Just A Girl

She's just a girl.

She's just a girl that walks down the hallways of her school, her bag pulled up onto her shoulder and her head slouched down. She's just a girl that doesn't have friends, but wants them desperately. She doesn't say much, if anything at all. She's shy. She's insecure.

After school every day, she's made fun of. They say mean things, those girls with the pretty hair and pink nails. They push her and speak obscenities to her. But she doesn't say anything. She doesn't cry. She doesn't fight back. She just stands there and takes it. But she's not as strong as she appears. She's not as strong as she tries to make herself. On the inside, the girl is weak and alone. The girl is torn into millions of pieces. Beneath what appears to be thick skin, she has scars that tear right to her very soul.

She's just a girl, after all.

When she goes home, there's nothing there for her but empty words. She isn't loved there. She isn't what her parents want. She's simply the image of her brother, a reminder of the teenager they lost long ago to a bad addiction. They smile at her - her father already drunk from the Jack Daniels and her mother simply a shell of the woman she used to be - and they say things to her, but she sees the emptiness in their eyes, the glimmer long lost along with him. When he'd died, he had taken them with him.

She goes to bed, but there's no hope for a new day. Every day is the same. Every day holds the same conversation, the same void that she wishes she could fill. Every day is the same. She waits for that trudge up the stairs, waits for that creak that says her father has come to deliver the same punishment night after night. She waits for those hands to close around her throat, for those fingers to tighten around her trachea and make it hard to breathe.

She waits for the spots to come to her vision, for the breath to leave her lungs once and for all, for no more oxygen to come again. She just wants it all to be over with. She wants to be gone. She wants to float away. But as he does every night, her father pulls back before he can finish the job, collapsing shortly after on her bedroom floor. This is the only time she cries.

The cold air fills her lungs again, painful, tears pinched off by her tightly shut eyes. The droplets trace down the side of her face, falling and disappearing into her mass of brown hair. She wants this all to end. She wants all the pain to disappear. She wants everything to be over, for the rest of her life to be a deleted scene. She wants to die. Her gasps fill the room, shaky and broken. Eventually, the lamentation makes her weary, and she falls asleep.

~

The next day is the same. It always is the same. But the loneliness, the pain, the ache is all too much for her. She's had enough of the teasing, the drunken father creeping into her room to begin suffocating her, only to pass out before he finishes. She's gone far too long without a friend, without someone to listen and to assure her everything will be okay.

Before her father comes up to her room, she's already got everything ready. She's put on her best dress and done her hair. She's got make-up on and a smile on her face. Because she's ready to leave. She's ready to finally step away from the pain. She has a letter pinned to her sleeve. And a rope tied around the rafters of her room, a circle around her throat that she leaves a little loose to tighten when she falls. Her bare feet move forward, and as she falls forward and the rope tightens, the sickening snap! of her neck breaking echoes in her attic room. Her body twitches a few times regardless of the nearly instant death, before she finally goes still.

By the time her father enters her room, she's gone cold. He doesn't see her - instead, he runs into her as he's headed to her bed. It's only after he turns on the light that he sees her - and actually sees her since the death of his son. He cries out, but no words are comprehensible. Nothing is.

~

The girl's death is announced to the school. There's a moment of silence, where everyone looks down at their hands. The ones who teased her after school think about her and how she might not have killed herself had they not bantered her. The guys that joked behind her back about how ugly she was think about how beautiful she really was. Her teachers think about how they should have known something was wrong, about how they should have been able to notice the signs.

Her parents and many of the children at school attend her funeral. Her casket is closed and lowered into the ground. And that's when her mother finally loses it. She breaks down, crashing to her knees and covering her face. She's sorry for never paying attention to her, sorry for all the things she should have done better. The girl's father follows suit, and in that moment in time, everything is in pieces.

~

Years pass, and things have changed.

The ones who've hurt her have gone on to have eating disorders. The boys that poked fun at her behind her back go on to become alcoholics and abuse their wives. Her teachers have quit their jobs and are unable to support their families and keep them healthy, leading to deaths of their young ones due to sickness. Her parents couldn't stand staying together after the death of their second child, and divorced. Everyone is not okay. Everyone didn't understand how their words had hurt her.

But she was just a girl, after all...