School finally lets out after what feels like seven hours of pulling teeth. I sink into my seat on the school bus and rummage through my bookbag for my phone so I can listen to some music on the way home. I stare out the smeary window and study the kids that plod by, hoods up, heads down, fighting through the heavy snowfall. I spy Mountain Dew Boy, who trips on the curb. People laugh at him and he gives them the finger. They laugh even harder when they see that he's colored his fingernails with black Sharpie.
Today was rough, I tell myself, but you survived. This means you'll survive tomorrow, and the next day. I press my face against the cool window and sigh against the glass, inviting this morning's winter art to reappear. I breathe life into the stick figures with every exhale. On the ride home, I find my playlist of favorite songs and allow them to feed my soul. The bus dives deep into the suburbs, pulling into deed-restricted and gated communities to let off cliques of teenagers already complaining about being back at school.
My development lies about a half hour to the west. The music and the movement get me thinking, swirling deeper and deeper into thoughts I believed I had buried forever. I can't believe that when I was first admitted to Circle Valley, I divided my peers into different categories based on their problems. I used to do to them the same things I accused my principal, teachers, shrinks, and other authority figures of doing to me: labeling, judging, and oppressing people I didn't bother to try to understand.
I think of Molly and the other girls, Lizzie included, who declared ownership of their bodies - the only things that they truly owned - by destroying them. It was never about seeking attention or getting skinny. It was about finding some kind of anchor in a world that felt as though it were spinning out of control. It was about damaging the property before others took their own selfish opportunities to deface it.
It took me ten months in a locked psychiatric treatment facility to learn these things, to get to know people on a human level. I've decided that it was a journey, not a mistake.
I paid a price to learn how to separate people from their darknesses.
I'm beginning to think it was worth it.
YOU ARE READING
Freedom of Sketch
Teen Fiction-Completed- After seventeen-year-old artist Shiloh Mackenzie is accused of assaulting her classmate and setting her school on fire, her dark and graphic portfolio catches the principal's attention. Suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation, Shiloh...
