Mia's P.O.V
Life.
I still can not make sense of it,
Or why I still have it
But what I do understand is this,
Life is full of surprises.
Like the taste of hospital food.
"Broccoli juice for my ever charming patient." The nurse, Ngila, places some absurd-looking green drink before me. I mentally snort.
Ok, there's no way I'm drinking that.
An eye roll later, though, I've downed two glasses and asked for another. Ya, it's that good.
She tells me to rest. I do, drowning my body pains with slumber. The stab wound was not the only issue. I had an infection on my swollen side, which led to another night in the hospital undergoing treatment.
I guess that's the only benefit of being stabbed - I could have died someday without knowing why.
Aunt Lisa comes around later. She watches me from my window, deflated, her eagerness to get out palpable.
Suddenly, the doctor steals her from sight, probably to give her the good news that I should be out in two days.
My eyes close, then, for the briefest moment, flutter open. I snatch the bucket under the bed, immediately throwing up.
Remorse floods my face, but Ngila smiles, taking the bucket from me. "Rest, dear."
Yet, I don't even get two hours of sleep before Aunt Lisa comes in, glaring at me. I shut my eyes, pretending to be asleep, when she plops down on the chair by my bed. There's an awkward silence as her eyes remain on me, making me squirm within.
Why are you looking at me like I have ruined your life?!
*
The two days flash by in a blink, so soon that I question my readiness for the outside world.
Since I refused to explain how I got stabbed, Lisa took it upon herself to conjure a story for any authority who may ask. I don't mind. I do not need to ask what the story is, and she seems too distracted to humour me. In fact the only time she talks to me is when she gets a call from the school, and then barges into my room to inform me that despite the doctor's orders, I better prepare for school.
Oh and- No, I do not want to go to school. I don't think I can stand people's stares and whispers if they got a good look at me when I was on the stretcher. The likelihood of that terrifies me.
However, according to Aunt Lisa, there is some kind of standard assessment examination for all students in the next two weeks, and I've already wasted a week of school; further absenteeism will be detrimental to my grades.
So, on Tuesday, I muster up the courage to cycle to school. When I enter the hallways, everything seems so different. Posters about suicide and seeking help have been mounted everywhere.
My mind shuts them out as I pull my hoodie over my head.
*
Luckily for me, none of my classmates paid attention to me, maybe except one girl in my French class who kept staring at me, clearly itching to ask if I was the girl who stabbed herself because my orange hair gave me away.
In my next class, Geography, I find myself entirely at sea.
"Losing your bearings?" Noah smiles, noticing the confusion on my face. I nod. He lends me his notes, then goes oddly quiet. I avoid his gaze, reading.
" Mia," he finally says, turning my attention to him. Fortunately, I have prepared for this.
"Mhmm?"
"Why did you do it?"
"Well, I was trying to see if I have enough belly fat to survive the apocalypse, so. "
"Urm, ok..." He scrunches his nose, looking both amused and disturbed at once.
I chuckle. "Ya. It's 'urm, ok'."
Thankfully, he does not press me about it. After this period, the next class I am supposed to have is called off, much to my relief. I use my free time to study in the library, where many foreign faces have hidden to prepare for their entrance exams.
This is not to say that I am the only actual student; Anna is here too, snooping around the history section. When she catches me staring, I wave, and she nods, albeit distracted. Her eyes flicker in another direction, so mine stick to my books.
A couple of pages feel my concentrated gaze before it shifts back to her. She's still looking at whatever she saw a while ago.
Curiosity prods me to trace her line of sight, which ends at the physics section, where a lanky dude wearing fluffy bubblegum pink earmuffs is leaning on a shelf.
His back is turned towards me, but his kind-of-white,-kind-of-pink French braid tucks into the collar of his blazer in an all too familiar fashion.
As Anna sneaks up on him and covers his eyes from behind, my focus drifts back to my notes. It's probably just a coincidence that I think I've seen him before, and, anyway, I am better off rather figuring out how to prove the derivatives of trigonometric functions. After attempting two examples from my study kit, I am still scratching my head.
"...Urm, so sine x will be equal -"
"- I SAID, DON'T TOUCH ME!"
Heads spin.
Sine x is abandoned.
Snapping my head up, the first thing I see is colour draining off Anna's face. It's hard to tell the guy's reaction, but his shoulders flinch as if she was yelling at him and not the other way around. The library quiets down, well, until someone quickly ices it by hooting,
"Yo, weirdo, shut up!"
And that's when Anna storms off. The boy does not move.
I look back at my calculation. "Sine x equals none of my business."
*
More school days usher me into the frenzy only Spencer High students can make over writing examinations, although, to be fair, the announcement was given on such short notice that even I wonder -
Seriously?! Next freaking week?!! Are you betting on our failures?!
