Heartbeats [ON HOLD]

one | obsession

Coincidentally, the same ones that Thea had no problem recalling a week ago, officially setting Thea two points ahead of her. Two steps closer to becoming Valedictorian. 

“Obsessed”, Imogen had called her on their first meeting in her cramped little office, one of the only places in Alderville where Quyen didn’t feel as though she was being watched by anything other than the pamphlets with tips on how to avoid burnout. Her mother, on the other hand, had said, “No, not obsessed. Just ambitious.”

Back then, she didn’t think there was a difference.

Now, however, with her entire being being consumed by thoughts of Thea, Valedictorian, Good-Enough, Valedictorian, Not-Good-Enough, Valedictorian, Never-Good-Enough, Thea, Thea, Thea, ‘obsessed’ is starting to fit the bill more and more.

It doesn’t help that Thea Salvador is undeniably attractive, right from her wry, sardonic smile that never fails to spark a vexing flame deep within Quyen’s chest all the way down to her slender fingers which are always twisting a pen in them and her dark hair that brushes at her neck because she never ties it up, no matter the weather, and her reading glasses with gold frames that perfectly contrast the deep brown of her skin and her permanently un-ironed clothes and her… her.

Everything about Thea is spilled-ink-from-bottles and cracked-window-panes and broken-tips-of-pencils and everything that Quyen hates to see, but everything that Thea somehow manages to take in stride.

God, she’s frustrating.

Study, her brain reminds her with a roll of its eyes. You’re supposed to be studying. Glancing down at her open book, Quyen’s hands involuntarily go up to rub at her tired eyes as they scan her notes; Lanthanide contraction occurs in the Lanthanide series, i.e. from cerium to lutetium. As the atomic number increases, there is a progressive decrease in the atomic as well as ionic radii. This decrease is known as…

It isn’t working. She can’t study here, she quickly realises, when her gaze seems to be adamant on staying fixated on Thea’s grin as she wipes her chalk-powdered hands on her friend’s sweater vest.

The library it is.

So, hastily shoving all her books into her bag and praying to whoever is listening that her papers don't get crushed in there, she stumbles out of her seat and makes her exit, echoes of the contact that her shoes make with the ground bouncing off the brick walls as she traverses down the hallways that she used to be terrified of— how can something so inanimate make me feel so insignificant?— but is now one with, because she quickly found that the building isn’t inanimate, not really.

The antiquated walls scrutinize Alderville’s student body’s every move, every breath, every sigh, the portraits yell theories and formulas, and the hallways track their every step, be it if they’re sneaking out of campus to escape the pressure that suffocates them all (but they’d all rather die than admit that they, too, are choking just like everyone else) or if they’re heading down to the library to pour over books at hours that the rest of the building pretends to be asleep.

Almost every day, Quyen wishes that she were one of those students who snuck out to escape the pressure, but she just… isn’t. She isn’t the library-at-midnight person either.

Instead, she’s the one who adds more pressure upon herself, as if the pressure from her professors, her parents, her peers, wasn’t enough to send her mind spiralling into the depths of delirium. She’s the one who sets unrealistic goals for herself and has breakdowns— that’s something that she does do in the school library— when she can’t successfully meet those goals. She’s the one who obsesses— there’s that word again— over whether or not this is her peak, and if it is, where does it all go from here? Where does she go from here?