Wingless and Beautiful

Chapter 5

“It’s easy enough to win over people you meet.  But getting strangers to love you… now, that’s the trick.” – The Fault in Our Stars, now in theatres!

Chapter Five 

I would be joking if I said that the monts of my life had been perfect.  That everything was peachy, filled with smile and laughter, with an abundance of blessings and love.  Sure, the nightmares didn’t come often since the day I met Hunter.  But I lived each day in pain… a different kind of pain from what my Mother and Stepfather left me. 

Another first.  My first heartbreak.

Surviving was a struggle for me.  It was hell for Meredith too.  She was the one who had to live with me while I try to deal with a breaking heart… something I always thought I would share with my Mom.  And she has to be the one to take care of the bills with the small pay she receives from the small-time jobs she got over the next year.

The day Hunter left, I listened to his voice message over and over.  Just memorizing the sound of his voice.  As I lied down in bed that night, I imagined him lying down beside me, saying those words to me.

I wanted to be angry at him… shout at him and tell him how unfair he was.  He made me fall in love with him, and then he would just leave?  I don’t even have his number so I could call him, talk to him, assure myself that he will come back to me.

But I know too that because he fell in love with me, he found the courage and motivation to undergo an operation he should have taken a year ago.  Because of me, he wanted to be better, he wanted to be whole again.  I just needed to trust and believe that someday, we will see each other again.

I went back to school a month after Hunter left.  I tried to live among the humans once again.  And it hit me that for the past year, I have been living in a limbo.  I got so scared of my own nightmares, I forgot that there are scarier things in real life.

The first day of school, the silence was deafening as I walked the corridor to my locker.  Everybody was looking at me.  They could not believe I had the guts, the courage and the face to go back to school.  I could almost hear their thoughts.  They were about me.  And they weren’t all pretty.

At first, I didn’t mind that they stayed away from me.  Sure, they could look past my scars.  I kept them well-hidden under my mass of blond hair.  But I could not hide the fact that more than a year ago, my name was all over the papers with the headline, “Mother Kills Insane Stepfather for Torturing Teenage Daughter and then Commits Suicide.”

I stepped right out of a Stephen King novel.  And these beautiful, spoiled, rich kids could not believe the fact that I share the same campus with them.  I was a stain in the spotless reputation of the school known for educating the town’s golden boys and girls.

During the first days, they were civil, polite even.  But one week after, their thoughts were getting louder.  Like they really wanted me to hear them.

Scarface.

Scary witch.

Criminal’s daughter.

Her parents were sick in the head, so she must be too.

Hideous.

Monster.

She shouldn’t have been allowed to go back to this school.

There were some who didn’t think bad about me at all.  Instead, they feel pity for me.  And I wasn’t sure I wanted their thoughts either.  I would never want to be treated with pity or be given special treatment just because of what happened to me.  I just want to be normal… invisible even.