Chapter Text
Stinging, stinging, stinging. Everything stung. Clouds upon clouds of bees and beetles of thoughts, actions, words, all hellbent on jabbing into the nearest feeling being. That’s what it felt like. Sneaking glances at other girls’ clothes—blouses, skirts, tank tops, shorts—stung. Seeing a girl hug her boyfriend in the hall stung. Seeing him hug her back stung, maybe even more. Enduring everyone’s smiles stung the most. How could they be so happy? Her eyes stung in the open, behind her door, under her dreams.
That’s what it felt like.
Why don’t you give up? she taunted herself, at the same time malicious and altruistic. It would be easier. It would be so much easier.
The sun streaming through the thin panes capping each end of the halls dissipated to harsh shadows before it hit the floor. What was she doing? Aging bricks leered into her peripheral. She shouldn’t be here. The metal door was heavy, too heavy, like one day she wouldn’t have the strength to push it open, and that would be the end. Should she even be here? Left, right, left, right, left, right. She shouldn’t be here.
The pitifully-small, veneered desk came into her field of view from the top, since her eyes tracked the lines in the paneled floor. Had the desk lost its companions, the scattered rows disappeared, leaving it the only inhabitant of the floor, she wouldn’t know nor care. All grace stayed chained up somewhere in her body as she felt her clunky movements maneuver her into the attached chair. She almost laughed at how little she could perceive the low back of the seat through her top layers. At least the thick sweatshirt minimized her contribution to the class cacophony.
“Tina Lam.”
Tina glanced up out of surprise. A substitute teacher; of course she hadn’t noticed. Hopefully this one would let her get away with simply raising her hand.
“No Tina,” the man deadpanned, reaching his large hand up to adjust the circular frame resting on his nose. What was the point of wearing glasses if you weren’t going to look up from the attendance sheet right in front of you?
Right, maybe he’s farsighted, Tina mused. The voices around her seemed to raise in volume, smothering the sound of her lips staying shut and her neck turning down once again. This kind of panic, at least, she could logic away. One absence didn’t matter. Maybe they would even correct it since she had been marked present in all her other classes. This, at least, was okay.
Ironically, the incident alleviated the brunt of her earlier moping, if only by distraction. In such sparse, fleeting, wonderful moments, she could escape the suffering by plain ignorance, shoving the mountainous sorrow onto her temporal doppelgänger. Sometimes she would even assign ahead the task of resolving some part, any part, of the behemoth, but more often she didn’t see the point.
She could think about anything else like a normal person. A normal girl. While autopilot took over the schoolwork—and such multitasking came easily when no one around cared to bother her—she savored the priceless opportunity to simply dwell. To dwell inside her own head surrounded by her own friendly thoughts who tried to convince her that she was normal and that everything would work out in the end, or even soon.