What do you do when all your hope as slipped away? When all you are is an empty shell of a maybe girl-child? When you can't feel anything and you don't know what to do about it? And you don't really care.

I sit in one of the hard plastic chairs in the food court on a Saturday afternoon. I sit at a corner table in the shadows of the slight protruding corner of the ceiling, an overhang. Nobody stops to look at me. No one can see me. I am the Invisible girl, I am the Nothing girl. I am the same as millions of other girls who are sitting in food courts around the world at the corner table by themselves eating Chinese food with chopsticks while everyone else uses forks. No one notices. Their eyes will slide past me. They can't make eye contact while I have my black bug eye sunglasses on. Impenetrable darkness. The only thing that makes humans try to connect to each other is eye contact. If they can't see my eyes I'm as good as not here.

No one notices the girl in the bug eye glasses with the fake leather bomber jacket (because her mom refuses to buy her a real leather bomber jacket) in jeans that are frayed on the bottom from being stepped on wearing a purple and black faerie shirt. They don't notice the girl with shoulder length tangled, curly brown hair. They wouldn't try to guess what she used to have a two inch crew cut. They wouldn't guess that even before that, she thought pink was the best color in the world and you never would have been able to tell her apart from all of your daughters' friends.

That girl is me.

I'm used to being overlooked, ignored. It's become a part of my daily routine and I rely on it now. If a stranger tries to stop me and ask me for the time, I answer in a mixture of Spanish, French, and Korean with many hand motions and head shakes. Since most of what I know in other languages is swears its a good thing no one tells them what I'm saying. I don't know how to react when people pay me attention. I usually end up being a bumbling stuttering idiot.

I look at all the teenagers milling around with their friends, the sad seventh graders who trail five feet behind their mothers because its embarrassing the be at the mall with your parents. I look at the groups of teenagers. I go to school with most of them. I wonder what would happen if I just got up and joined them. I know what would happen. All conversation would stop. Then they'd push past me. I don't belong. I never have. I've always known that I am on the outside, that I don't connect with these people. That is a social boundary that is clearly set up and I refuse to cross it.

Since seventh graders have such a hard time being at the mall with their mothers, my torment is understandable. My mother will not let me be at the mall by myself. So I sit and wait for her to finish her shopping. She sees shopping as some sort of required mother bonding time while I see it as the most grotesque form of torture. Shopping is the most pointless thing I have ever been subjected to. Another tally mark against me as to why I am not a “good normal” girl.

I look at myself in the mirror, my hazel eyes staring back at me. They look huge in the mirror, like they're taking up my whole face. My face looks as though nothing belongs. I want it off, I want all of these things off my face. I feel a sick panic whelm up inside of me. I don't know what to do. I want to be able to see me, see the rot thats hiding under my skin, like the rotten meat inside the bark of a log thats been sitting in the woods for years. How come whenever I look into the mirror I can't see whats really there? This is why no one knows me, because they can't see me. I'm trapped in someone else's skin, some well adjusted girl who never had any problems in her life. I need to make people see me, but how do I make them see me when I can't even see myself? I look at my eyes. I remember people telling me that I had dancing eyes. Like what, my eyes were just dancing in my head or something like those raisins off of the California raisin commercial? Supposedly eyes are the window to the soul. Is that why people can't see me? Because I have no soul? I'm the devil's reject, even the devil doesn't want me. I'm the Nothing Girl. I belong to no one because I have nothing left to give anyone. People only want you when they can have you.

The mirror lies to me. The only this wrong with this normal girl is that her eyes look sad, terribly sad, like she'll never again be happy. Whats wrong with her? Why is she sad? I feel the anger start to turn in my stomach and tighten my throat, like someone's wrapped their hands around my throat and are strangling me. I want to scream at this Image Girl, this Normal Girl. You have no right to be sad, no reason! Theres nothing wrong with you! I want to strangle her until she sees what I see, until she understands me. Am I speaking a fucking foreign language? Understand me! She just looks back at me with her big, sad hazel eyes.

I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do. And That is all I know.

I can't stand this. My thoughts build up a red haze of fury in my mind and I want to scream, to do something. I want this girl to stop being so damn sad. I want...I don't know what I want.

My hand whips out and slams into the mirror. It feels like my knuckles crunch, or maybe it was the glass. The glass cuts into my fingers and the blood stays on the mirror as I stumble over to my bed cradling my hand. The blood left on the mirror made it look like it was coming out of the Sad Girl's mouth. Good. Now she has something to be sad about.