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Chapter 2

I walked back to the car, looking at her through the window. Liz pointed at her cheek, and I reluctantly opened the door. I kissed her cheek quickly and rushed out of the car.

"I love you!" Liz exclaimed with a smile.

"I know," I muttered. I always said that to her. It was better than saying 'I love you' back to her. It's hard to say "I love you," when I don't. It's the one lie I can never bring myself to tell, and I lie a lot.

I walked down the street and onto school property, making my way all the way down to the main entrance rather than the east entrance, which I just so happened to be walking past. I didn't like going through the east entrance. The vice principal held watch at the east entrance, and the vice principal scared the shit out of me. Therefore, I always ducked my head down every time I walked past the east entrance and towards the main entrance, hoping that he wouldn't look at me. He probably wouldn't have noticed me, anyway. There were five thousand students at this school, after all.

I walked through the main entrance, putting my headphones on immediately. I pulled out my iPhone, trying to choose a song to play. I always wanted to play a song by a different band every day. Yesterday, it was Foo Fighters. The day before that, Kings of Leon. Today, I felt like listening to Pierce the Veil. I didn't even know it, but I was already playing Caraphernelia at a really loud volume. I wouldn't be able to hear someone if they tried to talk to me. Hopefully, nobody would even try to.

I stood by the main hall as I waited for the gates to open. I never knew why the gates to the hall were always closed. They closed them in the morning, during nutrition, lunch, and 15 minutes after school ended. It wasn't like students would steal anything from the hall. All that was inside were lockers and classrooms. Then again, there was an incident two years ago, in sophomore year, in which someone sneaked in a sulfur bomb when nutrition started. When the opened the gates, foolish freshmen didn't think stepping on an inflated Ziploc bag would do any harm. I remember my elective was doing a fetal pig dissection that day. The hall smelled even more foul than usual.

Once the warning bell rang for us to go to homeroom, I quickly made my way inside. There was a rule saying that you should put all your electronics away once it's 7:51—that's when the warning bell rang. I kept my headphones on anyway, and strangely enough, no one's ever stopped me. I've walked by staff so many times after the bell rang, but no one has told me to put my headphones away. The staff was weird like that. Perhaps it was because they had more troublesome kids to worry about. I don't blame them. If there were kids getting in trouble all the time, and practically breaking the law, why would they waste their time telling some reject to take off their headphones?

They wouldn't.

I walked into French class like I did every other day. I greeted my teacher, Mrs. Smith, I walked to the very back of the classroom, and I sat in my chair like I did every morning. It was very repetitive. I sat with my back slumped over, looking down at my phone as I scrolled through my Tumblr dashboard. Mrs. Smith didn't mind us using our phones in French. She said, and I quote, "If you get caught using them by another staff member, it's your fault, not mine." No one ever came to our class anyway, excluding the rare visits from Mrs. Aguilar, our coordinator, but we were always prepared for those.

Deciding that Tumblr was too slow and nothing would load anytime soon, I went on Instagram. I looked through my newsfeed, seeing that some band members posted some selfies and whatnot, and I decided to post a picture of my own. It took me a while to come up with a caption, but I managed.

@merrickmania: please save me from a dumpster (aka school ew) :-(

Soon later, I got a comment.