Glass

this is a true story i wrote for my english class and i got the highest grade in the class and i'm very happy with it so enjoy

Glass

It was an ambush. Lauren said that she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if something happened to Grace, as if Grace’s eating disorder was a burden to Lauren. I agreed that Grace needed help, but not like this. I sat on the hard couch next Lauren. We were waiting with three residence assistants and the head coordinator of student affairs in our apartment for Grace to come home. The silence was creating caverns inside me.

When Grace walked in, before she realized what was happening, she was smiling. I wish I could’ve bottled whatever she was feeling and used it to soothe her after what would happen next. When she lifted her large blue eyes and witnessed the group of people who were waiting for her, her eyes flashed to those of a wild animal. Her face flushed pink as she pressed her lips together to keep them from twitching.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. She was trying to smile, trying to remain calm, but I knew better than anyone that her stomach was on fire with anxiety.

“Grace, we just want to talk to you,” the head coordinator said gently. She was a very large woman with a fierceness in her face that forced you to confess things you’d never done. No one believed that she just wanted to talk.

“Did you call them?” Grace accused me, piercing me all the way down my spine with her wild animal eyes. Her whole face was red now. I couldn’t make a noise.

Grace stormed into her room, shouting that she didn’t have time for this. The head coordinator followed her. Grace was shaking the whole world with her noisy fear. I could only imagine what she was going through. The only thing scarier than getting worse is getting better. We just wanted to save her from the worse.

Grace burst out of her room, still screaming. Her eyes were chasing the room for answers, looking for something to attack to make this problem go away. My heart was being ripped to shreds. I had been the first person Grace had confided in about her eating disorder, she had trusted me and I let her fall into this trap. I wanted to hold her, put out the fire that was burning through her and tell her that it was going to be ok. How would she ever be able to trust not just me, but anyone, ever again?

“Grace calm down, we just want to talk to you,” the head coordinator tried.

“No! Just leave me alone!” Grace screamed, picking up a glass cup on the counter and throwing it against the wall, close to where an RA was sitting. The glass exploded into a thousand crystal spears, shattered like us. Lauren was shaking next to me, unable to even look.

“That’s it, call the police!” the head coordinator demanded over Grace’s screams of protest. “You two, leave!”

I put my arm around Lauren and we hurried out, leaving Grace to fight the world by herself. Once on the other side of the door, two enormous wails of sorrow escaped our mouths. We sobbed as we struggled to walk to the elevator, fighting the urge to collapse to the ground and cry our souls out into a river. An outsider might’ve thought that we were crying because it hurt to see Grace so upset, and it did. That was why we were crying but not why I was so afraid. I was terrified of Lauren. She had found Grace’s weakness and brought the whole world in to look at it. The worst part was that Lauren was actually trying to help, what if she tried to help me too?

When I first moved to the college where I met Lauren and Grace two years ago, I was a perfect glass sculpture on the inside, pristine and pure. My first weekend there the person my teenage brain had decided was the love of my life hurled a rock at me and ran away, leaving me filled with broken glass to poke and slice my internal organs. I swallowed burning poison to disintegrate the glass, so now I’m not bleeding but the poison has spread through every vein in my body and I feel like I’m more poison than person. At least Grace was trying to get rid of the poison inside her, I didn’t know what to do with mine except let it seep through my eyes so that when people saw me they asked my friends why I was mad at them. I wasn’t mad at them. I was mad at me for being made of glass in the first place.

Grace was made of glass. And Lauren was made of glass. And every person who has ever existed has at some point discovered that they too were made of glass. Some people love it, they polish their glass until they’re sparkling. Some people stack bricks or smear cement for protection. Sometimes the glass inside us shatters and we have to do whatever makes sense to save ourselves from being cut inside out by our own weakness.

Some people pick up the broken  pieces and make something new. Some people need to break into nothing before they can rebuild. And this is never learned the easy way.