I tugged the front door shut with more force than necessary as I entered my house, cheeks ablaze. The slam interrupted the conversation that my parents had been previously engaged in. They paused and averted their eyes in my direction. Holding their stare, I kicked my sneakers off my feet with extra vigor, maintaining my scowl.
“Stella, is something wrong?” My mother took a cautious step forward, forehead creased. My dad, on the other hand, remained in a sitting position and cocked an eyebrow before extending his arm across the table and grabbing the newspaper. I felt my eye twitch at his nonchalance.
“I’m fine,” I retorted, pausing to glance at my mother’s expression. Instead of the pained look I’d been hoping for, she had squeezed her eyes shut and brought her palm up to rest on her forehead. An exasperated sigh was drawn out of her mouth before she retreated back into the living room with my father, who hadn’t the slightest reaction to my sudden outburst. Unsatisfied, I tried again.
“I’m fine, and nothing you can say or do will get me to say otherwise. It’s my life, and you guys can’t keep trying to control it!” The words had caused my mother to hesitate midstride. She exchanged glances with my father, and after a brief moment, continued to march back to the living room. I stomped up the stairs for extra effect, grinding my feet into the carpet. My backpack had slipped off of my shoulders and tumbled down the stairs halfway up, but I didn’t attempt to retrieve it. I was too caught up in my performance: my countenance had to be one of evident rage, but not too strained. A peek out of the corner of my eye revealed that there was no longer an audience; only the stiff faces of the family portrait observed my movements, their eyes expressionless, their features unconcerned.
I gradually reduced my speed until I came to a stop at the peak of the staircase. My throat was raw from screaming earlier. My first instinct was to storm back down the stairs and whine about the pain, but instead I soundlessly slipped through my bedroom door, ignoring the hushed whispers that were emitting from downstairs. I knew that they were talking about the show I had put on earlier, and a tingling sense of accomplishment washed over me. My efforts had been worthwhile. I had gained their attention.
The door closed behind me with an almost imperceptible thunk, and the sensation disappeared. I tossed a pair of shorts and an empty Starbucks cup off of a chair before sinking into it; my eyes squeezed shut as I stretched my arms above my head.
“I just can’t deal with these people anymore,” I muttered, shifting myself so that my legs dangled over the left side. My arm extended to the desk next to me, blindly groping the air in an attempt to retrieve my sketchpad. It seemed to be my only comfort these days: freshman year was nothing like I’d been exposed to in the past. Just last year we were the 8th graders, the kings and queens of middle school. Kids in 6th and 7th grade stared up at us in awe, attempting to please us by cracking jokes in the hallways and putting up a façade of maturity. Now, we were like the vegetables on a toddler’s plate: unappreciated and shoved to the side.
My fingers brushed against a sleek surface, and I gripped the object, lifting it near my half-lidded eyes. It was my sketchpad. A turquoise pencil was wedged between the cover and the first page, standing out against the brown and white. It slid between my fingers with ease, and the familiarity of the object caused my shoulders to relax.  I flipped through the pages of the pad, searching for an unmarked sheet amidst all of my sketches.
These past few weeks of school had been the most intolerable all year: Mary and Alyssa, my only close friends in the entire school, had changed for the worse over summer break. Mary was obsessing over the transfer student from England that had arrived this year, and he had become the topic of every conversation she’s had in the past three months. His name was Pete Simmons, and he was a nice guy, but not fantastic enough to deserve his own personal fan-club. Whenever I brought up a story unrelated to Pete or British culture, she would brush it off and continue to blab about how dreamy his eyes were when he asked to borrow a pencil in History class four months ago.
Scowling, I ripped out a blank sheet and began to sketch lightly on the paper.
Selfish, I decided. The marks of lead had begun to take on the form of a person’s face, and I quickly swiped a few lines where the mouth would reside. Mary is selfish and egotistic, making her an impossible person to talk with or be around. The lips of my character were stretched open as if it was in the middle of a sentence. I quickly erased the upper lip and retraced it, making it twice as large. Perfect: a big, fat, blabbermouth.
Alyssa, on the other hand, just wouldn’t stop boasting about every single one of her accomplishments, from achieving another tennis award to getting an A on a math quiz. I could tell that she thought of herself as my superior, pitied me, even. Next to her striking appearance and endless list of talents, I seemed about as skillful as an armless swimmer. I skipped the eyes and nose to sketch in the eyebrows, making them as prominent and prideful as Alyssa’s when she would recite her latest awards.
