Divorce

This is my testimony. This is my story.

Divorce. I scarcely knew the meaning of the word. I had heard of it, but I never thought I would have to deal with it. Divorce isn’t just a word; it’s a life style. A cruel reality. A reality I had to live through and keep living through. And it had all happened so fast. Too fast. My life was changed forever in a single moment. And it will never be the same. It can’t. And it all started with one adult’s selfish decision. . .

            “Tori, Tori! Hurry up, the bus is almost here,”

            “Coming!” I shouted and rushed down the carpeted stairs, at the bottom was Kirby, my Old English Bulldog. He was about a year old and a fighter. The neighbors were terrified of him. Not me. He was my closest friend. We understood each other. We were both outsiders. We were both feared in some way or another. Him for his physical strength and sheer size, me; it varied from person to person. And I thrived on it.

            I stepped over the gate propped up against one of the stairs, since our stairway was too wide for the plastic gate. Kirby jumped up to greet me, licking my hands and face, his little stub of a tail wagging fiercely.

            “Hey wrinkle face! Hey buddy, how’s my wrinkle face!” I cooed and teased him like a mother would her infant. He jumped up and tried to lick my face with his long, slobbery tongue.

            I stepped down the last four steps jogged over to the closet that had all his toys and bones and food and scooped two cups of dry dog food out of a huge teal, plastic container and into his silver dog dish and set it next to his water dish with Kirby following close behind. It was my job to take care of Kirby, filling his dog slobbered food dish with dry food pellets and supplying his drool ridden water bowl with tap water from the sink. And shovel his scat into a brown paper bag and dispose of it in our smelly plastic dumpster whenever the yard was littered with giant dog pies like a foreign country’s border packed with mines buried deep underground. The only real difference between the two was Kirby’s pies didn’t explode and they were above ground, unfortunately for me. And man, that dog could poop! I had to clean up his crap sometimes twice a week! And to make matters worse, they were the size of a baby cow’s pie, and the pooper scooper was broken. Just perfect.

            Out of the corner of my ear I hear a distinct engine. The bus is almost here. This is the last day till Christmas Break, so the classes should go fairly smoothly. Or so I thought.

            “Tori wait,” said my mom as I slung my dirty purple backpack over my shoulder. I turned my head at the sound of my name. We locked eyes for a moment. Something was wrong. I could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. I have always been good at picking up subtle clues and hints. It developed over the years of rarely being told directly about things.

            “Tori, this is your last day at Rockford,”

            My heart stopped. For a nanosecond it stopped. Why did she wait to tell me now? Just as the bus was pulling up?

            Speak of the devil, the sound of the distinct bus engine grew louder and louder until it stopped right outside our door. I could feel my world cracking and shaking. Then it shattered. My heart was broken. It was all so sudden. I had no time to think, to process, nothing.

            “Tori, you have to go,” said my mother. Her hazel eyes were watering.

            I stiffly ran out to the bus without saying goodbye. Tears threatened to stream down my warm face. Some had already escaped. I climbed onto the yellow bus, keeping my head down, so nobody could see the tears in my eyes. I didn’t trust or like or even know most of the people there, most of them probably felt the same way about me too. If they saw me cry they would only bombard me with questions, but it only took one to release a thousand tears to stream down my face like a waterfall. Not only that, in a public school, crying could be seen as a sign of weakness, and that was the last thing I needed. So I kept quiet and slumped into an empty bus seat. It was near my usual spot. I liked having a usual spot somewhere, though, it was nice to have an option, but I usually just sat near where I usually sat, regardless of whether I had an option or not. An empty seat on my bus in the morning was nothing short of a miracle.

            I stared out the rainy fogging window; it was a cloudy and gloomy looking winter morning. How suiting.

            The bus drove on through the route we regularly took each morning during the week, and me, trying to cherish every moment, but it’s hard to when your world is in the middle of a doomsday.

            We pulled up to the plaza just off of the route to the Rockford Middle School, the parade of kids and teens invaded the bus and crammed into semi-available seats. No one sat next to me, even though almost every seat around me has at least two to three people per seat. Sometimes people sit next to me, sometimes they don’t, which suits me just fine. Most people don’t really like to sit next to me. I don’t talk much, and the people on this bus need a lesson in shutting up. While they yap away about who knows what I’m reading a book with my headphones buried deep in my ears, trying to block out their words while my music blasts on full volume. I don’t know what it is, but people kind of shy away from me, the only thing that keeps me from being an outsider is my tattered and spread out group of friends. Everyone else has a tendency to keep away from me. I don’t know what it is, sometimes I think it’s because they think I’m stupid or weird, other times I think it’s because they’re scared of me, I do have a tendency to be a bit aggressive. But I know I have an influence on them, I found that out a while back when I was obsessed with drawing this star I had seen in a movie. I would draw it on the bus windows every time the windows were fogged up and pull out a book and read. After about a month or two, or was it three? I don’t know, I didn’t keep track, but one morning I started to notice that there was the exact same star I drew on almost every window of the bus. At first, I was angry at them for stealing my idea and my star, but I learned to ignore it, like I did to everything else I didn’t like. I didn’t have to do anything; no announcement, no speech, I didn’t even have to say anything or even get them too really like me, nothing! I just had to keep doing it over and over and over and over again until they started to do it too.

