Maddie's Girls

Shameless promo for new story - Chapter 1 - Untitled story

A/N: If you find something that is written between brackets: (I don't want to go home.) It means its meant to be strikethrough. Its sort of like something the main character thought about but regretted it.

I don't know when I will be posting this story because as you can read, it will be somewhat of a delicate topic so it might take me a bit to write it. I'm posting it so you guys can see what I'm doing right now.

ALSO, trigger warning... there's a sexual assault scene, the main character's depressed and there's also use of drugs.

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Sometimes, I think there's something weird going on with me.

There's something in me that I don't understand no matter how many hours I spend trying to make sense of it all.

Sometimes, I get tired of myself and my own thoughts.

Some other times, I wish I could disappear.

Not dying, though, dying isn't precisely what I want. When you die, you create a hole in people's lives, your absence is felt every day, every hour, every minute— it's not that I think I'm that important, it's just that I know. I've felt it and I don't want my absence to be felt... but I want to be gone. I want to erase the memory of me from this world, from the minds of those who love me and have loved me, from those I've hurt and have hurt me.

Sometimes, I wonder how things would be if I wasn't here.

I try to think about Mami: who's going to take care of her on Saturday mornings when she comes back from her night shift, and she can barely get to her room, only to wake up four hours later to rush to her second job? Who's going to help her study to get through her college modules? My brother doesn't have the patience to help and he's busy with uni and work. Oh, Rowan... perhaps life would've been easier for Mami and Rowan if I had never existed.

Sometimes

I think

I think too much.

The first thing I do when I wake up from my nap is get my phone from my nightstand and open the four messages I've got from Rowan. He wants to know how I am, how I've been, what I've been doing.

I don't reply.

I put music on and drop my phone on my bedside.

I should be getting ready. It's almost 10 at night and I should be ready but I can't move. My body doesn't want to move.

It takes Rowan ten minutes to send me another text. You know it shows when you've read my messages right? Any plans for the night? How was school?

I reply with two laughing faces and a simple sorry; a short reply is better than no reply. I roll around in bed and come face to face with a worn-out poster of half-naked girls. I roll my eyes and turn to the other side of the room to find old Pokémon stickers mixed with Digimon, Dragon Ball and Captain Tsubasa stickers.

This was Rowan's room before he left for Uni. We live in a two-bedroom flat so I used to share a room with Mami because apparently, boys need their own space to grow into the men they're meant to be. After he left, I got to keep his room. I haven't gotten rid of his things yet even though he keeps telling me I can. Mami says I should try to make it look a little more like me and less like Rowan, but I'm afraid I don't know what 'a little more like me' would look like.

My phone starts ringing and I know it's Rowan because his ringtone is the Halloween theme song. I let it ring while I get up and head to the shower.

I make sure I scrub hard. Sometimes, when I get home from sixth form, I feel like I have layers and layers of dirt on me. It affects the way my mind and my body work, it slows me down.