Spencer was planning to spend another night alone. but one might say that's how she liked it. She put steaming water into the old rusty pot that used to contain Ramen noodles. When her father was home he would say, she ate the chili ones like they were going out of style, but of course, he never said much. Every day at 8:30pm on the dot, she would get a text message from her father which would simply read, “I love you honey, don’t forget to brush your teeth, and feed the hamster,” she didn't have the heart to tell him the hamster died almost a year earlier. She thought maybe she would tell him one of these days, but today is not that day.

Just like clockwork her phone lit up, and just as expected it was her father. Over the course of his absence this had become a nightly message. Spencer sighed and got out of the chair, her old SpongeBob Pajama bottoms were ripped, and faded making the iconic character almost unrecognizable. she went into a room set down on her bed. The springs were making loud noises underneath the weight of her small frame. She carefully moved her laptop from its perch on the wicker side table, turned on YouTube to queue up her old standby, the movie adaptation of “Columbine: Zero Hour”. The teen and seen this movie enough times she could quote it. Around the time that the movie was halfway over, she took a mentholated cigarette from her hiding place which was a hidden drawer in the bedside table. She took the smoke out of the box and sighed to herself. It was her last one, she would have to go get some more in the morning. She took too long drags off the cigarette before she extinguished it on the bed post, not even giving a second thought to the fact that there was going to be small circular burn mark in the framework of her bed. By the time that her father returned to town, none of it would matter anymore. She cuddled up in her fluffy blanket and giggle to herself when she saw the all too familiar watermelon pattern printed on them. Spencer turned to face the nightstand where she had placed a single white rose which was long passed wilted and now, it was turning shades of brown and black. She could not bear to throw the one beautiful thing away, it was the one Valentine she could truly remember getting, it was given to her by a boy she barely knew, a boy who drove a BMW, a boy who often wore a Red Sox hoodie. but for some strange reason he found it in the kindness of his heart to give a flower to the girl who he would always see sitting alone in math class. This kind gesture meant the world to her. Over the course of friendly hellos, she discovered his name was Trent, this was because his father was a huge Nine Inch Nails fan. She also knew that he liked to make different kinds of pizza and post the videos of this activity on the internet. She wondered if someday he would take her for a ride in his car and get her plastic flowers so they might not start to smell as bad as the current one.