Belong

Was there even meaning to anything? she thought as she laid in her bed, the moonlight streaming through her window. This had become a common reoccurrence, and as she looked over to see the familiar numbers 3:26 on her alarm clock, she allowed the tears to silently roll down her cheeks. Would she ever be okay? She desperately wanted to be; she just didn’t know if that was enough. Staring at her glow in the dark stars, she wished she could be outside watching the real ones. At least they had a fixed purpose, a fixed place where they belong.

“Lacy!” She felt the force of the door hitting the wall. “We do not pay the amount of a car each year for your education,” she watched as her mom opened the blinds, “just for you to sleep in until whenever you feel like getting up.” She hadn’t exactly been sleeping, but how does someone explain that to the person who gave them life? Well, a life anyway, Lacy thought as she looked at the clock again. 7:46. The first bell rang at 8:10. Immediately a heatwave washed over her body as her brain began functioning. Resisting the strong force of gravity that seemed to be radiating from her bed, she pulled on her uniform and studied herself in the mirror. She took a deep breath. Her mascara looked crusty and old, but then again, it was crusty and old. The bags under her eyes seemed more prominent today, displaying signs of bluish-purple, a new color combination she hadn’t seen before.

“Lacy, come on!” her mom shrieked at her from downstairs. “You always look like a slob anyways. There’s no point in trying to fix that now.” Lacy ran down the stairs pausing to see if there was anything she could eat for breakfast. Her stomach was speaking to her, begging her to give it something. What she really craved was an orange. A sweet, juicy orange she could consume all by herself. “If you didn’t pack food yesterday, you don’t have time right now. You need to think these things through Lacy,” her mom said, clearly exasperated even though she didn’t have anywhere to go after she dropped Lacy off.

“Okay, I’m coming.” Lacy held her arms over her aching chest, taking yet another deep, shaky breath. She hadn’t had the motivation to make a lunch the night before... she could spend money at the vending machine, or she could just not eat... again...

Somehow, she arrived at school, making sure to hand her teacher, Mr. Brenner, her tardy slip before she slid into her chair. “Late again, Miss Parker,” he said with a slight smile. A few of her classmates giggled: Lacy being late to class had become somewhat of a class joke, drawing attention away from the real reasons she was late— just the way she liked it. A couple of the guys in the back fist-bumped her as she walked past them. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders as she opened her laptop to start her day. Lacy knew people liked her; she never doubted that. She simply didn’t know why they liked her. She didn’t exactly have a niche, something she excelled at that set her apart. She noticed the gym bags at the desks around her that people had failed to put in the locker room before class, and she noticed her lack of one. Sports just aren’t your thing, and that’s okay. She took a deep breath. The heaviness she felt in her chest had recently felt as though it had spread into her back. Was that physically possible? She looked up her symptoms: lung cancer. She closed her computer and tried to focus on class, only to be tapped on the shoulder.

“What did you get on the test?” her best friend Emma whispered across the space between their desks. Lacy had failed to remember to check, and yet, she remembered everything. She shrugged her shoulders,

“You?” Emma’s mouth twisted into a tight line, but Lacy knew what was coming next,

“A 92. My parents are going to kill me.”

Parents, what an interesting concept. They were people too, yet they didn’t understand failure. They didn’t use their past experiences of pressure, hurt, and guilt to better empathize with their children, they just took what they knew and used it to shape how they thought their children should be. They cared about what everyone else thought just as much as their offspring did, yet they were reflecting this unresolved insecurity onto another living, breathing, human being. Just like her mom didn’t understand why she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning; she had never experienced that particular kind of pain, so she couldn’t empathize with it.