            And just like the day before, like almost every morning, there they were, the windows littered in cultic stars. I didn’t care. I just stared out the window, hoping for something to save me from reality. Anything.

            Before I knew it we were pulling up to the Rockford Middle School. The bus came to a halt and I slowly stood up, stiff from sitting in the same position for over a half an hour and from the grief. My face felt raw from the tears and I was sweaty, I always get sweaty when I cry.

            Instinctively, I pushed my way through the throng of people and made my way off the bus. I ran and thrust my way through the crowd of people and darted into the second- nearest bathroom. It would be a little while before I would have to go to class, our bus almost always came a little early, I had just enough time to do a little grieving and pull myself together to go to class, as long as I kept quiet for a while.

            I chose the second-nearest bathroom for its privacy; almost no one comes in here in the morning, or really anytime else for that matter, except maybe during class or on occasion in between classes, but almost never in the morning. Only me.

            I scurried into the handicap stall at the end of the two-stall bathroom, slammed the door behind me and locked it, slung my backpack onto the cold tile floor, and wept. I don’t know how I stood there in that stall, weeping as I sat back and watched my world collapse, engulfed in flames and being torn apart from two sides.

            I picked up my backpack and slung it over my shoulder; I had calmed down enough to go back out into the world, so long as I didn’t talk, so long as no one asked me anything.

            I sulked up to my forest green locker and spun in my combination and dumped my things into it and took out the things I needed for Language. I leaned against the wall outside the door to Language class, like I did every morning. Our language teacher always came after about an eighth of the class.

            “Hey, are you crying?” There it was. One of the questions that could send me weeping again. Hundreds of tears fought for freedom, and me, trying to fight them all off. I can’t. At least not for long. I scurried off towards the bathroom again with my notebooks and binder clutched tightly to my chest, and ducked back into the bathroom I had just come from. The one who asked the forbidden question was a boy with blonde hair, I was too grief stricken to remember what his name was. I didn’t care. I still had time before class started. I wouldn’t be missed. Then again, I could probably walk in during the middle of class and be OK. They don’t really enforce the rules as strictly as other places I’ve been to, which is why bullying is such a “problem” in our school. I personally didn’t think it was that big a problem, at least not for me, I’ve learned to be aggressive and my survival instincts have gotten as sharp as any poison dagger, fresh from the battlefield. I’ve learned to brush off people’s insults like leaves in the fall, to some people insults are merciless thorns, to others, like me, they’re nothing more than a leaf blowing in the wind that happened to land on my shoulder. They mean nothing. They only get in the way. The question hurt me more than any insult could. It was like being bitten by a poisonous viper, it was asking me how I felt, which in the life I had lived, was forbidden. No one ever asked how I felt. They weren’t allowed to. I was even told as a child not too, shut up when I told people how I felt. So now, whenever someone asks me how I feel, even if it feels like I had had a taste of hell, like someone stabbed me in heart and shattered it into millions of microscopic pieces, I put on a fake smile and say I’m fine. I don’t trust anyone with my emotions. They’re too precious.

            I stayed in the bathroom for a few precious, isolated minutes. And wept.

 

I later found out my parents were getting a divorce. That’s the reason why I was leaving Rockford. The reason I was being forced to leave Rockford. Being taken away against my will. They took me and my brother to a counselor, I can’t remember when exactly, maybe after school, I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember. I don’t care. They took us into the counselor’s office to break the news to us. I wept. My brother just asked naïve questions. He didn’t shed a single tear. He didn’t understand. But I did. And it hurt. They didn’t tell me why it all happened until much, much later. And even that information is small and patchy and only tells about one point of view. A twisted point of view. An opinion. And I know they aren’t telling me the whole story. The whole truth. Actually, I’m not even sure if they’re telling the truth. I’m constantly hearing two stories. One of them isn’t true. I know it. And I want to know which one is the liar and with one is telling the truth. The Dark Chronicles are being written, and there is still more to be written. The story is incomplete. I fear it always will be. Until my final breath.  Darkness is rising. And I’m scared if nothing is done to stop it, it will consume us all. Until my final breath. Until my final breath. Until He comes…

Drip, Drip, Drip.

Feel the pain flow

And the darkness rise.

Author's Note

This is a very real part of my past. Don't dis it.

Reviews

[She With Eyes Like Unsh..]

Aww. This story is really sad, I'm really sorry this had to happen to you.