Free How I Got Here by Hannah Harvey

and too high to be my own, and I just thought to myself, who is this girl? Who is the girl with the crazy hair, the one who is so unhappy, so miserable that she got to this point, standing in a bathroom after having her hair set alight? I didn’t recognize myself, and I think that scared me more than anything else.
    ‘I think it would be best if you spoke to someone.’ The nurse shoots a worried glance at the teacher. I think they mean I’ll have to give a statement to the police, or talk to the principal and put in a formal complaint. Both of them march me out of the bathroom, into the busy halls of kids, who are both shocked and excited to see how I looked at that moment. Maybe that’s what they wanted, to push me to the point where I broke, everything they had done so far was invisible to them, they didn’t see me exercising as much as I was, they didn’t really pay any attention to my obsessive organizing of things, to them it was just part of my weirdness, and they didn’t know that I cried myself to sleep every single night, after spending hours reading their hateful words. This though, this was a drastically physical sign of how far they’d pushed me, and they seemed to love it. Just like in the classroom, they were snapping photos, filming me. In fact if you go online you can probably find the videos, they’re probably still around. The girls, the ones who weren’t photographing or filming me, were texting or calling people like their lives depended on it. Telling people what had happened.
    They didn’t take me to talk to the police, or even to the principal. They hadn’t called my parents to tell them what had happened. It wasn’t anything that I expected; they walked me to a room next to the nurses’ office, where the school therapist had her office.
    The girl who lit my hair on fire got a warning, and a week of detention after school; I got thrown in daily sessions with the school therapist. Apparently cutting off your own hair shows way worse judgment than setting someone else’s hair on fire. That’s what the school thought anyway, and they think I’m the crazy one.
    River
     
    Chapter Eight
    Session 4
    ‘Amanda I need my keys, have you seen them anywhere?’ Oliver pulls up a cushion on the couch and tosses it to the floor, ‘I really can’t be late Amanda, where on earth are they?’
    ‘Try the fridge, Tiff likes to put things in the fridge, last night I found my hairdryer in the fridge.’ Amanda calls back from the bathroom, where she is curling her hair; she switches off the curling iron and leans against the doorframe. The bathroom has now been entirely taken over by Tiff and Amanda, with frilly things all over.
    ‘The fridge, you’ve got to be kidding.’ He shakes his head, but goes over to check anyway.
    ‘I didn’t think you had work today, it’s Saturday, and you don’t usually work on the weekend.’
    ‘I didn’t say I was going to work.’ He replies as he pulls open the large fridge, coming face to face with a pair of his shoes, a tie he’d been looking for, and sure enough his keys were there, lying on a pot of last night’s leftovers. ‘Can you please get Tiff to stop putting things in the fridge?’ He whips out the other items and throws them onto the table.
    ‘I wish I could but I can’t, she likes it too much, sorry.’ Amanda shrugs, ‘If you’re not going to work, then where are you going?’ Amanda asks, folding her arms over her chest and raising an eyebrow.
    ‘I do have a social life you know.’ He defends.
    ‘No you don’t, the only friends you have are college friends, none of whom live in New York, and you haven’t made any friends here, because you’re always too busy at work. So no, you don’t have a social life.’ She counters instantly. He hesitates for a second, his mind debating what to tell her, considering telling her he’s taken up a hobby of some sort, but in the end, he decides to tell her the truth, because she’ll know if