Free Blind Side by K.B. Nelson

furiously through a deep selection of socks. My hand curls around the butt of a gun. I drop the clip to check to see if it’s loaded.
    It is.
    I push the clip back into the gun and throw it into my purse, ignoring the silent ringing of the phone, with my husband’s face flashing on the screen. Through the picturesque windows, the sun begins to descend beneath the rolling hills outside.

11
    I ’ve walked a thousand miles up and down these halls; the same corridors where I spent my youth. The plan was always to become a teacher, but I was never meant to return to this place once I had finally mustered the strength to leave it all behind.
    Love has a crazy stupid way of changing everything. It can make you forget you were supposed to be someone else. Sometimes, it can make you forget who you always were as you blossom into someone new.
    You take the good with the bad, and pray silent enough so no one can hear you. You pray that somehow the good outweighs the bad, and that’s the secretive formula of happiness:
    A + B – C / personal threshold for bullshit = Happiness
    There are people in this world who can’t be happy, and there are people in this world who don’t deserve to be happy. I’m not happy, and I don’t know if it’s because I lost that ability a long time ago, or if it’s because I don’t deserve it.
    It doesn’t much matter why though.
    I feel as if I’m walking a tightrope, but with every careful step along the slim rope, I find the destination slipping away from me. One step forward, and two steps back. I look over the edge, and think about jumping.
    I never do. Whether it’s reality, or a too real to not be a dream, I always come back from the brink and continue my march across the tightrope. That was then, and this is now.
    Rage races through my veins. It took an injection of anger to diffuse the sadness of a broken heart after that fateful phone call. It was a call I’ve been waiting on for a year minus a day, where each day I woke up thinking, today’s the day. Naively, I always believed he’d pass on his own in the depths of the night. I couldn’t have foreseen that his parents—the people who had sent him into a downward spiral because they refused to accept who he was—would be the ones to pull the plug.
    Nathan’s dead, and the last vestige of my heart has been ripped off like a BandAid covering a fresh gunshot wound. It hurts at first, and then it burns. Finally, it goes numb.
    I’m numb, but somehow I feel the cold metal sheathed under the weight of my right hand. The hallways are dark, with the softest paintings of artificial light lighting the thin passages just enough to see. The air is thick, but chilly, suffocating me with a torrid vengeance.
    Outside these hallowed halls, a battle rages on the field, where each team is lost in a game that has the obtuse power to dictate futures. Young men will lose their souls on that field tonight, while others will find validation.
    Others—my husband—will lose everything the way I once lost everything. What’s left of his heart and soul could be shattered, but he’s losing more than that. He’s losing the power he holds over me. No longer will he question me about my whereabouts in the heat of a game.
    I come to a stop at a four-way intersection, where a short hallway bleeds into the oversized cafeteria on one side, and three corridors of classrooms all meet in this center.
    It’s poetic that my life will end right here in this spot. I raise the gun to my head and close my eyes.
    My heart pounds against my chest, crying for me to stop. My brain kicks against my skull, begging me to reconsider. My soul does nothing—it’s too far gone. In a world where I’ve become inundated with voices dictating what I should do, and who I’ve become, I opt to listen to the most silent of the voices.
    My finger hovers against the trigger with an eerie rhythm pulsing through my sweating appendage.
    “Stassi?” a familiar voice calls from beside