Then again, at least Mary and Alyssa weren’t like Harold, the “funny” kid in the class. On a daily basis he would throw himself off of his chair or “accidentally” blurt out a random comment in the middle of a lesson for the sole purpose of receiving a laugh or two. If anyone else was the center of attention for as little as a second, Harold would find a way to divert all eyes back to him. Every single time that he managed to attract the focus of the room onto himself, his countenance transformed into a reflection of a self-righteous child, rejoicing in his so-called success. My pencil hovered below the eyebrows of the face before plunging downward to create the sharp, smug looking eyes.
Selfish, conceited, narcissistic… I had been listing the qualities that my person was reflecting.
Switching to the nose, I made it wrinkled at the bridge and raised at the end, exposing the flared nostrils. Unimpressed and unable to see success in others, another despicable trait.
The jaw was hard and jutted upwards. At the same time, the person is self-righteous and unable to see their own faults.
I sketched both of the ears, and then erased and redrew them to be noticeably tinier and placed farther back on the head. They have difficulty listening to others.
Two almost imperceptible creases ran from the nose to the corners of the mouth. They were formed from the constant scowling.
Straight, shiny hair was draped on her shoulders and fell on her back. The person will be a female. She spends hours on end just to groom herself, feeding her vanity.
My hand was flying: completing one feature with a few flicks of my wrist and moving onto the next so quickly that my fingers blurred. It wasn’t just a representation of negative qualities: I was dripping my rage onto the sheet paper, creating a monster.
Selfish, prideful, narcissistic, discontent, self-righteous, livid, conceited, rude, oblivious, vain…
My fingers ached from gripping my pencil so tightly, and my temple was pulsing from my inward screaming. Finally, I stopped drawing and massaged my blistering palm. Despite the pain, an invisible force tugged at the corners of my lips. I was proud of my work: never before had my innermost feelings been so perfectly expressed in my art. My eyes grazed over the girl, her hair, her lips, her eyes…
My brow furrowed, and I leaned in closer to the picture. Those eyes…
It was then that realization struck me, squeezing all of the air out of my lungs. I scrambled out of the chair, swatting at the paper, trying to get away from those eyes.
But the picture gracefully floated to the floor, landing face up. She stared at me accusingly. I gawked back at the girl, the girl who was a spot on reflection of myself. Her mouth-my mouth- was still, yet it screamed in my face, blaming me of all of the qualities that I had been reprimanding moments ago.
I was the selfish one.
I was the prideful one.
I was the narcissist, the discontent, self-righteous, livid, conceited, rude, oblivious, and vain, hypocrite.
I longed to turn my back on the picture, but the girl’s eyes forced me to keep my gaze steady. I could look away. I could not move. I couldn’t even scream, though hysteria bubbled in my throat.
In a single, sweeping motion, I snatched the scissors off of the bed-side table and grabbed my portrait on the floor, attacking the girl with the sharp prongs. Bits of her face and hair floated onto the floor as I snipped away, hands trembling. Once I had reduced her to a pile of scraps, I lowered myself onto my knees and began to toss the pieces out of my open window. They hovered beside my house, weaved through the branches of nearby trees, and finally disappeared amidst the other homes in my neighborhood.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I collapsed onto my bed, still trembling from my realization. I was too busy listing off the faults of everyone around me to notice that I had faults of my own.
The soft crinkling of paper roused my from my sea thoughts, causing me to flutter my eyes open. A single strip of paper had drifted to my side, lured by a sudden gust a wind. Believing it to be a scrap that I had overlooked, I pinched it with my thumb forefinger, preparing to toss it out the window.
I paused.
As an act of curiosity, my thumb slid off the paper, revealing the two eyes of the girl. Without the sharply drawn eyebrows, the eyes seemed relieved, as if a huge burden had disappeared from their consciousness. They stared at me, pleading.
I nodded curtly, though obviously the scrap of paper could not read my thoughts. I released the eyes, letting them drift away with the wind.
It might hace been a trick of the sun or my own wild imagination, but I could’ve sworn that they winked at me just before they disappeared behind the rows of houses.