Consequence

• Keira Spurgeon, Grade 10, Pacific Coast Christian School -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition

You come back home to your house, hunched over as you try to conserve your body heat. It’s cold, but you don’t dare wear a hoodie, in case it’s taken from you.
You arrive at your house and go inside, heading immediately to your room, not wanting to encounter your mum. You and her have gone estranged over the years; it’s a common sight for you to be in your room for hours on end. And anyway, you don’t want her to see the bruises.
When you go inside, you head to your computer, and see all the emails sent to you:
Stupid.
Freak.
Weirdo.
Ugly.
Idiot.
Moron.
Dumb.
Weak.
Nobody likes you.
Pathetic.
Everyone hates you.
Disgusting.
Waste of space.
You’re nothing.
You feel tears well up in your eyes as those words cut you like glass, stinging even more than the kicks and punches you endured today. You’re thinking, Maybe they’re right. Maybe I AM nothing.
You feel it in your heart that it’s true, that what they say to you, what they email to you, is completely true. And it hurts; it makes you want to curl up into a ball and cry forever as you hide from the world. It hurts so, so much, that you want it to stop, that you’ll do ANYTHING to MAKE it stop.
And then you see the empty glass of water that you got for yourself earlier this morning, sitting on your desk... and you have found a way to escape the pain, the torment, the name-calling, the overwhelming feelings of shame, bitterness and sadness.
Your mother comes into your room two hours later to call you down for dinner... and screams at seeing her daughter’s body, YOUR body, lying on the floor, blood pooled around you, both wrists slashed with the broken shards of the glass you had smashed earlier.
So that you could commit suicide... to escape the bullying.
Bullying brings death. Its most serious, and most devastating, consequence.