I Didn T Belong Here: A Short Story

I felt like I didn’t belong. Maybe I didn’t belong here, but I didn’t belong anywhere else either. Part of me knew I needed to be in the hospital. I needed to heal. I needed to feel something again. The other part of me just felt like a psychopath.
Regardless of my raging and relentless thoughts, I only watched. I watched the kid that everyone called Mr. Smiley talk about his father’s alcoholism with his signature grin plastered on his face. I watched a young girl in a Minnie Mouse shirt talk about how she didn’t want to stand up to her bullies because she thought she deserved it. I watched a girl around my age scratch mindlessly at a healing wound that covered her entire forearm. Feet tapped, knees shook… calm didn’t seem to exist in this

It was a pathetic little smile, but a smile nonetheless. In less than a minute, I felt alive again. Maybe this hospital wasn’t a waste of my time.
We didn’t talk for the rest of the lesson. I spent my time observing the other kids. The girl with the huge wound was the only one who never looked away from the therapist. Most of the other kids were just as distracted as I was. They were all distracted by David. I got a strange feeling that David was meant to be here. He was a shooting star. You couldn’t look away and he made you want to believe in wishes again. It was then that I really understood what I was supposed to be learning. Believing in something else really did help people believe in themselves. I thought I believed in David.
As the therapist finished her speech all the kids began to arrange themselves into little groups. They laughed and joked around just as they had done before the lesson. Having not made any friends, I found myself alone. I knew I wanted David to talk to me, but the voice in my head said that he never would. The voice in the seat next to me had different plans.
“Hey, Jessica… so, um, what are you here for? If you don’t mind me asking, I don’t wanna be rude or anything…” David

She stared back at us with eyes that seemed to have an agenda.
“So David, what kind of music do you like?”
I shrunk into myself. Of course she only wanted to know about David. He was all I wanted to know about too. David didn’t reply right away and Ally began listing several bands that she listened to, all in the genres of pop-punk or screamo. I could feel how uncomfortable David felt. I could see it too. His hands were shaking.
“No, I don’t really listen to any of those people…” David interrupted.
I felt something right then. I felt like I knew something tremendously important. I felt like I had to say what I was thinking or I was going to explode. For a girl as quiet as I was, the sensation was frightening. So, I said what I needed to say.
“Do you listen to Neutral Milk Hotel?”
It was such a simple question. There wasn’t anything dramatic about it in reality, but asking it still made my heart race. Then, David smiled.
“Yes!” he replied.
Ally looked somewhere between annoyed and pissed off, but I couldn’t care less. Such anticlimactic words had never given me such satisfaction. David and I continued to talk about music. It felt effortless. It felt like breathing for the first time after being underwater. I wasn’t sure what was happening in that moment, but I knew that this interaction marked the division of my past and