Excerpt: New Friends, New Graveyards

from chapter five
Stupid, stupid, stupid! My mind chorused the same word over and over in my mind- and, to be frank, I didn’t exactly disagree with it. I was being stupid; here I was, living the fantasy that ran inside the minds of every other girl my age- living without parents, surrounded strictly by good friends and good people- and feeling remorse about the life I used to live.
Don’t get me wrong, things in Georgia were just peachy- no pun intended- however, compared to life here, where everyone is more than well off, where (almost) everyone lives in peace and harmony, where you have no one telling you what to do… it was like comparing living in a cardboard box to living in luxury with the rich and famous. It couldn’t compare.
My school was falling apart- spray-painted graffiti covering nearly every wall, desks whose legs had been sawed off by insubordinate teenagers and a pair of children’s scissors, lockers who had to be hit repetitively just to be opened- and here, there was no school. The roads weren’t that great either; potholes and cracks that made it impossible for me to ride my bike. Not to mention the people. Jasper was the kind of town that could convince you all Southerners were hicks by the time you fully made it inside city borders. Almost every block in the commercial part of town had a bar, an alcoholic store, or a novelty shop that sold cowboy hats.
Most of the time, I was ashamed to show my face downtown, as were my parents. They’d spent their whole childhood, adolescence, and college years up in some of the most civilized northern towns, and I myself had spent the first four years of my life up there. We had been raised to show dignity, self-containment, and intelligence- traits most people in our town had probably never considered.
On the other hand, who cared if it was a dump? It was my dump. I loved it, and, in its own way, it loved me.
Everything inside me told me not to go down that road; I was happy where I was at now. In fact, I was more than happy- I was absolutely elated to be living such an amazing life. Still, maybe I wasn’t meant to live an amazing life. Maybe I was meant to live an average life, in an average town, and be nothing more than… average.