Gone

Chapter 1 [Juliana] Flying away

BOOK ONE

Innocent Juliana leaves her state to get away from bullying, and she starts at a new high school on the last day when she arrives in New York city. She's done with being the shy girl, so when she runs into Mickey and meets her friends, all she wants is to fit in. But she doesn't realize who and what they are. They're the teens your parents warned you about. They are the popular kids, they go to countless amount of parties, use drugs, and revolve themselves around sex. Each character has their own story, but will Juliana let peer pressure get to her?

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       It's not that I don't want to live, or that I despise the life I live. It's not like that at all. I'm just so confused with everything. I want to grow up, finish high school and graduate just to feel proud of myself, but sometimes there are times where I just want to run away. It's like no matter how hard I try to be happy, it just doesn't work out. Nothing does. I try to smile, just the slightest bit, but I always fail completely. I'm an only child, my father is a workaholic while my mother stays at home.

    Some days I look at her and wonder why she doesn't ever want to leave the house. Me personally, I wake up and look forward to getting the hell out of here. I'm only sixteen years old, but I'm a lot more mature than most kids my age. I get decent grades but I don't even put that much effort into it. I guess you could say I'm just naturally smart, which you would think could actually make me feel good about myself-- but it doesn't. Not one bit.

       I'm bored with my life. I'm bored of moving all over the place, all around the country. I'm so angry that whenever I start to make friends at a new school, I come home to my parents packing boxes and stacking them near the front door, which means we're leaving once again. I understand that we don't have a lot of money, and that my father only works under the table at God knows where, but I hate the fact that I'm the one who has to suffer.

      I'm young, right? I have my whole life ahead of me too, right? No. Not right. Nobody knows when they're going to die. My theory goes a little something like this-- we're born into this world crying and screaming, terrified of who even knows what, and right at that very second, boom. We're already dying. Whether you would like to believe it or not, each and every one of us is living, but on their way to death at the same time. Our heart could stop and we wouldn't even see it coming. Car crashes, accidents, overdoses, they're all facts that are waiting to happen.

         Now me, I'll be honest. I was the cause of our moving. This one time, only time in my whole life, I was the reason why my mother and father boxed all of our belongings and moved us all the way from Georgia to New York City. Would you like to know why? I was at the lowest point I had ever gotten to, where I was getting bullied at school by girls who were much uglier than I am, and that was obviously the main reason why they loved picking on me. They called me names and even tripped me in the lunch room, which of course is the most dumbest prank a bunch of sophomores can pull on someone, but I was alone. I was lonely, just as simple as that.

        I ran home as fast as I could, yelled for my mother so she could pull me into her arms and wipe away my tears and take away my pain, but she didn't respond. I flew up the stairs and looked into every room in the house, but she was still nowhere to be found. I began crying at this point, walked down the to the kitchen, and spotted a small note hanging on the fridge. It said 'Hi, Juliana. I've gone out to get some shopping done. Be back much later, love, mom.' Now you would assume I would be happy or relived to know that in maybe only a few hours she was going to come home, but was I?

      No. I was in so much pain and emotional stress and agony that I opened up the cabinet and climbed onto the counter. I took out every bottle of pills that I could find, and took off the cap of one of them without even bothering to read the label of what it was used for, and I popped a few into my mouth. It was just three. Then nothing happened, so I took three more. Then I began crying hysterically again, so I tapped out five, but I didn't even care about anything at this point, so guess what I did. I took the rest of the bottle, which took me a while to get them all down, and it was so hard because I didn't even care to get myself a cup of water.