Eat My Heart Out

My grades are too low.

That’s the conclusion I’ve reached by searching through the different colleges online. Even though I haven’t gotten my final grades yet – haven’t even had a chance to change them with an exam – I can tell they’re too low. My GPA is gonna be too low for anything.

I shove the mouse away from me before I press Alt+F4 and lean back in the chair. I turn my head and stare out the window towards the house across the road. I don’t know who lives there, but I’m sure they had or will have a better GPA than I will. Everyone in this house does. I just suck at everything. I’m not good at anything. I have no skills that will ever take me anywhere.

I just suck.

I turn my attention back to the screen and start up the browser again, before I search aimlessly for something to cheer me up and make the clenching feeling in my throat and stomach go away.

“Sorry to interrupt your porn-search, but I need to write a paper,” Mikey says before I hear him drop his backpack on the floor. I press Alt+F4 again and turn around. He looks annoyed.
“Motherfucking bitch of an English teacher decided to move our paper two weeks, just to make it more convenient for her.” I smile at him sympathetically. I hate it when teachers do that. As if we don’t have anything else to do than make their lives more convenient.

Selfish assholes.

The kind of assholes I don’t want to be around anymore anyways, so why am I even searching for colleges?

“I’ll leave you to it,” I say and quickly exit his room to give him space. Down the hall in the kitchen, I see Frank cutting something yellow up while he’s talking happily. I guess my mom is in there.

I try to sneak along the wall so Frank won’t see me and call me into the kitchen.

“Hi, Gee!” But, of course, none of my tries work out the way I want them to.

I smile vaguely as I enter the kitchen.

“Wanna help me? There’re so many vegetables, and I wanna try them all!” I grin at him, but not as much as I want to. Just being in the same room as my mom is incredibly awkward. The guilt weighs me down and makes my every muscle weaker.

I walk over to the table next to Frank, and with an uneasy feeling in my chest and stomach, I look up at my mom. She’s standing by the stove with her side to me, staring intensely into the pot in front of her.

I look down.

“Get a knife and help me out. You can take the peppers.” I smile at Frank weakly, before I walk over to the knife drawer. I look at the smaller ones, but decide against taking one. A big one would make the job go faster, so I wrap my hand around a big knife and pull it out. The blade glistens in a way that makes my gut churn in a weird way – a mixture of excitement and fear twirling around down there.

I close the drawer and carefully walk over to Frank.

I could fall. While I’m walking with this huge knife in my hands, I could trip and accidentally bury it deep inside of me.

I get over next to Frank, take a red pepper and place the sharp tip on the top.

I push it in. I start cutting out the stem.

I could cut myself. The knife could slip and cut off one of my fingers. It could roll across the table and mix in with the carrots Frank is cutting to pieces with a much smaller knife.

“Why did you take that big a knife?” my mom asks and I quickly look up at her disapproving eyes. Taking in the look in her eyes is like taking a bullet to the chest. Or at least a hard kick.

I glance down at the knife, before I hold it up and turn to walk towards the sink.

“Well, it’s too late now,” she says tiredly and turns back to the pot on the stove.

A deep, hard kick.