It didn't make sense to Emilia, that her new maths classroom looked nothing like her old one. The blue 'school' carpets and white walls were the same, but the layout of the room, maybe its whole shape actually, were entirely different. The disorientation and pressure to just choose a seat instead of looking around for five minutes made her anxious, and out of habit she gravitated towards the far table at the very back of the room, currently only occupied by one other student who was tall enough compared to her that she didn't catch his face in her peripheral while staring ahead and slightly downwards in effort to focus on less, and ground herself more.
"Hello, you look a little lost. I'm Zane—" It seemed like it took a second for his facial recognition to kick in too, only realising who he was talking to as she looked up at the boy talking to her. "You're Emilia, if I remember correctly?"
"Yes," Emilia smiled, relieved. She knew someone, and she was thankful to have got a seat close to him, even if that was purely because her subconscious trusted his blue argyle sweater vest. "I didn't recognise you for a second."
"You look uncomfortable. Is everything okay?" Zane was refreshingly simple and easy to understand, interaction didn't feel like guesswork which had been exactly what she'd needed now more than ever. He also never sounded accusatory, but genuinely caring towards her.
"I'm struggling with the changes a bit." It didn't feel as embarrassing to admit to him as it did other people.
"I see, I too struggle with change," he explained, and Emilia found comfort in the fact he could relate. "It's usually easier for me to stay frozen in routine." She would never have guessed it from how collected he seemed, but his openness about his own feelings made Zane seem even more trustworthy than he had before.
"Me too," she smiled. At the clear end of their brief conversation, she copied him in beginning her usual routine again of getting her things out, and feeling mildly ready to pick up where the curriculum had left off last year.
Only midway through the first independent set of textbook questions did Emilia notice Clara. Admittedly she'd been too distracted by everything else, probably talking to Zane or organising her pens, then focussing on interpreting the mannerisms and teaching style of Mrs Richards, but the disappointment that someone who called her a friend didn't even look her way sat heavy on her chest. The weight soon transferred to anxiety. This was yet another class they shared and again Clara had chosen not to engage with her.
"It's cool to be doing mathematics with a new friend," Zane contextlessly mused. He had already developed a talent for picking Emilia up and taking her back to the present moment when her talent for getting lost in another time and place got in the way. She just smiled back at him in gratitude, while replaying what exactly the kind words he'd just spoken were so she could respond properly, but Zane just continued on his train of thought. "You're welcome to join me and my friends for lunch, if you'd like."
"That... thanks," Emilia replied. "I think I would like that." Zane smiled back. Her speech patterns were as unique as they were familiar to his own.
The eventual end of the class couldn't have arrived sooner. Mindless maths always took a toll on Emilia's energy levels, and the added anxiety of moving a new class only multiplied that. Combined with the warmth of the room, she was drowsy enough to take a nap over the desk had the class lasted much longer. Zane waited for her to pack her things away so they could leave together, the pair sticking around just long enough for their plans to be interrupted as Clara decided to give Emilia a second of acknowledgement.
"We're studying at lunch, right?" she asked, choosing only now to acknowledge Emilia's existence. "You said you'd help me." Emilia had apparently mistakenly figured that after being told Clara didn't need her help, that she wouldn't be helping her.
"Oh, yeah of course," she said, before turning back to Zane. "Sorry, I guess I accidentally double booked myself."
"There will be other days, you're always welcome. We're friends," he smiled, calming Emilia yet again when he wasn't mad at her. "Right?" He seemed as anxious as she was about establishing that.
"Yeah, we are." Emilia's smile conveyed the enthusiasm she was scared to put into her words. Making a new friend and the clarity Zane provided with that were more than she could've hoped for in her last year of high school, and upon moving into two new classes. Clara grabbed her arm. "I'll see you later Zane!"
Their usual spot in the library was always quiet at lunchtimes, hence why they'd adopted it, Emilia could just about tolerate the ticking sound of the clock on the wall behind her for a lunch break, before the repetitiveness and pitch of the sound broke her to a panicked mess. Gentle lo-fi music through her headphones was enough to muffle the sound of Clara's frustrated page turning, and jabbing of her calculator so hard that Emilia was surprised she hadn't destroyed it yet.
