I guess this is my first post since Lauren's accident a week ago. She's still in the ICU (she came off the ventilator yesterday), which is technically families only but the doctors keep letting me breach protocol (and I think her parents are telling them I'm a cousin or "my brother's nephew's half sister twice removed" or something along those lines), so long story short I'm allowed to visit (which means that I have to - fail). I would actually do anything to not visit, but I feel trapped and everyone expects me to because we're friends, and they have no idea how much a resent her. And I get this clenching feeling in my stomach every time someone asks me how Lauren is doing or how I'm holding up, and it makes me constantly want to puke all over the godforsaken green industrial carpet in all of the classrooms at school.

I have never been good at expressing my feelings. After Katherine "died" last year, my parents tried to make me go to counseling but I dug my heels in so hard that they finally quit. Now I'm watching and I feel like everyone around me is disappearing and I've decided that people shouldn't get attached to one another because it can only end badly.

Epic fail - I'm sitting on the couch watching the winter olympics right now and I'm so tired I can't even move. I've spent the last 3 days sitting in the ICU with Lauren, who's completely incoherent and just sleeps all the time. The doctor wouldn't use the term "coma" because she definitely was trying not to freak me out (because I wasn't already freaking out obviously).

One summer when she was in college, my sister volunteered in the ICU. She used to say that people call it the vegetable garden. I can feel my stomach turning every time I remember her saying that.

There are, on occasion, those moments when you know that your life has changed forever. Mine came at 6:54 tonight after I left Joey's basketball game and was on my way home to slog through another thrilling 50 pages of the Merchant of Venice - worst fucking book ever. Emily was riding shotgun, and since I've recently turned over a new leaf and decided not to text while driving, I made her open it and when she said it was from Carter, I almost told her not to read it, but she never gave me a chance. "Hey do you know anything about Lauren's accident? I think it was pretty bad".

There are also moments when you can feel your heart pounding in your throat and taste copper in your mouth. When I texted Carter back and told him I hadn't heard anything, he called me and told me that it was on the news earlier. Why the hell is a news station allowed to release names? Carter told me that he was pretty sure that she'd been med-lifted to Detroit and that the news had said she had "life-threatening injuries". Now I'm sitting at my computer looking at the local news station website where there's a short article (of course it doesn't give any names because that would be too fucking useful - it only says a 17 year-old girl) because I don't know what else to do. My parents are in the kitchen whispering together about how the news can't legally release her name and whatever else, and they keep asking me if I should call someone to get the real story, and I'm sitting here calmly (I think) but I swear I'm screaming.

I am one of those people who always makes up scenarios in my head of things that will never happen. In some of these scenarios I imagine my funeral. I wonder who would come. I wonder if my brothers and sisters would stand there silently making amends for all the times that they were nasty to me (sitting grounded in your room for 10+ hours a day really messes with your head, because I'm positive that would never happen). My aunts and uncles would be there, and my cousins. My older brother might even drag his ass home from wherever in the world he's kicking it and come to say goodbye. His wife would be there, and Lauren. Maybe Carter would be there and think about the girl who he never had. I can blog-dream I guess, right?

All the kids from the gymnastics center would be there. They might shake their heads and say "that Payson was something", and want to cry, but they wouldn't. My obituary would be in the back page with the others, and I would want the song "When I Look to the Sky" by train to somehow be a part of it because I've always thought of that as a fitting funeral song. I always imagine that I would be buried in the same cemetery as my grandpa, but that doesn't make any sense since that was in Chicago. And I imagine how the seasons would pass, and that as they did, I would rise and fall in everyone's mind like a tide.

So with the vast amounts of time that I've been spending holed up in my room in light of my recent run-in with the law (or my mother, if I'm being less dramatic), I've decided to finally assemble this star-gazing kit that I think I got from my birthday when I was about 7 (6? 8? who cares, is what you're really thinking right now). Weird, right? I just decided that maybe I'll be a backyard astronomer. I finally managed to put together the telescope, which is actually pretty neat now that I'm no longer looking at my own massive black-hole (yeah - I did forget to take the protective film off, don't judge). The kit comes with these pretty neat constellation-finders that go over the end of the telescope. There's one for each season and another for general use (I'm guessing this is why the kit says "for ages 6 and above")? The keyword was "backyard" in the aforementioned phrase "backyard astronomer".

So like any grounded (read: bored-off-their-ass) person would do, I put the "autumn" constellation-finder over the end of the telescope and proceeded to find the Andromeda and Pisces constellations (maybe)? I'm getting a kick out of this stuff, really. When I was little, I once heard that you could use the stars like a map, so I asked my dad how to do it. He started in about how you had to pick a star (North Star, I think), and had to know where other stars were and what their altitude should have been, and then you had to measure the angles, draw imaginary lines, and so on and so forth. When he turned and saw my face, he laughed. "Exactly," he said. "Never leave home without your GPS".

I'm thinking about it now, and it doesn't really seem so hard. Just head to the place where all those lines cross and hope for the best.

I'm writing this post from my room where I have been banished for the next several years of my life because my mother is a twit and I think I might be a druggie. Except when people think of druggies I'm guessing it's more along the lines of coke-heads and people who cook crystal meth in their basements out of Nyquil or whatever, so maybe I'm just flattering myself.

It all started last week when my back started bothering me again. My buddy Nick who works out with the guys at the gym's dad is a physical therapist, so I did a few things I'm not proud of at Lauren's party last weekend (and when that didn't "work", I borrowed seventy bucks from my mom - more on that in a minute) so I could pay him to score me some cortisone. Now I just have to find some way to inject it without becoming a paraplegic which, given my recent luck, would probably happen. I would rather just take the time off, but I don't like to lose. And I usually do, except in the gym, so I can't just let it go.

So, my mom - I asked her for seventy bucks so I could get a new dress for a mixer that our gym has every year to get rich whoevers to pony up the dough so the roof doesn't collapse or whatever. Then I borrowed a dress from Lauren for the party and used the seventy bucks to get nick to score the goods instead BUT apparently Lauren's mother isn't stupid and told my mom at the mixer how cute I looked in Lauren's dress. Ooop. My mom asked where her money was and I told her it fell out of my gymbag somewhere. She proceeded to ground me for lying to her. If only she knew.

This morning when I got to school, my car was on fire. Like, really. The engine was smoking. Carter, who was in the senior lot when I pulled up, had to put it out with the remainders of a can of red bull. Not that he'll really miss it since he'll be asleep 15 minutes into first period anyway. When we lifted up the hood of my car, there was the remainder of a bird's nest, all charred and disintegrating. I felt guilty - poor dumb shit bird had no idea what was coming. Apparently the engine of my '97 outback subaru does not serve as "Home tweet home" (my neighbor painted that slogan on her birdhouse - birds can't read, moron). When I called my Dad, he reamed me out for setting my car on fire - he probably thinks I was smoking up before classes and that's how it started. I'm positive he doesn't believe my bird story. Or much else that comes out of my mouth. "If you don't expect too much from me, you might not be let down".

When I got to homeroom, Lauren hounded me with questions about Carter - apparently she saw us in the parking lot trying to salvage my car, and apparently she's obsessed with him. I'd love to say this was new, but I'm pretty sure it's more along the lines of every-time-she-talks-all-I-hear-is-incessant-buzzing and I just never knew about it. I told her he asked me about my plans for this weekend (he didn't), but I told him I had a meet so not much was up with me. Maybe I'll get lucky though - my back keeps doing this weird twinge-thing, so I'm really hoping that will somehow blow up before Saturday.

Here's to hoping. More later.