display purposes only | skylar

The halls around us eventually fade as the bell rings, and the doors to classrooms shut, and the only thing that remains audible is her voice. Her hair falls in a natural brown wave, full in volume, and her eyes radiate a beauty that's a rarity to find. I've only seen it once before and that was the first time my heart broke.

Not long after I spit out my pseudo-jerk words, she yanks my wrist and nearly causes my books to tumble from my chest and land in a paper heap, and for a moment my stomach flutters with the worry of the consequences if that were to happen. I could feel my face flush a rosy pink as she continued to pull me along. "You're not going to any classes for the rest of the day, even if it is over in an hour. I liked how conscious she was of time, and I tried to see what that said about her. I wondered if time was as important to her as it was to me. Actually, I wondered if time was as important to everyone as it was to me. I wondered if people calculated time the way I did, and in the same context. One thousand, three hundred, ninety-seven days since my dad left me.

Eventually we slip out of one of the side doors of the school into the courtyard where we eat lunch, where a skin-tightening cold envelops me and probably her. I'm not exactly sure why it feels so natural right now, like a girl that you've occasionally watched from afar pulling you to the side in the hallways as if she has something important to say and then being lead out of the school is just the most natural thing to do. I hear her mumble a few words but my body is too in shock by the cold to take them in, but I'm lead over to a patch of trees, where a barricade against the wind is formed, and we settle down into the bases.

I scrunch my face and snarl my lip a bit, looking around as if there'll be an answer hidden somewhere in the wind. I believe that if answers were written in the wind, life could be more easily managed.

I'm not listening to her speak, and it's a bad habit I've picked up over the last few years. I think I've subconsciously built a fear on hearing the voice of others, like an unintentionally forced selective hearing. My ears grab on to the last few words, though, and "What's wrong?" resonates in my head.

When one has endured emotional pain to the utmost extent, their emotions usually go one of two ways. The first is a deep, outward and inward depression. This can be seen in hung heads, the inability to perform easy and simple tasks, such as picking up dirty clothes off the floor or sweeping snow off of the sidewalk, and an extreme lack of social interaction. The second emotion is that of inward depression, outward annoyance. This is what I've got, as seen in the the rolling of eyes that I give to the girl's words, but the leap of my heart as a realization that maybe, just maybe, someone can see the pain that I cope with by smoking and drinking.

"Um, a better question is what's wrong with you? I don't have time for this," I respond, picking up my books off the ground beside me and having an ounce of hope that the girl will stop me from leaving.