By Anonymous
My chin pressed into the saddle-shaped divot between the first two knuckles of my right hand as I slumped forward, palms stacked on the desk’s edge.
To my left, two girls were speaking, having drifted together gracefully while I shrunk into myself at my desk to avoid them. They looked like two forest leaves resplendent in autumn plumage as they dangled above me, a decaying heap of their fallen brethren.
“...maybe, like, over by the window?”
“Okay, yeah, sure!”
My health teacher’s lesson plan was to sort us into groups with a deck of cards and make us discuss what we’d do if someone we knew began to exhibit signs of depression. I shot a glance at the eight of diamonds tossed before me, remembering the way the knots in my shoulders had relaxed when the teacher told us we wouldn't be choosing our own partners. My foot began to drum faster on the grit-blanketed floor.
In a moment, the girl who usually sat next to me would ask me what I thought about working at the window, and I'd cough something out, staying seated until both of my partners had left. Then I'd trail behind them as they walked across the room, wait for someone to tell me I could sit down, and become a compact mound that mumbled at most half a sentence before the teacher put an end to the activity.
A chorus of screechy voices lived permanently inside my skull, lashing at me from every direction. And when they screamed Shut your mouth, nobody will listen to you, I swallowed and looked down as if I had never meant to say anything in the first place.
Niar, my parents called me from across the dinner table, shuai. Weak. Timid.
They didn’t know that boiling veins of acid spidered deep under my skin, their walls compressing thinner with pressure every day, hissing at me to do something. But some creature had clamped its claws around me, and I couldn’t wrench them off, couldn’t breathe beneath its strangling talons.
Still foggy from musing, I saw my partner’s expression shift as she turned.
“Okay, so, we’re gonna go work by the window. Is that, like, fine with you?”
My jaw clenched, straining against my chin, because there was only one answer I could give to the decision that had been made without me. I thought of the cast of her eyes as she looked at me, the curl and stretch of her lips. A dormant beast snarled in the cavity of my chest.
I could put on a mask, stare into her face as I spit out the words, and be the one who went first, just this once. Just a few seconds of enduring the screams of WHAT ARE YOU DOING and OH, THEY’RE STARING AT ME in my head. And then I would know.
I raised my head slowly, arms shaking from the frantic rhythm of my heart.
“Yeah, sure. That sounds fine.” My voice projected crisply through the breath that gusted between my lips. Seething in its crevices were the real words: It’s cute how much effort you put into opening your mouth when you don’t mean it.
The columns of muscle lining my spine rippled into motion, and I uncurled like one of the fiddleheads that stretched into swaying, lime-green feathers in April, finally free to seek the sun after a lifetime buried in dark soil.
One breath rushed into my lungs, crushing together the countless needling whispers telling me to sit back down. Then it streamed out, laden with prickly-sharp fragments, and burst apart in the air.
I faced the sprawling sea of crammed desks, pulled-out chairs, and overstuffed backpacks, and I walked.
I walked like I had never vanished into the hallways at lunch, fleeing from the lilt and roar of chatter. Never closed my eyes and drowned in all the things I couldn’t say. Never seen people fix dripping-sweet smiles to their faces before calling out to me as I passed.
I walked like a god among mortals, and my skin sloughed off my shoulders behind me.
As I sat into the window alcove with my back ramrod-straight and my hands folded above the comforting fuzz of my sweatpants, my breath hummed fast and shallow from the crackling electricity of what I had done. I couldn’t keep this up much longer.
Sitting first was reserved for the rulers of the group, the lions who I bowed my head to and fidgeted aimlessly before until I heard, “Yeah, you can sit, like, over there, I guess.”
And now I was the one who perched on the cool stone ledge like a queen on her throne of wrought silver, studying my partners dispassionately.
Three and a half seconds later, they reached me and sat as a pair. Air swam heavy and viscous over the yard of space between us. The sight throbbed like a knuckle dug into an old wound, but my face was too numb to move.
“So, like, what do you guys think we should say?” The girl who had spoken to me earlier held up a half-sheet of paper colored with a garish shade of salmon pink that stung a thin layer of tears from my eyes. Her voice was languid, and I saw something new in the tilt of her head toward me.
The gnawing thought that I had shoved down finally ripped free.
How much of my life could I have saved if I hadn’t wasted so much time caring?
My pulse cooled to a lukewarm amble. I eased my neck to the right, flicked my gaze over my partners, and loosed the thunderbolts from my tongue.
“Probably to give them emotional support, and try to talk to a trusted adult, a teacher, or one of the guidance counselors.” One sentence devoured all there was of substance to say, and now I let the dregs of the conversation drip away silently.
A shrill ding from the teacher’s bell jabbed me in the eardrum. I raised my head and launched myself forward, legs snapping into movement the second I felt ground beneath my feet.
As I wove once again through the chaos of the classroom to my seat, I gave myself a promise so deeply that it melded, thrumming, with my flesh.
I am never going back.
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