"Did you get question eight right?" Clara demanded. It wasn't really a question, but a request for a correct answer that Emilia had adjusted to over the years of knowing her.
"I got three of the four marks," Emilia admitted, anxious like Clara had a knife to her throat and her life depended on having all four marks, "but I'm pretty sure I know where the fourth one was, if you want me to explain it?"
"You don't have a mark scheme?" There was a correct answer to every question Clara asked, even if it wasn't the honest one. Especially if it wasn't the honest one, in cases like this.
"No, but I emailed Mr Treverton about it last night, and I'm pretty certain I've got it now," Emilia explained with slightly different phrasing, unsure how else to communicate that she could fully answer the question now, even if she hadn't got it completely right the first time she'd tried it. "I can get that email up if you want?" She started loading her email app up, easily finding the email in question before Clara could reply.
"I'll just find a mark scheme later," Clara said, dismissing any more attempts at the question. "Did you get any of the paper right?" Sometimes her bluntness felt purely insulting.
"The front pages were both fine," Emilia said as she flicked through her paper. The first few pages were a warm-up of multiple choice questions, most people had got all of them right. The rest of her paper was made up mostly of all marks but one. Her grades in physics were good because of her understanding, not her articulation and ability to remember keywords.
"I meant any that I didn't get." According to Clara that was supposed to be obvious, and Emilia could only quieten and internalise her frustration at herself for not understanding that.
"Not completely, but maybe I got something you didn't? And vice versa?" she offered. Realistically Clara would never accept it, but Emilia was too optimistic that one of her ideas would be good enough. "It's mostly the electrical topic I didn't get, everything else is okay." The electrical topic was still her least okay section, and it was probably best if she was open with Clara about that.
"You really loved proving me wrong in class but now you won't help me get it right?" Clara asked. Her obvious expectation was for Emilia to agree, that she was intentionally withholding information to sabotage her friend, but she wasn't going to admit to something that wasn't true. She also refused to believe what Clara was saying, when she was offering every solution she could think of. "Some friend you are, you just like seeing other people struggling while you get to be perfect." And with that as her final cutting remark, Clara messily shoved all her papers into her bag and moved to work at another table across the room. Emilia sighed heavily, the only relief from her friend's outburst being the near completed physics paper in front of her. Without Clara's help it wouldn't be as easy, but would still definitely be more than possible. Her biggest obstacle now wasn't correcting the paper, but forcing away the horrible social anxiety and overthinking of every word she'd said so she had room in her mind for physics concepts. She turned her music up a little louder, resetting the length of her mechanical pencil, and wiping the tears from her eyes so she could see the words in front of her, trying to avoid looking at Clara and focus on the soft beats in her headphones over the sound of the clock.
*❀💙❀*
Walking home by herself gave Emilia even more time to process the events of her day. Clara still sat on her mind, still getting behind her eyes like a freshly cut onion, and certainly making her consider whether or not she could stick out their interactions until the end of high school. It was only one year to go now, less than that technically.
The echoes of her feet and reverberations through her shoes against the steps leading up to her flat broke her away from the Clara induced thought process. The day was done, and taking a deep breath, Emilia prepared herself for the usual chaos of her family's evenings. She was a short walk through the flat to her room before she could plant her face in her pillow and finally have a good cry.
Unfortunately, her mother had chosen to be another off-topic distraction. "How's the career hunt going Emilia?"
"My day was really terrible, thanks for asking Mum, how are you?" she replied, her tone coming out far more sarcastically than she'd expected or intended, but it had happened now and she didn't have the energy to over-apologise to anyone else.
"You don't have to be rude about it, I'm only looking out for you," her mother said, somehow more sarcastically and backhanded.
