You teenagers. Always with your colored hair.

Hey dad, so you know how you forced me to go to this prestigious, judgmental, turn-children-into-working-robots school? Yeah, well as it turns out, I don’t really fit in there. Earth-shattering, right?

FRIENDLY CONFINES BY TESSA ABBOTT 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 104

Hell on earth, I yell, as the bus drives off without me, a gust of dust swirling in the broiling Arizona air. The expression written all over the face of the old lady on the bench says, “You teenagers. Always with your colored hair.”

“Cry me a river, grandma,” my face says back.

With a dead phone, the last bus gone, I’m out of options, and I start walking home.

I yank my tie to loosen its death grip, the tie of the snake pit that my dad calls a school.

Hey dad, so you know how you forced me to go to this prestigious, judgmental, turn-children-into-working-robots school? Yeah, well as it turns out, I don’t really fit in there. Earth-shattering, right?

As if that would go well. I can hear him already, “Really Mia? You’re 16 years…