New York City
Toothpaste bubbles sat at the bottom of the sink, as I rubbed the rest off of my lips. They bubbled and popped waiting to be rinsed down the rusting drain. My eye itched and my stomach hurt. It was September 8th, the day when hell was about to be let lose. There was a clear buzzing noise in the back of my head, but I chose to ignore it simply because it always happened. The invisible fly inside my mind flicked itself around and ate at my brain. I could feel its mind-numbing buzzing inside of my skull. It was stronger today. Perhaps that was a sign.
The house was still dark. The dull morning sun hadn't chosen to rise; it was sleeping in at five-thirty. That's weird. Usually the sun rose and bugged the shit out of me because it could. It made New York look happy. I scratched at my eye, which was now red. I looked like a stoner. Well, I guess that's not entirely untrue. I can't lie and say I don't snort a few grams once and a while. My lips were chapped, too, and my heart burned. I couldn't find my medicine. Maybe Mom had thought it was her pills.
The floor of the living room was filthy and Mom's newest boyfriend was passed out on the couch with a beer bottle in his hand. That's real attractive. He had a single drop of drool hanging out of his mouth. His eye was black, probably where some guy had punched him. His clothes seemed to be in tethers, but he at least had one shoe. It was a nice shoe, it almost shined in the dull light of our apartment. I hated him.
My brain-eating fly friend was buzzing desperately in my head now as I made my way for the door. It wanted to be free and get out of my head, but it was ramming itself against my brain instead. Maybe it would dull the pain a little. There was nothing up there it could destroy any further. It was fried and empty. My mind was a pit of blackness. Depressing, right? I'm turning into one of those people, those people who just become grey blobs on the street. Those people that hold cardboard signs that say things about their lives and their screw ups. How their families hate them or their father died when they were too young or how their mother drinks herself to sleep every night. I could picture it now.
New York is said to be the city that never sleeps. Always awake and operating. Not where I lived. It was deathly silent when I exited the house. The fall air seemed to whip itself against my face. My arms were bare and undefended against the sharp northern winds. Probably my own damn fault for forgetting my jacket. The cold was making me numb though, so at least that smoothed over the agonizing drone of the brain-eating fly. I walked to the bus stop where a lifeless hum from the streetlight rattled above me in the dark sky.
Greyhound buses around New York aren't usually in the best shape. This one was a piece of crap. The breaks squealed unhappily as it came to a stop in front of me. My ears screamed painfully from the screech as I entered into it. The floor was stuck with gum and dirty grunge and grime. I felt like the floor with all the various pieces sticking to it. I was so many parts and pieces that didn't match.
Sleepy blobs sat on the desolate bus. They were all grey and discolored like the rest of my world. Their eyes only saw the happy, delusional fog that surrounded all the normal people. Unlike me, they had a family, friends, and a home. Or perhaps one of them was like me, alone, but still walking. Still walking because for some reason, we didn't want to curl up on the ground and give the last breath of our lungs.
"Kid, this your stop?" The driver grunted from beneath the fat folds of his neck. He must have hated being that big, but I was opposed to even eating, so perhaps he was normal sized to me. I got up and tossed some change at him, leaving the fat driver and the blobs behind.
Crestview High is a shit hole of a school. It may be one of the top schools in the country, but no one knows anything. The teachers don't see anything that happens at our cookie-cutter school. They "hold us to a higher standard" and "expect us to resolve our problems with our diplomacy." Yeah, that's definitely going to happen, Crestview.
It was pretty, with the colonial brick and marble pillars in the front. It was charming and had a nice view of the city at the top of the school. A small rooftop garden was planted in a dome at the top of the building. The windows were wide and open, revealing the great and massive concrete jungle we lived in. There were plenty of great hangouts in the school, too. Since it had been built and founded in the time of the New York's founding, the founding fathers of the state had made sure there were plenty of back tunnels and underground passages. Last year, I had one biology class that was underneath the school, it had been pretty awesome. The inside wasn't too bad looking either, the large metal staircases wound throughout the building and abstract art hung from the walls. It was like a crazy mix of colonial, modern, and vintage all in one.
Upon entering I was greeted with a rush of peppy squeals from the cheerleading squad. Everyone in the school was a fake. They all laughed with glassy, fake eyes. Fake eyes that stared into oblivion at the tacky, pasted on smiles. The smiles fell off onto the ground and melted away at the end of the day. Nobody cared about anyone. We were a papier-mâché palace, delicate and barely dry. One ounce of water could have crushed the artificial world we all thrived in. Well, they all thrived in… I was alone.
Room 209 came in front of me looming like a massive villain of some child's tale. It was just the same as it had been my sophomore and freshman year…but now it was tainted. It was dirty and unclean. It was all because of him. I slowly made my way to a seat in the back of the bare classroom. The walls were empty and dull, but the teacher, Mr. Hendrix, was actually a really interesting guy. Not only did he play the guitar, but he was named after Jimmy Hendrix. Everyone loved him, except me. He was defiant of the ways of the school and probably even smoked a roofie once and awhile. He taught AP American History. I used to like history, now that was part of the happy age.
