dear frida (coming september 1st)

written in willowish ink

paper damp from crying whilst writing

dear frida,

it's been days since i wrote you. i'm so sorry. things have been hard to write about. less so now, but yeah. i think i do need to write about them. you wrote about the tough things too in your diary.

so here we go.

snake boy. and fattouma telling me she liked my skirt.

"don't listen to her, lei," he said to me, and i hated the way he spitted my name, as if it was just another thing to order in the drive through - a lei with some fattouma on the side and don't forget the damn chopsticks like you did last time. "she's got the exact same problem."

"i don't have any problems," fattouma said, crumpling up her lunch bag the way i'd liked her to crumple him up as well.

"that's the thing with prudes," snake boy smiled, "half the time they don't even realise."

"you're the one with the problem here," she rephrased, still looking eerily calm, and maybe that's what caused him to snap, maybe that's what makes snakes attack, because the next second his fangs were showing and he slurred "raghead" at her.

i choked on the word. she didn't even blink, but i could hear her heart land in the pit of her stomach. "i'm not hungry anymore," she said, "come on, lei, let's go," but as soon as she tried to stand up, snake boy yanked her back down by

her

hijab.

i feel so sick writing that down, frida. i felt so sick seeing it happen.

it didn't entirely come off, but a lot of pins sprang loose, and it looked as if she was a robot falling apart. "don't you dare touch me again," she yelled and though her face was flickering she was still functioning.

i was not.

i turned around.

i feel so bad about it but i turned around and i started walking and i left my sandwich just like i left fattouma who was still yelling at the boys, who'd grown five more heads, six, seven, eight, eight monstrous faces telling her to sit down, crazy bitch, and that's when my maths teacher noticed them and i swear to god he started running - in the opposite direction i was tripping over that cursed skirt - but fast was not fast enough because by the time he'd reached her the boys were already rubbing a bacon sandwich across her face and my blue eyeliner was gushing down my face like a guilty thunderstorm and when he tried to separate fattouma from the boys, they yanked on her earring so bad

her

earlobe

tore.

i still want to vomit just thinking about that. maybe i could gag those boys out, along with the taste of the words they used - ugly words.

words shouldn't be ugly.

fattouma had some earlobe surgery monday. she looked really empty when she came back, as if they had ripped out way more than just her earring.

when i told leander, he started crying in this terrifying white-hot way. we tried to find some words worse than "asshat" but none were bad enough.

we haven't had lunch in the school cafetaria ever since. fattouma's mum let her skip the first two days of school after the incident, and the day after leander came up with the idea of sneaking away to have lunch behind the school building, on this moldy gymnastics mat that's always laying around there. both me and fattouma are terrified of getting caught by a teacher or our parents, but leander isn't all that concerned. which is quite funny, considering we're still on school property but he's two bus stops away from his school.

it's amazing though. more amazing than terrifying.

he meets us at the school's fence every day, and then he hops over with this ridiculous feline ease. when i pointed it out to him a few days ago, he swore we could do the exact same thing. fattouma tried, and though she looked less like a bubbly burglar than he did, she did surprisingly well. i didn't try it though. i didn't want to fall on my face.

the rest of lunch break we just lay around. talk shit. cough a little, because leander sometimes smokes when we're back there. talk more shit. it's so strange to hear the bell ring and step into the real world again after an hour spent under the radar, almost underwater.

"then don't go," leander sometimes offers when we complain about the break being over already - i think most of the days he doesn't go back to school and spends the afternoon hanging around in the park taking pictures of ducks or something. we've never gone with him, because we both think we're going to get so fricking caught if we cut class, but it does sound tempting though. escaping.

escaping always sounds tempting, doesn't it?

yours truly,

lei