Aunt Lorie and Greg argue about me upstairs while I sit at the dining room table, snacking on some organic trail mix, like a regular Riverside-ian. Selina has already gone to bed, and Wes is in the living room on the other side of the stairs, picking up where he left off earlier in his video game.

"I don't want him staying with me," I hear Greg protest.

"Shh, you're going to make your cousin even more depressed," Aunt Lorie scolds him in hushed tones.

I scoff and pop another almond and chocolate chip combo in my mouth.

Here's the thing no one understands about depression unless they've had it. It isn't always sadness. Most of the time it's this lurking, invisible blanket that covers your entire life. It darkens everything and keeps you weighed down, unable to do anything. Depression is months, or in my case years, of not doing anything. Then you stop caring about anything. Then you start feeling anxious and guilty about not caring and not doing anything, until eventually, all you can think about is your anxiety, guilt, and apathy. And the cycle continues until finally, you're me, and you're just sort of numb to everything.

It's a state of life, not a bit of sadness. So it's sort of comical to me listening to Lorie say that Greg not wanting me in his room is going to worsen my depression, because I'm already in the cycle. I'm already too numb to care about Greg's hissy fit.

"I can't Mom," Greg says, and I'm 100% certain he knows he's saying this loudly enough for me to hear. "He's just so...." He stops and makes a disgusted noise. "What if he has fleas or something? What if he's a junkie too and I wake up to him shooting himself up?"

That's the thing that breaks through and stings. I don't want to listen to Greg's shit anymore. It's not making me depressed—it's bringing back memories of the kids at school making fun of me and staying away from me for the same reasons.

There was this one girl in elementary school, and she sat next to me while we were working on a project about Delta. We had to focus on our house and our neighborhood and make a paper cut out of our house with the surrounding environment on a piece of paper behind it, and then we would all put ours together and make a big Delta border to go around the classroom. It would have been cute if the teacher had done her research about where some of us lived. Because Country Meadows all funneled into the same elementary school, me and Kyle and some other kids were all sort of put on blast with the project. And this girl, Camilla, announced to the class once the border was up that she thought it would look better without the grey box houses and that her mom told her she wasn't allowed to talk to kids from our neighborhood. She then asked if we could leave the class, as in "can all the Country Meadows kids leave the class," so she didn't have to see our houses or talk to us. From that point on, kids started making fun of us, telling us we lived in boxes, asking us how the boxes were in the cold, stuff like that that made us sound homeless. It was shitty, and it, like most shitty things, stuck with us into high school. We were the grungy, homeless kids who lived in boxes and probably shot up because our boxes were in Country Meadows. That was the joke. It wasn't funny.

I'm not going to beat up my cousin, not on the first night, so I resort to my second go-to response: I decide to leave. I walk into the living room where Wes is slumped on the couch, lit in the blue glow from the TV.

"Hey, I'm going outside for a bit," I say to him as I approach the side patio door.

Wes sits up and pauses his game. "I, um... I don't think I can let you do that."

"Why?" I ask, a little too aggressively than I mean to sound.

He doesn't look like he has an answer, so he huffs and says, "Just... you have your phone on you?"

I pull it out of my pocket and wave it at him.

"Ok, just don't do anything you're going to regret."

"Like what? Doing drugs?"

"Like hurt yourself."

These people.

"I won't hurt myself, I just need to get out of the house," I say as Lorie and Greg keep going at it upstairs.

Wes nods and gestures for me to use the door, the first cool thing this guy has done. Rufus briefly looks up from his dog bed under the TV when the door opens, but then lowers his head back to the floor, granting me safety as I get the hell out of that house.

It's cool for a summer night and dark. There are a few stars in the sky, but mostly it's overcast and not even the moon is shining down. There aren't the "porch" lights or street lights that would make all of Country Meadows glow orange at night. The only glow comes from the upstairs window in the back, where Lorie and Greg are arguing about me and where Greg has made it clear that I'm no longer welcome.

I don't really care, I'll sleep outside if I have to. Because, actually, Camilla and all of those assholes are right all along: I'm literally homeless. It was the great Delta Border Project Prophecy that foretold this, and now, here I am: a homeless pariah.

Then, as I'm wandering around the yard sort of dragging my feet, a light appears ahead of me. Someone is in the cemetery, at one of the headstones right on the edge of the easement.

Because I have nothing better to do, I walk closer to see what's going on. Lorie said some teens drink up there, so maybe I could join, you know? Once I'm close enough to see the person's face in the reflection of their flashlight against the gravestone, I step behind that dying willow so I don't scare the shit out of them. Imagine being in a graveyard at night and you look ahead and there's a dark figure just standing in the middle of everything, staring at you. Yeah, I'm not trying to do that to someone.

