Lyric: Four

I pulled into a parking spot and killed the ignition. I dropped my head onto my steering wheel and took a deep breath. ‘I can do this.’ I told myself. It was my mantra this morning. I didn’t want to go to school today. But I had to. I even passed up Blair’s offer to skip school and go shopping, and he’s the academic genius of the family. Not saying that the rest of my brothers are slackers, it’s not like that, but Blair is the last person I’d expect to tell me to skip school. That’s more Aidyn’s territory. But then again, nobody else knew what was going on with me, other than Blair. I’m even surprised he hasn’t told any of them. If something is wrong with one of us, and somebody knows what it is, they tell the others. Blair’s silence should be a relief to me. I don’t really want any of my other brothers to know what was going on. I didn’t need to hear the laughs and the “The girl who’s made of stone actually has feelings, how cute.” Yeah, I didn’t want to deal with that just yet. But at the same time, Blair’s silence was a bit weird. He didn’t want my other brothers to know, obviously, or he would have said something to them. He knows what they would do if they knew. Did he not want to see me get made fun of over this? It was the only conclusion I could come to, but it really didn’t make sense to me. Blair and Carson were the pros at making fun of me, and they took every opportunity they had to remind me of this fact. None of it added up.

The pound on my hood sent my thoughts, and my heart rate, out the window. I looked up to see Andrew lying on my hood. “What the heck are you doing?” I yelled out my window after I rolled it down.

“Trying out my new found passion for jumping on car hoods, duh.”

“Well next time, try it out on your car and not mine. I don’t feel like having dents in my car,” I yelled at him as I undid my seatbelt and got out of my car.

We walked in silence to the school. I knew he wanted to ask if I was okay, but he was stopping himself. He knows how much I hate being asked, and he knew I was going to lie anyway. There was really no point in asking, which is probably why he was restraining himself. I grabbed the handle to the front door when I first saw him. He was walking out of the door next to the one I was about to walk through. I felt my heart clench. He didn’t even glance at me. He was mad. I almost called out to him, to ask what was wrong. But I caught myself right before my mouth could make a sound. I couldn’t do that anymore. I didn’t have that right anymore.

I got to my first period and took my seat next to Andrew. Psychology was always a good period to start off to. Mr. Nelson was definitely my favorite teacher, by far.

“Eyes and ears up here please! We’re going to do The Box today.”

‘Oh great,’ I thought to myself. Any other day and I would love The Box, but writing down what’s on my mind right now isn’t exactly what I wanted to do today. I looked over at Andrew and saw him pull out his notebook and sheet of paper. “Hand me half?” I asked.

Andrew nodded and ripped his paper in half, handing me the other. I pulled a pen out of my backpack and stared at my paper, almost hoping words would just appear and I wouldn’t have to actually write anything down. The Box was anonymous, you wrote whatever was on your mind and the class would do whatever appropriate action was necessary. If there was a problem, whoever thought they had a solution would simply state it and whoever wrote it could take it into consideration or not. That was the beauty of The Box; you never knew who wrote what. But I couldn’t write what was really on my mind. If I wrote about him everybody would know I was the one who wrote it. I didn’t need the ‘I told you so’ or the sympathetic looks I was bound to receive if people found out. I knew eventually everybody would find out. My high school lived for that sort of juicy gossip. But as of right this second, nobody knew, and I wanted to keep it that way.

‘Chuck Norris uses a nightlight. Not because he’s afraid of the dark, but because the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.’ I finally scratched out on my paper. I folded it up really small and nudged Andrew for his to put in the box. Everybody would probably know it was me who wrote the Chuck Norris joke. I was practically famous for knowing most of them. One time, in Psychology we had a sub. Naturally, we did The Box. Then, I was happy and didn’t really have anything on my mind, so I wrote a Chuck Norris joke. The sub got really into it and had me look some up online, then wanted to play a prank on the next period and wanted me to write a couple I saw online onto the bored and the next class would have to write it down. I did better than that. I filled up all three whiteboards in the front of the class, top to bottom, from my memory. As dorky as that sounds, I’m slightly proud of myself for being able to do it.

“I’m bored, hungry, and tired,” Mr. Nelson read from the first paper and sighed. Most of the kids wrote that or something extremely similar to it. It was sort of annoying. I pulled out my notebook and started doodling as Mr. Nelson pulled out the next sheet of paper.