Star Bright

(Well, here's a new idea that I had. Not much to be said about it at this point. Hope you enjoy it.)

The heavy drone of hundreds of voices rang throughout the crowded hallways, signaling yet another dreary morning of high school life. Cathleen quietly skirted along the edges of the halls, doing her best to remain oblivious to all around her. Her best was next to impossible, and she knew it, but she still had to try. Occasional snide remarks were hurled her way, with very few making any attempt to hide the fact that they were the ones who had said it. She kept her face a blank page and looked straight ahead as she walked on. Ignoring others was a routine she had long since grown accustomed to. It helped, a little. Without so much as a sound uttered from her, she braved the gauntlet of verbal abuse to her locker. She was grateful for the one she had been assigned. It was at the extreme end of the science hall of the school. Very few students ever wanted to be in that hall unless they had to. Which was why she noticed that something was slightly off that morning. There were just a few too many others lounging around than normal, and it sent a wave of unease through her. Keeping her eyes focused on the floor, she walked over to her locker and quickly went through the combination to get it open so she could get the books she needed for her morning classes. When she swung it open, Cathleen instantly discovered why so many people were in the science hall that morning. Stacked on top of her books in the center of her locker was a multitude of tanning and hair dye products. Dangling from several threads of yarn were various little bottles of various colors that had been labeled ‘natural eyes’ in really crappy handwriting. Shock spread through her and she felt her throat tighten. Someone had broken into her locker, and had played a sick prank on her.

All around Cathleen, she could hear people laughing at her. They asked all sorts of rude and offensive questions to her. She overheard one girl was so cruel that she asked if Cathleen had taken her daily bath of bleach. Feeling her face grow hot with shame and embarrassment, Cathleen slammed her locker shut and rushed out of the hallway as fast as she could. The laughs of the other students from behind her hounded her as she ran away. Cathleen had always been good at hiding her feelings, but today it was just too much. She raced into the nearest bathroom she could find, picked the stall that was furthest away from the door, and locked herself inside. Safely secured in her private world, Cathleen buried her face in her hands and began to cry. She hated being treated so badly by everyone else. She hated how they singled her out for torment every day. But more than anything, Cathleen hated herself and how she looked. After a few minutes of shedding some very painful tears, she sat up and wiped her eyes. After she had done that, she looked sadly down at her arms.

The paleness of her skin was revolting to her. It was skin that made her look like she was dead, so white that she could put it next to a blank piece of paper and no one could tell the difference. She had wondered several times if she was some kind of Albino. She had seen pictures of ones before, and certainly her skin was almost identical to that level of paleness. But aside from that, she had nothing else about her body that suggested otherwise. Swallowing a lump in her throat, Cathleen took a clump of her nearly foot long hair and held it in her hands. Rubbing the strands between her fingertips felt very much like rubbing silk. Signing, Cathleen brought the hair up to her face so she could look at it. Cathleen had never, ever, known anyone else who had hair that was silver. Not some odd color of platinum blonde, but exactly the color of silver. Her unique hair color wasn’t what disturbed Cathleen the most, it was when she was out in the sun that her hair truly freaked her out. Every time that Cathleen did, she would catch it giving off a disturbing glisten from the yellow light. It was very unsettling for her, because it just didn’t look right. It wasn’t natural. But as bad as her skin and hair were, nothing was more unsettling to Cathleen than…

Hating herself for having to do so, Cathleen pulled out a small hand mirror from her book bag and checked her eyes to see if they were badly bloodshot. A cold chill ran through her spine as the light purple iris that rimmed her pupils gazed back at her with their otherworld color. They were a permanent testament to her of exactly what she was. A freak. And her eyes were a permanent reminder to her how very alone she was in the world. Cathleen certainly didn’t know of anyone, anywhere, who had purple eyes. If only the color of her eyes was the worst she had to deal with, then Cathleen might have been able to handle the rotten hand she had been dealt in life, but it wasn’t. Ever since she had been old enough to remember, she had been constantly singled out by others because of her looks. Girls would always ask her if her eyes really were that color or if she was using contacts or taking something to make her hair appear that way. And they had always gone of their way to torment her about it. She could remember on a field trip in the fourth grade, a pair of boys had snuck scissors in their lunch boxes and had quietly sat behind her on the bus. Giggling under the breaths, they had methodically cut away whole sections of Cathleen’s hair. By the time they were done, most of the back of her head had been nearly bald. She could remember being so devastated that she hadn’t gone to school for a whole week after that. No amount of punishment done by the teacher could take away the deep cuts her tormentors had sliced into the core of her heart. And the tormenting only continued. There had even been one time when a girl had spilled milk all over her, and said that no one could even tell it had happened. That was how Cathleen had gotten the nickname ‘milk girl’. Even now, after so many years had passed, she was still called that horrible name.

