My Life As A Book

Chapter 4

A/N

sorry I haven't updated, life kinda got in the way again. (cheers to another chapter)

-L

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Sixth grade was really a hard year for me. Life was good, and we had all finally started letting go of what happened. School was okay, I guess. I was pulling D's and C's, barely passing. This I believe was due to the situation we were in, and my constant worrying over the 'next step' as I called it. I liked my teachers, they liked me, it was all right. I even got presents for them around christmas. (wow what a teacher's pet) 

Above all, though, was when I became closer than before with my now good friend Brandon. We wrote together in english, seeming to always find a way to turn it into a game we were obsessed with ( the Last of Us. I can publish those stories another time XD ). We cracked jokes in Social Studies when the teacher would say his signature phrase "the whole nine yards". We paired up in Science for nearly every project (at that point a lot of people thought we were dating), and even got separated a couple thousand times by Mrs. Fitz in Math class. We grew onto each other, and he became my only close friend at the time. My other friends were absolute rubbish to me, so let's not say names. At lunch, they had these round tables that could only seat a certain number of people. There were only two seats left, and there were four people in our little group. One of them was already sitting. I tried to sit in both seats, and as I lowered myself into the seat the second time, the girl already sitting says to me..wait for it... "You can't sit with us today. There are only two other seats, and you're the least important one so you can sit somewhere else." My jaw dropped and in that moment, I was feeling every emotion. Embarrassment, anger, frustration, sadness, happiness, you name it. The happiness was because I lowkey hated them haha. After the incident I went over to that table in the corner that seemed daunting due to its size, but was really kind of cheerful and warming. I sat down across from Brandon, who sat there all the time. Everyone looked at me, the unexpected addition, and some of them even opened their mouths as if they were about to ask me to move. That's when Brandon spoke up.

"It's okay, she's with me."

I sat down, grateful for the few but important words he had said.
This kind of fueled our friendship.

So, towards the end of sixth grade I was in my room studying when I got a call from my brother Jason. I picked it up, expecting a hello but instead I got a "hey, this is officer so-and-so. I'm afraid your brother has been struck by a car. He wanted someone to call and let you know that he loves you." I thought it was a joke at first, but then I remembered the tone of the man's voice. It was real.
I sobbed for hours, and at that point in time I hadn't known that he had passed away on the way to the hospital.
I didn't go to school for a week, and when I went back there was an immense dark cloud over me. I couldn't concentrate. I had to talk to 2 different therapists weekly. My grades were slipping even farther and sometimes I wished it was me instead of him. I wished I had died in his place.
The funeral was about a month later. It was open-casket, but he was so badly injured that I wasn't allowed to go to the ceremony. It would have scarred me too much.
I was getting more grief stricken by the days and by the time summer rolled around I still had not gotten over it. I tried and tried, but nothing seemed to work.
A few months later I woke my parents up one night crying because I couldn't get a certain thought out of head. I could only think about death, when my time was, and it was scaring me right to my very core. Occasionally I would think about Marcus, and it made me wonder what he hated so much about my mother, why she had to go through that. I started going to a psychologist after that. I went every week for two months, but the thoughts were still there. Depression I remember the doctors called it. At the time I had only heard about something like this, but I had in no way experienced it. It feels like there's a dark cloud over you constantly. Some days it grows darker and other days it sits in the back of your mind. But it's always there.
I struggled with this for the rest of he school year and on to summer. It kind of faded out a bit when things started looking brighter, but I'll go more into that in the next chapter.

A/N-
Sorry this one was just a tad bit deep...so..um..yeah? Yeah.
-Lilah 💜