Her heart was beating fast in her chest as she approached the ugly brick building in front of her. Large windows were cut, in regimented rows, out of the side of each of the walls, and cheap strip lights could be seen hanging inside. She could see kids running around in the caged space next to it, shirts untucked, school shoes scuffed and dirty, as they chased a ball around, shouting and swearing jovially at each other. She looked down at her feet, trying desperately to concentrate on just taking one step after the other, praying she wouldn't encounter the person she was dreading she would, and had been now for as long as she could remember.
That was a mistake, and she knew it straight away. She shouldn't of looked down. How could she have been so stupid? She cursed herself loudly inside her head, and quickly snapped her head up, blinking her eyes furiously, trying to suppress the tears that were threatening to blur her vision, and quickly made to tug her skirt down with her hand. She pulled hard on it, pulled it down as far as she could over her thighs, but it wouldn't budge. She couldn't hide any more of herself, and she knew exactly why.
This thought was all too much for her. She stumbled into the building, and dragged herself up the staircase, oblivious in those moments as to just where she was headed.
She reached out an arm and shoved blindly at the double doors at the top of the staircase. They swung open, and she ran over to the wall of lockers in the corridor in front of her, throwing her bag to the floor, and collapsed against them. She squeezed her eyes shut, and covered her face with her hands, bringing her legs up underneath her. She was gasping for air, sobbing; she felt as though she were choking, drowning, suffocating, being crushed by the weight of it all. The weight, a cold voice in her head snarled at her. What a fine choice of words.
A small sound from the back of the throat escaped her mouth. It was a quiet, pitiful cry, a strangled moan, a sound that would threaten to break a heart even if it were heard by someone without one.
But there was no one there to hear it. And there wouldn't ever be. She knew that, she always had known it, she always would.
It was just all far too much, there was just so much wrong with her, so much she'd done that was unforgivable. She didn't know what she wanted any more. She wanted a future, of course she did. She wanted to travel around the world, maybe find someone who would go with her and just go out there, and go everywhere, and see wonders. But she didn't know whether she could have that future, she didn't know whether she could have any future at all. Maybe this was it. Maybe she was just born to be alone, maybe she wasn't ever going to recover from this, maybe, even if she survived it, it would haunt her for the rest of her stupid life. Maybe she was only ever going to end up alone.
And that, quite frankly, terrified her.