Whispers from all different parts of the room circled around me, suffocating me with their knives and harsh saws. They all thought they knew what happened last year. The bitches really had no idea. No one had any idea in their heads. Their brains were filled all the way to the top with lies and rumors and anecdotes. I don't know how they spoke with so many thoughts of jumbles of words in their heads. They must have drowned inside…
Hendrix came in and sat at his desk, propping his feet up on the wooden table top like he was a king. "Alright lesson 101, don't ever get hammered the night before the school year starts, okay?" Chuckles and calls of encouragement echoed around the tall room. The sounds carried up and around the towering walls of the classroom, making it ring with the annoying yelps of teenagers.
"Alright, alright get out your textbooks. Now, forget what you have previously learned about the National Bank in my previous classes, it was a giant conspiracy." I sighed and leaned back in my seat. My eyes shifted from Hendrix's sermons and to the outside world. It was pretty. To some degree it was sunny, the sun just barely breaking through the over casted sky and shining down on the small school garden. A blue jay flew across the window it danced around on the sky's currents, free from the burdens of the human life. I would have liked to fly. Even if I was a bird that lived for seven years, it would have been better than living in my hellish life.
"Fray, let's say that bird out there is your money, okay?" An internal groan came from within me. Why did he insist on calling his students by their last names? I looked at him with disinterested eyes. "It flies away, what does that mean? Oh, shit, your money's gone. Now what? Your husband's dead from the war, your sons are dead from the war, and your daughter can barely walk yet. What do you suppose you would have done?" I frowned and shrugged.
"Really, Ms. Fray, no idea?" I shake my head again.
"You would have gone to the National Bank. And that was how the government pulled you into its trap. See what I mean? The war could have easily been staged by Britain…" I turned my head as he went on prattling about a fake war, a fake government, and a fake life for the people. I hated him. The bell rang. I ran.
Running sometimes made me forget that it had happened. That it all had conglomerated into one bulging, breathing, living mess that made puke bubble at the bottom of my stomach. It was the serpent slinking up into my organs and eating them like they all did… Running made me forget that it had been them and him and me… I ran from Hendrix's classroom, a scream threatening to tear at my throat. My nails curled into my skin digging deep into the layers of the earth that dug holes to China and back. I slipped on a step and fell. There was laughter. Blurred and indefinite faces that formed into monsters and creatures with claws and teeth.
Blood flowed down my face like wet velvet. It came like a waterfall shooting from rock and soil, bursting like lava from a new born volcano. My hands shook and reached for something, grabbing the next step and slipping over my blood which pooled around me by gallons and oceans. I shakily got to my feet and pushed through the laughing faces, falling into the bathroom. I grabbed the door to the first stall and slammed it behind me, sliding down against the cool metal of the door. The sleeve I had been wearing was soaked with my blood, I had been holding it there without any knowledge of my touch. There must have been part of me that wanted to keep on living. I smiled at that. Wouldn't that be something?
My hand pushed at the door of the stall, it opened slowly and I walked out looking at my broken face in the mirror. My nose was still wheezing bubbles of blood from my left nostril and small red streaks of blood touched the flyaways around my face. The small scars of the old and ancient periods of my life still circles in elegant loops and circles across my skin. They blazed forth as my thoughts touched the memories, and the same old emptiness erupted within my stomach. I wished the fly in my head would hurry up and eat the last pieces of my brain, already. The green eyes in the mirror looking back at me were empty and completely absent on any life, they were like buttons sown onto my skin. My hair hung around my face in rugged, natty orange clumps that ceased to live. Even my own skin was stark pale, I looked like a zombie. The marks that had once looped around my face still blazed slightly but they had died down. Everything had died down the hope, the demons, and the entire race of them. It was died down to a single word that screamed in the back of my mind and terrorized my dreams.
I left the bathroom, second period had started fifteen minutes ago and I was screwed as it was. With every step I took down the abandoned hall, void of every sound but my own feet, a jolt of fresh pain vibrated through my skull, the fly didn't like being disturbed. The headaches didn't last long, they were temporary, they could go and come as they pleased. They would suck the life out of me, but left enough just for me to carry on till the morning, when they return and attack me until my own name could barely be remembered. I welcomed them. I liked their pain and the numbing effect they gave my body, it was my own personal high. With the surreal feel all around me as the pain made my vision tunnel at the edges… I could have believed I had just popped a molly.
Second period was on the third floor. That would mean I was climbing stairs. Shit. There was a time when I could climb the three floors of stairs within thirty seconds, but that time came and went like the pain. My feet slowly went up them, taking them one at a time. The art work hung on the walls was phenomenal, probably done by the senior art class. There were splashes of color and light to brighten the metal stairs, but in my opinion, it was nothing but scribbles that burned in my vision long after I had left them. Finally, the feet touched third floor territory. The third floor had been renovated last spring, it smelled like Fabreeze and musk. The floor was marble, glossy from being freshly polished over the summer. My reflection stared up at me with dead eyes.
As I entered, the thirty sets of eyes all came to look at me, while Miss. Pellaway snapped at me to get in my seat. She kept rambling on about how disrespectful I was and how she was going to call my mother and I'm insubordinate and I need some manners and I'm always late and… My head hurt from her yelling, if she would just let me sleep some… I rested my head onto the cool desk. My mind going into overload. "Clarissa." She snapped. I raised my head to look at her. I didn't want to be called by that name. I wanted to have no name, no identity or face. The nameless people who wandered the streets as blobs were fortunate enough to receive no name. The blobs always got lucky, because they never had friends, friends that could be melted away within seconds because of one stupid decision.