Tear Stains are Easy

My eyes don't want to open when my alarm blares the radio to wake me up.

I groan and push myself up, only to realise that I am still on my floor, fully clothed.

I grunt and curse as I push myself up and stagger sleepily towards my alarm clock to hit it and shut off its blaring music. I can feel my muscles protesting with every movement I make and I just want to curl back up in my bed and sleep endlessly. But of course, that isn’t an option.

I stagger to my bathroom and take a moment to look at myself in the vanity mirror. My eyes are puffy, tear stains are left on my face, untouched from the night before. I rub my eyes a little and strip, hopping into the shower just as I turn it on. The cold-water startling me awake from my stupor.

Once I get out, I look back in the mirror and see that my eyes look a little better now, still a little puffy and red rimmed, but nothing too noticeable. I still rub concealer on and try my best to tame the puffiness out of my eyes before going towards my closet. However, when I see the great big gaping hole in my closet door, everything about last night comes back to me in full force.

I sigh, holding back more tears. But I’m tired of crying about this and rub my temples to fight off the oncoming post crying headache.

Today is going to be a very long day.

I get dressed into another uniform, one that I hadn’t just left stuffed in my bag overnight. My thick and comfortable black school cardigan and my black shoes are thrown on and I collect my stuff.

Scooping my phone off the floor from my room I notice about a dozen messages from my father. I feel the guilt start to eat at the already gaping hole in my chest. I feel really bad about last night, but I never said anything that wasn't true.

I walk downstairs grabbing my backpack, opening it and throwing my crumpled uniform into the hamper on my way to the kitchen. I sigh as I notice the mess that I never bothered to clean up last night, plus the party mess on top of that still laying around from two nights ago.

I guess tonight is going to be a fun clean up night for me.

I grab a nectarine, one of the last of the food in the fridge, and head out; I can't look at the mess anymore without having to do something about it. I guess I’ll have to go grocery shopping too.

I close and lock the door even though, like my thoughts yesterday, I knew that it wasn't going to do anything to change the fact that my mother happened to have a key to her own house. Unfortunately enough for me.

I turn my back on the house, praying to whatever god that may be out there, that she wouldn't go back and ransack the house even more while I was gone to school. Not that the mess could get much worse, but I didn’t want to have to come home to it two nights in a row.

I continue my walk to school, attempting to put a smile on my face and not let anyone know just how many problems I was actually having. Not that some form or another of what transpired yesterday in my house wouldn’t be making its rounds soon enough.

Everyone in this town knew of my story. Well, they knew the basics at least, anything more detailed than that and it was most likely a lie or an over-dramatization of the situation. No one knew the real, full extent of the small world I am living in. No one knew the severity in which the situation had gotten except for the few of us who lived it.

I was going to try and keep it that way as well. For as long as I could help it, this town didn’t need the real gossip circulating around along with the rest of it too. I didn’t need to hear it when I was outside of the four walls of my house-like prison.

So, as I pass by the other citizens of this 'oh so lovely' town, I smile at them as I would normally. Acting as if my mother was not some out of control addict who was now out and about God knows where, probably finding her next fix or currently on it.

Although I had one thing going for me. No one would be able to recognise my mother if they saw her. Not anymore at least. She has been using for far too long for the nice people of the town to recognize her at first glance anymore. She looked like any other major addict in the rundown part of town.

Skin and bones. Aged years due to her addiction. Ragged and thinning hair. The loss of teeth, the stench of pee and over excessive perfume. The look of vacancy in her sunken eyes.

I get to the campus with lots of time to spare. Which can either be a very good thing, or a really bad thing for me.

Apparently, life decided today was a great day to be cruel to me, because I wasn't already feeling like utter trash this morning. Like my last night wasn’t enough of a psychological torment already.

I guess my guardian angel had taken a very long vacation. Several years long at that.

Which meant that I met with the only people who didn’t just treat me like a pariah with some sort of communicable disease, or who pitied me incessantly, but with the group that liked to make fun of me and harass me because of the rumors.

Megan’s eyes shine with a wicked gleam as she stands in front of two of her other friends.

“Well look here guys,” She smiles, looking down her nose at me. I sigh and try to walk around her and her friends, not in any mood to deal with them right now. Why couldn’t they just push me and pretend I didn’t exist like they usually did? Was it some sort of special occasion today?

One of them grabbed me, quickly releasing me after they had gotten me off balance. I fell to the grassy area beside the walkway.

“Okay, yeah, hi. Is there something you want from me?” I ask them, pretending that I didn’t see the girl who grabbed me, I think her name was Chantel, wipe her hand on her skirt with a grimace.

“The drug rat managed to drag itself in today.” The other one chuckles, and I sigh.

“Need a new fix? I heard the guys came up from the metropolitan area just the other day.” Megan sneers. I ponder how to respond to this. I know that it would not be in my best interest to tell her that the fact that she knew that information said more about her than it did about me.

“I don’t use,” I finally decide on denying the statement, it was the easiest. The least likely to get a rise out of her and her friends, and the most likely to get this over with faster. She and her friends would probably make a few cracks at my denial and then go away somewhere else, bored.

“Oh, are you going to go cry to mommy and daddy? Oh wait,”

“Megan, you know that her mommy and daddy don’t give a shit about her,” The one I presume to be Chantel smirks and I let out another heavy sigh. Hardy Har Har. Like I’ve never heard that one before. Though the tightening of my chest at their words hurts a little. I’m practiced enough to not show that their words hurt me at all.

"What is going on here?" Tristan asks as he comes walking towards us from the parking lot. And that’s when the lightbulb lights up. I finally connect the dots.

