| You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud. You'll think about me and wish that you had been able to talk me out of this. You'll try to figure out what would have been the one right thing to say, to do. I guess I should tell you, Don't blame yourself; this isn't your fault, but that would be a lie. We both know that I didn't get here by myself.
You'll cry, at my funeral. You'll say it didn't have to be this way. You will act like everyone expects you to. But will you miss me?
Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question? When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.
You become the mutant who fell into a vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart.
You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like. I used to stand in front of t mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right. Ask a random kid today if she wants to be popular and she'll tell you no, even if the truth is that if she was in a desert dying of thirst and had the choice between a glass of water and instant popularity, she'd probably chose the latter. See, you can't admit to wanting it, because that makes you less cool. To be truly popular, it has to look like it's something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.
I wonder if anyone works any harder at anything than kids do at being popular. I mean, even air-traffic controllers and the president of the United States take vacations, but look at you average high school student, and you'll see someone who's putting in time twenty-four hours a day, for an entire school year.
So how do you crack that inner sanctum? Well, her's the catch: it's not up to you. What's important is what everyone else thinks of how you dress, what you eat for lunch, what shows you TiVo, what music is on your iPod.
I've always sort of wondered,though: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own? There's a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It's when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question, though, is why? I think part of it is just self-preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it's banned together against an enemy. It doesn't matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you. You just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. I think a person's life is supposed to be like a DVD, You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.
There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones, You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there.
Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes, Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over. All from Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. |
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