I am so not prepared. There is no time to think or do anything else apart from studying, which in itself should take more than a week. Heck, the only reason I am not freaking out is that no one is prepared either, except for nerds, of course.
Speaking of nerds, Noah tells me that the school board wants us to finish with the potential students doing their entrance exams.
" Weren't their papers cancelled?"
"Na, it was just postponed!" Noah heaves, running beside me. " And they don't want us to distract them, so now we are all writing together."
We are in our physical education period, which, despite being known to be a stress-relieving class, is rather aggravating the palpable frustration of my classmates.
"Sir, you promised us the basketball court last week," AJ, one of the good basketball players from the class, points out to our balding P.E. teacher.
He's right. We all thought we would play a game or two for the entire period, but instead, here we are on the field, running laps.
Some colleagues say, "Yeah," and "This is torture!" but the teacher ignores our laments. Begrudgingly, we do ten more laps around the field until someone brings our attention to the seniors coming out of the court.
"So that's why he didn't let us play basketball, even though he promised, " AJ gasps, "that's unfair!"
One may call what we do next "ditching class," but I call it "a unanimous consensus on how to appropriately avoid wasting our remaining energy on dissing our bald teacher."
All of us girls head to the changing room, where I linger a little longer, even after changing, to see if Casey is among the seniors coming in from the court. It's better to talk to her now than to wait longer for whatever storm is in store for me.
Our lockers separate the seniors from us, but when Autumn's sidekick with the red hair fills the stuffy air with her giggles, we all hear it.
Spotting her, I hide behind my peers because the last thing I want is the crazy girlfriend drama resurfacing.
She and her friends are circling in front of the door, blocking it, much to my irritation, when she gushes, "Anna! How are you?!"
No one is more surprised than Anna. She looks like a truck just hit her for a moment. Then, regaining composure, she smiles grimly. "What do you want?"
"Oh, come on, we're friends, aren't we?"
"No." Anna rolls her eyes.
"Geez," the redhead chortles, "It's not like I don't do you favours."
"What favours? What can you possibly do for me?" Anna scoffs back, drying her hair with a towel. At this point, the other girls are invested in their conversation - although, to be fair, it's not eavesdropping if you can literally hear what they are saying all the way from the back of the room.
"Ur, have you forgotten I run the school press?"
"No, Kate runs it," Anna corrects," you're just a noise maker."
"Damn."
Someone cracks up, and then another person, then two girls standing beside Anna, then one girl sitting on the same bench as me spits out water and - let's just say the seniors aren't as amused about it as we are.
Anna smiles victoriously back at us, and it almost feels like a war between classes, my peers already getting their guard up while the senior girls shoot condescending glares at us.
"I heard about your situation with your newbie boyfriend." is the tension breaker.
Anna doesn't reply.
"Ouch, and he's a cutie too." The redhead's voice picks up mischief. "You know I'm good in the boyfriend revenge department. But I don't render my services to insolent little brats. So maybe, just maybe, if you can apologise, I can let this slide and do you a favour, after which, of course, you've got to give me what you know I also want."
Still, Anna does not answer.
The redhead observes her nonchalant glower momentarily before turning to the rest of us.
"And as for you kids, " the senior orders," be very, very, very careful. You won't like what I'll do the next you disrespect your seniors like this again."
If that threat amounts to anything, we never see it.
Besides that, the day goes smoothly for everyone except Anna. She keeps the scowl and doesn't talk again.
In Mrs Peters's class, I realise she still has a grim expression when she walks into class late. She catches me staring and walks up to me, much to my surprise.
"You were there." She crouches by the left side of my desk. She looks at me with puffy eyes.
"You witnessed my humiliation in the library," she says, "what would you do in my shoes?"
I can't tell if she's being serious or if this is my brain playing tricks with me, but it looks like liquid is forming at the corners of her eyelids. I'm terrible at consoling people, so whatever led her to me must have picked the wrong girl.
"I don't know," I frown in confusion.
What is going on with her?
"What about what Rexha said?"
"Who?" I say and process the name for a second.
"Oh wait- ya, don't mind, Regza."
"It's... Rexha," Anna says.
"Rex..ha," I nod, and she looks at me like it shouldn't be this difficult to pronounce. I don't see a difference between our pronunciations, though.
"What are you guys talking about?" Noah buds in suddenly. Anna scowls at him. I shrug at his confused glance back and forth between us.
"Boy issues, I guess."
That makes him frown. "Anna, having boy issues?! That's impossible."
"Why?"
"Because." Then his frown deepens. "Oh, you, it's nothing."
*