I don't really know why I wanted to write this, but I did. I'm sorry, I know a lot of my stories have been...downers ... lately but I promise A Smile Like Yours will be up soon, and I'll go back to being the happy person I usually am. Anyway, I have a few unbelievably fluffy one-shots in mind, and I can't wait to write them up. Anyway, this is kind of a sensitive piece, so take heed. I...don't have much else to say.
The truth was something that Amber Von Tussle was never very good at. As far as she was concerned, it only made things more complicated. It only pissed people off, only hurt their feelings. Not that she was overly concerned with anyone else's feelings, but still. It was nice to pretend to be.
She had stopped caring about what others thought of her long ago, back when she was still the perfect blonde baby doll; the ice princess that made boys bend over backwards for her, and made girls avoid her in the halls. She had known who she was then, and she had never let anyone forget it. But, who she was, wasn't real. She would lie, to make herself look better, to give herself more experience.
"Did you and Link go all the way, Amber?"
"Yes, we most certainly did." It was a lie.
"Are you disappointed that you didn't win Miss Teenage Hairspray, Amber?"
"No, that was my mother's dream, not mine." It was a lie.
"Doesn't it bother you when Shelley pushes you on camera?"
"No, it doesn't." It was a lie.
Her entire life was becoming one fantastic lie. And the more she told, the easier they became to get away with. When she lied and said that she hadn't been skipping school, everyone believed her. When she lied and said that she hadn't started doing drugs, everyone believed her. When she lied and said that she still cared about what people thought of her, everyone believed her.
They continued to view her as the goddess of eleventh grade, maybe even all of Baltimore, but she was no goddess. She was nothing. The drugs made sure of that. They kept her in a constant daze, kept her from being able to move as swiftly and as gracefully as the other kids on the show. Not that it mattered much. Since the show had become integrated, she'd been pushed to the back. That put her at the back of everything; the back of the classroom, the back of her mother's mind. She was no longer the front-runner, the bubbly blonde girl that had once danced and twisted. She felt herself turning into a mindless blob that moved with no rhythm. Her feet felt heavy all the time, her eyes would droop.
Soon, the drugs began to affect her so much that she had to stop dancing. She would knock the other council members over with her bumbling. She didn't care, though. At least she didn't think she did. She'd been so confused with keeping her lies and the truth straight that it was hard to really focus on any one thing.
People finally began to notice that she had changed, but it was too late. She was beyond the point of letting someone save her. She had tried to ask for help when her life become one huge, inflated mess, but no one had bothered with her. Though she couldn't blame them; she wasn't the same beautiful girl she'd always been, she'd turned into some sort of monster, and it was only her fault.
And then, one day, the day that she had gotten kicked off the show, Corny had tried to talk to her. He'd sat her down, and looked into her blue eyes, which remained glossed over from being in a constant state of high, and he'd taken her hand in his own.
"Are you all right, Amber?" He had been as honest and breathtakingly blunt with her as she had always wanted someone to be, but she didn't care anymore. It was too late for her to save herself from the downward spiral her life was in. The drugs, the self mutilation, all of it was beginning to catch up with her, and it left her numb, and unwilling to care.
"Yes," she lied to him, and though he could see the truth in the dark circles under her eyes and her rail-thin frame, he left it at that. And then, she was gone from the show. She hated him for not trying harder, but knew that she wouldn't have responded to him, even if he had. She would never have let herself admit she had a problem, though she had so many of them; too many to even count.
That would be admitting the truth, and she'd always known that the truth was a hard pill to swallow. And still, though she knew she couldn't say them aloud, there were a few constant truths that never left her mind.
The truth was that her mother was a conniving, heartless bitch that had never cared about anyone but herself.
The truth was that she and Link had never cared for each other, and he probably saw Tracy as an excuse to finally get out of the relationship they'd been struggling in for some time now.
The truth was that even when she looked into the mirror, she saw nothing but a cold, dead reflection of the perfect girl she had used to be. She had finally succeeded in tearing her body down to the point where even she didn't recognize herself.
And the truth was, she liked it.