His hair falls perfectly but imperfectly on his forehead, with strands that would move as he did. His smile is contagious even though one corner of his mouth rises just a millimeter above the other. His eyes, glistening like raindrops, somehow shine brighter than any diamond I’ve ever seen. He laughs, eyes squinting with a hand over his mouth. He looks to me and I pretend that I wasn’t staring, even though he probably already noticed. He waves in my direction and I am caught in something between a dream and a nightmare, but I couldn’t decide. I wanted to be comfortable. Lifting a limp hand hesitantly, I manage to sport something of an insecure smirk which said merely, “Hi, I exist.” Only he wasn’t waving to me. He was waving to her. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, they always wave to her.

She struts up next to him, placing her professionally polished fingers on his shoulder and shows her white teeth to him in a smile that made me clench my pen tighter. She grasps her long, sleek blonde hair and lays it over her shoulder. I run my calloused hands through my frizzy brown mess and sigh. He slings an arm over her shoulders and she presses her glossed lips to his cheek as he grins again. She looks over to me and I quickly change the direction of my head. I hear footsteps. I listen briefly to the pitter-patter of finely cut fingernails and I slowly turn around to find her scribbling a note on a slip of paper before folding it and placing it in my hand. She glares at me once more, raising her eyebrows and then returns to the popular world that she came from. He is watching, brows furrowed, and for a second, I think that he may notice me. Maybe one day he will see me as more than one more in the population. But as soon as she is back at his side, he is back to reality and I am once again, the outsider. My hands fiddle with the loose leaf and my eyes scan it quicker than I can process.

The dorky girls never end up with the pretty boys, darling.

“Of course not,” I murmur under my breath before tearing the slip of paper to shreds. How could I ever be so stupid to think so much of a guy as to step out of his universe just to welcome a nobody like me. That’s all that I am, you know. I’m scared to be anything but the girl who no one notices. I fear having judgmental eyes constantly looking me up an down, wondering what I’m all about. But then there’s the endless possibilities of slumber parties, spa treatments, movie dates with real boys; things that would make me seem beautiful, popular in any of those eyes looking down upon me. No, that’s not me. I don’t want that for me. Running through the hallways at the end of the day, I find her. She’s just like me, the spitting image you could say. She’s understood me for longer than anyone else has. If she’s ever sad, I’ll say, “You know I’m always here for you. You know you mean the world to me. You know that I would do anything for you.” When tears spill down my cheeks, she doesn’t dry them anymore. When I need someone to comfort me, hug me, listen to me, she’s out of sight. She pulls away in order to hide behind popularity, success, and this new beauty she was adapting and somehow she, too, made me feel not good enough. When I pick up the phone just to see how she’s doing, she’s busy with the girls that we vowed to stay away from. The ones that she told me would never replace me in one million years. Yet here I am, sitting with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, wishing that I was good enough for those popular girls. Hoping that I was pretty enough for him. Wishing, though, with every ounce of my heart that I wasn’t doing anything wrong for her to push me away like that.

Thus begins that grueling decision of choosing to be happy or sad, the simplest yet most complicated choice any girl would ever have to make. I’ll change for the boy, I would say and begin starving myself, frying my hair with product and treatments, overworking and weight loss would become my new best friends. I’ll change for her, I would say and start to change my hobbies, interests, personality, and the way I looked and acted just to fit in. I won’t change, I would say and I’d stay exactly the way I was, invisible, unloved, pushed and pulled toward and away from things that should stay put. The dorky girls never end up with the pretty boys, darling, The dorky girls never end up with the pretty boys, darling, The dorky girls never end up with the pretty boys, darling... I yelled and screamed for my thoughts to seize, cringing and squirming under the weight of the cruelty in my life and it didn’t stop. It never stops. But no one ever notices the chaos in my mind when my face doesn’t show it, which makes me almost wish that mind readers and supernatural things existed so that I didn’t always become unnoticed, left as prey, carried into my own world once again, looking back on the issues that I never solved and the people who pushed me out.

I guess it goes without saying that I don’t do with change easily, and I shouldn’t have to. Change is for people who are unhappy, and I am nothing less than fortunate, lucky, and appreciative. Surprising, right? A girl writes a whole monologue about the things in life that annoy her and make her wish she isn’t alive and she claims to be.. happy? Ask all nine of the best friends, sisters, savoirs that I have ever had. They’ve loved me and transformed me into a fun-loving, self-confident, outgoing girl who doesn’t give any of her time to hate and other opinions. A girl who is allowed to act, dance, sing to escape it no matter how tone-deaf or cow-like she seems while doing so. She is free to be whoever she wants to be on stage, in the choir room, with her newly found companions and yes, she is happy. She smiles, laughs, and is everything that she promised herself not to be. She talks to those who have wronged her, still spends time with them if she is ever invited (even though she often isn’t), and waves to them in the hallways but refers to them as her past. She is better now.

I am better now. My thoughts no longer devour me, and my mind is free to be happy.