Amor, tam pulcher | KTH

18| Opposites attract

—Now playing: R.I.P. 2 My Youth by The Neighbourhood ✫

"Daph? Are you there?" And there was silence. After what seemed like a trance founded on anxiety and heavy breaths, there was silence. Back to life. Back to reality. Or was it?

"Rhodes?" Her head was a cage with rubber walls, the type that allows words to bounce nonstop, the only right formula that can fuel her anxiety. They won't come out nor stop popping up.

Daphne was in the bathroom, in a stall. Beneath her was the toilet with the lid closed and in front of her was the door behind which she'd just heard her friend's voice. How long had she been there? Couldn't have been too long, come on. She hadn't cried that much, had she? Her tailbone wasn't complaining about the discomfort it would feel when she sat on a hard surface for too long with her knees against her chest so it couldn't be.

"Rhodes?" She didn't verbally reply when her name was called, just got up, systemised her sweater a bit and went to the desk. When she was standing next to the teacher, she tried not to look at the colour of the pen he used to write her grade so her heart dropped out of her body nearly as hard as she did on her chair when she read the number in the top right corner.

Like a slot machine, the sadness on her face disappeared to show no reaction. Her brain behaved the same way but in the row were three equal numbers penned in red with Mr Keeley's handwriting. Just as she'd made her way back to her desk, her feet moved one after the other almost robotically as they did when she walked out of the class, along the hallway to the bathroom and into a stall.

Her hand reached for the lid, closed it after closing the door and sat on it before taking in a big breath and letting it all out, giving space for her brain to focus on what was next. Like fuel to an empty engine, the battery to a malfunctioning clock and the current through a wire. That was all she needed before her vision gradually blurred out, her eyes filled up and the pinching on her thighs got more intense. It took her no time to reach her height, climbing up the stairs to the maximum stress. The last drop of water sank into the filled cup and it overflew, dragging out sobs that she tried to muffle against her legs.

Maybe she needed this. Not the failure but certainly the venting out hence the surprise she felt when her ears caught something disrupting the echoing silence of the bathroom. It wasn't entirely surprising on its own: it's a school bathroom, people are expected to walk in whenever they want and do whatever they want; it wouldn't have stopped her from crying. She's behind the door of a stall, her feet are on the toilet and certainly no one could recognise her just from the sound of her weeping.

"Daph?" The voice was a wake-up call, the necessary to have her snap back to reality and out of the virulent world her mind was easing its way to.

"Y-yeah?" Her voice was there—somewhere, very tiny but present and she didn't forget it in the toxic dimension. Her hands moved to wipe the tears away before she could even register, muscle memory.

"You okay?" It wasn't official but Daphne's brain's favourite activity was overthinking but not enough to have a prepared answer to such a simple question, maybe a bot response.

Was she okay? Objectively, no. Subjectively? She had to be: she had wrongly planned her study schedule and underestimated the physics topic which caused her to make so many stupid and little mistakes that weighed a lot in the final grade. The number penned in red was a six and a minus following which meant she didn't pass it—its real value was 5.75, not a full six. It was expected after prioritising that stupid physics topic about light. The topic of this test was easy and quick to understand with common sense so it didn't scare her and she studied it superficially.

Cleo didn't know this as she waited for a reply behind the stall door. It eventually came but non-verbal: Daphne came out after trying her best to conceal the traces of a potential anxiety attack that she was about to go through.