Falling Into Sunday

23- I Am Feeling Better

On Tuesday, my mom is out of the house and Eli is still MIA but on the bright side of things, the press has died down and me and Benson are kind of back to normal. We’re friends again but just friends which is what we’ve recently agreed on, so that’s nice.

My mom has tried to call me a few times, probably to talk to my dad to convince him to let her come back home but I haven’t answered her phone calls because I really do not want to talk to her. My dad was right when he told me that it wasn’t my fault that she’s in trouble- it’s her own fault for caring more about her status than her own daughter.

“I think that it’s crazy that your brother ran away,” Benson tells me in music theory right after lunch as we’re taking notes. The teacher doesn’t really care if we talk or anything as long as we’re not too loud and we do our work which is nice. I mean, we’d talk anyway but at least this way, we don’t have to worry about getting yelled at or anything.

“Me too. He’ll probably be back soon though. I doubt that he can survive as long as I did out on his own,” I say nonchalantly. “Considering I don’t think he’ll find a perverted CEO to spend his time with.”

“Jeff Erickson is perverted?” Benson wonders curiously.

It suddenly occurs to me that the only thing that Benson knows about my time away is that I spent some of it with Mr. Erickson but he never really knew how or what I did with him but now that I just called him perverted, I think that it starts to give Benson a better idea on what happened. “Um, I mean, maybe. I don’t know, I’m just guessing.”

“You never really told me how you met that guy,” He tells me.

I shrug. “He stopped me from jumping off of his building, that’s it.”

Benson looks over at me with an incredulous stare after I tell him that and it actually grows to be kind of uncomfortable because he doesn’t say anything, he just stares at me for a minute.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I wonder in confusion.

“You tried to kill yourself?” He whispers stupidly. “You never said anything about that.”

“Yeah, it’s not something that I like to talk about,” I inform him with a shrug. “It wasn’t exactly my proudest moment. Is it really that shocking though?”

“Yeah, it really is that shocking,” He nods.

“After the hell that I went through- why is that so surprising?”

“I just never pictured you like that,” He explains, writing down the notes that are displayed on the SMART board in front of us.

“That’s because you didn’t know me back then. If you’d seen me eight months ago, you’d understand,” I tell him, feeling defensive against my actions when I wanted to jump off of that building. He’s acting like it’s just the craziest thing ever in the world for me to have wanted to die after what had happened.

“Yeah, I guess,” He sighs, obviously still not understanding my reasoning at all.

“You don’t know what it was like,” I snap quietly at him. “That’s why you don’t understand, because you have no idea what it felt like. You have no idea what it feels like to have your body taken from you. It’s the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me. You don’t know.”

“I know that I don’t know,” He confirms with a nod. “Venice, I wasn’t trying to start a fight or anything, I just can’t believe that you were so close to ending your life. I mean, I would have never met you and that would have really sucked. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.”