𝐋𝐢𝐚𝐫, 𝐋𝐢𝐚𝐫 | 𝐉𝐉 𝐌𝐚𝐲𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤

28. Bacon Bits.

I don't think it's my quickly dwindling financial prospects that scare me about ageing; I think it comes down to the idea of trying to find someone who is going to want me when if I have a kid and my body changes, or I when get my first grey hair, when my wrinkles begin showing, after things start to go wrong and I need someone to lean on. I don't want to give everything to a man for him to have a foot out the door.

I think I might be spiralling.

With a thought or warning, I stand up. My chair scraps against the carpet and almost topples over from the suddenness of my movement. The teacher turns to look at me. An elderly white woman. I can feel the judgment.

"May I use the bathroom?" I ask, despite already walking for the door, she simply gestures for me to go, and so I do. Opening the door, with my bag on my back, and taking a lungful of air from the corridor that smells both damp and dusty gives me some clarity. The stuffy room I've been sitting in for the last twenty minutes was already suffocating me.

I turn toward the toilets on the far side of the building and begin walking. One foot in front of the other, Frankie. That's what my Mum said to me when I'd come back crying because Audrey Bacon was mean to me. My brother told me to call her Bacon Bits—I think he inadvertently ruined her life, because that nickname stuck until she left the Outer Banks.

I've been thinking about Bacon Bits since the tit picture of me was sent out. If I'm being honest, the nickname 'Bacon Bits' is—in my humble and extremely biased opinion—not quite as damaging as my situation. The nickname stuck with her for her entire stay in the Outer Banks, until her family up and moved. I can't stop thinking about her, because I wonder if I just up and left if I could ditch the photo or the moniker of the slutty teenager whose doomed for a life of destitution and misery.

When you're a kid all you want to do is grow up. I wanted to be sixteen so I could start driving, eighteen so I gallivant across the world without a bedtime, twenty-one so I could get wasted—turns out I didn't need to wait too long for that. I wanted to meet a man, and have a love story worthy of a Disney movie. But now, I just want to be five-year-old Frankie again. To have hope for the future, to have the deluded idea that amazing men would flock to me and beg for my hand in marriage because I was such a catch.

Using my shoulder to push open the door I walk into the bathroom.

I cross the rather large bathroom, with a high roof and peeling paint that matches the occasional cracked tile, I zero in on my destination. I have to fight to pry open the window, trying to get some air into the room that stinks of bleach. It has to be giving me cancer.

"Trying to escape?" A girl mutters from behind me. After successfully lifting it open enough to get hit with a nice breeze, I turn and see Nelly. "Don't blame you." She continues, I just watch her walk over to a stall and crack open another window, the door is half-shut. "No one really uses this bathroom, so it's pretty good for hatching an escape plan without running through the front gates."

I hear a lighter. I smell weed.

Curiosity getting the better of me I walk over and, sure enough, Nelly is standing on the toilet, blowing the intoxicating smoke out the window. I hover between the main area and the cramped stall, my hand on the door, my eyes on Nelly.

What am I supposed to do?

"Close the door, would you?" She nods for me to close it, wanting to not piss her off so I can smoke some of the blunt, I do as I'm told. She smiles at me. "I get anxious, okay? It's medicinal."

"So you're a nervous Nelly." I lean against the newly locked door and look up at her.

"What is it with you and nicknames? I was friends with Audrey." She sticks out her hand covered in rings, I grab it and stand up on the toilet lid. Nelly smells like lavender, I wonder if it's to help anxiety or to cover the stench of the pot. "Bacon Bits. Stuck with her for years, she actually stopped eating bacon." Despite her apparent friendship with the girl, Nelly smiles after tapping the blunt ash out the window. I haven't ever paid much attention to Nelly, she's always been someone who almost blended into the background.