debt when a local college was just as good, at least for the more generic classes.
Granted, I was going into my third year at the local college, whereas most students only spent two years at places like that, but still. My case was clearly not the norm.
I gave him a smile—a fake smile that made my heart hurt inside, but a smile nonetheless my dad believed—and then I walked out. It was truly amazing what a smile could do. A reassurance that I would try my best to make friends…and, of course, fail spectacularly because I didn’t care enough to try. Why make friends when they’d just disappear down the road anyway? Mom and Dad didn’t have friends. They had me and Michelle, and their jobs. That was literally it.
The smile instantly fell off my face as I headed to my car. Was I that good at giving fake smiles? I supposed I did have a few years of practice now. I had no clue when the smiles morphed from being real to being forced, but it was sometime in high school. I knew the change wasn’t overnight, but sometimes I tried to look back and pinpoint the exact day I realized everything was pointless in the end.
Obviously, I couldn’t find the day.
Mom and Dad said I would get over it. It was just me being a mopey teenager. Maybe they were right. Maybe, in a few years, I’d look back on how I acted now and laugh—genuinely laugh at my antics and my thoughts.
Or maybe not. I was twenty, after all, no longer technically a teenager. Since my parents had shrugged my feelings off so easily, I decided to stop showing them to anybody. Why bother when no one cared?
I tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, heaving a sigh that was not so quiet this time. When I was alone, I didn’t have the energy to be fake. I started her up and began the half-hour drive through town to the community college that sat one city over.
It was a nice enough place, I supposed, though I still had no idea why college students in America had to take stupid courses like chemistry and biology when we literally had a full year of each in high school. Just another way for the universities to get money, I guess. Must be nice to be able to dictate how young adults should spend their time and their money.
Money they didn’t even technically have. Loans were a predatory thing, but so was everything in life.
I’d taken most of the generic stuff already; I was now getting into some higher-level stuff. A lot of sociology, psychology, even a bit of criminology. I found that stuff interesting; I didn’t know why. Some kids might not look forward to their classes, but I did. What better way to take up the time than to sit and learn about how society treated deviance from the norm?
You know, I used to enjoy a lot of things. I drew, I jammed out to music, I dabbled in writing. I even played hours upon hours of videogames. But there came a time when I just couldn’t do it. Any of it. One day I sat down at my desk in my room, a blank page of paper before me, and the last thing I wanted to do was draw. No songs caught my attention, and writing was…it was shit. Why bother writing when everything I typed up sounded like it was written by a fifth-grader?
I even lost interest in videogames. A horror, truly, but the truth all the same. No amount of stealthy assassinations in Assassin’s Creed could get me out of any funk, nor could any romance in Dragon Age. I literally could not force myself to sit down in front of a TV screen and play any of the games I knew like the back of my hand.
When I arrived at the college, I brought my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus. A big, wide lot already full of other vehicles, I found an end space, backing her in before turning her off. My eyes glanced upward, at the blue sky above.
A pretty blue. If only a pretty color could make me feel happy.
I sat in my car for a while, waiting until I absolutely had to leave to make it to class on time. I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed out.