WHEN THE HALO FADES

My bubble

I sighed in defeat as I stared at the ugly numbers which stared right back at me, wishing they would magically become juxtaposed and raise my grade from a very depressing big fat  '29' to a wonderful '92' but they stubbornly remained.

After losing a mighty battle against my much hated best friend, Sleep. I failed to prepare for my chemistry test the night before the blasted test just like I failed to prepare for my Math test yesterday. Urrgh...

I really didn't want to see my Math test script ever again. When I did get it back, I would probably chuck it in a trashcan.

Damn! Dad was gonna be really disappointed once he got wind of just how badly I was doing.

I gave the paper a final glance before folding it in two and slipping it into my Chemistry textbook. I kept it there with the intention of going over my mistakes and taking corrections. I told myself that I wouldn't forget to do just that tonight. Convinced myself that I could up my grades if I could just dedicate more time to studying but deep down I knew that it was more than that.

Things were different now. Much more different and I was now different. Gone were my days of being a perfectionistic straight A student. Long gone was my long-lasting attention span.

Now I battled with sleep and escaped reality by drowning my head in novels, the ones that could make me feel things that I had never felt before, take me places I'd never been and most of all, for as long as their words wrapped me up, make me someone else for a while.

That was the only way I knew to cope with my problems. It was affecting me but I really couldn't help it. My attention span didn't even make matters any better because whenever I won the battles against sleep and my novel addiction, I inevitably lost to my poor atention span which even posed a greater threat to my ability to pay attention in class. Most times I'd stare out the window wistfully, gazing at the sky and the careless, carefree birds soaring. I envied them. Sometimes I'd just space out without even realising it. I'd play different scenarios in my head and act out my parts. Other times I'd stare at the teacher trying to make sense of his words before giving up and succumbing to sleep's seductions.

Today was just like other times. So I folded my hands on the table and put my head down as a wave of tiredness hit me but as soon as I did so, the teacher's boring chatter ceased and I almost thought I'd been discovered until I heard a voice, deep and quiet from the front of the class seemingly addressing the teacher. I must have been so consumed with my own thoughts that I didn't notice the door opening to admit someone.

I raised my head up lazily from the table to get a glimpse of the person talking and I froze...

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Well, well...this is chapter two. Nothing exciting but it get's pretty exciting from here hopefully. Enjoy...