Chapter Text
Through the window of a tall modern looking apartment, was a boy with messy curls and brown worried eyes. He sat on a wheeled seat with his desk drawn too close for comfort. Beads of sweat collect on his forehead as it races down, threatening to wet his paper. He was currently studying for an upcoming weighted assessment, well at least trying to.
This is Drew, the boy who topped his class so many times in all subjects that people would look his way before the teacher even announces the top scores. However, Drew has a rather disappointing life back at home, he's parents were rather inconsistent despite their care and financial support. And with the little attention he gets, his younger sister, Maple needed. This made him grow up a lot faster than most of his friends and in some way made him quite an overachiever (to prove he's worthy for attention).
It was coming in a few days and he needed to be sure he was ready for it. Perfectionism had him memorise the long strings of words from his notes, that had his head buzzing for about an hour now. He thought they would be useful but in all honesty he didn't need to.
Drew felt his breathing heighten as an odd sensation rose from his gut, building up in his chest. His knuckles are now white from the iron grip he has on his pen. If only he had the same iron grip on his focus, the test is next Monday and he barely scraped together anytime to study today.
The day's been stressful.
The week's been stressful.
The whole freaking month's been stressful.
Drew felt like a spring, twisted so tightly that he could barely breathe, balancing school and work is harder than he imagined. But if he left, Nolan would have to work alone… surely he could leave his best friend behind.
Drew felt his heart grow impatient, he looked at his textbook and notes messily, sprawled on the desk and knew he wouldn't see the end of it very soon.
The longer he stayed there, the harder it was for him to concentrate.
Drew forced himself to look at his papers again, his vision felt clouded even though he could see the strokes of every word. They just didn't make any sense to him anymore.
Just keep writing, he turned to his pen and fumbled about, only to discover that his hands no longer knew how to write. Every minute it became clearer, that there was no way he could continue in this state. For all those times he yearns to regress, couldn't this have come on one of those days?
He grunted frustratedly as a pigeon landed near a tree by his window.
Within a split second, a childish urge immerged as all he wanted was to jump up and try to scare the poor pigeon.
Trying hard to contain his urges, he bit hard into his lips and crossed his arms like a child about to throw a fit.
This is no time for a little like him to goof around, though a whine from inside said otherwise.
Drew pushes it down hard as he tries to rub the gloss off his eyes and forces himself to recite the lines he just memorised.
He shrunk into his seat as he thinks hard, out of nowhere a familiar tune escapes.
"The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round~" he sings softly.
He grabs his pencil and draws a little bird on the blank space of his notes. As if on instinct he reaches for his color pencils and colored in the bird. With nothing else left to color, he filled up the 'o's in his notes with hues of blues, oranges and greens.
Drew stepped back to admire his work, when he realised. 'What am I doing?!?' he caught himself.
Now he felt like he was on a crossroad. One side begged him to slip, it just felt so easy to give into the headspace. But on the other hand, he knew he doesn't have the luxury of time and this isn't the time to slip.
Drew bit his wobbling lips as his big self scolds him about how they would have to work extra hard to study the rest of this chapter and throw off the schedule they had to follow.
Even if Drew tried to study, he knew he would slip anyways, he reasoned. Drew then slid into bed, curling into himself letting himself cry as silently as he can. Knowing mum would, without a doubt, find reasons to call him cry baby.