The Lonely Girl

6

My life could be described in a series of words in a run-on sentence with no punctuation marks to document the passing of time: monotonous, sad, cliche, predictable, tragic, and borderline traumatic. 

These words were just that--words, something consisting of the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet combined in countless ways to describe something that was so tedious and exhausting that sometimes I hardly opened my mouth to form them. 

Granted, that was when I was actually able to make words, when the scratchiness and almost unbearable pain coating my throat and vocal cords wasn't absolutely paralyzing to attempt to speak. 

Sure, there were surgeries, and they sometimes helped, but the truth was that this was what I would have to deal with for the rest of my life. 

Flicking another barely smoked cigarette to the ground and stomping it out, I grunted my distaste for the fact that I could hardly take a single puff without the pain becoming excruciating. 

My doctors hated me--that was a definite--but that didn't mean I had to stop trying to smoke, no matter how much it hurt. 

Parker's voice rang through the air and I braced myself for his scathing looks or insults, but none came.  

Instead, he flung open the front door to the house and stormed inside.  I followed, naturally, to find out what the hell had crawled up his asshole.  Again. 

"Fucking asshole!  I can't believe he did that right there in front of everyone, in front of Leah, too!  What did I ever do to him, anyway?"

I rolled my eyes, realizing that he was probably talking about Colton, the shit-stain on the boxers of the world that was his 'friend'.  In reality, I knew he only kept him around for Alec's sake.

After what had happened with me, I didn't blame him for sticking close to his best friend for the warning signs he'd already been showing. 

"And she just stood there and stared at him like he was crazy, but she still said yes!  Since when were they a thing?  Was she the booty call that he'd been bragging about the entire fucking time, and I had no idea?"

I wanted to interject and ask something--anything--but my vocal cords were shredded and my throat burned from the one puff I'd inhaled of the cigarette, so there was no way I'd get a single word out without coughing a lung up, shredding everything up again.

So, I stayed silent, like always, while Parker went on and on about some girl who was fucking his friend that he clearly wanted to fuck instead. 

Damn.  What I wouldn't give for that problem instead of--

Nope.  Feeling sorry for myself was more cliche than wanting your friend's girl, and I wasn't going to do it. 

"And then her best friend stood there all excited and happy while Carter--fucking Carter--asked her out too, like he hadn't just called them scholarship pussy that day!  It was like he wanted to show me that it didn't matter who I wanted, he would get her first!  It doesn't matter who I want or who I like, someone else just gets there first, or ruins what I already have with them."