My nails scratch desperately on my scalp as I check my phone for the thousandth time this morning. I'm pacing at my locker, trying to tell myself not to pace. I'm calling attention to myself, and I do not like that.
I feel a little wet down there in my panties.
NO!! NOT LIKE THAT! In another sort of way that my mind is not calm enough to process.
I check again. Still just one tick.
Where the fuck are you?!
"Hey!"
My head bobs up to see Hermione standing beside me. Her calm is stressing me out. Her arm rests across her belly, cradling a couple textbooks while her other hand gestures to me.
"How are you?"
"Um--good?"
"Okay... Have you seen Nikki this morning?" She squints at me with a concerned look and I try desperately to force my body to calm.
"Uh... No, I haven't."
"Really?" she says with genuine disbelief. "That's unusual." Just as she raises her wrist to glance at her watch, the bell rings. "Oh well then. I'll see you then."
Before I can remember to wave back, she's spun around to leave.
I compulsively check my notifications. Still nothing.
Messages? WhatsApp? Instagram? Snapchat?
Not delivered.
My chest tightens as I put my phone in my locker. The little metal door shuts with that clang that echoes deep in my brain, an I start imagining all the possible worst-case scenarios.
I mean, she's always never conforming to any rules she didn't personally approve. Every day at this point goes smoothly by pure luck.
I hurry, however, and make it in time for my first period math class. As I take my seat at the right back corner next to the empty desk beside me, I bite my lip and suppress the almost overwhelming urge to cry.
My head is throbbing so I lay my head on the desk. I turn to the wall, away from the concerned looking kid across from me next to the empty desk beside them. They pass me a small folded piece of paper, but I ignore it.
"What is wrong with you?" I mutter to myself. "You were fine yesterday."
My teacher asks me to lift my head off the desk and then demands the answer to what nonsense he had scribbled on the board. I squint nearsightedly at the numbers and symbols he had written on the board and my brain goes "Nope. Not today".
Hey, hold up though. When did you stop wearing glasses?
Wasn't that grade 7 or...?
"Anya," he insists, holding out the marker when I don't respond. "Come out. I wanna see you solve the problem."
I stare blankly at him and wish oh-so much to leave. My breath feels funny and I'm getting very irritated by the murmuring people around me.
"Anya Tanaka," he repeats more sternly. "Out here, now."
"Just take the damn pen," shouts somebody from the front of the room.
"Urhh... Language," pipes up preppy Eula-May, the "erm actually" kid of our class. She tosses her auburn bob and spins around in her chair to look at me.
I don't hear what she says. I'm suddenly obsessed with those huge pimples and crater-like pores and that lipstick that bleeds WAYYY too far past the border.
And the way she aggressively chews the gum like it personally offended her, showing me strings of spit and constant flashes of tongue... EWWW!!!
I actually physically cringe.
After one more prompt, I push my desk aside and awkwardly shuffle down the aisle to the front of the room.
"Look up at me."
I feel that annoying damp feeling again. Something's coming out.
Not pee. DEFINITELY NOT PEE!!
Please don't be. Please don't be!
I lift my head and try to make eye contact, but that feels way too intense after some two seconds so I look away. He holds out the marker and I tentatively take it and look up at the board.
What does that broken infinity symbol mean? Triangle x? What's that? Wait, alpha? Greek alphabet in MATH?! AGAIN?! The fuck are theta and lambda doing here? Are they variables or...?
I look back at my teacher who is staring down at me like a disappointed parent. You know, the kind of disappointment where you just wanna toss the kid out the window, but you've spent way too much money on it to really attempt it for real. And also, baby food is mad expensive.
#JusticeForTheMoms.
I forget about everything for a minute while I'm doing my internal commentary so my teacher reminds me.
"Anya Tanaka."
Bro, why you gotta be spamming my full legal name like that?
"Yes?" I answer, my voice feeling tight.
