Never feel alone

Chapter 8

Callie

A week passed, and I didn't have another night terror. Stef and Lena didn't mention it again, either. I took it as a good sign. School was going okay, and I was starting to learn the ropes. I even made a new friend, a girl named Emma. She was a jock, and I didn't have an athletic bone in my body. And she was a straight A student, while I barely managed to scrape by. But she was friendly and fun.

We were sitting in English, and the teacher, Timothy, was talking about guilt. A subject I knew all about.

"For your assignment," he said, "I want you to write in your journals about something you feel guilty about in your own life. Something that's been bothering you. Anything at all."

Yeah. That was gonna happen. To confirm my skepticism, Emma turned to me and rolled her blue eyes.

No one will read what you've written but you," Timothy said in his smooth English accent. "So, I want you to free yourselves on paper. I guarantee you'll feel so much better once you get the words out."

It was like my hand had a mind of it's own. Across the top of the paper, I wrote in neat print, The Brian Thing.

The bell rang just then. Emma joined me, and we walked to lunch together. "Is he serious?" she asked. "Like I'm going to spill my deepest, darkest secrets to a guy who wears mandals."

I snorted a giggle. "I know, right?"

"You know what?" she went on. "I think I'm going to write something really embarrassing and made up, just to see if I can get a rise out of him."

"Like what?" I asked, biting my lip, which had finally started to scab over and heal.

She shrugged. "I don't know. I haven't thought about it yet."

"He said he wasn't going to read what we write," I reminded her. We found a table in the cafeteria, and sat down. I opened the lunch Lena had packed for me. The napkin had a note scrawled on it, like it did every day. Have a great day! XOXO Lena.

Emma laughed. "He said that. But I bet he does. Maybe I should write something juicier, like a murder confession." She grabbed my notebook from my stack of books. "What do you have so far? Maybe I can get some ideas."

"Hey, give that back!" I said, a little more panicked than I should have been.

"Relax, Cal," she said, handing my notebook back to me. "You only have three words written. What's 'The Brian Thing'?"

"I don't want to talk about it," I said, taking a bite of my sandwich.

"Was Brian your boyfriend?" she asked.

I almost gagged on my food. "No. Not at all." I set my sandwich down and pushed it away, my appetite suddenly gone.

Emma studied my pale face. "Hey, don't worry about it. You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. It's cool."

"Thanks," I smiled.

Before I went to my next class, I erased those three words I'd written.

That night was also Sophia's first sleepover ever. Her friend Taylor was coming over to spend the night, and she was so excited to do 'normal girl stuff,' as she called it.

I was lying on my stomach on my bed when she came into the room, staring at my blank notebook. We'd separated our beds earlier in anticipation of the sleepover, and Taylor was due over in a few hours.
"What are you doing?" she asked, flopping down on the bed beside me.

"Homework," I mumbled, chewing on my pencil eraser.

"But the page is empty," she observed.

"I know," I said. "We're supposed to write about something that we feel guilty about."