The World Below

Chapter 1 - The Discovery

She was such a bitch! Why wouldn't she just fuck off and leave us alone. Casey was furious. Ms Fysh was always in her face. Some days it was about her uniform, her shoes not being right. Other days it was about her hair needing to be tied back. What did it even matter? Wasn't school supposed to be about learning? They said that they had a uniform so that students could focus on their learning and not be distracted by fashion and what they were going to wear. Or social differences because some kids had stuff and others didn't. Yet, they spent most of their time fixated on their uniforms. Maybe if they didn't, they might actually bother to try to teach them something useful.

Casey turned on her heels and continued on to the girls bathroom. She didn't really need to go to the toilet but there was nowhere else to go if you needed a break from the sound of mindless drivel that teachers felt was vital to student development. Most of it wasn't even real subjects either.

Casey thought about the class she had just escaped. They were discussing Mindfulness. In her school, this meant someone playing music and everyone falling asleep while they pretended to meditate. That is all very good, if you need a nap and if the kid next to you is not farting eggs right next to your head.

The girl's bathroom was pink. Not just a bit pink. Totally pink. Someone had had the brilliant idea that painting the bathrooms would make it more welcoming for students to use. The original idea was to use several colours and then paint affirmations on the walls in white. So it would be lilac, aquamarine and yellow with white writing in pretty script on the walls. The reality was that there was a sale on and it was cheaper to buy a lot of one colour. The girls who started the project when they were in Year 7, were now graduated, it had taken that long. So the colour was chosen by the only student still around when the staff were about to buy paint. Mrs Stevens was leaving to go to the hardware store. As she was passing through the library to go to the carpark, she asked Jodie Green what colour she should buy. Jodie Green was always in the library studying. She said pink. So Mrs Stevens returned with a lot of pink paint. It wasn't even a nice pink. It was like a musk stick pink, slightly dull and really dusty looking.

Mrs Stevens spent days in the girls' bathroom painting the whole lot herself. When I say 'the whole lot' that's exactly what I mean. Every square inch of the girls' bathroom was dull, dusty pink. Unfortunately the girls' bathroom did smell as much like musk sticks as it looked like them.

It smelled of damp and unflushed toilets. There were always clumps of wet toilet paper stuck to the ceiling and to the walls around the mirror. For some reason, the taps were always turned on too!

Casey turned the tap off as she came in. She understood that the girls did that to cover the tinkle noise of peeing in the toilet. It gave them some privacy. Still, it was a huge waste of water and really annoyed Casey that they couldn't at least turn the tap off after they were done.

She walked through the first room, filled with a row of toilets along one wall and a row of sinks along the other, with a hand towel dispenser on the wall between them. In the second room, there was a row of showers and two walls of bench seats that served as a changing space. That's as good as it got at St Justin's College.

She pulled her legs up onto the wooden slatted bench and leaned back onto the concrete wall.

"Hmmm...." she breathed out.

It was a small relief on an otherwise continuously observed day, which everyday was. The students were always watched. Always controlled. She stared at the screen of her phone, face lit with blue light emitting from the screen. Speech bubbles scrolled up her screen, the ongoing conversation of her friends.