I woke with a start. My eyes jolted open, as if electricity had been flowing through my body for a split second. Everything was a blur for a few moments, and I wiped the dark yellow crust from my eyes. The twitch in my left hand started, and I had to hold it with my other hand while I swung my sunken in legs over the bed. I weighed very little, and my skin was covered in a dark black ash, that had bumps on every inch of it, and those bumps in turn oozed pus. I am bloated in my face, and my chin is a foot long drape that flows out and over my neck. I have a foul odor, that permeates the room and fills it with it’s sickening stench.

I am ugly this morning, as I am frequently, so I walked over to my sink and splashed water on my face. My skin moved itself back into place for a moment, expecting the shell. After a few moments of heavy breathing and pulling the stray flecks of ash out of my throat with my toothbrush, the skin began to sag again. I pushed it back up into my jaw, hard this time. It stuck. Then, I washed the toothbrush off and exposed my teeth. They were jagged and misshapen, so I took the brush to them. After several minutes of hard scrubbing, they straightened and turned from their typical black color to a slightly yellowish white.

After that, I walked over to my shower, and pulled the curtain. Then, moving slowly, I climbed into the tub. Turning on the hot water took all my strength. I pulled the pin that switched the faucet to the overhead spigot, and it hit my skin, which hissed and popped. I began to scratch. Every inch of me needed to be wiped of the ash, the bumps, and the slop that covers it once it is combined with the steaming water.

A dull, heartless whimper echoed around me as the pain from my actual skin being torn off of my body overcame my tolerance to it. The tears helped shape my face to the image I wanted. It began to sag less and less. My arms began shaping themselves too, into sacks of muscle and fat. My cheeks enlarged themselves, and then fat began to fill the rest of my body too. It poured seemingly out of nowhere, and pushed my skin to the limit, adding to my stretch marks with brand new sets of red streaks on my abdomen.

My whole body shifted into overdrive, and my usually filthy skin became a tanned white, while down below, my legs grew muscle mass. I scratched a little more on my legs and hair sprouted from them, as well as my armpits. The transformation was nearly complete. But, as always something is missing. The thing that protects my fragile body from reverting back to the filth I am. The shell.

    As I looked in the mirror while walking back to my bedroom, I looked somewhat presentable. I looked like just another fat ugly white kid. Marvelous that I was able to get myself looking this decent on a bad morning. The fog from the boiling hot water could’ve been clouding my vision, but I digress, that I indeed made the best from a bad situation. My hair was short, but began to grow quickly out of my scalp to its normal length. My eyes switched from their solid black to brown eyes with white all around them. Normal again, but not quite yet.

I stepped out of the bathroom and over to the closet, pulling the door to the side. The shell hung there. A happy, emotionless mask, that pulled over and attached to my face, with a set of clothes I stick to the drape every night so that it is ready by morning. Today, I had a little trouble pulling the shell over my body, so I punched my gelatinous face into position.

I put on the shell fully, and it continued to mold to my body. My face twisted and contoured even more to fit the image, and the shell stretched my jaw to a permanent, cold, and steady expression I loathed to keep wearing. Hideously, it pushed my cheeks so hard they turned red, and forced me to smile whenever I thought anything at all.

I opened the door to my bedroom and walked outside, with a large smile on my face.

            I guess the shell took very well this morning. Unfortunately, the side effects are always major, being that my gelatinous form will often push violently against the shell. The body I hid inside is cramped, and yearned to break out at every conceivable moment. This entire process is painful, and, even on a good day (like today), my new muscles ached for more space. The perpetual, residual torture within the shell makes my smile even harder to bear, especially at school.

            I constantly get recommended to visit a peer counselor at my high school, which wouldn’t be a problem to some, but it bothers me greatly. As if, the spoiled human brats will know what it is like to suffer through my kind of pain. The worst thing that happens to them is that they tear their ACL during football practice, whatever that is. Probably a major injury to these people. I don’t have their bodies the minute I remove the shell, so I don’t participate in extra curricular… anything. When my time is done, I have the privilege to be done.

            I also try my hardest to get my homework done during class because of that, and my work ends up getting me into trouble, because I’m supposed to be focusing. Supposedly, I have to listen to things I have already heard the last three times I went to high school. I just wanted to get the shell off. All day, that is the only thing I think about. How long, for how much longer, must I pretend? I have never felt, or thought, anything but this.

            They’ll never really understand it, even the students here who fake being friends with me. I just stay quiet, because I fear that if I open my mouth too often, I will end up groaning or screaming in pain, and doctors visits could obviously be catastrophic. If I were to be found out, I would be taken back to my home. Home is not a nostalgic memory like it is for the humans who reside here. Home is a tainted, broken, wasteland. I hope I never return there. I’ll do whatever it takes, and so far, that has lasted me twelve years.

I have to do my work, and get to the end of the day. One more assignment, two more assignments, three more hours. Constantly, more and more. They’ll never understand it, even if I explained it in perfect detail. I could write it all, maybe, but they don’t let us write freely in English classes. I have to make little metaphors, here and there, to describe the monotony of my life. Hints of nihilism, and despair, just out of hope that someone will pick up on it. They just write an ‘A’ at the top of the paper and move on.

A couple of days ago, something strange happened. A group of girls asked me if I had a girlfriend. I didn’t know what to say. I panicked and blurted out, “What makes you think that?”

One of them, a beautiful one, replied, “Oh, well you look nice today, I was just wondering,” she snickered afterward. I recognized the sarcasm instantly. I guess the clothes I draped over the shell looked nicer than usual, a problem I wrote down for later. Look worse. It seemed impossible.

“No, I don’t have a girlfriend. I haven’t had one for a long time,” I said matter-of-factly, sitting in my chair and staring blankly at the whiteboard in front of us.

“You’ve had a girlfriend?” She asked, clearly bewildered. I’m not at all surprised by her reaction.

“Yeah, I had a girlfriend once. I don’t really care about it anymore. Stop asking me questions, I don’t want to talk to you,” I commanded, without looking at her once.

“Fine by me, loser,”  She retorted, turning her nose up at me. She didn’t even have to insult me, she had done it enough with the conversation preceding.

            The girlfriend I had left when I took the shell off in front of her. I don’t know why I did it, to this day. She never should have seen my insides. I knew how horrifying it was, but I guess I did not think hard enough before I made that decision. Never doing that again. Girls are a waste of my time, and they’re not even my species.

            My continued stay on Earth has been nothing but agony. I don’t know when, but I hope there is some relief. I just have to be patient.