Cathleen had asked her mother many times about why her appearance was so different from other kids. Her mother’s answer had always been the same, she had some form of extremely rare genetic disorder that made her physical appearance the way it was. In other words, she was born to be a freak. Cathleen had tried many times to find so sort of conditions there were that caused people to have weird eye colors, but she had never found anything that suggested that a person could have purple colored eyes. So she herself was a medical mystery, one that was destined to be subjected to being singled out and tormented because of her looks. It was only one of many reasons why she had slowly grown to hate her parents. The pain and misery of her tormentors transformed itself into an inferno of rage for the people that had brought her into the world, because they had decided to have children, and had given birth to her. On days like this, when the teasing was at its worst, Cathleen wished with all her heart that her parents had never decided to have kids. It would have been better for her if she had never been born.

Sighing sadly, Cathleen’s hands slowly slid away from her tear soaked cheeks, gently traveling their way down towards the slight bulge under her shirt at the center of her chest. A light rapping on the other side of her stall door broke Cathleen out of her trance, and her hands instantly went to her sides. “Cat, you in there?”

Cathleen swallowed hard, trying her best to shore up her broken appearance and self-esteem. Wiping her eyes one last time, she called out. “Yeah, I’m here Maude.”

Leaning forward slightly, Cathleen unlocked the door and scooted back on the toilet seat. In stepped a dark haired girl roughly about her height and weight. The three strands of pink dyed hair, along with the dark shade of eye liner she used, topped with her almost completely black ensemble of clothing made her stick as the only ‘goth’ in their school of just over twelve hundred students. But Maude didn’t mind, she reveled in breaking away from traditional looks that were expected of their area. Living in a more rural mid-western state, full of farmers and various other kinds of skilled laborers, kids their age typically wore more rough and ragged outdoor clothes. The dirt stained white shirt with a pair of overall jeans that Cathleen was wearing that day was a sort of testament to that. Cathleen could have dressed like Maude, her friend had even insisted it several times, but she already stood out enough and didn’t need to go any extra steps to advertise it. Maude, who had moved to their quiet little town for their first year of high school, had brought the tastes of the big city with her, and had no intention of changing to fit in with others. The fiery determination of her only friend was what had given Cathleen the strength to make it to her senior of high school, but even that was starting to become lost to her. The understanding that they would part ways once they graduated left an endless pit in Cathleen, one which grew bigger with each passing day.

“What happened this time?” she demanded hotly.

“My locker…” Cathleen mumbled, looking down at her beat up tennis shoes.

“What about it? What happened?”

“You’ll hear about it soon enough.”

Maude growled through her clenched teeth and kicked the brick wall the stall was built against hard. “They can’t keep treating you like this!” she snapped. “Who the hell do they think that they are?”

“Forget it.” Cathleen said, keep her eyes on the floor.

“Enough of that self-defeating crap, Cat. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to tell someone, or they’re never going to stop.”

“It won’t make a difference.” Cathleen mumbled. Unlike Maude, she knew full well exactly how much good telling a teacher or the principal would do her. Nothing. The one time she had told on a student that had been picking on her had been in the fifth grade. Her reward for that had been a month of spitballs on the playground, dirt thrown on her, and enough verbal abuse to make her want to leave school and never come back. She had learned her lesson, and had from that point on constructed a mental wall around herself, one that she had only let Maude get through. Before Maude could tell her anything else, the bell for first hour rang. Cathleen looked nervously up at Maude, and felt terrible with the sad look her friend was giving her. It was almost the kind of look that a person gave towards a mangy, starving animal. It didn’t do anything to help how she was feeling. She walked to her first class almost as if she were in a trance.

