This is Part II of Until You’ve Bled. Part I is here.
“Teacher’s pet”.
“Kiss ass”.
“Brown noser”.
Yeah, she’s heard it all. Maybe if the others actually focused on doing their work instead of trying to be popular, they’d get decent grades.
They didn’t like Jessica. An otherwise good kid, Jessica didn’t have that many friends.
It hurts worse as a teenage girl though. When it actually matters.
Regardless, Jessica kept doing her thing. Kept to her books.
Sadly, they didn’t realize she had it worse than any of them. But alas, we all know that teenage girls are the last people you’ll ever get any empathy from.
First Mom died in a freak car accident. Lost control of her steering wheel. Crashed into a tree. Took her almost an hour to die.
People would have stopped if they had known. But of course, it happened off the beaten path. By the time they found her, it was too late. When the ambulance arrived, she was already dead.
Then, in her senior year of high school, Dad got cancer. He stood strong. Lied to Jessica that he’d beat it, and would always be there for her. Who knows? Maybe Dad even believed that nonsense. You never know with grief. Grief does funny things to you, especially when you haven’t even gotten over the last one.
So she had her reasons to be buried in her books. They were her only safe haven. In her freshmen year of college, her books were all she had.
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