Lacy opened her laptop and saw her grade had dropped from a 90 to a 76. She didn’t know why the school put their grades right there on the front of the portal page so that as soon as you open the webpage everyone within eyeshot can see how much you studied for the chemistry test the night before. The chemistry test that Lacy knew everyone would forget about in less than six months time, but would all go home to discuss study strategies with their parents or slam their doors shouting that they tried their best. Lacy dimmed the brightness of her computer screen, hoping no one saw what her grade had dropped to. Not that she cared, she reminded herself. What other people thought didn’t matter. She didn’t click into the class page to see what her specific grade was; she had stopped wanting to know the second she saw her grade drop. She knew it didn’t matter long term, but it would still add tightness to her chest-back combination of pain that she knew she didn’t want, or at least, didn’t need.

By the time lunch rolled around, Lacy had decided she would escape into her chemistry teacher’s room. She had him for fourth period anyways. He didn’t let people eat in there, but she didn’t have any food. She just wanted the quiet to sit and escape into her novel. She pushed through the sea of people, keeping her head low so none of her friends would meet her eyes and ask her to sit with them in the cafeteria. Finally, she smelled the rubber of the lab tables and the faint smell of lingering chemicals in the air. She took a deep breath and took a seat in her usual spot at table two, a round table towards the middle of the classroom.

“How’s the mind today, Lacy? Still running down the endless road?” Mr. P had noticed something was off with Lacy one random Tuesday in October. She had been in his room with her friends during their study hall period, laughing and chewing gum, even though they knew they weren’t supposed to be, when he beckoned her over to him. She spit her gum in the trashcan before she got to him, assuming that was what his comment was going to be about. Instead, he sat her down and drew a picture of a cart rolling down a hill on the white board. He explained that the cart’s purpose was to roll uphill, to reach the place it came from and belonged to, but it had been carrying too much weight. He asked Lacy what the solution to the problem was and she rolled her eyes, smiling, and told him to take the heavy boxes off the cart so that it could continue rolling upward, as though that solution was obvious. He asked her if someone could take 1000 pounds of boxes off a cart at one time, or if it would be easier to take off the boxes in 20-pound loads. She told him that taking the boxes off one by one would be the easiest. “Exactly.” He had said, ending the conversation. But Lacy never stopped thinking about this cart.

Even as she sat in Mr. P’s room, wasting her lunch period just to get through the day, she still thought about the cart.

“Got anything to eat?” Mr. P took the stool right next to Lacy.

“I thought you didn’t allow food in here.” Lacy tucked her hair behind her ears. She didn’t need someone else’s grandfather to be more concerned with her than he already was, however perplexing this care may be. 

“Not in here, but the school definitely allows you to eat pretty much anywhere else in this enormous building.” Lacy wanted to end the conversation and return back to her book.

“Well, I prefer to be in here anyhow.”

“Now that’s a curious thing. Why, of all places, do you love being in the chemistry room? It’s not as though you’re called to chemistry as a future career path.” He chuckled and passed her a wink.

“I could be.” Lacy shrugged her shoulders, yet she couldn’t help but grin.

“I just feel some sense of... belonging here. I don’t know really.” Mr. P walked back over to his chair behind his desk and opened a drawer, pulling out two bags of Lays dill-pickle potato chips and an orange. He walked back over to her and set them on the table in front of her. She stared at them, fighting back tears and feeling the pang of hunger in the pit of her stomach. She had mentioned to him one other time her favorite chips were dill-pickle flavored, and she recounted telling him about the time she devoured the entire bowl of cut orange slices in her European history class.

“It’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got.” He said this as though he didn’t have these particular items just for her. He opened his bag of chips, smiling. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” Lacy picked up the orange and began to peel it, quickly remembering she hated the way orange peel made her fingers feel. Her chest felt tight again, but she told herself she could just wash her hands afterwards— it was no big deal. As she bit into one of the slices, she realized she could probably eat hundreds and hundreds of oranges and dill-pickle potato chips in this very room. She wished she had a whole cart of oranges at her disposal. A cart of oranges that rolled upward. “And Lacy,” Mr. P added. “You are welcome to sit in here whenever, taking off one load at a time.” Lacy took a deep breath and felt her chest slowly start to unravel, like an orange peel falling off an orange.