The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1)

by Amber Smith

you and got lodged in your gut somehow. No, can’t cry. Because there’s nothing to cry about. Because it was just a dream, a bad dream—a nightmare. Not real. Not real. Not real. That’s what I keep thinking: NotRealNotRealNotReal. Repeat, repeat,

It’s the first day back from winter break. And I’m trying so hard to just go back to my life.

I shrug. I try to stay close to the wall as we walk. Lately it feels like my skin, just like my mind, has been turned inside out. Like I’m raw and exposed, and it almost hurts to even be brushed up against. I hug my clarinet case to my chest to make myself smaller, to be my armor.

Only, I can’t answer her, either, because the gory scene of this basketball player’s death is reeling through my mind, and it is truly terrifying. Because I’m not supposed to be capable of thoughts like that, I’m not built that way. But I feel it tingling in my bones and skin and blood—something barbaric, something animal.

“Are you really okay?” I nod, even though I’m not sure if I am—if I ever will be.

I smile again, letting the chemicals go to my head, and imagine what I could be, all the things I could do.

Why do I feel like, sometimes, I have no one in the entire world who knows me in even the slightest, most insignificant way?

All you have to do is act like you’re normal and okay, and people start treating you that way.

My heart feels like a bird trapped in a cage in my chest. Its wings flapping violently against the bars of bone.

My body is a torture chamber. It’s a fucking crime scene. Hideous things have happened here, it’s nothing to talk about, nothing to comment on, not out loud. Not ever. I won’t hear it. I can’t.

He’s just a boy. And I’m just a girl, a girl who needs to pick up her own pieces and put them back together herself.

“Okay. Friends.” He grins and knocks his shoulder into mine. “Friends.” I smile. I have a friend.

“He came into my room. It was 2:48—I looked at the clock—by 2:53 it was over,”