Blue {DoTae} | complete

Four: It's not enough

Doyoung slides onto his chair in the biology classroom. There's a suspicious stack of paper on the teacher's desk and he nibbles on his bottom lip, hand brushing against the edge of the table when he reaches down to find his pencil case. He flinches and waits a moment for the tingling on his skin to cease. Other students are gossiping, their voices merging to form an inescapable haze of noise that Doyoung can't escape. His throat is dry, eyes unfocussed.

"We must be getting our papers back today." Doyoung reasons to himself in a tiny voice, turning to stare at the pile on the desk. They could be for another class, though. But that's unlikely.

"You alright?" Jungwoo's voice is sweet amongst the bustle of all his classmates. Doyoung doesn't even know half of their names.

Someone screams for whatever reason, and he snaps his eyes shut, fingers gripping his pen with a painful amount of pressure. He still does his best to smile at his friend. Jungwoo inhales and returns the gesture, but from the pity etched onto his face Doyoung deduces that his own must be twisted in discomfort.

"Do they really have to be so loud?" Jungwoo remarks with a playful eye roll. Doyoung forces a laugh, which only makes the younger frown. His lips open, about to speak, before the teacher claps her hands and orders a few students at the back to see her after class, and a stifling silence falls over the room.

He was right. They do get their tests back, despite having sat them not even a week prior. Teachers usually take at least two weeks to mark anything, and when Doyoung takes in the ghastly sight of the red 'B' scrawled at the top of the paper like a curse set in stone, he wishes that she wasn't so organised for once.

"Oh, thank goodness." Jungwoo breathes out as soon as his own lands on the desk in front of him, and Doyoung snatches a glance in his direction.

His friend got the same grade as him, with just one less mark, and Doyoung supposes he should be pleased with his own result. By the way the teacher's beady eyes are scanning over the room, he guesses that some of his classmates did much worse than him. Dread still rises through him. His parents are going to flip. Not that they would be able to score any higher than him. But they'll still flip.

He tried so, so hard, and yet he scraped a measly B.

The rest of the class involves going over the answers to the hardest questions. He spelt a few key words wrong, which cost him a mark or two or maybe six, then he made a stupid mistake of misreading a question. That was another four marks down the drain. Each time he turns the page, he's faced with a mess of errors he shouldn't even be making and he bites the inside of his cheek to tame the tears. He'd never hear the end of it if he burst into tears in the middle of a lesson.

Doyoung cries in the toilets instead. The cubicle is stuffy and smelly with rude graffiti on the walls, and he has to rub his hands with a tissue until the skin turns red after touching the toilet seat so he can sit on it. His sore fingers shake and seem to convulse with the germs on them, but each sob steals more breath from him so he's far too uncoordinated to be able to wash them properly.

The door to the toilets swings open. Footsteps follow, and whoever it is pauses outside the cubicle before realising that it's engaged and moving onto the next one. Doyoung stuffs his face into his arm to muffle his crying. He studied all evening and it still wasn't enough. He's going to have to push himself even further from now on.

One of his elbows hits the wall when he shifts his position. He repeats the action with his other elbow. But the pressure was different. He'll get a C in the next test if it's uneven, so he has to keep going, knocking the wall with his arms until everything matches. The walls shake from the force. Someone retaliates by punching back from the next cubicle along.