Chapter Five: The Good Fight
That Christmas it snowed. That was probably the weirdest thing that's ever happened in Sunnydale. I mean, seriously, snow in Southern California? Weird. And not like paranormal weird, just plain weather weird. Well, okay, hellmouth. I guess it coulda been paranormal weird. Anyway, it freaked me out. The thing was, for a while after that things were a little better. Everyone was nicer and just generally happier. But only for a little while. Then things turned to shit again.
Well, maybe not for Xander. He did get this really cool car for a little while. I think girls may have actually started insulting him a little less then. It's funny how dating Cordelia got him nothing, but a car made him a little less losery. Well, to the shallow girls at least. Which, at Sunnydale High, seemed to be about 99 percent of them.
As Xander's life was getting marginally better, mine was getting a whole hell of a lot worse. I guess I was sort of on a downward spiral. My parents didn't even talk to each other anymore. They didn't even talk through me. It was like I didn't exist anymore. I heard one time that parents, when they split up, tend to show the kids too much affection and buy them lots of stuff to sort of "win" them, but with mine it was like once the marriage was over, anything that had come with it no longer applied. Which included me. Not that I wasn't used to it. I had been practically clinging on Buffy and Xander and Willow for three years and they had yet to acknowledge my existence more than a "hey" when I was thrust upon them. I was like the invisible boy. Well, not actually, because then I'd be that girl who was, well, invisible my sophomore year. Very weird.
Anyway, at that point in time I was sort of building up anger about my assigned place in life. I figured if I didn't exist to anyone else, why exist at all? I know it was kind of a crazy way of thinking now, but at the time it totally made sense. I was just so angry. At my parents, at the students, even at Willow and Xander. They used to be, if not my friends, at least in my general group. And now I didn't exist, even to them. I know this probably doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but it made sense to me at the time. I got so crazed that I stole my dad's gun and started carrying it around in my backpack. I know, how clich�. But I wasn't gonna use it to start a school massacre or anything, I just wanted to know that I could end it at any time. I had the power over my own existence. I guess it was just good timing when I decided to use that control.
Just as I reached the end of my rope, Buffy showed up. I wasn't thinking to clearly, and Buffy sorted it out for me. She showed me that I wasn't invisible, it's just that everyone else was dealing with their stuff, so they tended to focus on what was directly in front of them. While I was sitting there thinking that I had the monopoly on inner turmoil, everyone else was thinking the same thing. It was so obvious, yet I totally missed it. I guess sometimes you lose perspective. Can't see the forest for the trees, and all that. Buffy saved my life. Buffy, if you ever read this, thank you again. I know that you're probably wishing you had let me end it all right there, after what has happened, but I also hope that maybe one day you won't. Maybe I'll be able to give you a reason that makes what you did a good thing. Maybe you didn't let another monster slip away.
God, I hope I can fix things.
Anyway, after that I went into therapy. I was in it for about two years, until my therapist got killed by a vampire. It happens. So my being in therapy gave me something, well, I guess it gave me whatever Xander's car had given him. And I actually got a date to prom. It definitely helped my self esteem issues to get an actual live girl to go with me to prom. Especially since that was before I met Warren and could have had a date built. But I'll talk about that later.
So I actually went to my senior prom with a cute girl. She was like a foot taller than me, but she didn't seem to mind. I think she might have even had a good time. I know I did. I spent the whole night dancing and psyching myself up for when I would have to take the stage. I found out about a week before that I would be presenting an award. Our school had the usual awards ceremony, you know, Class Clown, Most Likely to Succeed, etcetera. It was stupid stuff mostly. No one really took it too seriously. Well, not as seriously as Prom Queen or Homecoming Queen, anyway. But my senior year half the ballots had write-ins on them for a new category. I had written in "Class Hero", but they decided to go with a phrase that they got from, of all people, Harmony. So when the time came around, I got to present Buffy with an award for "Class Protector". It was a good moment. Probably the best of my high school career. I knew, probably more than anyone else, what a protector she was. I know that there's no way to repay her for all she's done, but at that moment I got to at least give her something.
It was a good prom.
But, of course, the good times never last long in Sunnydale. So I found out a week and a half later that the Mayor was planning on killing the senior class on graduation day. Which was so not cool. My class managed to have the lowest mortality rate of any Sunnydale High class ever, and he was gonna just kill us all right at the end. I don't think so.
So the rest of the class kind of felt the same way, and we acknowledged Buffy's power as an entire group one more time in order to take down the Mayor.
Weapons were passed around and every single senior was given a role. It was full on battle, and we were fighting for our right to have normal lives, even when being forced to grow up in that town. We knew that some of us wouldn't make it, but we also knew that it was the first time everyone had acknowledged the existence of evil in Sunnydale as a group. And that had to count for something. It had to lead to something good. And I think it did. A few students didn't show up, which was valid. I wouldn't have either, except I knew that I owed it Buffy and Willow and Xander to back them up and try to help them at least once. I think most of the students felt that way. This was our way of repaying them for all the times they halped us, as well as taking our town back from the dark side. We were the good guys, and the good guys always win.
There were a few casualties. I think Larry got killed. The Mayor ate Principal Snyder, which was weird, but, well, sort of fitting. He went down with the school. Kinda appropriate. I jumped right into the fray. Cordelia staked a vampire, then I got the next one. Harmony got bitten, but she was okay- I saw her later on walking around the UC Sunnydale campus. It was a huge battle, but we survived. I survived. I never thought I would be a part of something that major. It kinda gave me perspective, you know. Kinda made me see how big some things are, and how much some things don't even matter.
I thought that would be the end of it. I was free. I could move on and be a normal person in the normal world- pretend monsters weren't real and Buffy had just been some girl in my high school class.
I was wrong.