Graffiti

I knew my fingers would never return to normal.  Not after what they had felt and what I had seen.  I wanted to go back to how it was when nobody paid any attention to me and when I could slide under the radar.  But now, I couldn’t walk down the hallways at school without someone whispering behind my back.  But at the end of the day, maybe it would end up being good for my reputation.  Maybe if I got used to the attention now, when I let my big secret out, I wouldn’t mind the attention. 

The secret was my lifeline. It was my way out. The only way I could get out of this tiny little town. My dream was to get to NYC and I knew my writing would get me there. I still went back and forth between being focused writing fiction or somehow get into journalism. I was nosy to a fault and loved getting into other people’s business. I thought maybe investigative journalism may be the way I needed to go. Get paid for being nosy? Sounded great to me. But I also knew my nosiness could and often did get me into trouble. That’s why I often wrote fiction in the down time while I was waiting for the trouble to pass. 

But the trouble I was in now was way over my head and I needed to get out as quickly as possible. And I knew the only way to get out from under the water was to divert everyone’s attention to someone else. And I knew as soon as I heard Sophia’s laugh she would be my last and best target. I needed to make sure everyone thought she was the one who was graffitiing the walls of the locker rooms, not me. I couldn’t risk my future on something so trivial, even though it had been the most fun I’d had in a while.