DAYLIGHT | taehyun

06

I can't breathe.

It feels like I was underwater, my eyes were closed and for some reason, I was choosing not to open them. All I could hear were the faint movement of water around me and the distant sounds of laughter above the surface.

I need to breathe. But whatever I do, my body is petrified, as if something was bounding me from moving out of my place. I wasn't floating around either, I was strictly confined in one place. With unseen but compelling forces chaining me down.

Something drags me by my hair and suddenly, my eyes shot wide open and the laughter abruptly became clear and loud, like it was surrounding me from all sides.

Through my drenched vision and the dripping waters from each side of my cheek, I look around and see two girls boisterously cracking up at me with their hands wrapped around my wrist, detaining me.

I was kneeling and before me was the sight of a toilet bowl, where my head had most likely just emerged from. Splashes all around its seat and the walls of this narrow and suffocating toilet stall indicated signs of me resisting and struggling.

Tears started swelling up in my eyes and soon, they became mixed with the toilet water with which I was soaked in. Their laughs grew by a cosmic amount.

The grip on the back of my head tightened as if the person holding me intended to detach me from the rest of my body.

"Aww~ Is the queen bee sad?" The girl holding me on my left wrist poked fun at my situation.

Queen bee?

Why would this girl call me that? Was I ever mean to anyone? To these girls specifically?

"You want to go to your mommy and tell us on her?" The one on my right jokingly fakes a cry, "Oh wait... that's right... you don't have one!"

"Poor Akira... so high and mighty... but her own mother doesn't even want her," The one on my left kept it going. "I wouldn't want you either."

Oh, I remember this. Middle school. 6th grade to be exact. Don't exactly understand what triggered them to plunge my head down a toilet bowl repeatedly.

The force holding me by the back of my head grew stronger and clenched onto me tighter, that person violently pulls me back and I was met with the face of someone you wouldn't expect to be here, doing this to me.

Eyes like that of a Disney Princess, as well as her voice that sounds like it should only be spurring kind and gentle words, her hair is perfectly overdone with clips and a headband adorning all over her head, her uniform was neat and proper, unlike mine that was so permeated with toilet water, you can't even tell that it was a uniform anymore.

"Let go of me, Jeong Gayeun."

"Or what?"

"You don't want to know what."

"Shut up, you stuck-up know-it-all!"

"I said let go."

"Not before I give you the royal flush~"