WrongSufferedAtHands

6.

The sky was a gentle hue of blue with pillows of cumulus clouds that formed patches on the sky. The melody of birds tweeting rang into her hearing, mingling with the ripples of the flowing river in an ever-so-pleasant combination. She could sense the icy air caressing over her face like a golden wind. She seemed to be on seventh heaven; her heart was swelling up with sheer intensity of grace, fulfillment, and ecstasy as her smile reached miles. Her skin was tickled by the grass beneath her heels, and she was unconcerned about her hair grazing her face. Instead, she was all over heels in love.

But then she experienced a twinge in her arm, as if getting pricked by a needle, in a precise spot on her arm. Her face was damped with sweat, and her feet felt like they were drenched in muck. She was stiff as a brick, her body cumbersome with her weight, and the constant pressure of her chest and on her heart made it much harder for her to breathe properly.

She heard her name; someone was addressing her by her name. The thick, solemn voice pierced her ears like a rainstorm after a bright day. Her vision adjusted to the brightness that cut through her irises, and she flinched. Her eyesight was weak and hazy, like if she was seeing through fish lenses.

She blinked twice, taking in the hazy figure before her

"Are you awake?" She hears him.

"Look at me, how are you feeling?"

"Afiyah?"

The ache surged through every curve of her body the instant she rotated her neck.

"Are you in any pain? Do you mind if I give you another analgesic?"

Sameer's face was as lifeless as nightfall when she glanced at him, and her heart sprang with redress.

Then she looked down at her drip-injected arm, the stiffness on one side of her body indicating that she had been struck hard in the muscles and tendons.

"You collapsed." As he adjusts the tapes on the syringe that has punctured her vein, he says, "It's been three hours, and we've been worried about you. Do you recall anything?"

With a shake of her head, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the scenario.

"According to your headmaster, you were seriously hurt when you fell on a glass-topped table. Take a look at the cuts." He indicated the bruises on her left arm with his pointer.

She couldn't look down, so she shifted her gaze to the side, attempting to deliberately ignore him.

"What had happened, Afiyah? Say something, we need to know."

She chose not to answer at all.

For a week and then, she wasn't fatally wounded to actually neglect school, yet she was still urged to do so. Her father claims that her school's headmaster advised her to stay home for a week or until the crisis subsided. Her father claimed that she had been assaulted by a student, as he had been informed by the instructors, but she had always resisted.

It wasn't him.

Her father became enraged when she repeated the statement like a mantra, and he locked her up in her room to discourage her from requesting to go to school nearly every day.

She'd shed tears in the darkness of her room until her throat tightened as if being choked by a shed of ropes, and until her condition worsened, until she went to sleep on the blazing hot rug. She was furious to learn that Hassan had been named as the culprit in the incident; he wasn't responsible; he was blameless, and he had rushed to rescue her. She wanted to blurt at the top of her lungs, "It's not Hassan's fault!"