Quite honestly, this is my favorite chapter. Because Newt.
Liar
Newt was that kid that's the odd combination of "daydreams in class" and "wants perfect grades".
Sure, working hard and doing well on tests and everything was fine, but did there really have to be so much...attention-paying?
English was definitely the worst class for this. (Physics was boring, but he continually found himself jerked back to reality by what he thought was the teacher calling his name but was in fact one of Newton's theories being explained. Shucking Newton.) And so it was that as the class was analyzing the poem Sea Fever, he was lost in a daydream, alone on a sailboat with the wind whipping around him, waves crashing and sea spray hitting his face. It was a strange kind of stormy-peaceful, another world that he found himself unable to leave until finally he was pulled back to himself by the bell. The teacher left the room with the quickly exiting stream of students to go pick up assignments, and as he hurried to shove all his papers in his bag, he realized he was not quite alone. A girl with long red hair stood in the corner, ostensibly checking her phone. Finally, after glancing quickly up at him a few times and looking away just as quickly, she took the few steps over to him. She never spoke much, or he never paid enough attention, but he thought her name might be Amalie.
She took a deep breath, and spoke. "Hey, so I don't mean to be rude, but I've been wondering for a while now. How did...how did you get your limp?" She bit her lip as she asked, nervous about asking such a personal question.
Newt answered with the lie he'd used for as many years as he'd lived here. "When I was little, I jumped out a window. Trying to fly or some stupid kid thing like that. Broke my leg and it never healed right. I was lucky though, any higher and it would've killed me."
"Oh," the girl said. "Well...I'm sorry."
"It's ok. It doesn't hurt all the time, it just doesn't work quite right," Newt replied. Again, a standard reply. The warning bell rang and she drifted away. Newt left in a different direction, but inside, he was wondering how many times he'd heard "I'm sorry." Like this time, it was almost always filled with sympathy, but every time he couldn't help but ask himself how much sympathy they would have if they knew the real story. Or was there only pity for a messed up kid that had tried to kill himself at age 15?
He couldn't help but think about that day a lot. It was back when he'd lived outside of Chicago, not that the location had played a part, really. At that point in his life, everything had really just sucked. He didn't know when it had started, but it had gotten to the point where he utterly hated himself. He was never good enough, was never going to be good enough. His life was a mess anyway. And then his friend had died. His one real friend, who had kept him going through the pain and the anger had been killed in a random shooting. Everything had spiraled out of control, and it led to one wreck of a teenage boy standing on the ledge of a building. The fall should have killed him. He wondered why it hadn't, but suddenly he had woken up from complete blackness to find himself lying in an alley, bleeding, broken, and alone. The police found him, a few hours later, and that was where he told the first of so many lies about what had happened. He told them he'd been hit by a car, giving them an imaginary license plate number. It would be enough to keep them busy until they had something more important. He had been taken to the hospital, and though his other injuries healed, something had gone wrong with one of the surgeries on his leg, which had been only slightly better than pulverized in the fall. He would walk with a limp forever.
Things had started to get better when he had moved to Colorado. He had a good friend he could always count on to help him, and all the little things were never as bad as they used to be. But his injury would never let him forget how broken he once had been, no matter how much he could lie to the world.
Remember when I said this was my favorite chapter? Well, I'm weird. Anyway, please review!