"Somewhere Down the Path"

Chapter 1: (After I get some feedback, I will upload the remainder of chapter 1 and later chapter 2)

   My name is Claire Evans. I’m the average teenage sophomore in high school. I earn mediocre grades, my room looks like a tornado tore through it, and I love to stay up late and then immediately regret it in the morning. I can’t really think of much else to say about me but my family…a book about the length of the last Harry Potter book isn’t enough pages to describe my family’s strange antics that leaves me wondering whether I was just left on their doorstep and was taken in out of pure pity rather than being taken to an orphanage.

   The Evans family is a strange family, or, my family, I guess I should be referring to them as, and they do things that not many other people seem to do. For example, how many other families out there use the family dog to make a profit by charging parents of young toddlers $10 to take a wild “doggy back” ride. It’s just not normal. I will always remember sneaking out of the house before the morning of the strange event was to take place. I refuse to be caught doing such a thing. Although now that I think about it, helping with the event would’ve been more fun than experimenting with public transportation and suddenly finding myself on the whole other side of town. All I’ll say is I won’t be doing that again. Drunken people should also try to use cabs rather than buses if they have to. I got a one hour lecture about the dangers of alcohol because I reeked of booze when I returned home that day. I look like a thirteen year old, how would it ever be possible to purchase alcohol? Hell, when I actually am twenty-one, I’m just going to opt for wearing an ID around my neck since any place that I go to that involves alcoholic beverages or gambling, I will always be asked for my ID since I’m always going to look younger than what I really am. Some women say to appreciate it but when you’re at that stage where you want to be seen as an adult, not a child, it’s quite difficult to appreciate it.

    My appearance has played such a humongous role in my life. The role wasn’t quite nice, however. I have chocolate brown eyes, dark brown hair that annoyingly is referred to as black by pretty much everyone, a strange olive shade of a skin color, and I stand at five feet two for height. I’ll always wonder what it feels like to be a tall model with blue or green eyes, and a hair color such as dirty blonde or a lighter shade of brown. The odds of my genes were definitely not in my favor. Moving away from my rather bland appearance, my reputation in high school is not quite to my liking either. I’m a wallflower to everyone at school. It’s most likely because I’m a complete introvert the majority of the time in most of my classes.

    The sad thing is that I love to talk and be wild with my friends but with people that I don’t know well, I just don’t feel comfortable. I take a long time to feel comfortable to be completely myself around someone and apparently a lot of people don’t find me to be worth the time. Freshman year, I sat alone at lunch for the first few months of school while people came and went. They all tried to talk to me out of pity but just because I wasn’t zany and spontaneous during the first impression, they took it as I don’t like to talk and I like to be by myself which is completely false! I detest being alone and I crave company but I never receive it. Ever since then, I retreat to the school library every day for lunch and just lounge at the computers and do my homework and whatnot. At least I don’t get stared at as if I’m some kind of creature from space like I was in the cafeteria, all alone sitting at the middle table. Bad seat choice, I know.

    I hate myself a lot for things like this. Being an introvert does not make assignments easy either. I haven’t been to a doctor or a psychiatrist but I can say that I have social anxiety and I cannot give a presentation without feeling nausea and feeling trembly everywhere. Sometimes I lie awake in my bedroom at night and stare up at the ceiling in the pitch black room thinking, Why am I like this and why am I treated like this? I don’t hurt anyone and I try to be as kind as I can to everyone. It just never seems to add up. I also tend to daydream about being a hero in school and finally getting some recognition for once in my lifetime. It could be for anything. Saving a student that collapses, stopping a crime outside of school, anything.

   I know that could never happen though. Someone else always gets to take the cake and is better than me. From elementary school to the present, I’ve just learned to accept the fact that I’m meant to blend in with the shadows and I only exist to my peers when they need something. At least nobody can ever hurt me if I’m always alone. Except for myself. Misery loves company, so they say. And boy, a smile sure does trick people into thinking you’re actually happy and not broken and shattered to pieces on the inside, barely getting by each and every day.

   That’s just life; it’s all set up for you and if you can’t handle it, either you handle it or you handle it since the only other way out is vastly permanent.

   This was supposed to be a happier description of me but as you can see, I’m not a very perky person at the moment and this is the real side of me. The side of me that wishes to be someone else, someone who isn’t broken and has people at her side to care for her and actually comfort her, not make her feel like everything is her fault and she should just stop being sad. It’s not as easy to just snap out of it like people think it is. Someday I hope deep down that things will change but some days I just feel I’m fooling myself and nothing will change. It’ll be the same life draining me of my emotions forever. And that scares me, quite frankly.