Whispered giggles and rude comments about ‘milk girl’s’ locker filled her dazed ears, but she continued on as if she were deaf. Throughout the rest of the morning, Cathleen could hardly focus on her studies at all, she tried with all her mental and emotional strength to keep from completely breaking down in the middle of one of her classes. Thankfully, she always managed to get a set in the back corner of each of her classes. It helped to keep all of her would be bullies at bay. She always waited exactly three minutes after the bell to each class rang before rushing towards her next class. Avoiding torment had become like a science to her, and today her hard learned lessons were paying off. By the time lunch period had started, Cathleen’s mood began to change.

One major reason was that she would finally not be alone anymore. Being with Maude during lunch was one of the few times that Cathleen ever got a reprieve from the vocal torture and torment of her peers. Everyone else had too much to do to bother with her in the short time they were given to eat. The other was that the heavy cloud coverage had finally passed, leaving the entire school bathed in a bright sunny afternoon. As she sat at the bench that was the furthest from the lunch grounds, next to a massive oak tree, Cathleen basked in the warm, comforting rays. It sometimes creped her out with how much of dramatic effect sunlight had on her. She was always gloomy and depressed on the rainy or overcast days, and always at her happiest on the brightest days. Feeling as if she were lying in a pool of pure joy, Cathleen’s feelings about the day made a complete 180. She no longer was upset about the incident with her locker, or the jokes, or anything else. She was just…happy. The sun was her one constant companion, and it would never leave her. When Maude finally joined her at the bench, Cathleen gave her a genuine smile.

“Well,” Maude said. “Glad to see you’re in a good mood.”

Cathleen didn’t say anything in response, she just happily bobbed her head and at the lunch her mother had made. The only thought of sadness that existed in her at that moment was that Cathleen knew what would happen the instant lunch was over. She would go right back to being her old miserable self. The ability of the sun to cause joy within her sometimes made Cathleen wonder if she wasn’t some kind of extremely rare form of albino, but was in fact a vampire. But the thought of a vampire that needed the sun instead of hiding from it seemed really absurd to her. Yet, it would go a long way towards explaining yet another one of Cathleen’s oddities. It was the most subtle of all the things that made her odd, but it really did cause her to be concerned at times. Sometimes, it could even diminish the joy she got from sitting out in the sun. Not once that she could ever recall…had Cathleen ever gotten sunburned. It didn’t make a difference how long she was out in the sun. It could be twenty minutes, it could be six hours, but at the end of the day her skin would not have changed in the slightest. That ability, like so many other things about her, would keep her awake at night wondering just what the hell was wrong with her.

Thankfully, Maude managed to take her mind off of all the things that were bothering her, at least for a while. After lunch, Cathleen’s mood when right back to being melancholy, just as she knew that it would. The rest of the day passed like a dream to her. No one seemed to take much interest in her for the rest of the day, and she was all too happy to not attract their attention. She certainly didn’t go anywhere near her locker. The final bell of the day felt very much to her like an execution pardon. After waiting for the majority of the class to filter out, Cathleen quietly made her way to the bus. As far as she knew, she was the only senior aside from Maude that didn’t have a car. Her family had enough trouble just keeping their farm running. Her dad did what he could, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of help. Cathleen did what she could to help, but it wasn’t much. Another painful mark upon Cathleen that her life was one endless train wreck. As she went to climb onto her buses, she saw Maude several vehicles down, giving her a friendly parting wave. Cathleen waved back, and then climbed onto the bus. She didn’t say or look at anyone, there was just no point. She sulked to the back of the bus and sat down. When they finally left the school, she gazed longingly out the window. It didn’t take long for the small signs of civilization to pass into endless countryside. She didn’t really even look at it anymore, her mind was light years away in deep thought. Being the last person on the route, Cathleen had to wait almost an hour before she was finally able to leave the memory of that place she called a prison behind her.The only time she was broken from her trance like state was when the bus hit the large bump in the road a half mile before her stop that caused the bus to bounce around wildly. Then just like that, the bus was stopping and it was her time to get off.

