I grabbed the keys off the rack near the door. With my hand on the knob, I was about to walk out, but my dad called out, “Have a good day at class. Make some friends.” A desperate plea from a father to his daughter. Make some friends. Like it was just that easy, like I could snap my fingers and have a whole horde of friends appear at my back.
Maybe if I’d gone to the colleges my old friends from high school had gone to, but honestly…I didn’t see the point. Getting all that student loan debt when a local college was just as good, at least for the more generic classes.
Granted, I was going into my third year at the local college, whereas most students only spent two years at places like that, but still. My case was clearly not the norm.
I gave him a smile—a fake smile that made my heart hurt inside, but a smile nonetheless my dad believed—and then I walked out. It was truly amazing what a smile could do. A reassurance that I would try my best to make friends…and, of course, fail spectacularly because I didn’t care enough to try. Why make friends when they’d just disappear down the road anyway? Mom and Dad didn’t have friends. They had me and Michelle, and their jobs. That was literally it.
The smile instantly fell off my face as I headed to my car. Was I that good at giving fake smiles? I supposed I did have a few years of practice now. I had no clue when the smiles morphed from being real to being forced, but it was sometime in high school. I knew the change wasn’t overnight, but sometimes I tried to look back and pinpoint the exact day I realized everything was pointless in the end.
Obviously, I couldn’t find the day.
Mom and Dad said I would get over it. It was just me being a mopey teenager. Maybe they were right. Maybe, in a few years, I’d look back on how I acted now and laugh—genuinely laugh at my antics and my thoughts.
Or maybe not. I was twenty, after all, no longer technically a teenager. Since my parents had shrugged my feelings off so easily, I decided to stop showing them to anybody. Why bother when no one cared?
I tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, heaving a sigh that was not so quiet this time. When I was alone, I didn’t have the energy to be fake. I started her up and began the half-hour drive through town to the community college that sat one city over.
It was a nice enough place, I supposed, though I still had no idea why college students in America had to take stupid courses like chemistry and biology when we literally had a full year of each in high school. Just another way for the universities to get money, I guess. Must be nice to be able to dictate how young adults should spend their time and their money.
Money they didn’t even technically have. Loans were a predatory thing, but so was everything in life.
I’d taken most of the generic stuff already; I was now getting into some higher-level stuff. A lot of sociology, psychology, even a bit of criminology. I found that stuff interesting; I didn’t know why. Some kids might not look forward to their classes, but I did. What better way to take up the time than to sit and learn about how society treated deviance from the norm?
You know, I used to enjoy a lot of things. I drew, I jammed out to music, I dabbled in writing. I even played hours upon hours of videogames. But there came a time when I just couldn’t do it. Any of it. One day I sat down at my desk in my room, a blank page of paper before me, and the last thing I wanted to do was draw. No songs caught my attention, and writing was…it was shit. Why bother writing when everything I typed up sounded like it was written by a fifth-grader?
I even lost interest in videogames. A horror, truly, but the truth all the same. No amount of stealthy assassinations in Assassin’s Creed could get me out of any funk, nor could any romance in Dragon Age. I literally could not force myself to sit down in front of a TV screen and play any of the games I knew like the back of my hand.
When I arrived at the college, I brought my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus. A big, wide lot already full of other vehicles, I found an end space, backing her in before turning her off. My eyes glanced upward, at the blue sky above.
A pretty blue. If only a pretty color could make me feel happy.
I sat in my car for a while, waiting until I absolutely had to leave to make it to class on time. I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed out.
The one thing I hated on campus was how busy the sidewalks were in between classes. Like, so many people, either focusing on their phones or jamming out to whatever music was in their AirPods. Some of them were in groups of friends, walking together, talking and laughing. I kept my hands on the straps of my bag, my fingers toying with the fraying edges of it.
This was just another day for me. Yet another day to get through, another day I couldn’t wait for it to end.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Today was actually the day that everything would start to change.
Chapter Two – Mason
Getting out of bed in the morning was tough. Super tough. I was not a morning person, which was why I always carried a huge travel mug full of coffee to class. I drank that shit like it was the fountain of eternal youth, the fountain of life. It kept me sane, mostly because I hated myself for scheduling such an early class.
Silly me of last semester thought the earlier I was done with classes would mean the earlier I could go home. Had a part-time job at a local grocery store, you know. Not super proud of it, but I’d had it since I was fifteen, which was…six years ago? Damn, I was getting old.
Yeah, twenty-one and still at the local community college. I knew it was a little weird, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. There was no point in choosing a major when I flitted from thing to thing every week. One day I thought being a therapist would be cool, but then the next week I realized I didn’t want to listen to people all day. Then I thought, maybe I could be a doctor—Mom always said I was smart.
But then I’d have to get my hands dirty on a daily basis, see other people’s blood. Yeah, did not want that.
The thing about growing up, I guess, was that you always shot for the stars, reached for the sky even though the majority of us would never get there. That wasn’t me putting anyone down; it was the truth. No one grew up wanting to be a janitor or a custodian. Everyone wanted to be the doctor or the teacher or the astronaut.
Then we grew up, and our childish dreams seemed just that: childish.
I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and that made me feel a little better. If I was the only one fumbling around, clueless in this big, wide world, I’d feel pretty stupid. Luckily, most everyone I talked to on campus felt the same, even if most were a few years younger than me.
Today was a Monday, and Mondays were especially hard for me. Something about them always seemed more difficult than any other day of the week, probably because it was the day after Sunday, the last day of the weekend. Getting back into the groove was hard, what could I say?
Unfortunately, me needing coffee made me stand in the kitchen at home and wait for it to brew. Then I got caught in some road construction, and then I couldn’t find a damned parking spot in the lot. I had to find a spot on the street and try to dig out a few quarters to pay the meter.
Yeah. Mondays were so not my favorite day of the week.
By the time everything was good, I realized I was going to be late to class.