As I sit alone in the quiet waiting room, students fly past the window, not bothering to notice the tiny girl drawing circles in the carpet with her shoes. The time: 2:06 pm. The place: the principal’s office. An assistant calls me in and I am seated at a round table across from Her. I stare at Her gold watch, one hand holding a pen to a yellow note pad, while the other nudges a purple Kleenex box towards me.

Just two days before this is when it all started falling apart. Even now, I can’t stop seeing it. The fluorescent classroom lights glinting off the scissors pointed directly at my throat. Those ten short words hanging in the air: “I’m resisting the urge to slit your throat with these.” It didn’t hit me until later that night, when my mother’s tears stained the dining room table cloth, that I could have died. Again. We thought a meeting with the school principal would help, but we didn’t know that the notes that She so eagerly took down would end up in the trash right next to all of the pain-filled tissues from the purple Kleenex box.

A girl tried to murder me in the Science Lab. It’s simple, right? If only it were. It wasn’t just any girl, it was Rachel, the girl who could talk her way out of anything, and buy almost anything. As class President, Rachel presided over the weekly class meeting. Against her, I was nothing. I was the girl with the dead eyes and the broken smiles. I had been physically attacked three times already and people were starting to think it must somehow be my fault. I am nothing. I am invisible. I am alone.

The chair creaks, another tissue falls, and the pen stops writing. The office is completely silent, but everything is crashing and burning. I’m too afraid to meet her eyes in case I see myself. Nothing is said. Everything inside me is caving and slipping away. In the silence, I’m losing myself more and more every second. She clicks her pen, looks up at me, and says, “You know, Natalie, everything happens for a reason…”