Megan had a desperate crush on Tristan, it wasn’t a secret at school, and she had probably seen him in the parking lot, so she decided to plant herself somewhere that he’d see her. Of course, the icing on the cake was that I walked up just then.

And guess who is right behind Tristan as he walks up to our little side show. Three of his cousins that I met at the diner last night. The other one and Tristan’s little brother had probably already made scarce.

"Oh! Tristan! She is so horrible! She started to call me all these awful names!" Megan cries as she throws herself at Tristan, though he avoids it well enough. Megan rights herself and snivels dramatically. Drama club could use acting like hers, though they were much more exclusive than one might think, so they probably wouldn’t.

But anyone with eyes looking at this situation would know that I wasn’t the perpetrator. Since I was on my ass on the grass.

I snort at her overly dramatic antics and shake my head. Standing, I rub my grass-stained palms on my jacket, hoping that the back of my skirt wasn’t also green. I only had so many skirts and one was already out of commission due to being stuck in my bag all night last night.

“I’m going to go,” I mutter and then turn on my heel. Megan ignores my departure and I sigh in relief. Thank God for Tristan. At least he was part of the ‘pity from afar’ crowd like his mother.

“Wait!” I hear a female voice call after me and someone grabs my arm. I cringe, but then register that the voice held an accent. I turn around, not being able to hide the shock on my face as I see Tristan’s female cousin, her long blonde hair tied up neatly, her makeup perfectly in place. But what I’m most shocked about is the fact that she is currently holding my arm. Most people avoided any length of contact with me, or like Megan and her crew, only used it as much as they thought necessary to humiliate me in any way possible.

“Um,” I blurt out, looking down at the hand on my arm and she releases me quickly when she notices my stare.

“Oh sorry, I just…” She trails off and looks back at the surprised faces of her cousin and the trio of girls.

“Is there something you need?” I ask her, curious if she really had a reason to stop me.

“It’s just, um.” But Megan cuts her off.

“You shouldn’t interact with that loser there. You don’t know what kind of germs or diseases she might give you.”

“Yeah, have you heard about her mother?” Another crows along and I just sigh. Soon enough these new kids too would hear about all the gossip and rumors and would decide that I wasn’t worth being a social pariah for. It’s fine, I didn’t need more ties to this city that I was so close to escaping.

“But what her mother does has nothing to do with her.” The dark-haired boy that is standing directly behind Tristan says, his voice is deeper than I was expecting, and I notice that his one hand is placed firmly on his brother’s shoulder.

You could tell in an instant that the two boys were identical twins. The only difference was that one of the brothers had a scar running over their left eye. Which would be a telling marker at least to differentiate the two. If I ever bothered to learn their names. And one could easily assume that if the three of them were all attending their senior year here, that would mean that they were triplets.

It must suck for them to move to a new school just after their last year of high school starts. But I shake off that thought. They hardly need my sympathy for their situation. They’re well off enough, have enough social connections, that it shouldn’t be too hard of a transfer for them. And I didn’t really have the luxury to give others my sympathy like that. I needed to focus on my own problems and what I could do about them.

I smile at the girl who looks a little shocked and confused.

“Don’t worry about it. Welcome to Sisalli Academy.” I greet and then I spin around and walk off to the main building. Their cousin and Megan’s trio would be enough to help them get settled in at school. They would probably also make a lot more friends very quickly. Besides, the campus wasn’t too hard to follow once you knew the layout, though it was excessively large. Which could attest to the rich children that attend the school itself.

The lockers are quiet today. Some people stand in small groups and quietly converse around their lockers, but most people are still outside on the lawn playing around. It was still about fifteen minutes until class anyways, so it wasn’t hard to believe that there wasn’t a rush quite yet.

I make my way to the biology lab once I collect the books I'll need for my morning classes. William is already seated at our shared lab table. He seems to be engrossed in the thick novel in his hands and I try not to disturb him too much while sitting down.

He glances up when he hears the stool moving and sees that it’s just me sitting down.

“Morning,” He greets, but before I can even greet him back, he has already turned back to his book.

“Good morning,” I still decide to answer him out of common courtesy, but then I just pull out my phone and start scrolling through my social media accounts to pass the time until school officially starts.

Surprisingly enough, when the bell rings the teacher is still not in the room. I see a couple others looking around curiously, wondering why he was so late this morning. About five minutes after the bell, he appears, carting along three faces that I’m starting to become very familiar with.

“These are the new students, Rowan, Caleb, and Xander Meier. Help them out with anything they might need during labs.” He tells us and then he shoos the three of them to the only empty lab table in the back of the classroom. Because there were no other empty spots in the class, it looks like they would be a group of three. Though I think that might be at least somewhat comforting to have familiarity in a new place.

The class is dull today too, and most of it is talking about the lab we will be performing Thursday and Friday of this week. Finally, the bell rings and everyone begins chatting amongst themselves immediately. Well not everyone.

Many people go to the back to talk to the new kids, ask them questions, maybe even help them find their next classes. Just as I am leaving the room, I hear a deep base accented voice tell the crowd that they have all their classes together, lucky for them.

Not that it has anything to do with me.

I move on to my calculus class and sit at my desk. In this class we were allowed to choose our seats at the beginning of the semester, which meant that everyone left at least a one desk radius between me and themselves. This also meant that the desk directly behind me, to the right of me, and behind the desk beside me were all free desks. It was also lucky for my peers that there weren’t enough students to fill up the entire class, meaning that this set up works without fail.

I gather my stuff and lean back, preparing for the class, and glance out the window to my left to distract me, when a loud commotion at the door gathers mine and everyone else’s attention. Walking into the classroom is none other than Tristan’s cousins. Again.

I glance around and try to hold back a groan. The only seats left are the three by me.