Headphones

She hides…

… underneath the hood of her baggy sweatshirt.

… behind dark lipstick and thick eyeliner.

… between all the noisy people in the crowd.

Her headphones block out the noise of other people, her lips silently trace the music throbbing in her ears. She shuts her eye, they disappear. You scream at her, but you don't exist, so she doesn't answer you. She doesn't even hear your frustrated requests.

All she hears is the screaming of her music, and that is faint, covered by the wail of her thoughts. The pain in her mind does not seep into her facial expressions. The fear does not fill her eyes.

She has trained her body not to care about what her mind does. Outwardly she is set into an expressionless mold, her face a mask to hide the countless emotions she feels. Most of them variations on sad and angry, all of them deep daggers plunged into her barely-beating heart. None of these feelings are good, all of them part of the rut she is stuck in, the circle she walks around in: day to day, week to week, month to month. All of the calendar days are smeared together.

The teachers worry, the other students wonder, all of them waiting for something drastic.

None of the can see… so she tries to make them see.

Standing on the orange plastic chair, she screams. "I AM PERFECTLY SECURE IN MY INSECURITY."

Then she puts on her headphones back in and pulls her hood back over her dark hair. She closes her eyes and lets all the others slip away.