They wanted me to make friends. To go out, to live what they thought was a normal life for a young adult in the twenty-first century. Eh, they had Michelle for that—my younger sister by two years. Eighteen and anything but innocent; this semester might be her first in college, but she had stepped foot on college campuses a lot earlier than now. She was doing some online school, but in a year or so, she’d be moving out and going to a college that was a few hours away. When that happened…I had no idea what I’d do. She took my parents’ attention off me, so once she was gone, Mom and Dad would have nothing better to do than worry about me.
I picked a baggy sweatshirt, along with a pair of torn jeans. I slid my Vans on, a simple black pair, and stopped before the mirror resting on my dresser. I didn’t wash my hair yesterday, so it was a bit greasy. I hated showering, honestly, just like I hated making the bed. It’s why I hardly ever did it. There was no point.
I did, however, decide to grab a beanie hat off the floor and pull it over my head, hiding the worst of the grease. Having thin hair was a drag, definitely. I could thank my dad for that. Luckily, with bright pink hair, everyone always noticed the color and not the grease. Unless those people were my parents, in which case they always brought it up.
When’s the last time you showered? None of your goddamn business, okay?
My backpack, my old, worn bag from high school, sat near the door to my bedroom, and I picked it up silently, leaving my room. The moment I stepped into the hall, my nose picked up the scent of bacon. It smelled good, of course, but that wasn’t going to make me stop and want to have it with my dad, who was surely the cook downstairs.
Michelle’s door was still closed across from me in the hall, and I wondered what time she got in last night. She’d been dating this kid from our high school for over a year now; she and Kyle were still somehow in the honeymoon phase, where they wanted to spend every waking moment together.
Good for them, I guessed. I’d never known what that felt like, and I doubted I ever would.
Heaving a silent sigh, I headed down the stairs. Indeed, I was right: my dad stood before the stove, a plate of fresh bacon beside him. He’d just cracked two eggs over the pan, cooking them in the way we all liked in this family—over easy, the best kind for dipping. Sunnyside up wasn’t cooked nearly enough for my taste.
“Morning, Bree,” my dad chimed in, tossing a smile over his shoulder. Mom was still upstairs; I’d heard her in the shower as I came down. “Want eggs before you go?” He worked at a local dentist’s office; today he didn’t have to go in until the afternoon. His thinning brown hair gave way to a shiny scalp up top, though his facial hair showed no signs of thinning. My dad looked like literally every other dad in America, nothing super impressive or imposing about him.
I liked him, as much as you could ever really like your parent. I liked Mom too, I guess. They were both decent people. I felt bad they wound up with me as a daughter. No one deserved me.
“No,” I said, heading straight for the door. “Thanks.”
I grabbed the keys off the rack near the door. With my hand on the knob, I was about to walk out, but my dad called out, “Have a good day at class. Make some friends.” A desperate plea from a father to his daughter. Make some friends. Like it was just that easy, like I could snap my fingers and have a whole horde of friends appear at my back.
Maybe if I’d gone to the colleges my old friends from high school had gone to, but honestly…I didn’t see the point. Getting all that student loan debt when a local college was just as good, at least for the more generic classes.
Granted, I was going into my third year at the local college, whereas most students only spent two years at places like that, but still. My case was clearly not the norm.
I gave him a smile—a fake smile that made my heart hurt inside, but a smile nonetheless my dad believed—and then I walked out. It was truly amazing what a smile could do. A reassurance that I would try my best to make friends…and, of course, fail spectacularly because I didn’t care enough to try. Why make friends when they’d just disappear down the road anyway? Mom and Dad didn’t have friends. They had me and Michelle, and their jobs. That was literally it.
The smile instantly fell off my face as I headed to my car. Was I that good at giving fake smiles? I supposed I did have a few years of practice now. I had no clue when the smiles morphed from being real to being forced, but it was sometime in high school. I knew the change wasn’t overnight, but sometimes I tried to look back and pinpoint the exact day I realized everything was pointless in the end.
Obviously, I couldn’t find the day.
Mom and Dad said I would get over it. It was just me being a mopey teenager. Maybe they were right. Maybe, in a few years, I’d look back on how I acted now and laugh—genuinely laugh at my antics and