"I haven't even taken my shoes off, you're not looking out for me, you're trying to build a perfect me for three years' time!" While pointing it out, Emilia struggled to take her shoes off, her fingers clumsy around the laces as her vision blurred with tears once again from the delay on cry-time. Again, her inability to pick the most effective words in the heat of the moment got the best of her, and she was just acting emotionally instead of constructing an argument that would be productive. Her mother's condescending explanation of the concept echoed in her mind every time it became relevant.
"Watch your tone with your mother," her dad called, not even looking up from his laptop, using it more as a convenient buzz-phrase to keep Antonia happy. If Emilia had thought harder into it than just how it made her feel, she would have struggled to disagree with his intention, for she hadn't even noticed he was home until he'd spoken. Sometimes she wished she'd inherited his ability to hide in plain sight, it would have solved her a lot of stress.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered, forcibly continuing on her pathway-turned-warpath to her bedroom.
Any frustration she still held evaporated upon closing her bedroom door, leaving Emilia with cold, empty remorse. The habit of blowing up out of anger and saying something she regretted, only to be hit by that regret seconds later, was harder to break than it sounded. Lying on her side on her bed, knees drawn up to her chest and her most huggable shark plushie in her arms, the longest day of holding back tears was over and they were all absorbed by her pillow. Her right temple had become damp, and a wet trail formed over the bridge of her nose. Time was irrelevant, and she'd ignore all dinner calls, making something for herself later or just falling asleep and catching up with breakfast tomorrow, but the idea of even looking at her mother just had her crying harder. The shark was squished as she held it like it was her only lifeline. In the past, emotionally, it had been. A dull knock on her bedroom door made her worry she hadn't cried as silently as she thought.
"What?" There it was again, the anger Emilia thought she'd cleared, resurfacing.
"Hi." Alexander hardly opened the door, pressing his face against the gap as if it would make any difference in their communication. The compassionate yet reserved smile on his face made it obvious he knew she'd been crying.
"I'm so sorry Alex, I thought you were Mum," Emilia sighed. She hated herself for it, that she could be influenced by her frustration from the argument with her mother so much that she ended up taking it out on someone who didn't deserve it. And one of her siblings too. The last thing she'd accept was the three of them growing up the way she did, that was her job as the eldest child.
"It's okay. I brought dinner," Alex said, entering her room as she sat up, passing her a plate of macaroni cheese with a little side of mixed vegetables. Emilia would be lying to herself if she said her father's best dish wasn't exactly what she'd needed, and a part of her suspected her dad knew that too.
"You didn't have to. Thank you," she said with intentional softness. She was going to do better for him. "Do you want to stay? I could put Spider-man on?"
"Yes please," Alex grinned before hesitating. "You don't mind if I eat in here?" He was the only one who was considerate of her sound sensitivity, although she couldn't fault Crystal, she was too young to understand.
"Nope, I've got headphones anyway," Emilia said. She still worried she'd be unable to stand it, but that didn't matter so much when it came to making it up to Alex for her earlier outburst that he was on the receiving end of.
"Cool," he acknowledged, sitting on her floor to look up at her monitor screen, leaning back against her bed. Emilia sat beside him as the first episode of their evening started, picking up where they'd left off on their last watch-through of the series before either of them started eating.
"So, did you have a good day?" Emilia asked him, always a little unsure as to how much Alex liked talking and how much he just loved watching Spider-man cartoons on her streaming subscription. Either way, she wanted to prove she cared about him enough to make sure his day was alright, and if it wasn't, to help him figure out a way to feel better about that.
"Yeah, English was boring though," he bluntly replied, but that was just Alex, there was no malice there. He was one of the only people Emilia could trust to talk to her like that without worrying she'd upset them. "How was yours?" It was like he remembered he should probably ask something back.
Once again she'd overthought how much of an impact things had on her siblings relative to her, but Emilia would always prefer it to be that way around. The question brought up her argument with Clara, still incredibly fresh, which had shaken a lot of her social anxiety and doubt in her academic ability back to the surface.
"I had an argument with one of my friends but I think it'll be okay," she said, phrased in an Alex-friendly way. Most of her truly believed it, but a deep part of her subconscious knew she'd always be jumpy around Clara, that she'd always feel a need to prove herself while also always feeling insufficient. Nothing she could do would be enough and that was just a fact that she could never consciously discover.
