Miss, Do I Know You?

04 - Thursday, September 17

My excessive negligence of health had once again demanded its due.

The sleepless nights came so often that I'd started looking for excuses to celebrate things just so I'd feel less pathetic. End of a week—why not reward myself? Passed a test—how about a joint or a glass of cheap wine before bed? Managed to throw a piece of trash in the bin from ten feet away on the first try—bring out the bubbly. It's an easy enough system to follow, and it works, until your dehydrated body starts getting hangovers during school mornings and either makes you ravenously hungry by lunch or nauseous on an empty stomach.

Despite my best efforts to engage with the lesson, my water bottle had already gone dry again, my stomach was grumbling and turning over itself, and the air was so perfectly cool that I couldn't stop imagining being wrapped in blankets and snuggled up in bed, which only made the drowsiness worse. That's the thing with negligence—it'll always come back to bite you.

And that was the thing with one of my teachers—she'll always make sure to single you out. When a nudge against my shoulder turned me toward Olivia's eyes that were casting warnings at me, I already knew what awaited me. I blinked the fog away from my eyes and straightened up in my seat.

"Yeah?"

Miss Martin gestured to the board. "I asked you if you could come solve this."

"Can I not?"

A sarcastic smile pulled up the corners of her lips. "Can you not be witty and bother to pay attention for more than three minutes?"

"Do you want an honest answer?"

"I want you to grasp that it was a rhetorical question and do what I'm asking of you."

Fatigue smothered any sparkle of defiance that would've burst forth any other day. I merely nodded and shuffled my feet to the front where, reaching for the marker, my gaze lingered on her hand a moment longer. Forming some upside-down word I couldn't make out, smaller designs peeked from under her rings, along with something on the side in a twirly script. Her right hand, however, was blank. Not that I cared. I swallowed the queasiness that inched up my throat and calculated everything, all the while trying to ignore the hot gaze searing the back of my skull. I'd grown sick of it.

Her obvious intention to humiliate me did nothing but accentuate this sickness, both mental and physical. Mentally, I wanted her to stop singling me out for once and curb her terrorizing that she veiled as teaching—I knew I'd probably earned this attitude because of my misdeeds on the first day, but three weeks surely had to be enough to quell such grudges. The physical, I could handle that; eventually, it would go away, after I got home and slept off the evidence from my futile attempt to secure more than a mere two hours of sleep for once. Or so I thought.

"Um, miss?" I managed a feeble smile. "Can I go to the nurse?"

Miss Martin glanced at her watch, and though I fully expected her to say something about class ending in two minutes, a gentle flicker of worry passed over her face before she offered a nod. If I looked anything like what I felt, she must have known that in no universe would I be capable of finishing the class with more composure than a decomposing vegetable.

Feeling as if a squirrel had taken residence in my cerebral cortex and was clamping down with all its might on some exposed nerve endings, I wasted no time to shoulder my bag and beat a hasty retreat from the classroom, but before I could even reach the stairs, my legs redirected me in another direction, and my mind begged my stomach to keep everything inside for a few moments longer.

I barely outpaced the nausea before the restroom tile hit against my knees and bitter taste of bile invaded my mouth. And while the school bell grated against my eardrums like nails on a chalkboard, all I could do was push through the choking sensation and think about what the hell was going on with me. The constant feeling of being on the edge was getting progressively worse; I had chalked it up to stress at first, the move, the new school, leaving my uncle and everything I'd known behind, and all that jazz, but as the weeks went by, nothing had changed, and I was at a loss.