"I'm okay, thanks."

She had the habit of always saying that she was "okay." In truth, she was not okay. She doubted that many people ever were, so she didn't think of herself as especially extraordinary. In fact, she found herself painfully unordinary, unfit even for the joys of being ordinary.

She began to hate the term for every lie it represented and every connection she failed to make. "Okay" became an unsightly and common term that her peers vulgarized further by shortening to O.K. The word always rang with glaring double capitalization and periods, and no one could ever understand how to punctuate around it. The ordeal was entirely unprofessional, and she decided to remove the word from her vocabulary, wanting not just to rid herself of lies, but also to grow up.

For the first week, she placed a quarter in a jar every time she said the dreaded word, but that felt very childish as well, so she stopped. I must grow up, she thought. She began grimacing every time the word escaped her lips, but that wasn't enough, so she grimaced whenever she heard others say the word as well. As a result, she spent most of her time with an expression of pain. Her classmates were afraid to approach her, thinking her to have some terrible and perhaps contagious disease. So they stayed away, and the girl returned to her room each day, alone.

She spoke with her mother on the phone every evening, and when her mother asked her how she was, she began to say, "I'm awful." "Today was horrible." "I feel terrible about my lack of achievement." Her mother never knew how to reply, so the line remained silent. Eventually, the girl began to say, "I hate myself." Mother and daughter both wished for comforting words, but nothing ever came. "Okay then. Goodnight," her mother would say. And the girl would grimace.

After three years of refusing to say okay, the girl found herself with no friends, no acquaintances, and a mother who avoided her telephone calls. "To put it bluntly," she said to herself, alone in her room, "I am not okay." She grimaced, but she noticed that her face didn't move. It was frozen in a permanent expression of pain.