Freedom of Sketch

Back to School

On the morning of my first day back to school, I wake from a restless sleep, my sunken eyes ringed in dark circles. I'm running a little late, so I skip my makeup routine. Why bother? Every speck and pimple glares visibly upon the white backdrop of my skin, but people will stare regardless. I am The Freak. I am Caberwood's village idiot. I am Psycho, and everyone knows it because of Brooke Adley. My story rages across the front page of the school's gossip magazine, traveling from lip to ear to text message and good old-fashioned notes.

I pin back my long hair with a silver skull clip. The weatherman promises us "a cold one!" so I pull on layer after layer of monochromatic clothes, and two pairs of new socks. I wiggle my feet into my favorite pair of combat boots, then march downstairs with my bag slung over my shoulder. I packed way too many notebooks. I should be wandering around a college campus, navigating a grid of brick buildings to get to English Comp I, Beginning Studio Art, Intro to World Religions. I am too embarrassed to ride the bus, but my mother refuses to drive me. We rage/bicker at each other until my mother wanders off, muttering parental shit about "building character".

The bus it is.

A new clan of kids from August cram the seats. Most of them sit shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing tragic stories of uncomfortable family reunions and photos of drunken Christmas activities and ugly sweater parties. The underclassmen recognize me instantly. They're going to think I'm repeating because I'm an idiot. Of course, my real excuse - being stuck in a psychiatric facility for ten months - isn't much better. Would I rather be known to them as being a) stupid? Or b) crazy?

I'd rather be c) none of the above.

Sitting in the front is a big mistake, because all the little whispers wash toward me from the back of the bus: "She's the one that burned down the art studio." "She tried to kill herself." "They expelled her and changed their minds because her mom threatened to sue." "I heard she went to rehab for heroin."

By the time we reach the high school, I'm bleeding from my gnawed-up fingertips. I tuck down my sweatshirt sleeves so no one will notice. I walk through the front doors and although everything looks, sounds, smells, and seems to have stayed exactly the same as the day I left it, the space around me feels so hollow without my friends by my side. A part of me has been amputated, leaving me with a smoking wound like a black hole in my chest. I have to curl myself around it or the emptiness will suck my entire body in, making me implode. I am no longer me. I am only a collage of the remaining parts left over from a year gone horribly, horribly wrong.

People - students and staff alike - stare straight at me, like really stare. This observation has nothing to do with my adolescent paranoia and self-consciousness anymore. My peers bear down on me with their eyes. Each and every one of them has heard a hundred different stories about what happened, and now they want to hear it from me. They thirst for the truth, but it's gluing my lips together.

Each slice of gossip contains its own complications, plot twists, and cliffhangers. Shiloh disappeared and took her friends down with her. Shiloh got locked up in the loony bin and Lizzie and Daniel died because they missed her so much. Shiloh went to jail for setting the school on fire, Daniel went to jail for getting drunk in Study Hall, and Lizzie starved herself invisible - exactly what she wanted.

Kids who only knew me in passing boldly approach me, exploring my face for the latest news. How are you doing? some ask. Where were you - are you okay?  They only want to be my friends so I'll give them the answers, and also because they think that I had the guts to burn down the art studio, which instantly makes me some kind of high school antihero. 

Then there are the other kids, those who carry a grudge for the destruction of their art studio, those who were Brooke's sidekicks, and those who are just plain mean. They come right up to me, spit out insults (and sometimes actual spit), then call me spiteful and unoriginal names. "Sticks and stones," I mumble, navigating around them, my head down. A girl I've never seen before tells me to go kill myself. "You first," I snap. She rolls her eyes, flips her hair. But she doesn't say anything else.

An acne-freckled football player staggers down the hall toward me, his school sweatshirt tied securely around his arms and torso like a straightjacket. I've never even met him... how could he know enough about me to turn my predicament into a joke? His buddies laugh hysterically, bent over with their hands on their knees, struggling to breathe.

"Psycho-psycho! Psycho-psycho!" the football neanderthal howls to the tune of The Twilight Zone theme song. What a meathead.

Under normal circumstances, I probably would have given him a generous view of my spiked bracelets, along with a calm narration of the exact plans I had for each and every one of those spikes. Or I would have cornered him against some lockers and strangled him with his sweatshirt. Today, I stare through the boy and retreat further into my mind. "Shut your face," I growl halfheartedly, sidestepping around him. Laugh, laugh, laugh, neanderthal staggers back to his herd.

Once the whispers find me, they stay, stalking me through the corridors. "Hey, Loser! Hey, Nutcase! Hey, Froot Loop!"  I don't have the energy to fight back, so I blend into the crowd of silent sufferers who line the walls and hide in the bathrooms between classes. I wonder if those kids wear cuts underneath their sweaters, stick their fingers down their throats after lunch, or have hospital bracelets stuffed in their closets. This is the clique I never knew existed until my hospitalization.

 I haunt the art hallway, making my way to the studio's remains. I turn a corner and look at the space where it's supposed to be. They've covered the doorway and the surrounding walls with thin tarps that flutter beneath the heating vents. Yellow caution tape forms a giant X over the tarp that hangs in front of the doorway, but if one were desperate enough to get in, they could simply lift a corner of the material and crawl inside. I'm tempted, but I don't want to see the ruins of one of my favorite places. I guess there's still no room in the school's budget to fix it. Maybe I should start a fundraiser. It would be a decent distraction, and it's something everyone, even Principal Matheson, would approve of. Good Shiloh drifts to the surface to take a breath. I should listen to her more often.