My Con(dolences)/(fessions)

Everyone says I’m a good kid, which is the polite way of saying I get good grades and only come to the office if I volunteer to make photocopies. It’s the polite way of saying I’m a borderline invisible person who hides away somewhere secrete during lunch and does homework.

They appreciate it, the teachers and principle, the disciplinarians who don’t know my name, couldn’t find me in a crowd. They appreciate me because they don’t know me, and they don’t know me because I’m a good kid.

I do hide away at lunch, but they turn the other way in regards to that. I have recorded medical issues, I need quiet, a certain eccentricity is to be expected in someone as smart as me. They have their excuses. And they trust me not to steal or break things, not to write on the stalls.

It’s sort of dumb, really. The trust on now basis except that I haven’t done anything before.

After all, how do they know? How do they known anything at all?

“Because we know you.”

Do they? Does anyone? Do I?

I don’t believe them anymore. They claim to know me on the basis that they don’t. Scars and sharp teeth. The way I cry in the bathroom. They way I sit and sit.

Who does?

Don’t blame them, why should I?

No one thought he would set the fire. Not even him. It just happened, went wrong. Spark. Flame. Smoke.

Granted, I’m not setting fires in the bathroom. I’m standing in the bathroom, penciling replies to the I-hate-myself, the I’m-so-sorry, the I-want-to-disappear.

Don’t. Don’t hate yourself.

It’s okay.

They’ll erase my replies, I’m only pencil. Forgotten, invisible. They’ll erase the comfort, the hope, the efforts to reach these girls that open in the stalls.

But they’ll never expect me.

I’m a good kid, they say.

Please. What do they know of me.

Gray-scale borderlines. As if it was that easy.