The Muse Read Online Free Page A

every once in a great while. Usually I dove into them around the same time when the leaves started to crisp and fall off the trees in piles deep enough to jump into and get lost. Something about the ripened smell of Macintosh apples and brisk mornings pulled me back to those days when I’d press my thumb onto the tip of a bottle of Jean Nate perfume, armed to defend myself as I walked past the tangle of girls drenching me in insults. They’d line up like a chained link fence, supported in strength by their numbers, and laugh as one would trip me with an outstretched foot, or pelt me with rocks as I ran into the building’s only unlocked entrance. They’d call me names, chanting rumors about my being a lesbian.
    At twenty-nine-years-old, I still cringed when I traveled back through the memory of my former best friend, Barbara, and how she grabbed my personal journal and bolted down the school hall laughing at me for what I’d written about her. I was a dumb teenager, high on hormones or whatever. I wrote some silly stuff about her eyes sparkling and wanting to kiss her petal soft lips and a bunch of other sexually explicit stuff that I should never have written down. I had stupidly left my locker open as I talked with a couple of other girls, and Barbara decided to snoop around. Well, she locked in on the bright blue spiral notebook tattered and littered with flower and butterfly stickers and hearts that said things like – ‘I love someone’ and ‘I think someone’s cute.’ Barbara, being my best friend and all, took this to mean she could read its contents. I was too busy chatting with the others about Brian Luding’s new haircut and didn’t notice her reading it. One moment I was bubbling over in giggles with the girls about how adorable Brian was when he swung a baseball bat, and the next, I was ripping the spiral notebook out of my shocked best friend’s hands. Not fifteen minutes later, my life spiraled out of control along with her laughter and her lack of concern for my future happiness.
    They marked me as disgusting, a mere pile of crap to avoid at all costs for the remainder of my time at the middle school. Rock pelting, foot tripping, profane graffiti on my locker, squirt guns and the occasional black eye and bruised cheeks followed.
    When I entered high school, and our neighbor ran to my parents and told them he had just saved me from suffocating under a pile of boys who were attempting to gang rape me into being straight, my father did the thing any respectable father would do. He called a real estate agent and placed the first home he had ever owned, his pride and joy, on the market. Within one day, a young couple with a dog and two toddlers purchased it. The U-Haul pulled up and all of our aunts, uncles and cousins piled all of our shit into it and moved us four towns over where surely my bullying days would end.
    Thankfully they did. No one bothered me. I turned to reading instead of seeking out new friends. Books became my new best friends. They would never hurt me like people could.
    My sister required more than a book to entertain her. She needed to belong, to be part of the in-crowd, to live life out loud. So, she turned to drugs. She got reeled in by the popular druggie crowd. She smoked pot every night and dropped out in her senior year. She never came right out and said she hated me for uprooting her and taking her from the safety of a cheerleader squad and dropping her in the middle of what could only be described as teenager hazing hell. But I knew, when she scurried off to work as a bagger at the grocery store, she resented that I caused this rift in her future dream of becoming a doctor. Many would argue she carved out and followed her own path. I would argue back that with desperate times, came desperate methods. She didn’t know how to be unpopular. So, pot and then other more potent stuff massaged this cruel, new world into something doable, livable, and eventually unmanageable.
    My