I have a week left until I take my test.

One week. One week to get my life together.

One would think the days would drag on, but it doesn’t. Instead, it makes life go that much faster, leaving me grasping at the tails of time. There isn’t anything I can do to slow it. I can only go forward. And while I know that’s the best thing to do, it’s the most difficult thing to accomplish.

I have a horrible feeling in my stomach that something awful is going to happen, and it’s putting me on edge. I try to focus on my studies, but instead my mind travels to negative thoughts, successfully wavering my gall.

My mom forces me to study, so much that I barely see Luhan.

It’s okay, I suppose. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw Luhan again. I can’t believe I did that. Kiss him. I can’t believe that happened. And I acted like a completely immature girl in front of him, too. Why did I let him see that I don’t have it all together?

It’s because I trust him. In so many ways, that realization is both freeing and constricting.

So when I see him again, I hope I won’t act abnormal and will continue to being, well, me.

Plus, I think it’s good that I am being told to study, and that I’m keeping myself holed up in my room, spending literally every day and every night poring over the pages of each textbook, learning and understanding every detail that could possibly be important to me. If I was left to do nothing, then my mind would have the liberty to grasp at any thought, and the one thing I don’t want to do is worry.

I still can’t wrap my mind around what happened to my dad. I can’t believe he was taken away from me like that. I always had my suspicions that he never simply disappeared – that he had always died, somehow – but having it confirmed is different from the conclusion being suspected. All my assumptions were real, but instead, knowing that does nothing to comfort me. It only unsettles me.

It makes me wonder what else the Institute has done. Are there other families that they have wronged? Are there other people they have killed because those people did not support them in their cause to forward the production of Exons?

Who else suffered like I did? Who else grew up with the wrong idea in mind because of what happened to their family member or friend? Who else had an unhealthy desire for the truth?

I can’t hate the Institute.

That sounds strange. I know it does. I should hate them. They killed my father. They ruined my childhood. They changed every good viewpoint I could have ever had about them and their products. They destroyed me in a way that was not physically evident.

But I can’t hate them. They made Luhan, and I could never hate them for that.

And the fact that I am more thankful to the Institute than I am hostile confuses me.

Should I hate them? They killed my dad, didn’t they? I have every reason to. I hated them before,