It's a girl, young, probably about my age. She has shoulder length, curly dark hair that she tucks behind her ears as she places a round rock on top of the headstone she's in front of. She's crying, but it looks like she's so used to crying at this point that the tears come out of her eyes without any reaction from the rest of her face. I've been there.

She sits down on the ground in front of the gravestone, leaving my view. I think about walking over to the back gate of the yard and trekking up the little easement hill to see her and maybe talk to her. She seems like she's on my level right now. But that's something that Kyle would do and totally scare the girls away, I've seen it happen. So instead, I take a seat on the ground too, in front of this willow, and even though she doesn't know I'm here, I just sit here, sort of with her, in case, I guess. In case she needs someone. In case something bad happens. In case I can maybe just fall asleep here or live in this dead tree.

I'm not sure exactly why I feel connected to this girl enough to stay here instead of walking away from this awkward situation until I realize that she sort of reminded me of Princess Positivity. She's not blonde like Princess Positivity, but their faces are similar. She has the same kind eyes. Even their crying faces looked the same.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and Google Princess Positivity for a comparison, and maybe just to see her face too. It's the first time I've Googled her instead of just trolling her channel, and the website hits come up first before the image results. The second website that shows up reads, "Princess Positivity and Her Kingdom of Lies."

Obviously, I click on this.

When the page loads, I see a picture of Princess Positivity as I've seen her on YouTube next to a picture of her with dark curly hair. The header reads, "Have you listened to her bullshit about staying positive? Did you know you were listening to a liar?" Then below the pictures is a full rant-filled paragraph without any punctuation, which... I'm not a good student or anything, but c'mon.

It starts off with: "Princess Positivity or Cora Green is a liar she lies about herself and I cant imagine she is practicing what she preaches because I've totally heard her complain and be down before you cannot trust her she even wears a wig for her videos like that is fooling anyone everyone knows who she is and what she's doing online and its hilarious that she thinks she can put on a wig and pretend like she isn't Cora anymore DON'T LISTEN TO LIARS LIKE CORA GREEN."

Damn, I think. Not because Princess Positivity, or I guess Cora, wears a wig, because who cares? But because if she's dealing with this sort of shit, I definitely don't need to be trolling her on top of that.

But then I get sort of excited, like nervous excited, and I freeze in my place behind the willow. It's entirely possible that Princess Positivity is just on the other side of the easement, and I could meet her. She could be here, in Riverside.

"Who's there?" I hear a girl's voice call from behind me. That has to be her. I hurry and turn my phone's screen off so the glow doesn't give me away.

"I know you're there, your phone was just on. Who are you?" She sounds angry. "Is that Greg?"

"Shit," I say to myself. I'm going to have to come out from behind the tree, otherwise, I'm going to be back in horror movie territory. I push myself to stand and brush the dirt from my ass before stepping out for her to see me.

"Hey," I say, immediately hating myself for starting with such a creeper greeting. "Not Greg, just staying in his house. Sorry, I'm not trying to be creepy." Now I hate myself even more. If I have to say I'm not trying to be creepy, I'm being creepy.

She peers at me in the dark. "What are you doing down there?"

"I'm just trying to get out of the house. I'm staying with my aunt and cousins, and they're fighting, so I wanted out."

She nods in understanding, but she doesn't seem convinced. "Were you watching me? Or filming me?"

"No, no, I wasn't. I didn't even know someone was out here." The lie sounds believable.

She nods again. "I needed some time out of my house too." She steps out from behind the gravestone and I can see she's wearing some loose pants that look like they're probably her pajamas with a black Northface jacket. "It's weird that my grandma is buried so close to your family's yard."

"Yeah, apparently that little hill there is what separates the cemetery from their property."

She peers down at the easement. "I was going to ask if maybe your family had a drinking problem," she jokes, though that's sort of a shitty thing to joke about.

"Yeah, no, it's from kids like us apparently. That's the easement. It's this space that no one owns, but for some reason it's my family's job to clean it. I guess they're slacking."

She smiles, and if I had any doubt that she was actually Princess Positivity, it immediately leaves me. I could never mistake that smile or the way it lights up her whole face.

"So, it's like the free parking spot in Monopoly?" She asks with a smile.

"Sure," I say. I feel warm for the first time in a long, long while.

"Want to sit with me in free parking?"

I shrug, trying to play it cool. "Sure." I tuck my phone into my back pocket and head up the hill toward her. Princess Positivity.