the front of my house, and I brace for what’s to come. All the lights in the house are on.
Taking a deep breath, I walk up to the front door and knock, because I left my keys in my backpack at school. The door flies open and there’s my mother, looking at least ten years older than she had this morning.
‘Skylar! Oh my God!’ she cries as she flings herself towards me, throwing her arms around me.
I can see inside the house. There’s a policeman standing there next to Curt, both of them staring at me with frowns on their faces. Noah is also hovering in the back of the room, his lips pursed and his arms crossed in front of him.
Daisy comes flying down the hallway, practically pushing my mom to the ground in her hurry to get to me.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ she growls, squeezing me so tightly, I’m finding it hard to breathe.
I realize I’m shaking then, and the tears that have been on and off all day are streaming down my face. Again.
I’m dragged inside, everyone staring at me incredulously when I tell them I had gone to the mainland all afternoon and that I just lost track of time.
My mom and Curt apologize to the police officer and thank him for coming, and he gives me some sort of lecture about never doing this again before he disappears into the night.
I’m still feeling numb though, still trying to fight off the blanket of melancholy draped across my shoulders since that moment in the theater when I first started thinking about ending my misery.
‘What were you thinking?’ my mother shrieks as soon as the door’s closed. ‘You realize how worried we’ve all been? I would’ve never expected this type of behavior from you.’ She’s ranting and raving, her face turning red as she gestures, and I just sit there, like a lump on a log.
Finally, my mother realizes that her screaming isn’t getting through to me. She murmurs something to Curt and he leaves the room, snapping at Noah to follow him. Noah reluctantly follows him, and I feel the loss of his gaze the second he’s gone.
Daisy refuses to leave though. She’s standing there with her arms crossed, her hair uncharacteristically unkempt like she’s been running her hands through it all evening.
My mother sits down on the couch next to me and takes one of my hands in hers. ‘Skylar, help me to understand.’
‘She’s being bullied,’ Daisy blurts out, finally shocking me out of the fog that I’ve been wrapped in.
My mother’s mouth drops. ‘Bullied?’ She stares at me, concerned. ‘Why haven’t you said anything?’
Again, Daisy inserts herself before I can say anything, not that I have anything to say.
‘Would you even have cared if she did?’ Daisy spits sarcastically. ‘When was the last time that you even spent some quality time with us and asked what was going on in our lives? Sorry to burst your bubble, Mom, but since we move here you’ve been so far up Curt’s ass you’ve forgotten about us completely. You’ve been acting like Grant and that shit is saying something.”
Shock and guilt is written all over my mother’s face as she stares incredulously at the both of us. She opens her mouth, to defend herself I’m sure, but Daisy waves her away, not wanting to hear it.
‘Sky, you should’ve said something to me. You scared me. Not knowing where you were all day, scared me. If all you wanted was a break, I could’ve gone with you to Falmouth.’
That does get my mom speaking again, because she starts lecturing us both on the fact that we are, under no circumstances, allowed to play hooky from school, and how this whole instance has damaged her trust in me.
She seems to skip right over what Daisy’s told her, or the accusation that Daisy’s levied about just how interested in her daughters’ lives she’s been over the last year.
After another thirty minutes of lecturing, I’m sent to my room, grounded for the foreseeable future. Daisy tries to follow me inside, but I tell her I just need some space, and reluctantly she gives it to me.
I’m lying listlessly on my bed, staring up at the ceiling when the door opens, and I don’t have to look over to see who it is this time.
Noah walks inside and closes the door behind him, clicking the lock. He stands there by the door, so long that I have no choice but to glance over at him. The look on his face is inscrutable. He’s just staring at me…almost blankly.
Finally, he walks over to the bed and sits at the foot, reminding me of that moment we shared. It almost feels like another lifetime at this point.
“Where did you go?’ he finally asks.
I don’t bother answering him.
I don’t owe him anything.
In this moment, it feels like he’s won, like all the fight’s been wiped out of me. Who was I to think that I had enough in me to go up against someone like him?
I was a fool, that’s what I was.
“Skylar!” he snaps, frustration thick in his voice.
I stare at him.
He looks…wrecked. There are dark circles under his eyes and his hair is all over the place.
“I hate you,” I whisper to him, and he leans back, his face stunned.
“What?—”
“I hate you.”
He shakes himself out of his momentary stupor and leans forward.
“Is that what you’ve been doing? Going out to God knows where and blaming me for all of your problems?” he taunts.
I jerk up, adrenaline spiking through my veins for the first time in maybe…weeks.
“Excuse me…are you actually asking that? You are the cause of all my problems!”
“I’m not the cause of any of your problems. I’m just the one that points out you’re too scared to do anything about them!”
“You told the entire school that I kissed you,” I hiss, my heartbeat so rapid it feels like it could explode out of my chest and fly away any moment now. “Everyone thinks that I’m some kind of sick freak now. I hear about it all day, every day. My life is ruined until I get out of this place. You’ve made my life…unbearable.”
The word ‘unbearable’ slips out, more honesty than I ever would have wanted to give him.
“This is on you,” he mumbles under his breath.
“On me? Really? All this is on me?!” I question in outrage.
“Isn’t it?” he counters looking me dead in the eye. “You’re wasting time blaming me when you should be asking yourself one very important question.”
“And what’s that?” I seethe.
“Why you never told anyone that I. Kissed. You. Back!” he spits.
Now it’s my turn to rear back, like I’ve been physically hit. I stare at him incredulously.
“You think anyone would have believed me? Those idiots worship the ground you walk on. You could tell them to get on the floor and lick it, and they would do it without a second thought,” I explain frantically.
“So what? You could have still told the truth.”
“Like they would ever believe me over you.” I scoff.
He gets up from the bed and shakes his head before tossing one last remark over his shoulder.
“What makes you think I would have denied it?”
When he starts walking out of the room without saying another word, my apathetic heart begins to faintly beat in my chest, needing this exchange to remind itself that it still has life in it. So much life in it.
“Is that your way of telling me that the truth is my friend?” I ask before he has a chance to leave.
“Probably the only one you have,” he quips, his back still towards me.
“That was my first kiss. My very first kiss. And you ruined it. How’s that for some truth?”
With my heartbeat drumming a mile a minute, I watch as Noah’s back stiffens, his hand white knuckling the knob of my door. I wait with bated breath for him to turn around. For him to confront me. To call me a liar. To say something.
But he doesn’t. Instead he just leaves.
He’s said enough for one night.
We both have.
