Slowly but surely, Nick rolled out of bed. His feet met the chilled hardwood at precisely 2:38 a.m., just before he began to wander about his room.
At sixteen, Nick was a good kid but he wasn’t the best student; he did just enough to get by. He got along well with everyone at school but struggled to make any solid friends. Nick enjoyed music—listening to it, playing it, even talking about it; therefore, that’s what he invested most of his time into. Aside from taking band in school, Nick drummed for a local jazz band. He also produced drum covers out of his basement in his spare time. Nick was on the right track. He’d just gotten his driver’s license, an enormous feat to any teenager, and the school’s homecoming dance was only four days away. Nearly everyone already had their dates, and Nick didn’t plan on going. He wanted to go, deep down, but he figured he didn’t stand a chance finding a date—at least not one he would’ve enjoyed going with. Janie tried dancing to the blaring music with her friends in the sticky mosh pit of bodies, lasers, mirror balls, and fog; but when the guy grinding on Casey spilled his beer all over her, she decided to slip away and wound up at the crowded bar. Alone, sweaty and exhausted, she was packed in like a sardine with other people who were, at the very least, sweaty, drinking, and dancing to exhaustion or until last call. Whichever one came first.
Perched on a sticky wooden barstool, Janie tugged her rising hem down for what seemed like the millionth time. The thundering of the beat and the strobe lights rattled her core and made her eyes water as her contacts throbbed under caked on black mascara and smoky silver eyeshadow. Her stained, white camisole clung, exposing the obviously stuffed bra Casey insisted she borrow. The neon yellow underglow of the counter illuminated the long rip down her leg to show swollen ankles and feet pinched into teeter tottering, sit-pretty, scuffed, pine needle heels. Janie pulled her too tight high-pony out of her light, glowing hair. She tapped her chipped nails restlessly as the bartender continued to ignore her and the DJ dropped the beat yet again, chuckling behind his shades as some of the dancers missed it. The moon was unnaturally big in the cerulean sky. I sat on my old trunk looking out the window to appreciate the beauty of the night. I spend a lot of the night awake, staring into the darkness from my window. I sometimes dream that I will have the courage to sneak out and experience the night time magic.
I am not that brave. Just as I am about to turn back and get some sleep, a yellow dash catches my eye. I look closer into the woods, face smashed against my window, but see nothing. Wait. There. Alan: Guess whaaaat…
Whenever he texts me that, it means one of two things. Either he’s going to tell me something incredibly exciting for the both of us, or he’s going to tell me something that’s incredibly exciting for him. Me: What lmao Alan: I got that costume we found at the mall last week! I think I’m going to wear it to Jackson’s Halloween party tonight. Me: You mean that weird ass scarecrow costume??? You know that gave me bad vibes…. Far deep in interstellar space, billions of stars, perfectly unmoving, dot the infinite void; a peaceful omnipotence created from chaos. Among the two-hundred billion points of light was an insignificant speck suspended in the vacuum travelling at an abysmal forty-nine million kilometers per hour.
That speck was a stolen Confederacy ship; an efficient vessel designed for its resilience—although, it was fast enough to travel from the earth to the sun in twenty-four hours, it had been damaged. While it was being commandeered, a lucky shot pierced the hull and lodged itself inside the fusion reactor creating a small leak. But the thief was in no real danger, as the radiation was only leaking to the outside. However, with the ships main energy source slowly exuding power, the interior temperature of the ship plummeted to a blistering -6 C˚. The small, pretty nurse just came in and took the IV out of my hand. There’s a big bruise that is black and green where it was, it is gross and hurts. They put a band-aid on it for me, one that covers my whole hand. I also got to change clothes; I’m in my Sailor Moon sweatshirt I got for last Christmas. And pants. I have pants! I am so excited not to be in a hospital “gown,” as Mom called it. It seemed more like a sheet cut up with holes to me.
Mom and Dad were here a little bit ago. I went to the bathroom and thought I heard them say something, but I didn’t hear what, and now they’re gone. I have to find them. They can’t leave without me. I’m ready to go home. Where are they? She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t hurting. She wasn’t stuck, crushed, defeated. She wasn’t broken. Not...broken.... But her thoughts betrayed her two legs, in an ever damning synchronicity, as they rocked on the ledge. Every second of regret was buried under a minute of torment, and that voice had finally gained control, and this time it would not be silenced. She had run for too long, she had hidden in the alcoves of fear for decades, and she could bear it no longer. That wind was bitter in December. She didn’t even bother to wear a coat that day, because what snow could possibly be colder than that of her heart?
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Editorial Staff
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