❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 37
The New Effy
Ellis
You know the saying 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'? Well, it wasn't necessarily true, I found out, as the clock above Mrs. Kiers seemed to tick by torturously in the notions of hours.
I looked to my right, at the plump, bespectacled boy, who was still taking notes in a frenzy, and I almost wanted to laugh at his dedication, because he reminded me of myself almost a few months ago. Then to my left, at a short, dark-haired girl, who was drawing on a piece of paper from her notebook and I exhaled in relief when I saw I wasn't the only one fed up with Advanced Mathematics class.
My pen grazed across the corner of my math textbook, eyes glazing and melting tiredly at the swirling equations as I struggled not to yawn. First week back to school and I was already halfway there to putting the gun towards my head.
The first week barrelled towards me like a bullet I couldn't dodge and this cathartic nothingness that was swallowing me whole was the numbness caused by the proverbial painkiller to block out the pain of the wound. The first came in so fast- unlike what I was expecting the senior year to be. I thought senior would be the moments that lasted, the moments I remembered- but I could barely remember how to compute calculating the NAIRU in my economic class, despite learning them on the second day of school. They didn't stick in my brain like they usually did.
It was the first week of school and I barely remembered how it started, except for moments. Like how Jem picked me up in the morning with Heath and Caleb, Calista and Astrid, all five of us piled together in a metal tube hurtling at sixty kilometers per hour towards school and how punk rock music blasted out of the stereos as we drove. Like how it was fast, heavy and loud, kind of blurring and jarring, screaming at all ends of my vision, and in retrospect, I didn't understand the appeal of the music but I understood why Jem played it. Like how I saw him rocking out, head banging, completely seduced by the enticing offers on the table. He'd been childishly enraptured by the dark undertones of the lyrics, the angst of a typical suburban teenager hating how it was destined to become part of the expected cycle- go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, ten year plan, American life, white picket fence, yada, yada, yada.
Jem would say it was very reminiscence of a Salinger-type novel, very Catcher In The Rye, explaining how punk rock could have a deep symbiotic meaning towards literature while I rolled my eyes and pointed out how he was using it as an excuse to cover up how predictable he was- a metalhead teenager in the middle of nowhere, hating his life. But I guess I was deeply impressed, as I always was, again and again, never knowing that Jem was smart because no ordinary teenage boy even knew who J.D Salinger was. It was moments like these that I remembered, like Calista's new haircut being complimented, or deep-fried Pizza on Good Thursday.
As my hand drifted over to pick up the water bottle sitting on the edges of my desk, I tilted the water into my mouth and looked towards the clock. Not even five minutes had passed. I sighed, blowing my fringe out of my face as the scraping of chalk against blackboard timed my incarceration in this boring four-walled classroom.