Throwing her book bag over her back, Cathleen began the long half mile walk to her parent’s house. The gravel road crunched under her hiking boots as she sadly looked down at her feet. Behind her, the sun was just beginning to dip below the very tops of the trees. In less than two hours, the world would be completely shrouded in darkness. But that fact, just like many others, was almost oblivious to Cathleen. All she could really think about was how miserable her day had been. So consumed by her suffering, she only gave her mother a half-hearted hello as she walked through the front door. Without so much as saying a word to her father, Cathleen ascended the steps towards her room and shut herself off from the rest of the world. Finally away from the prying eyes of others, Cathleen threw herself onto her bed and began to wail uncontrollably. The pain of the entire day that she had kept bottled up inside her finally burst through the walls she had placed around herself. It was an all consuming emotional suffrage that was drowning her, and it was only getting worse with each passing day. Cathleen cried for nearly an hour before she was able to finally pull herself together. Just in time too, because only minutes later, her mother called her to dinner.
Wiping the sadness from her eyes, Cathleen put on a fake face and went to eat with her parents. Sitting down at the table, she glanced at her mother out the corner of her eye. It was something that Cathleen did from time to time when she was feeling depressed about her looks. She would try to find something of herself in her mother’s appearance. To say that they looked anything alike would be considered a bad joke. Her mother had unruly brown hair with a dark tanned complexion with dark brown eyes. There wasn’t even a hint of Cathleen’s unnatural looks in her mother. Fighting to hold back the tears, Cathleen ate without really saying much. She gave her mother weak and evasive answers about her day. Cathleen quickly realized that wasn’t the best choice she could have made. Her mother may have been born and raised in the country, but she certainly was anything but stupid.

“Cathleen,” her mother said softly. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

Clearly, her mother wasn’t buying that. She put down her fork and looked over at her intently. “Honey, was someone picking on you again?”

If things couldn’t have been worse, that was the exact moment her dad chose to walk into the kitchen. Like her mother, he looked nothing like her. His body skin was even more tanned than her mom’s from countless days he had spent working out in the sun. Clumps of dark hair snaked out from under his broad brimmed hat as he wearily sat down at the table. His light blue eyes fixed on Cathleen with a mixture of concern and curiosity.

“What happened this time?” he demanded.

“Nothing.” Cathleen said, her voice slowly rising.

“Don’t lie to us.” Her mother snapped. “If you’re having a problem at school, you can tell us about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

“Why honey?”

“I’ll tell you why!” Cathleen snapped. “Because you don’t understand what it’s like! You don’t look like a freak.”

Both of her parent’s eyes went wide and their jaws dropped. Cathleen had never snapped like that at her parents before. But they had pushed her on what had to be one of the worst days of her life, which was pretty much every single day. Her mother rose from her chair and started to walk around the table towards her. “Sweetie, you’re not a freak. You’re just…different.”

“Tell me then, why should I be happy that I look like this?”

Her mother stumbled, clearly trying to come up with some kind of answer that would be satisfactory. Cathleen didn’t give her a chance. “You know what, forget it.”

Cathleen jumped out of her chair and stormed out of the kitchen.

“Hey!” her father yelled at her. “Don’t you talk to your mother like that! Get back in her and apologize to her right now!”

“Leave me alone!” Cathleen screamed, running for her room. She heard her dad start to come after her, but her mom stopped him. Before she was even at the top of the steps, she could hear their voices rising at each other. Cathleen slammed the door behind her and locked it. Even with it shut, she could hear the argument rampaging a floor below her. Knowing that she had caused her parents to fight, Cathleen felt even worse. She didn’t want that, she didn’t even want to be mean to her folks. It was just that…they didn’t understand, how hard it was to be so different. To have absolutely no one that could know what it meant to be what she was like. Feeling the weight of depression crushing down on her chest, Cathleen walked over to her bedroom’s sole window. Looking out the glass, she could see that the sun had already set. All that was left of the day was a faint orange hue lining the tree tops. Feeling the stabbing pain deep in her heart, Cathleen opened the window and climbed out onto her roof.

