I'm not broken

Chapter 1

"She doesn't even care."

"She doesn't feel anything for me."

"I hate her. She's such a flirt."

His words dug under my skin and through my bones, around my blood circulation, and finally made it's way up my spinal cord and into my brain. I shivered, the cold water making my arms numb, but my hair soaking in all the coolness of the gully. The sound of other party people had faded as I submerged in the water, as if they were speaking to me under... well, water. I forgot about the people I knew since kindergarten, the people that had been always there even when you never talked to them: it just comforted you knowing that there was someone there, watching your back.

Now no one had mine.

I heard the familiar thud-thud-thud of the loud music and the singing, whooping, hollering of all the rest graduates, the class of 2015 and future of our town.

That is, of course, if the town even had a chance of a future. We all came from some place or another: from Louisiana, Mississippi, California, Washington D.C. or from a different country. I came from Arizona and moved to this... sad excuse of a town when I was three. I had been stuck here ever since. The name of this isolated town is barely a whisper over the tall, itchy grass; a word uttered during the dark depths of the night when the dealers go out and sell their jellybeans, when people are fast asleep or watching funny cat videos deep under their covers; A small peep known to the world that is only heard of when freak storms happen.

And that name is Brook.

I got stuck in this place because of my oh so awesome mom, who left me and my brother as fast as you could say:

"Them cop's be coming for Krista Marks again."

And I never knew my dad, which is just as well, since all I've ever heard of my father was that he got drunk one day and took a gun to the head. So me and my brother, Ray, have been stuck in Brook for all our lives trying to make it with two low paying jobs and a small house in a mobile home neighborhood that had cockroaches lurking at every corner and a dripping faucet.

"She never cared for me."

"She liked someone else."

"I was stupid to ask her."

His words played over and over again in my mind, and I emerged from the water and gasped for breaths. There was nobody left on the beach: they had gone into the water. I felt shoulders brush against my own, the whole place cramped: like we were weeds that grew on top of each other and didn't know what else to do. I stood up, feeling the cold mud under my feet and worm through my toes. I made my way through the glistening bodies of people I had known since I was four, squinting under the bright sun. I finally saw the ledge: a ledge that jutted out from the wall of rock that led up to a cliff...

The same cliff that John Castor from Dot's row had jumped off because his wife had slept with another.

Have I mentioned that Brook is a town full of mental people?

I felt the rough bite of stone against my palm and put one hand in between a crack, then found a foot hold. I started to climb up, mindless of the noise getting quieter and quieter below me.

"You don't even care, do you?"

"I did everything for you!"

"You're a mistake. I hate you."

I replayed our conversation over and over again, furiously making my way up without hesitation. I didn't slip once. Wasn't planning to. I just climbed further and further away from my problems, from my life, from Brook. I never wanted it to end that way. I wasn't used to showing my emotions, or knowing what love is.