Bell, warmth, relatively soft carpets compared to the surprisingly hard sand Jay had repeatedly fallen against over the course of the evening's training session, and he could relax. Enough of his day was done that Jay could take the remaining hours off.
"Good day?" Felix asked across the shop, a piece of normality that meant Jay didn't really have to think much.
"Better than I expected!" he smiled back as he took the left side stool, finding enough time to consider anything he wanted to say in the few seconds it took him to sit down. As it turned out, he actually did have news to update Felix on. "So my physics class was moved, and I didn't think I'd know anyone, right?"
"But?" Felix could sense the contradiction to his initially apprehensive attitude from the moment Jay had walked in.
"But the girl from my electronics class is there!" Jay told him, Felix instantly remembering the nameless boy Emilia had mentioned from her electronics class. But there was no way, that would be too convenient and Felix of all people had enough life experience to know that things were never that neat.
"You two sure seem to have a lot in common," he remarked, a gentle prompt that might help him confirm or deny it if only to satisfy his own curiosity.
"She's so smart, Felix. And she's so nice," Jay said, exasperated, running his hands through his sweaty hair with his elbows on the counter, getting lost in recollection of the day he'd just completed. With the evening training sessions, especially when they finished this late, sometimes he struggled to recall that the morning belonged to the same day. "She didn't have to be that patient with me." The one thing that stood out to him was how Emilia always took the time to make sure he truly understood the material rather than just allowing him to claim he did. It went more appreciated than she knew.
"People aren't going to be horrible to you, that's not what's normal," Felix bluntly told him with a laugh that stopped the advice sounding cold. "If they're—"
"If they're not at least polite, I don't need to give them my time," Jay finished for him, for it was a sentiment Felix had communicated many times over the years. He smiled in recognition of it, and on behalf of the many younger versions of himself that didn't understand the lesson as well as he did now. "I know." It still hadn't fully sunk in, and likely never would. Felix knew it too, but clearly Jay appreciated the advice nonetheless, as he routinely asked for it. "But there's a difference. Polite, and then helping me when I needed it, answering my questions, not thinking I was stupid or weird for asking things." The list had been longer in his mind, but the point was made. "I got really lucky Felix, I'd worried school this year was going to be awful."
"But it isn't," Felix finished for him. "And that's the power—"
"The power of positive thinking!"
"I was going to say gratitude," Felix laughed after hearing the most pessimistic concerns from the situation initially, labelled somehow as positive thinking. "But that works too."
It only took a couple of episodes of The Ultimate Spider-man for both Alex and Emilia to finish dinner, a third just getting past the opening titles before their mother opened the door, with no prior warning as usual.
"Emilia, finish that episode," she demanded before looking at Alex. The shift in tone couldn't have been unintentional. "Then bedtime?" She hadn't even tried to hide the change from order to gentle question.
"Sure," she muttered, the sudden difference in tone taking her aback. If her pattern recognition aligned with her brain's habit of defending itself, she'd understand more consciously how frequent this was. Antonia would blow up at her daughter and then act as if nothing had happened a few hours later. When she'd mentioned it to Lloyd once before, he'd accidentally convinced her it was just what parents did.
"Thanks." Yet again, her mother's sudden shift in attitude back to expectant bluntness had Emilia confused, which distracted her at why something so routine had confused her in the first place. She hadn't even paid attention to the last minute of the episode, but it definitely was not the first time she'd seen it. That didn't matter.
"Go on, Mum wants you in bed," she reminded her brother.
"Night Emilia," Alex said. He'd never been difficult, especially when it came to rules and requests. Sometimes she worried it would get him in trouble.
Left on her own with two empty plates and a ball of resentment lodged beside her diaphragm, all Emilia had left of the day was her usual bedtime routine. She left the plates on the kitchen counter, retreating to her bedroom again after wishing a neutral goodnight to her father who was still behind his laptop.