It scared her mother to death the first time she had ever found out that Cathleen had climbed onto the roof. She had threatened to move her out of the room, but only her none stop begging had prevented the move. After that, she had gotten a lot more careful about going out. The step angle was nothing to her after having climbed out so many times. Flopping down on her back, Cathleen gazed up at the night sky. Aside from sunlight, staring up at the stars on the roof was the only other thing that she knew which would bring her true peace. Up there, she felt as if she were the only soul existing in the whole world, and that the night sky was the greatest tapestry that had ever been painted. She could stare at it for hours, becoming lost in the endless sea of the cosmos. She would search every last speak of the void, spotting out the constellations and just marveling at the beauty of it all.

But tonight felt different. She wasn’t up on the roof to search the night sky for peace. She was up there to escape everything. Her parents, her tormentors, but especially the sinking depression that was growing deep within her each passing day. And it was destroying the majestic, almost mystical feeling she got from being up on the roof by herself. Tucking her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs gently, Cathleen began to slowly rock back and forth. Two small lines of tears began to slowly roll their way down the side of her face. Sobbing softly, Cathleen began to wonder what the point of anything was. What kind of future could she ever hope to have? Growing old on the little hole in the ground farm her parents love so much, destined to never leave, to always be alone. To become a nightmare for children who lived around to hear about and dare to sneak up to the house late at night to see her. What kind of future was that for anyone? As much as she hadn’t wanted to believe it when the thought first crossed her mind, Cathleen found herself feeling that more and more she didn’t really have any other choices. Wiping her eyes a bit, she reached through the top of her shirt and clasped an object in her right hand. From under her shirt, Cathleen pulled out a jewel in a necklace.

Holding it up over her face, Cathleen lined it up to be directly in front of the half-moon that was rising above the tree line. The jewel was given to Cathleen on her 10th birthday. It was a special gift from her mother, a very rare gem that was a family heirloom. She had said that she wanted her to have it. A special gem for a special daughter, her mother had said. Cathleen thought that was as stupid idea, since she was an only child. The only condition that her mother had given her for having the jewel was a promise by her to never show it to anyone else. Her mother had said that it was worth a lot of money, and that some people might want to steal it from her. Since, Cathleen hadn’t had any friends at that point in her life, keeping a promise of secrecy hadn’t been that difficult to follow. Maude was the only other soul she had ever shown it to, and she had marveled at its uniqueness. It was a funny thing for Cathleen to think of, that she had been given a unique gem by her mother because she was unique. And there was no mystery to her that the gem was one of a kind. She had never been able to find another sort of gemstone anywhere that was somewhere between a deep shade of red and purple. Plus, when light it’s surface, especially sunlight, it glistened the same way her hair did. Staring at its sparkling surface reflecting the faint beams of light from the moon, Cathleen sadly lowered her head. Not even her jewel’s radiant glow could cheer her up at that point. She was just too deep in her depression to have anything make her feel good. She put the jewel back under her shirt with a suppressed sniffle, and went back to brooding about her miserable existence.

She stayed up on the roof for a while, going so far as to even ignore her mother’s knocking on the door. It wasn’t until the half-moon was high in the night sky, cast the world in a faint glow, that Cathleen finally decided to go back into her room. She slipped back inside without making so much as a sound. Walking softly through her room, Cathleen flicked the lights off and sat down on her bed. In the darkness, she fumbled under her bed until she found it. A bottle of high dose painkillers. Her father had needed them almost a year back when he had accidentally broken his leg. He had gone through those things almost like an addict, and had ordered two full bottles just to make it through the pain he was going through. But he had only needed one before the pain had become bearable enough for him to not need the pills anymore. He thought he had thrown away the other bottle, but Cathleen had pulled it out of the trash. She had read through the prescription what felt like a million times. No one was ever meant to take more than two through out a full day. And she had over twenty at her disposal.

Still crying a little bit, Cathleen traced her fingers around the top of the bottle, almost as if she were toying with trying to get it open. More and more, those pills were looking like a long lost friend to her. An escape from all the misery and pain that she had to endure every single day. And end to her suffering. Hiding the bottle under bed again, Cathleen lay on her back and stared with an almost empty gaze up at the dark ceiling.

How much longer would she be able to go before those pills became her only choice? Lying there in the darkness, thinking of just how much she didn’t belong anywhere, and how utterly alone she felt, Cathleen imagined that it wouldn’t be much longer. As she slowly closed her eyes, she was almost certain that she wouldn’t last more than just a few days.

Then it would all end.