You'd Be Home Now (36)

* * *



—

    I wake up, breathing hard, Fuzzy stirring against my feet under the covers. I reach for my phone. I know I’m breaking our rules, but I can’t help it.


Can’t sleep.



I wait. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—


2 in the morning

Need



    I stop. I almost type you but instead I type something


Need something



One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—


K





* * *



—

Gage slips through the pool house door, dressed in loose sweatpants and a T-shirt. His hair is messy. He yawns. “It’s late, Em. What’s going—”

But I don’t give him time, because what would I say? Tell him Candy is in my dreams? That Joey’s been places I can never reach?

That your whole life, it seems like no one ever really sees you, they just see what they want to see, what they need to see. They never see the holes inside you.

We kiss and we kiss and we kiss and we bend down to the long bench and his weight on mine feels good and I shift a little to ease my knee and it feels even better. Maybe this is something like Joey felt. This need to get lost in something other than yourself. Lose yourself. Erase yourself. So that none of your awful, wrong self remains, not one blessed thing.





Mis_Educated


“Get over it”

“Move on”

“You’ll bounce back”

“These are the best years of your life”

“What I wouldn’t give to be your age again”

Did you ever feel that adults never really listen to you?

You say, I am sad

And they say, What for? You’re sixteen! What do you have to be so sad about?

You say, I’m afraid

They say, Of what! I feed you, clothe you, love you, let me tell you about being an adult

You say, I’m heartbroken

They say, Oh, now, now, you’ll meet someone else, stop crying

You say, I’m lonely

They say, Be more outgoing! Stop staying in your room

You say, they say, you say, they say

It all runs together, words drifting into unhearing ears

It’s like they don’t remember what it felt like to be us

To be sad, lonely, heartbroken, afraid, sometimes all at once

They say we should get over it, bounce back, be positive

It’s like they don’t remember what it’s like to be young

They’ve had a lifetime to paper over their wounds

Ours are still fresh, and bleeding



220 likes

#heywoodhigh #heywoodhaulers #millhaven #mentalhealthawareness #depression

GiGi I broke up with my girlfriend and my aunt said “that’s what you get for not dating boys”

Stewie13 wtf that’s horrible

NutellaAddict honestly I just don’t even tell my parents anything anymore they never listen

LzySusan my dad just tells me suck it up, that it will make me stronger

     JerBear I started to feel out of place in middle school tbh. Mom said it was just hormones and it would pass. Never did

HelenOfJoy I’m crying reading this post. The stuff I could tell you

MrPoppersPenguins My sister has been missing awhile now from Dover. She has an addiction. Was at a party in Mill Haven in May. Name is Carly. Anybody got any leads DM me





18


MR. WATSON HAS US push our desks together in fours for silent reading during class because some kids complained the books were so long they were having trouble reading them with all their other homework. We got a lecture on time management and now I’m in a group with Max DeVos, Tasha, and Daniel Wankel. Mr. Watson changed one or two books from the original list, but people are still unhappy.

Max keeps shifting in his seat, his chair squeaking on the floor. “I just don’t get it,” he finally says. “I thought we weren’t reading a book because it was about rape but this lady seems to get raped.”

Tasha says, “She does, but it’s a different context. Think about this book in terms of the lasting effects of trauma. And slavery.”

“It’s sad,” Max says. “And I thought this was the one that was the movie with Oprah where she suffers but ends up punching the guy and getting her mojo back.”

“Max,” Daniel Wankel sighs. “That was The Color Purple and an entirely different author.”

Max shakes his head. “I don’t want to read this. This is freaking me out. This is sad.”

“It is a sad book, Max,” I say. “There are a lot of facets to it. To Sethe’s experience.”

“You have to understand the parts of a person, Max, to understand the whole,” Daniel says. “Emory’s right. And some of the parts might be painful.”

    I can feel him looking at me and it makes me feel weird, because although he’s very cute in a bedraggled, slouchy way that I find curiously appealing, there’s already Gage, and I don’t need any more complications in my life. I busy myself making notes in the margins of my book.