He pinches his nose and sighs, waving airily at my desk. I just stand there, wondering what to do.
"Go," he whispers like I had broken his heart by not knowing math.
And honestly, I kinda got hit in that spot for a second feeling a little bad for him.
It's not HIS fault I don't know math.
But whose fault is it? I wonder as I shuffle back to my seat, hunching my back all depressed-style.
Yours, I answer myself. Who else's?
Oh?
It is my fault. Isn't it?
I sigh deeply. I pick my pen up and flip to the back of my textbook to start drawing Nezuko. But then, I change my mind and start working on Boa Hancock instead. I'm doing her hair when the bell rings, and I'm genuinely confused how an hour became five minutes.
Like, didn't I just walk in?
The drawing doesn't look good. The ink's fidelity is poor so my lines break and fade out. The left eye looks a little squinty. The right eyebrow is too high into the hair and the mouth is too big.
"Ugh. Fuck this."
I rip it out of my book, crumple up the page, and aim for the basket.
Of course, I miss.
I'm the last one to leave and I try my hardest to not look at my teacher on my way out.
I need the toilet. When I get there, it's confirmed.
I'm bleeding.
"Not today you fucking-- ughh!! What happened to the seventeenth? Did you get affected by February THAT much, huh?!" I whisper-shout at myself in the bathroom stall.
The girl on the other side knocks on the thin ass aluminum wall. "Hey, you okay?"
"Yes," I reply, trying not to keep the frustration out of my voice. "I'm good "
"Yeah, well, 'cause talking to yourself is a sign of early stages of insanity, you know," she says, exploding into laughter and snorts. I bite my lip with anger, like, what the fuck? Why are people so fucking rude?
"Bitch, take your shit and leave me alone. This place stinks."
I physically have to drag my hands off my head because I'm so itchy right now. My arms are flapping uncontrollably and I'm pacing in the stall. I remember the 5-4-3 rule, but I'm too restless to want to do that right now.
I meet a random senior outside and she gives me a pad that is WAY too thick. It feels like sitting on a fluffy wannabe cinder block.
A soft, cottony, itchy cinder block-- but a cinder block still.
Like, didn't the inventors ever test this stuff out?
Wait! Why am I explaining pad feels? I'm needed in my classroom in some two minutes.
Fucking Christ! Graduation, you better be worth it.
I have ESL next. But why take ESL when English is my first language?
Oh well.
I pick up my phone and check on progress. Nothing.
"'Message not delivered'," I read aloud with disappointment. "Shit."
I clamp my hand around my mouth to smother my groan and just slam the door shut. I push through the crowd to the sick bay and tell the nurse I have headaches and period cramps. Anything to stay away from the classrooms today.
She wants to send me away with a couple pain killers and a "you'll be fine" but it's good I'm already upset so crying isn't that hard. She grudgingly let me stay, but I quickly regret it because she and those three girls that practically live in this place (except when their camping in the toilets or in the Janitor's closets making TikToks) start talking about how she got back at her ex.
And the worst bit of all of this is her faux, overly exaggerated wannabe Aussie accent.
She's def one of those people who think a nationality is an esthetic, for real.
So, here's the tea. He was getting married so she got invited. (Tha audacitei, y'know?) So she invited her ex (tha bride's, yea'?) and the guy's side chick who he was currently cheating on the girl with. (I'm tha' evil, y'see. Hehehe) And so, she laid it all out during her toast (hehehe *bites into hard boiled egg*) and now, three months later, they're divorced.
I just roll my eyes.
The classic homewrecker's hobby.
Where is Nikki??!! My brain screams. Where is she? Where is she?! WHERE IS SHE?!?!
I rest my head on a pillow, but immediately jolt out of that position and toss it aside.
You never know what petty ass nurses do during their spare time to pillows, do you?
