𝗦𝗜𝗗𝗘 𝗦𝗖𝗘𝗡𝗘 ⨾ vernon

13 | 𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗲

Memorandum is my favourite word. It's evidence. It's proof of your innocence and it's what holds you and sweeps you back into reality. Sometime when you hear something so many times, you start believing it. I am hearing I'm the bad guy here literally all the time. Am I though? Did I really cause this effect of breakage bonding between my best friend and cousin? I don't know. I am just gonna shrug it off unless I really get pushed off at corner and get punched on my gut like this guy right in front of me.

I need some sort of evidence to put this in to reality. Amazing things like this that can help you gain back your respect shouldn't be left unseen.

I quickly take my phone from my bag and click more or so fifty pictures of a bully gang ruthlessly kicking a poor guy on the stomach. He's bleeding and I shouldn't wait longer.

After taking perfect shots of the perpetrators, I put my phone back and shrug myself off my bag, keeping inside a janitor's closest near to me. Before any fight, I like to wear my favourite track pants. I'm in my school uniform now so I have to take care of my shirt not getting pulled off by the wind.

"Y'all are crazy," I murmur and head towards the main bully and smack him off the ground. He falls down at a whim and the rest look at me with rounded, enlarged and surprised eyes.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Someone says from behind me and due to my poor intuition, I fail to block the next blow that I receive. My head hurts from the hit, which didn't feel like a hand. I turn around and see that a lean and green haired guy with a broken bottle in his hand.

My head survived a bottle?

Wait, do I have broken pieces... on my... head? I stumble for a bit and my vision starts getting hazier.

"Hey!" The wounded guy shouts from the floor. I look at him and before I can clearly see the drops of blood that washes over my fingertips, I faint.

☺︎

"— yeah and I looked at the graphs. I don't think the teacher — hey! She's awake!" I flutter my eyes open and instantly feel a deep thud on my head. It hurts. I start to take in the surroundings and notice that I'm in the school nurse office... and that Yeonhee is standing next to the bed, holding her phone, with a very unexpectedly concerned face.

"Yeonhee. What happened?" I force out a sentence and she sighs, putting her hand on her forehead.

"You stupid brat. You fought again? How many times have I told you to not?!" She looks at me with anger and a second later her tears start flowing. I have no idea if this is a Click situation or not.

"I'm sorry, they were bullying him." I try moving out of my position.

"Bullying him? What are you talking about? Who bullied whom?" Yeonhee looks bad. Her hair is all undone and her clips are falling off. I laugh a little and she looks at me with disbelief.

Yeonhee doesn't know about the Clicks. I can tell from here. There are two of them in my life — Yeonhees — I mean. She's different with the Clicks clicking around. And she's my best friend when they aren't. No matter how absurd a theory this may be, this is what is serving me right now. I don't want my head to hurt anymore, so I won't invite any such emotional doubts.

"Near to where I was found, there's a janitors' closet." Yeonhee does her best to listen. "You'll find my bag there. Bring it to me."

Yeonhee doesn't question, doesn't even look at me before—in milliseconds—sprinting away from the nurse's office.

I twist around and look for any sort of liquid I can chug down to calm my thirst. As soon as I find a bottle of water, I'm relieved.

"You have not learnt anything since the last time you got suspended." The doctor who examined me before comes up to me and puts a spoon of some sort of syrup inside my mouth.

"I don't know how to sit still when people act crazy. They did it to themselves." I sit up and stare at the doctor's face. He's nearing his thirties and is quite the opposite of mediocre. His hair is styled perfectly and in now way could you tell if he's supposed to be a doctor or a model for... Balenciaga? I wonder if he experiences the Clicks too.

"When people act crazy," he scoots over to me, making me a little nervous, and pulls the spoon out of my mouth, "you let them be crazy. You don't become crazy like them." I had no idea I was talking with the spoon in my mouth. What a bummer.

"Being crazy isn't the only thing you become. You become lifeless, you forgot that part." Woah, what did I just say? Then I realise, I'm speaking the truth. There are no clicks or anything, but it's me, it's what I feel, it's what happens all the damn time.

He looks at me with a half-smile and nods before going away.

Yeonhee comes back running in a while and helps in easing the awkward silence that my very serious comment about lifelessness caused. Yeonhee's hair is all messed up from the running and she holds out my bag and sits down next to me.

"You might have just saved me tons of reputation, my friend." I unzip the backpack with a smug smile on my face, knowing exactly where this is going to go. If the Clicks can decide what I cannot control, I decide what I can.

I grab my phone from the back pocket and unlock it. Yeonhee's face turns around a whole one eighty degree from confusion to horror when she sees the video that I took.

"Atomic." Yeonhee laughs and I join her. I look at her and ask myself what happened to moments like these when we would just lose ourselves laughing at the most serious things in the world. We would not care about anything that anyone had to say, we'd just spend time with each other like we were the only ones that mattered. Recent happenings make me doubt if it was really her who threw me aside, or if I can get her back.

"You will break the whole internet," Yeonhee says.

"I might end being a public figure. Watch out, influencer, competition coming right up." I play with her necklace.

"Oh come on, you could never compete with me." Yeonhee tucks my hair behind my ears, smiling. "Equals don't need competition."

I look into her eyes and feel a colossal amount of emotions. Love, loss, grief, disappointment, happiness, grace, jealousy, pride and belonging. It feels like she and I could actually be friends again. At least if she isn't aware of how she acts when the universe decides to flip me off.

"Let's get you clean, baby." And then Yeonhee does, actually, break the internet by posting the pictures on her socials.