The Vanishing Act

Everyone has wanted to disappear at one time or another.

A young girl glared angrily into the shadows, her knees hugged to her chest. There were no windows-- only tall walls, stretching up until they hit a gray ceiling. This room, this prison cell, this virtual hellhole is love. Yes, love is nothing but a trap. The person one falls for is a lure, dragging you to certain doom.

Snap.

I raised my pencil from the smudged piece of notebook paper, looking irritably at the pencil in my hand-- sharpened only a minute ago, the pencil's point had snapped. Dammit. Looking cross, as I had the tendency to do, I got up from my nice seat by the window, jabbed my pencil into the electric pencil sharpener, and waited.

That's what a secret love was. Waiting.

I thought a lot about love lately, for no reason whatsoever. Okay, maybe there was a reason. Not that you need to know. What do you know, anyways? How do I know you're even there? And if you really are there, I have a question for you: if you want to bad enough, can you disappear?

Waiting for love to come along and tap you on the shoulder is like that. You just get so sick of waiting, that you want to disappear. Sitting there, next to the person you think you love, and not having the nerve nor desire to let them know that you don't really hate them. That you really, really don't hate them. Even if you say you do.

Well, that's what it was like for me. It's almost July, and we still hate each other. Not that I care. Okay, maybe I do. But do you even know what it's like? I doubt it. You hate the person you think you kinda like. I just wish it'd end.... How do you turn off love? Is there a switch, that you can just walk over to and flick off?

I want to disappear whenever he's in the same room. It's so stupid, the way we can't talk in a civil way. It's always either teasing or shouting or swearing. I swear, we could be standing on either ends of the room and be doing this. But no, our seats just have to be placed next to each other's.

I can do this. I can handle anything.

No. I can't.

It's be nice if I could just disappear, because then, maybe I could stop thinking, and just love. Like the big authors always write about.

A/N: Fin'.