The soft rain batters on the soaked roof, making a steady tapping sound which rhythm nor tempo ever falters. The sound lulls me to sleep as I lie beneath the covers of my bed. I picture the rain drops falling against my walls, streaking the paint in jagged vertical lines. Thunder rumbles overhead and I think of a great earthquake, splitting up into a great dark abyss with no end and if you were to fall in you would only keep falling through space past immense planets and millions of stars. Lightning flashes and lights up my room in a blindingly white glow. The wind whistles and I imagine a cloud blowing a breeze that screams eerily as it rips at the leaves on trees and scrapes against the wet pavement.
I pray that tomorrow will be a day with better weather. I want to feel the warm sun on my face, but not too hot or I will burn. I burn too easily for my skin was the color of fresh milk. And my ribs stuck out too far so it always looked like I was sucking in. People call me “skinny ribs” and “Milky Way” in school and my grades were plummeting drastically.
And there was the constant pressure of smoking at the back of my mind. Everyone calls me a coward because I’ve never tried it but I know I’ll never be able to stop if I do. All through my life people have said, “Don’t do drugs. You’ll regret it.” I know this. In sixth grade, we spent four months on the topic of drugs because there were people bringing marijuana into the school and showing it off at lunch. Not of course sixth graders but high school students guaranteed a bargain for them instead and I knew that some of them were definitely tempted.
That’s the difference between me and regular kids. I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t stupid enough to try drugs for popularity, whereas I could probably count up fifty people I knew that wouldn’t hesitate at all. That was why I got picked on. People said that I would have more success in life if I got hit by a bus because if I got any smarter, my brain would burst out of my head. People spread rumors that I was actually a robot that was being controlled by aliens in outer space and that if they could break my head open, they would find the chip that would lead them to the alien’s aircraft. The consequence of that rumor was three consecutive concussions. I can still remember me lying in the dirt, pleading for them to stop, but they just kept pounding on my brain.
I can remember the shouts of “Harder! Harder!” and “Her head’s not cracked open yet!”
The drug program we looked at had several pictures of teenagers that had taken various drugs. They showed one photo of a eighteen-year-old girl that had taken crystal meth since she was thirteen and the statistics showed that she had the brain of a fifty-five-year old woman. Because that’s what drugs do. They eat away at your brain until there’s nothing left.
Then maybe the bullies would be satisfied, because the “alien chip” in my brain wouldn’t be there and I couldn’t possibly get any smarter if my brain was nothing but chemicals, right?