[CONTENTID1]Krystal POV[/CONTENTID1]

[CONTENTID2]I stayed there for a long time, just staring at the blank art project. Slowly, my body shut down and I sank to my knees and began crying. I wish that words would never hurt me. Not even sticks and bones could do me this much pain. Tears streamed down my face as the memory of the bright old me surfaced. That vibrant lively child. Where was she now? Clearly she wasn't the bratty teenager I am now.

After a while, I calmed myself only to burst into tears again. A good amount of time passed before I finally managed to stop crying and moved on to my art drawing. I ended up drawing myself surrounded by stacks and stacks of books, reading one after another with black pages that had squiggly lines drawn in them. The drawing would surely pass as a normal piece of art rather than anything questionable. The drawing was sort of true in a way. All I ever did was read study and study. I'd always liked science and math because there was always a solution. But history and language arts always asked for abstract things like opinions, feelings, emotion... Things that I don't understand.

I struggled on those, but of course to please my parents, I must get an 'A' in all subjects; the ideal grade. However, they would much rather prefer that I get everything correct and be perfect. Impossible, it was.

"KRYSTAL! Daddy is home!" my 'father' shouted before going straight to the living room to watch TV.

I know it's harsh to disregard him, but you don't know how long this has been going on. He never played with me when I was a child. He doesn't even try to make up for me and now he's treating me like I'm a tiny kid. Let him grow fat from eating all that junk before watching TV shows that are utterly stupid. It's fine as long as he doesn't annoy the hell out of me right after mother already tortured me with her words.

Do you know how insulting that is to me and how many times I've told him to stop bothering me? Every time I asked him to stop doing it he got happy that I was annoyed, almost as if it made his day brighter somehow. Then, he would act like a complete lunatic and be so childish that mother would even oppose him to stop bothering me only because it was bothering her and her perfect child, Jessica.

I envy my sister. She's beautiful, great in school, obedient, and bound to get into a dream college. All that mother could ask for. Mother would scold me for not running toward my goals. My father would just say that I act too old for my age and tease me to the point where it actually is just insulting. I'm not sure if it's me that is too mature or if it is my family that is too childish and mean to me. The true irony here is that my mother tells me to run toward my dreams while she and father crush each of my childhood dreams without even pretending to support me.

"KRYSTAL! HOW WAS YOUR DAY?" My dad asked in that annoying child-like tone.

Then after a minute or two, "KRySSSSsSSS! TALL! So Jung!!!" (I really mean to say So Jung not Soojung. Also think of Krys as in Kris and then tall instead of just Krystal.)

If I replied he would keep asking the same questions over again and say he doesn't understand until I rephrase the event ten times so I chose not reply and continued drawing all the books around my figure. I was too lazy to draw my own ugly face so I drew a stuck paper to it. I decided that the paper was small enough to pass without decorating it much and then labeled in moments. My homework had finally been completed. For the rest of the afternoon, I stayed in my room thinking about how things could be better than it was now. If I had listened to them and became their puppet, maybe, just maybe, I would be loved by them.

But it was just another one of my broken dreams.

My mother had shouted that she wasn't my mother and disowned me many times throughout our arguments. A good day would be if she didn't call orders for me to do things, a good week would be only one argument, and a good month- which was extremely rare, would only have three arguments. The arguments... Even though I don't want to admit it, they crushed me as a person.

I wanted to do so many things when I was little; invent, draw, play soccer, martial arts, play violin, and even become a world famous mathematician. One after one, they were all crushed, regards to my mother. She tol