Junior Year - Outcast Series

The Past

Bastian's POV:

School feels like it has been an eternity of making and breaking relationships, turning my heart stone cold, closed off. None of my friends meant anything to me anymore other than people with which to pass the time.

I had stopped emotionally connecting myself to people through true friendship or through my own secret little crush about two years ago. Love and happiness had completely drained from my soul as if people had stolen petals from my rose until I was left with a stem left to wither and die alone.

My mom had us move almost every year ever since I was in second grade.
I remember that I used to think it was normal. That it was normal to form relationships, good friendships, only for them to be ripped apart when my mom just had to move across the country again.

When I was in ninth grade, I had dreaded the last day of school. A lot of other students had left their middle school friends behind for a new start in high school, so I was able to fit in and make some great friends who were always by my side.

I remember I was slouched on the sofa the Thursday before the last Friday, staring at my phone and at the contacts on them. All of my friends, my compatriots, my fellow soldiers in a war against the odds.

I could hardly lift my thumb to hit the little button that looked like a waste basket. The never-ending trash can. The burn pile that had taken each and every one of the friends that I had held close to me and burned them alive, not leaving a morsel of ash nor a scent of cooked flesh. And I had to sit there in front my phone screen as each one of them was thrown in to the furious flames.

It looked like just a button on a phone. But it had watched me build tremendous towers of victory filled with good times and bittersweet memories, only to fill it with TNT, light a match, and watch the small, innocent sparks sizzle down the line until they finally reached my castles, my cathedrals of pure and true elation¹ and ignited them. Thus, shattering my well-constructed, stone-hard towers into heaps of shards of rock and mortar and burying me, suffocating me, slowly and excruciatingly annihilating me under the intensity of my, once again, failed attempts to make a life for myself.

And this time, I had only assumed that my mom would drag me along as cargo to move again. I was willing to be dragged by a noose every damn mile behind her stupid Honda Civic because then I would get a better view at what I would be leaving behind as it would fade into the horizon. After all, it's not like it could make the pain any worse.

My thumb was shaking, faltering as it was hovering above the waste basket button that had me on a leash. That button made me more of a slave than my mom had. It could crack a whip of doubt and self-hatred to make me scream out in pain with steaming tears overflowing as if the volcanoes of my eye sockets had finally erupted.

But I had gotten used to my master's whip and I hadn't uttered the slightest cry. Only a few silent tears had coated my face. The tears helped me cope. They were my way of letting all of my deepest fears and angers out and moving on. They were like a warm trenchcoat in the winter time of every start of every June. My tears protected me from the eternal cold, masking my identity from a world that wants to give me love, but doesn't know that it will only give me sweet heartbreak ten months later.

I was about to press the button when my mom came in the room with a beaming smile on her face and told me that we would be staying another year. I instantly didn't believe her. I had heard that one before a few times. "Oh we're really going to be able to stay this year." But within a few weeks, we would move to another one of the states.

I never even knew why, so I had asked her, "Why do we have to move every single year, mom? Couldn't we actually just stay one place? You know, settle down like the rest of the world?"