Fear. Misery. But most of all, frustration.

These were the three words Sarah would have chosen, if anyone had asked her to sum up her feelings right now.

She was officially finishing high school in the next few days, the date of her graduation - a month away and counting - bearing down on her like an oncoming express train. It seemed like everyone around her was thinking only of the future; the next day there would be celebrations. Celebrations for the end of school. Celebrations that, to her, were as joyous as a funeral ceremony. None of them were stopping to think, even for an instant; it was bang, I go to school, bang I graduate, bang I go to college. One after the other like a set of dominoes knocking over each other in a sequence. Leaving no room for emotions, no room to remember the past; only looking to the future, perhaps wishing it to come too soon. What happened when there was nothing left to look forward to?

"Where's Sarah going to college? What's she going to study?" seemed to be the first questions her mother's friends always asked. Sarah hated those questions; she considered them undue pressure when it was all anyone ever wanted to know. And she knew her mother hated not being able to give a straight answer.

On the one hand, she could sympathize with the woman; after all, putting her through school - a private school at that - as a single mother, on an unstable salary, uncertain of where the next school payment would come from, must have been difficult. And now, seeing that same daguther so indecisive, so negative about her future, she could appreciate her frustration. Not only appreciate it, but share it; she would have loved nothing more that to be able to give her the answers she wanted, to get the same divine intervention all her classmates sememed to have gotten that made this and everything else so effortless: they all had loads of friends, they all got good grades, apparently (if the stories were true) without effort, and almost all had their driving licenses while she was still messing around with the local bus system.

But, something even her mother didn't do, was stop to consider her feelings. Forget that there was such a thing as college, if only for a moment, and think: how is she handling the idea of finishing school, leaving the only school she had ever known for the last thirteen years? If she had stopped to ask, her answer would have been 'terrified and miserable.'

The worst part was that there was no one to voice her real feelings to and so, she walked around in a numbed state, enforcing her automatic way of dealing with what she didn't like; pretend it wasn't happening. And it was helping, for now. But how long would it last?

The graduates she and her friends had always laughed at when they had watched them at closing cermonies - 'why are they crying? They're leaving,' they had said - now made perfect sense to her. But even they had had something Sarah didn't: fellow sufferers. People, friends, classmates they could share it with.

Although Sarah couldn't be considered the most unpopular, her best friends - in fact all her friends - where in other, lower years and would consider her crazy. The handful of friends in her own class wouldn't understand either, and she felt so inferior to them when they talked there was no way she could tell them. If it ever did come up, she knew she would end up turning it into a joke, to seem as 'cool' as them.

For now, all she could do was wait for the end. Her happy ending. Where would she be this time next year?