Here is a random excerpt from a book I am writing. I don't know, I guess I felt like sharing.
I am not like most teenagers. Most teenagers go out on Friday nights with their classmates and drink milkshakes, see the latest movie, have make-out sessions and down shots of vodka. I stay in my room on Friday nights. I stay inside my ten by twelve foot bedroom every night and read a book. My favorite is Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, which is a gripping tale about a Russian man in poverty wrenched with guilt over his murder of an elderly woman. The novel is intense, educational, and tragic. I first read the foreign piece of literature in my ninth grade English class. I remember being the only student who liked it, and I think that might be because I was the only person who understood it. Now, as I read it again for a third time, it frightens me. It frightens me because I can relate to this man, this murderer – Raskolnikov. He spends his days entirely consumed by the fear that the police, the random man on the street, and just about everyone else in the novel will figure him out and learn what he has done. People already know what I’ve done, but not here. Here, I am the new girl, the new girl who moved in with her distant father and likes to sit by herself. Just like old times.
I’ve always liked to collect butterflies because they’re beautiful and ugly at the same time. They have exquisite wings, but the tiny body pressed between those wings is a reminder of the ugly caterpillar they once were. Butterflies evolve. Even the ugliest caterpillars become butterflies, but they don’t forget what they used to be. Did you know that the reason butterflies are attracted to humans is because of the salt on our skin? Or that the spots on a butterfly’s wing are to confuse a predator from knowing where its sensitive head is? Butterflies look like delicate creatures and they are, but they can also take care of themselves.
For a short while, I tried very hard to fit in. I gave up mentioning my butterfly collection, the indi bands I am drawn to, or the latest biography I consumed. It was difficult at first because the cliques in school had already been formed, and I had been sorted into mine: The loner. Yes, Becky Harmon wasn’t quite smart enough to cheat off of and not nearly cool enough to party with. I didn’t fit anywhere, so my peers created a category for me. I’m pretty, which confuses people. What’s confused them even more is that my older sister Taylor is an active member of the drill team, makes time for charity, and is beloved by just about everyone in my old High School. Did I mention that she also participates on the Mock Jury team? She would like to become a lawyer and go to school at Princeton. She was accepted, and if she wasn’t the type of person who had to take about everything with her on a trip, then Taylor would surely already have her bags packed for college.
Then there’s me, the black sheep of the family. Supposedly, it’s normal to have a black sheep somewhere in the family line; the one person that relatives try not to mention or look at too much. Certain topics are avoided if they involve the black sheep and if they are discussed, heads shake in disapproving unison. Before I moved in with my dad, before I had to start all over at school and become the loner again after experiencing my brief encounter with popularity, I was the oddball, but I wasn’t the black sheep. Now I am undoubtedly, most certainly, and positively the black sheep. I am the poison that seeps in unknowingly into a family party by the slip of the tongue and sucks all the fun out of it. With my name comes the fresh memory of a terrible tragedy. No one in my family knows what they are supposed to say or feel about me, and so they fall into heavy silence. It’s okay, I suppose. At least now I make an impression. I just wish the reason for it was different.
I used to think I knew what empty felt like, but I had merely tasted it. I don’t care if I’m hated – I deserve it. I don’t even care if one day I am left without a single person in my life and no home to sleep in. I care about the blood on my hands. I care about the people that I’ve hurt. I care about Ellie, even if no one believes it. When I care too much, it looks like I don’t care at all. It might be better that way; it might be easier for them to hate me if I am unremorseful, so I put on a strong face and bear it. Because I deserve it. Instead of pressing my face against my pillow and crying into its feathers, instead of running up the stairs and hugging my dad, instead of taking the bus to the graveyard so I can lay flowers on my sister’s grave when no one is looking, I flip another page of my book. I read about Rodion and his terrible adventure, and I lose myself in it.
I pretend I am Rodion, because I’d rather be him. After all, he killed a mean old woman that he didn’t really know, and I killed a person I love.
Copyright KJ Heier, 2011.
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