Free 7 Souls by Barnabas Miller, Jordan Orlando Page A

look up until somebody talks to me , she thought. But that means I’ll still be standing here when the sun goes down .
    The nurse had been useless. Mary had waited behind a couple of seventh graders who had cut themselves doing some kind of experiment in science class and needed disinfectant and gauze bandages and wouldn’t stop crying , as if their small wounds were the most extreme pain they’d ever experienced. Shut up! Mary wanted to shout at them as she sat and fidgeted in the chair on the other side of the nurses’ station’s white curtains. You think that’s pain? You don’t know what pain is .
    I know what pain is , she thought. It wasn’t something that happened to you on the surface; it was something that hit you far, far deeper inside. She could feel the hurt floating in her stomach, beneath the outfit she’d worked so hard at putting together but that nobody had cared about. This is the definition of pain—the worst day of my life, and there’s not a scratch on me .
    Except that wasn’t true, was it?
    The scratches on Mary’s lower back seemed to have closed up and started to heal, but the skin was still tender. She still had no idea where she’d gotten them, or what had happened the night before.
    I hope I had fun , she thought bitterly, because I’m sure not having any today .
    “There’s something wrong with my brain,” she’d told the nurse helplessly, when the two desperately wounded seventh graders had left and it was her turn. The nurse, a stocky Eastern European woman with a solid helmet of hair pulled back into a bun that looked like a steel soap pad, dutifully took her vitals and made her look at some flashing lights and asked her some simple questions, never really hiding her own skepticism. Mary couldn’t blame her—how many privileged young hypochondriacs did this woman have to deal with every day?—but she became more and more uneasy at the thought that nothing was wrong with her; that she was being a princess, a crybaby, a little girl starved for attention and not getting it and feeling sick because of it.
    Or maybe there’s something really wrong with me , she’d thought as the nurse rose briskly to her feet and impatiently waved Mary away. Maybe this is one of those brain tumors or ski accident things where nobody notices anything wrong until it’s too late . She even had tried to ask the nurse about that, but the woman just shook her head impatiently, ordered Mary to go back to class and turned to the sophomore football player (Kip something) with the sprained knee who was waiting his turn.
    The wind was picking up, out in front of the school, an hour later. The sky had not cleared. Mary drew her trench coat more tightly around her and continued staring at the grooves in the dirty sidewalk, realizing she’d memorized them. She knew she should go home. She’d long since given up on getting a “Happy birthday”—that was the impossible dream—but she’d settle for a simple “Hey, Mary” from somebody she knew, or even somebody she didn’t.
    Oh, who are you kidding? Go home. Nobody cares; not Patrick, not anyone else. How much clearer can they make it? All she was doing was making it worse for herself. She could just go home and take a bath and go to bed and sleep late tomorrow morning and watch Saturday cartoons and then maybe throw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge. The only reason she was staying at Chadwick—the only reason she hadn’t left, after cutting all her classes—was because home meant her own dismal little room and Mom calling out for her cigarettes and blended orange juice. Maybe watching some MTV or even soaps on the damn Daewoo television, which sucked … and that was just too pathetic a way to spend her seventeenth birthday. She drew the line at sitting at home watching television—she would rather stand here leaning against this metal gate and be ignored and wait for—
    “Hey.”
    A male voice—one she didn’t know—coming from right in