𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐇𝐞𝐫 | ✎

i.

I HATE WINDY days. They mess up your hair, flair up your skirt, and make your overall appearance look like you've just come out of a category five hurricane. It's awful. It's already bad enough that I'm going to be in school late, but if I show up looking like this, I'm going to have some nosy Uniform Prefect giving me a blue ticket and sending me to the Principal's Office; not only for being tardy but also showing up improperly dressed.

Picking up my bag, I resume my walk through the narrow pathway alongside the road, all the while snuggling into my jacket to get a hold of the small warmth it gives me. Looking ahead, I see the traffic light turn red for the pedestrians and green for the drivers and at the other end of the road a few blocks in front is the Bus Stop.

"Almost there," I think to myself.

Finally reaching the crosswalk, I press the big red button hanging on the pole and wait until the traffic light turns green so, I could make it to the bus stop on the other side.

"It's peaceful out here," I said out loud, not to anyone in particular; just to myself. I like being by myself sometimes; it calms me. Some people find it strange and/or worrying to see someone out by themselves, doing something with themselves, by themselves. And I always think that people who see others hanging around alone think that they're lonely and have no one to talk to.

In my case, that's both true and false. I have friends; not a lot, but at least it's something. I always think that people with a huge friend group are usually feeling very lonely inside, that they have to have a bunch of people around them to feel something . . . I don't know, special? It's strange, I know. But I'm a little strange like that at times.

There's just something so therapeutic about being alone with a good book and a big mug of coffee or tea. It's like my little happy place—my escapism. The place I go to when I need to just . . . breathe. Where I don't have to worry about my own problems but read about people who do.

My family doesn't understand it. They think the only books that I should be reading are my school textbooks and what not. I do that—yes. But it's not where I go to, to relax. It's where I go to be competitive, to be seen as smart to my other classmates, to see my name at the top of the score sheet and feel like I have finally achieved academic validation. Not to relax and sit tight. I know for some people that's their form of escapism but, not mine.

But I guess you can say it is a little bit. My parents never gave me any attention, ever since I was little, it has always been Natalia, my older twin sister. You see, she's the golden child, perfect in whatever she does. In my opinion, she is the definition of perfect. Lucious long bottle-blonde hair, beautiful big ocean blue eyes, perfect body, fairest skin with a well-placed summer tan, popular, a part of the Brickwood High Cheer Team, and most important of all, a complete copy of our mother.

She's everything I'm not; she's outgoing, funny, charismatic, charming, deceitful, downright mean, manipulative and all other stuff I couldn't even bother myself to mention. But yet, I still want to be her.