Manic Attack

II. Chanel Your Inner Peace

"Look, Miss Knightley!" he exclaimed, pointing somewhere near my feet. "We batch!"

Batch? I squinted towards him, standing alone in the middle of the university hall with a red-tipped nose.

Ah, he meant 'match'.

I cautiously followed where his finger was pointing. To be met with the most dreadful sight humanity could offer- My four-inch sparkly Jimmy Choos had been replaced by a pair of gaudy green, stomach-churning - 

Crocs.

Panic and horror seized my chest. My lips parted but my voice seemed to have vanished. BOC drew closer with the same happy grin plastered on his face. As I took a step back, he took one forward. Every step with which I tried to put distance between us, he seemed to be coming closer.

Thud. My back hit a wall.

His grin widened. "Don't you see, Miss Monica?" he said, stretching a hand towards me. "With our fabulous taste in shoes, we could rock this world together."

I screamed- loud, blood curdling, and at the girliest pitch, my throat could muster. Sweat beaded my forehead as if I'd just run a marathon, my heart raced like it was still running a marathon. By the time I found control over myself and Billy had run over to lick my face till it dripped with her saliva, relief began flooding through my system.

Thank God, it was just a nightmare.

I lay still. Staring at my bedroom ceiling as a familiar sensation pricked my nose. Before I knew it, I had sneezed all over Billy and her soft Pomeranian fur until I thought my brain would blow out of my nostrils.

BOC hadn't just gifted me with nightmares. He had blessed me with his cold, too.

Talk about leaving a first impression.

~ ~ ~

"Monica, Monica," she soothed, her perfectly manicured hands gesturing me to relax. "Take a deep breath and calm down. Why don't you tell me everything from the beginning?"

"Beginning?" I cried from the sofa I was lying on. "I spent an hour relaying every detail and now you ask me to start all over again?"

Melissa, a therapist by choice and my best friend by her own damned luck, gave me the blankest stare. "All you've been saying is 'who the hell wears Crocs to a dance' and 'I can't believe how bright that tie was'. How am I supposed to figure out what happened?"

"Green Crocs, Melissa!" I slammed my palm on the table between us. "Green bloody Crocs with the crocodile shaped silhouette! I wouldn't use them as my bathroom slippers and he wears them to a ball dance?"

She let out a soft sigh, picked up her pen then set it back down. Mel already looked done with my highly traumatic experience. "Okay. Let me j-"

I narrowed my eyes. "You sighed."

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did. You know how I feel about sighs."

"Monica," she repeated in a tone probably reserved used to calm frustrated housewives with daddy issues. "You're stressed and you also have a terrible cold."

"Thank you for stating the obvious. I can see why you're always booked, doctor."

Being best friends with Melissa since high school had led me to read her as swiftly as I could memorize the latest issue of Vogue and, right now, I could tell she was getting agitated by my ill-humored rambling.