Confessions- Chapter 2

When Jane woke up the next morning her shoulders felt very tight. "Geeze," she said to herself," when are my shoulders going to loosen up a bit?" Jane was under a lot of stress, stress a fifteen year old should not have. People probably couldn't tell from the outside, but the place she called home was falling apart. Her dad had been moving in and out for the past three years. He'd been out a total of six times, but every time he always seemed to be around the house anyway. He came in to shower and do laundry, and he had an attachment to the basement. That's where he was if he was at home, sitting on the computer in the basement drinking and doing god knows what. The situation left the family torn. Jane's mom was always complaining about everything, and her sisters were the biggest cause of Jane's stress. She came to the conclusion that they decided to make a point to make her life hell. She was glad she had Zach and her friends, every time things felt unbearable they made her feel better, as best as they could anyway. Band also used to be a great place for her, until the new director came along. Miss Doltish, what kind of person has a name like that anyway? The woman was dumb, to put it simply. She was no good for the band, she was a horrible director, and just plain stupid. It frustrated Jane even more to see the band, her second family, fall apart like they were. Everything was hard, and not a day went by when she didn't want to burst into tears, but she knew she couldn't do that. To Jane crying in front of people you love should be considered a sin. She felt it was a terrible waste of emotion, and thought for some reason showed weakness. Her mother, one could assume, was partly at fault for this. Countless times she told Jane, "I need you to grow up a little more, I need you to be stronger." What a shame this was. At fifteen Jane sometimes felt she had lived a lifetime thirteen times over again. When she was thirteen she discovered her first gray hair, something some would find funny. Not Jane. At thirteen she already felt ancient. She was wiser than many adults around her, and it scared her. She felt mentally worn out, and nothing seemed to help other than for short periods of time. Her mom tried going to church once or twice, but the family always ended up not going back the following Sunday. Not that it mattered to Jane, church never seemed to help her. Praying to her felt like talking to herself, only with less responses. She felt nothing when it came to religion, and it left her with a slight sense of abandonment. It was hard for her to believe in a heaven and hell with all she had seen, felt, and heard. One more thing she kept to herself, and at times was ashamed of; it wasn't uncommon for Jane to have an "otherworldly" visitor. She once confided in her cousin, who told her sisters, aunt, and uncle. This, by the way, took all trust Jane had in her cousin. Her uncle and sisters hardly ever brought the subject up, but her cousin and aunt often gave her a hard time about it, which is what she feared most, and why she didn't confide in anybody else after that. It was easy to see, knowing these things, she had a lot to deal with, and with little anyone could do to help. She often wondered how she would make it out of her own home, and how much longer she would have to wait. Until she could get out, Jane knew she just had to grit her teeth and take it, so she did her best to put on a happy face, drag herself out of bed, and make it through one day at a time.