High School Me (DNF)

Chapter 16

A couple months later

It was December again. 

I would be turning 18 in three months and I hadn't seen Clay again. 

I wished to talk to him longer than I had the past times. 

Because i was talking to him less. Where before our calls fell three times a week, he became busier and he was only able to call once every other week. Cuts replaced calls that I had hoped against the voices would come. 

My mother said that money was tight and that she would have to start taking night shifts on the weekend, but I knew that was a lie. She was going out with guys and sleeping with them throughout the week. 

When she tied me this, it was in the form of a short text message. I hadn't talked to her in so long. 

I hadn't seen her in so long. 

I knew that if she saw me, she would only find a ghost of her son. Sunken cheeks and a pale silhouette of the sunburned boy that arrived home with a grin from the beach with his friends. 

I knew that if she spent time with me, she would only grow to miss a voice that had become too broken to play. My vocals were shattered, and trying to activate them sent shards of what once was into my throat, making my eyes well up with the pain of it and spill over with the hopelessness inside. 

I knew that if she'd talk to me, she'd notice how dead my eyes had become. 

I wondered, however, if she'd be saddened by it. Would it change anything?

DId she know I was alone?

Did she know I didnt eat?

I sat on the bottom step of the stairs, waiting for her to come into the house. 

I hadn't been downstairs in so long and no one had been home in a while, so a layer of dust had settled over most of the surfaces, proving that in many different ways, we'd allowed ourselves to break. 

I had been sitting here for 3 days. 

I couldnt bring myself to care. 

I couldnt care about the three missed calls from Clay, from a month and a half of being tired of his bullshit. 

I couldnt care about the fact that I was dying.

Why should I care if no one else did? Why should I continue to put up with the hidden traumas in my life if everyone lived theirs happily without a care as to my ending one. 

The carpeted stair I was sitting on was wet with the constant tears that were shed at the many mentions of inadequacies that the voice pointed out. 

I'd decided to call it 404 because it was on April 4th that it was last quiet. 

It was 40 days after that when I'd felt loved for the first time in a long while. 

It was 4 days of hell that I'd endured when my life came crashing down because of it. 

And all those times, it had something to do with Clay. 

In April, he comforted me through my panic attack at the bottom of the crater. 

It was 40 days after that on my birthday that he'd made me feel loved. May 14th, Clay made me smile, got me to socialize, eat a small dinner, pursuaded me to speak, and made the voice in my head shut the fuck up. 

And now, on the fourth of December, Clay called again. 

And I picked up, wanting to feel that love and relief from his voice, finding the strength to ignore the voice that told me that I didnt deserve to feel that way just at the sight of his na,e on my phone. 

I almost cried again, preparing myself to hear his sweet words of comfort.

"George," his voice was gravelly, but still smooth and comforting despite its nervous tone. "Can I come over to your house?" 

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