Benjamin, sometimes I wonder if our souls swapped bodies during birth, he has beautiful smile and charming eyes. Soft and polite like a girl, most of the other boys bully him but he has never backed down. Behind that calm exterior is a heart of stone, an unbreakable will of fire. That's what I love and hate about him.

He is like my father, seemingly endearing but the violence he is capable of? I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. "What do you think about Diane?" He asks, and the world returned to me, it wasn't just the two of us anymore. 

Clattering trays, amalgamation of different conversations with a burst of laughter. All kinds of smell invading my senses, sweet aroma of food, terrible scent of sweats and someone passing gas. The bright lights, and the crowd, too much of everything at once that makes me want to burst. "What?" I force the smile I practiced, holding back the world that threatens to shatter inside me.

"Diane, do you think she's cute?" And my world shattered, drowning and drifting away from me as I stare at him with disbelief. We are bestfriends, isn't that what love is? What lovers should be? Why is he interested in a girl who is but a stranger in his life? He might as well have taken a knife and pierced it through my heart.

"Cute?" I rise to my feet. "She definitely is, I doubt she would like your ugly face." I walk away from him, I could hold back so many things, so many words but not with him, with him I am without control. My greatest blessing and curse, I can be the brightest light and the darkest shadow around him. And I just hurt him, I don't want to hurt him.

My world turned upside down with a crash, one moment I am on top of a front bumper and in the next, I am laid out on the street. "Are you okay?" I got up, I was too caught up in my wreck of emotions I didn't realize I was crossing the street. "Jane, are you okay?" It is Kevin.

"I am fine." Why am I fine? I should've just died. Bad things always happen to me, enough to tell me I am cursed but not bad enough that they kill me. Maybe because being alive is worse than death? That my punishment is to live in hell? My karma for being born a monster. 

I walk away, looking up the sky to see a bird landing on the branch of a nearby tree. If I could be reborn, I would want to be a bird, to spread my wings and fly freely across the sky. The bird tilts its head, staring at me with small but beautiful black eyes and a chill sprints down my spine as it does.