My Name Is Adaline Baker

Part 1

 My name is Adaline Baker, I'm 15 and I'm dead. I killed myself at 4:27 a.m. on the 19th of September 2018. This is the reason why...

3rd September 2017

It's 7'o'clock on the first day of year 10 and I'm laid on my bed, sheets thrown aside in a bundle, staring at the flaky white ceiling. I don't want to get out of bed, never mind go to school. The thought of having all those eyes on me, is making me want to crumple into a ball and disappear.

"ADA!", that would be my mother screaming from the front door, "GET THE FUCK UP! YOU LAZY SHIT, YOU'RE GONNA BE LATE FOR YOUR FIRST DAY!"

She slams the front door in her frustration and stops down the driveway. Swinging my legs over the edge of my creaky bed, I release a deep sigh and place my cold feet on the ragged carpet beneath me. Forcing myself up I stagger across my room to the window. With some form of relief, I watch my mother pulling off the drive (almost hitting the wing mirror on the gate post as normal) and collapse back onto my bed. I know I must get up and get dressed but I can't bring myself to do it, the thought of going back to that place alone brings tears to my eyes and makes my hands shake. Another alarm goes off on my phone and I wearily swipe the screen.

I drag myself up and to the bathroom. I run the cold water over my hands as I stare vacantly at my own reflection. My reflection... I hate it. I try covering up or moving mirrors, but my parents always put them back. I splash the water on my face and hurriedly turn away from the house hold torture device.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. A thousand scenarios race through my head as I lace up my worn leather boots and try to convince myself it wont be as bad as the voices are telling me it will be. I stepped onto the loose doorstep and dragged the door closed, having to use all my strength to force it into the frame. Twisting the rusty key in my skeletal hand, I slowed my shaking breaths. My boots scuffed on the pavement as I made my way up to the bus stop with my earphones in blasting some old rock music in a failed attempt to drown out all the anxiety rushing through my mind.

"Oh God, you look like death," Denny my best friend of ten years, she's a dick but I love her, "Just kidding sunshine. You looking forward to going back to that shit hole?"

I looked at her in the eye with a serious expression, then rolled my eyes back with a smirk and she acknowledged me with a short snicker of her own. The bus shuddered to a stop in front of us, the worn wheels turning up a fine spray of puddle water up the side of the bus stop as they skidded still. Denny almost skipped onto the rickety bus, it seemed older than the average grandparent but that makes sense considering the scale of our town. We live in a very small village between the coast and countryside in the forgotten side of northern England on the border of Scotland. Most towns about this part are a collective of several farming families and old folk who wanted to move away from the bustling streets of the modern cities, out town was a little different. To most it would seem a normal town just on a smaller scale, that's because an unsettling number of people who were essentially exiled from there old towns gathered here. I have never known another town, I have never left. I know every inch of it like the back of my hand which has its perks. Very few people know all of it despite its size, few people venture from where they must go. Luckily for me my parents never paid much attention to where I went and still don't as well as that our shabby little house has a shabby little garden that backs onto the most magnificent forest. As a child it was the best place to be, plenty of room for my imagination to run free.

As I was saying, Denny skipped onto the bus. She claims to despise every aspect of school, yet she always seems to have a little more happiness about her when we were at school. The bus driver was an older man, who wore aviator sunglasses and studded, leather, fingerless gloves every day. I always thought he was kind of awesome. I flashed a tattered bus pass at him and handed him a small pile of change, trying as best I could to control the shaking of my dainty hands.