The clock read 7:21. She was so incredibly tired, but there wasn’t time for that. She pulled her head off the desk. Her nose was finally separated from the disgusting smell that wasn’t really there. Both hands hadn’t moved for nearly an hour and felt as if they weren’t there, but she still felt the imaginary sand strike them. Tears fall from somewhere, they never come when they are supposed to. She is not sad now, she couldn’t be, today was going to be special. Nobody who would ever hurt her knows her name, but the prospect of this day is the gun to her head and the hug she imagines from her friend. She grabs the edge of the table and spins herself around. She keeps spinning until she hits her elbow on the lamp, and after a tense moment spitting curses she plants her feet on the floor and stands up.
She spins the chair around again, it spins no differently without her. That feels upsetting for some reason, but the reason evades her. She’s never been good with words. Her brain seems wired to reject them, refusing to think with them. Never capable of accurate translations of thoughts into them. Never able to communicate reality with them, nevermind the lack of efficiency she subjected all tasks using them to.
The window’s openness had managed to evade her detection all night, allowing freezing air to sneak through. The window’s rebellion was cut short, the gap violently shut, pieces of dead bugs that had managed to sneak through the mesh long ago, crushed or sprayed into the air. She pulls her jacket off its hanger, turns the fan on, the lamp off, and leaves. In that moment she is the only disruption to the universe other than the breathing of the three gray cats and the inept heater.
She wraps her jacket around her. The denim gives little insulation, but it mutes the feeling of imminent death. A ring of three keys falls out of the pocket of the dark blue sweater under her jacket. Her left hand grabs them from the floor and taps the table nearest the door as she opens it with her right hand. The ground is soaked after being rained on for over thirty hours before this morning. She runs to the road as fast as she can. Each footstep brings monsoons upon the kingdoms of ants or worms. Once she is on the road, she slows down. It’s too late, her purple shoes were already soaked, and the water was snaking its way into her socks. She didn’t care, she couldn’t, today was too special to care. The keys exited her pocket once again, this time deliberately. The blank-faced trees and bored animals heard as she shook the keys along to the final chorus of piggy. “Nothing can stop me now, cause I don’t care” over and over, until she reached the yellow house on top of the hill. The house she was told was home, but couldn’t be. She quickly unlocked the door and slammed it quietly in order to get out of the cold air.
It didn’t take long for the boring things she had to do this morning to be done. It only cost an hour and however much blood had leaked out of her cuts. She gives herself four new ones, none deliberate this time. All of them are caused by her overcompensating razor usage. It takes about nine minutes for her legs to stop bleeding, two for her face, even after being bandaged. She walks back out of the door of the place called home, back to her grandmother’s house.
She unlocks the door to her room and packs her backpack. The bottom pocket on the backpack’s front contains a bag of pencils. The top pocket contains random necessities. The large main part contains two books, headphones and a Kindle. The pocket on the back of the backpack where laptops and clipboards with paper go has none of those things. It’s full of clothes, including a pair of sock gloves that she’d spent all night making. She puts her jacket on, this time actually wearing it rather than wrapping it around herself.
Her grandmother drives her to the library, and is going to come back for her at 2:30.
As she walked across the carpark, there was nobody else there, she’d arrived one minute before the library opened, but that was intended. She went inside, said a few hellos, and then went to the bathroom. She chose the handicap stall, as it was the only one with any room to put her backpack down, and then she changed into the clothes she had packed, pausing every time a man entered the bathroom, she’d only resume once she was sure they’d left so it ended up taking nearly 10 minutes for her to change. After stuffing the sweater and pants into the backpack, she went out to the mirror on the wall and organized her hair. It reached slightly below her neck and it was deliberately messy most of the time. It took another ten minutes to make it look nice, and she ended up with four cat clips in it.
She finally walked out, looking like herself, like a girl, and crossed the hall, a few people looking confused at why a girl had come out of the men’s bathroom. She helped set up. The librarian was her friend and needed help, though she’d always looked up to the librarian as more of a mother figure.
The setup was done. She sat down and waited for a fight. She knew everything about everyone that was expected to come through the door, and she knew who would despise her. She didn’t care but it scared her anyway, how could it not? There was no fight today. Her adversaries never came. Nobody who was supposed to be there came. The event had been cancelled after she’d gotten there. The only person to show up was someone she’d never met, and this new person was amazing, and arguably more damaged than her and her best friend combined. The new person was another friend she’d found, and together with the lack of the expected fight, made it a good day.
So when it got close to 2:30, she went to the bathroom and changed back for the car ride “home” which was spent debating one question. Is it better that there was no fight? The event which had been cancelled was monthly, and the people who were supposed to show up would show up again next month. Next month the conflict would happen, the disgusted faces shown, and the hopefully unnecessary backup plan of hiding in the chair storage room, used.
It’s alright. She’s asleep now.