I eye the pillow suspiciously for a minute and then start regretting not bringing my phone with me. If I leave to get it, they may not let me back in. I hear some kid on top bunk (yeah, it was a bunk bed and I was sitting on the bottom one) groan in pain. The bed shakes as they try adjusting themselves into a more comfortable position.
"Nurse Veronica?" they groan.
No answer. She's busy talking about a revenge fuck she had in college.
Someone's entertainment, by the way, I think dryly looking at the overly made-up girls dressed in "GUNCCI" and "PRVDA" staring so intently at her, paying all attention like they owed it rent.
Nikki would SO want to wipe that thousand-dollar Sephora trip evidence off all their faces.
With a metal chair.
"Nurse!" the kid calls again, this time with more pain in their tone. "I need to puke!"
She still doesn't respond. She's not done talking, I guess.
I jump off the bed and climb up the ladder to see this kid writhing and clutching their belly.
"Nuuuuursee!!!" they call again, practically screaming this time.
I rush down the ladder and find a bucket under the bed. As I make my way back up, the nurse yells at me. "Hey! You can't use that!"
Before I can think of a sarcastic answer, the kid snatches the bucket from me and pours out a week's worth of undigested food into it.
I scrunch up my face at the smell and grimace at a couple undigested antacid pills in the bucket.
Oh, I think. It's gastric issues? Bummer.
I want to offer to bring them more medicine, but I am very rudely ushered out because, of course, I look fine now.
I go back to the restroom for the rest of the period and of course, I encounter the toilet campers that are the wannabe TikTok influencers, the gossips, the cryers, the make-up addicts, and also the shitters that bomb the place and just casually walk away. And also, the casual toilet-goers who escaped class (like myself).
I find myself a decently dry little stall and fall asleep seated on the toilet lid. I wake up with my head in my lap to the bell and loud conversation going on outside my stall. I feel even more tired than refreshed. It's P.E. next. I get my sports clothes and head to the girls' locker rooms. I'm immediately hit with the overwhelming smells of sweat, body mist, and deodorant (and occasionally, if i get close enough, halitosis and lip gloss).
PE class in itself is not too much. I can run. I can jump. I can do Pilates (surprisingly) and I'm not new to tumbling. But I'm bored and tired and I want to leave.
When it's lunch time, I dread having to go into such a noisy hall. I walk in and the noise hits my ears so hard that I want to scream. I quickly weave through the suffocating crowd to my corner, only realizing now I have to eat alone. I descend into my seat slowly to allow reality to sink in.
Tears fill my eyes as I open my lunchbox. "Aww, Larry," I mutter. He packed me three heart-shaped peanut butter sandwiches, some perfectly cut-up strawberries, a juice box, and a blister pack of two aspirin and put them in my favorite pink bento box.
My period comfort food.
How did he know?
"Hey!" somebody shouts over the noise as they take the seat opposite me. I shut my eyes and press my fingertips on my palm, trying my best not to snap at whoever it is for interrupting me oh-so rudely like that.
I look up, and it's Anna-Kat, smiling at me, her big eyes scrunching up in that cute way I like. (I'm always so jealous of people with aegyo sal! I wanttt!!) "Hello!" she mouths at me as she adjusts herself in her seat.
"Hi," I say back, wondering how she looks so unfazed in all this chaos.
"How are you?"
I can barely hear her, so I'm grateful for the gift of lip reading.
I shrug an "I'm good" as I open my juice box and take a sip.
"Nice. Nikki isn't here today," she says oh-too enthusiastic. "So I'm here to keep you company."
I don't know what to say. I guess I should be happy, but now, I just feel overwhelmed and all I want to do is eat. But if I say so, she might not understand what I mean. So I just summon the best smile I can.
"Yeah, cool."
"Great! Let's go!" Anna-Kat says, clapping her hands all cutesy as she practically leaps out of her seat.
"Huh? Where?"
"You'll see," she winks, standing over me with a mischievous look.
I guess Nikki's influence runs deep , I think as I walk behind an overeager looking Anna.