The Forever Room

Setting: a high school.

“Stacy, where were you the past few days? You can’t just skip school all those days in a row just after the weekend! You should know that we were worried sick about you; Hillary and I are like mothers. Not a phone call, not an e-mail, not even—”

“Marley! Don’t try to tell me shit about being a mother. You have no idea, okay?”

I storm off, feeling the clasp of my own personal Pandora’s Box threatening to crack, the evils inside my mind ready to escape and wreak their havoc on my subconscious.

“Hey! Tace! Come on, Tace, wait up!”

Those words. Those same goddamn words. They make me shiver and they make my insides quake with the fury of an eight on the Richter scale, even though a sixpointeight is the highest it will go.

I freeze in my tracks, no longer able to run away from my problems or even run to my next class. I click my nails to try and distract myself; I clench my teeth like I usually do. I cannot help the constant flow of tears that follows, for I am, like I was that night, completely incapacitated. I can barely breathe, and I feel so sick to my stomach.

It’s like she knows, and is only doing it to ridicule my weakness behind my back. I am dying to lash out at her, to tell her that she can just go to hell for all I care if she’s so intent on ruining my life by never letting me forget this one simple incident. It’s like a dropped stitch while knitting a scarf. You can pick the pieces right back up, but they’re not the same, and the end product looks just bad enough to notice, but not to care.

I cannot decide if I am simply angry because I did not sleep last night (nor have I slept for the past few days, save for during classes), or if I am actually feeling all this rage towards someone I once called my best friend. I don’t see his face every time I try to sleep, but what I do see is an endless span of nothingness, and the darkness scares me more than anything else. Because I know he is waiting there for me, in the nothingness. Waiting for exactly the right moment, waiting for me to shut my eyes so that he can come back and press his dry lips all over my face and—I hear a series of loud, choked sobs tearing through the school’s regularly quiet atmosphere. Despite my own anger and pain, I feel compelled to take this crying person under my wing and tell them everything is going to be okay, no matter much of a lie that usually is.

Until I feel a petite hand on my shoulder, and the whispers of comforting words into my ear. Then I realize that it’s me. I am the one making a scene in the middle of a school hallway, crying my fucking eyes out.

I scream, “Don’t touch me, don’t fucking touch me!” as loud as I can, much louder than I should, my hatred for him coming out now, in the only way it can. I am screaming no now, screaming no like I should have so many times that night, but I was so shaken with fear that he broke me, broke everything I’d ever learned into a million shards of glass, and then had his way with me on top of them.

I am surprised that not every single classroom has opened its door, surprised that children are not popping out of the frames with wide curious eyes, wondering who the crazy psycho bitch is who is so fortunately disrupting their Geometry pop-quiz or their Psychology lecture or their ninety-degree push up test.

I curl deeper into a little ball, letting my tears out in short, strangled sobs, reining them in now, not because I have an audience, but because I don’t want to have another panic attack to throw me back into the darkness.

Mrs. Rinklinn, my favorite teacher because she is head of Art Club, creeps over just in time for my crusted eyes to open; the other person who tried to comfort me is long gone.
“Stacy, come on into my classroom for a little bit. I have a class right now, but the bell for lunch is about to ring, and then you can calm down in a place where you won’t get trampled, alright?” I am sure she heard my shouts earlier, because she is careful not to lay a single hand on me.

Reluctantly—though of my own accord—I stand, pressing down on my bent knees to give me some way to stand up. My whole body shakes still, but it is so mild that to the outside world it may go unnoticed. I shuffle to Mrs. Rinklinn’s classroom, which is only a few doors away, but as soon as I see what is playing on the overhead projection screen, I feel the anger bubbling up inside of me, and all of her kindness goes to waste.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, US statesman and 32nd president (from 1933 to 1945), was an extraordinary man. Roosevelt’s plan, the New Deal, managed to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, and despite his crippling polio, Roosevelt managed to become one of the most remembered presidents of these United States…

“Is every single fucking person out to get me?” I scream once more, turning on my heel and sprinting out of the room before I have to hear that name ever again. The bell makes a deafening chirp in every classroom and hallway, and the hall I am trying to run through is now bustling with people. I crash into several not even taking the time to apologize. I have to get out of here, now.

I reach the front door of the school, finally, and press my back up against the cold painted cinderblock exterior. I slide down, defeated, waiting for someone to come and kill me off, because surely it would be better than this constant anger, this constant fear that he is never going to leave me alone. At this point, I would rather feel a barrel against my temple than the steady creeping of bile wetting my dried up throat.

The last thing I want to do is tell my parents, lest I have to speak it out loud, let the words fly past my lips. So I sit in the grass, against the rocky wall, wanting to throw up and sick of crying but doing it anyway. It’s never going to end. I’m sure.

Setting: A bedroom.

I have to try so hard just to not be completely sick to my stomach at the Beatles posters all over my walls. I stare at them, Abbey Road, Lennon’s Imagine, Revolver, Help, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and my least favorite of all (well, it used to be my favorite), Yellow Submarine. I lock eyes with that stupid yellow contraption, letting my eyes burn holes into its clunky metal exterior, hoping that it will sink out of view. My teeth are clenched together and it feels like I might just break a sweat with the intensity of my stare. The circular windows are glaring back at me, the sub smiling that same sick smile that haunts my every day. I might have said haunts my dreams, but I can only sleep during the day, and in the daytime I am safe from nightmares.

Hands quake, the shake spreading up to my elbows and past that up through my shoulders, until the earthquake turns into a fire, the flames licking up through my legs and igniting them so I must get on my feet and stand up. The fire rolls through to the tip of each finger, and when I reach up to the top of the poster, the fire touches it and burns it down as I tear it off my wall, letting it curl up into a pile of ash on my floor. My smile grows wide, and the fire infects every other poster, turning my room into a bonfire, and I throw all of my memories of that one horrible into the raging inferno.

My cheeks are railroad tracks and tears are chuggachuggachuggachugga rolling down the tracks, and they won’t stop no matter how much I try to tell myself that I am over it.
I sit on my bed and stare at the lightening sky of dawn, hoping that someday, I’ll escape this curse and find myself the key to getting out alive. But until then, I stay and watch the sunrise, pressed up against the window, letting my heated breath fly across the glass, trying to kill the phantoms in this dark forever room.