Baby, I'm Bad News.

Title: You're smiling?



“Hey!” I heard someone call out in unison with a light tap of flip flops against pavement.
The sounds seemed to be heading in my direction. I turned around, smiling which stopped my best friend Kate in her tracks. She jolted her head up, letting her long blonde hair fall over her widened blue eyes.

“You’re smiling.” She said more of to herself than to me.
I looked down in an attempt to hide my embarrassment stricken cheeks.
“And you actually are moderately dressed up, today.” She noted, once more.

It was true. Instead of wearing my usual ripped jeans and oversized hoodie, I replaced it with a dark jean skirt and a white short sleeved shirt I got from Hollister a couple years back and completely forgot it was in my closet. In fact, it was thrown into a huge bundle of other clothes that I completely forgot about owning. I had a scavenger hunt that morning looking for something to complete a new found mood.
I could act like a typical teenager at times. After all, we were all allowed to a little indulgence in life.

Before I realized it, Kate was right next to me - poking the side of my cheek slightly as if she had to make sure I was real and not made of some form of gaseous cloud.
“You haven’t smiled since...” She began, but at the weary glance I sent her she stopped. “Well, you know when.” She said instead.

And I nodded.
“Well...something feels different about today. I think something’s going to change.” I replied looking past her into the vast blue sky.
Her laughter broke my gaze, and she pulled me along with her into the school building.
“No, my friend, I think you’ve inhaled too much oxygen. Did you even grab a bite to eat today?”
I shook my head, not really paying attention to her words – I was lost in my thoughts.
But she was accustomed to my day-dreamy status.

Yet, something today seemed to be stirring me back to reality – slowly, but surely enough – soon I would be back there and taking in all the world’s crap like a normal being. People have begun to notice that I’m “much too calm for what has happened to me.”
I don’t even bother to remind people that you can only take so much; cry so much…until, you break completely. And then, you just seem to fade away it seems. As if you’re not even living at all.

“Addie!” Kate wailed, waving two freshly manicured hands in front of my face. “Have you even been listening to me these last 10 minutes?” She questioned in an angry tone, but the smirk on her face told me otherwise. We knew each other too well to get mad over things we couldn’t help but do.
I mirrored her smirk, verifying my answer, as she shook her head slightly.

That’s when I heard it.
I don’t know how I suddenly began to realize that the whole school was raving about my dilemma…I guess for the past couple months I’ve just ignored it all. Before, I was a great student who studied three days prior for every test. I planned ahead, and it always came in my advantage - and never did I miss a day of school since I first moved to this town in the 2nd grade. But, after a major mishap in my life, I found myself not caring about anything at all. I didn’t do my schoolwork, didn’t study, and on many occasions I simply didn’t bother going to school at all. Teachers were worried. My friends were worried. Everyone seemed to care…but none of it seemed to help. I was traumatized.

Yet, for some reason or another, today I wasn’t feeling my-newly found- “you won’t get pass my walls”-self. And I let what other people had to say get to me. I opened myself up to my surroundings, brought myself back to reality, and became, once again, utterly….vulnerable.
“Wow, look who’s in school, today?” I heard a girl’s voice say around me.
“Miss popular coming back to claim her crown once more?”
“Who’s she trying to prove?”
Various questions like these began to revolve around me and it didn’t take long for me to realize that they were talking about me. I looked around the school to see many eyes on me, and if they weren’t on me, they were turned around disguising the fact that they were before I caught notice. Kate was still talking away about last night’s previous events with a guy she had just met. I already knew the story – I could tell as soon as she waved her manicured nails in front of my face. She never got them freshly coated unless there was someone new in her life. It was her mini celebration.

Standing in the middle of the hallway was like being on a stage with the audience all staring back at you, waiting…for you to do something so they could talk more.
Then, one person said it; the one remark that would faze me and dig underneath my skin.

“Did you hear? She killed her mother.”

That was when I realized I was standing on a stage that I didn’t belong, as I dashed towards the school’s front door, leaving Kate in the midst of a conversation she knew I wasn’t paying attention to.

I was fooling myself….A wish wouldn’t help this. It couldn’t. Things weren’t going to get better anytime soon.
In all my despair, I did the only thing I could ever remember how to do in a moment such as that: I ran.
And as the tears ran down my face, the wind pushed my hair in every direction possible mixing it with my wet concoction of false hopes – and I found my lips muttering the same words over and over again.

“I didn’t mean to.”