"And here, the negative root of x is equivalent to the squared quadratic power of two, making it equal to y to the power of negative five..." Mr Fieldson's droning voice drilled like a jackhammer through my brain, his words bouncing around the inside of my skull like drunken moths. I stared at the board without seeing the list of questions that had been scribbled there, trying not to let my head fall onto the desk in uninterested exhaustion.
Looking at the steel clock that hung tauntingly on the wall for what seemed like the billionth time in five minutes, I saw that there was still what would feel like an eternity of Maths left to endure. I nearly groaned out loud.
It was bad enough that this was the last lesson on the Friday before the Christmas holidays, when we should be hanging up fairy lights or watching stereotypically jovial films. Or perhaps baking a chocolate Yule log while gazing out of a heat-steamed kitchen window at the falling snow (while, in my case, trying not to burn the house down in the process). Not sitting in a freezing, dimly-lit classroom with a teacher that seems to hate you for merely existing.
Like most teenagers, I didn't particularly enjoy school at the best of times, but Maths was the worst of the worst. At one point I'd even carried out a number of boisterous protests with some of my friends. Dylan and I would never forget the most recent one we'd organised, which had ended with Dylan standing on a table in the staff room, shouting about the unfairness of education while we cheered her on from below.
But, despite our greatest efforts, they'd all come to an end with bitter, two-hour-long detentions, and after the countless number of minutes sat in a stuffy, abandoned classroom staring at the wood grains in the table-top or doodling idly in an old notepad , we'd been forced to admit that maybe our protests often ended up causing more bad than good. And a few days after that last detention, the whole school had been called into the hall for an 'emergency assembly', where the head teacher announced that any students that continued to protest against the school curriculum would be expelled.
Outrageous.
The whole affair had, for a while, boosted our ranks in the school hierarchy, transforming us from awkward Potterheads into infamous-but-kind-of-awesome rebel activists. The reactions from the students had been a mixed bag. A year seven girl who couldn't have been taller than 3 foot 9 had plucked up the courage to shuffle up to us and squeak that we 'were, like, really cool', and a pompous boy in our year had offered to help us 'make our future protests more authentic' so that 'more people would actually listen'.
We'd politely declined the offer, smiling through our teeth while grimacing at each other in annoyance. But, after a week or so of recognition, we had all retreated back into our shells and reclaimed our 'awkward nerd' labels. After all, there was only so much social attention we could take.
Blinking to try and dispel the memory, I glanced at my best friend Dylan sitting across the room, and she formed a gun with her fingers, placed it to her temple and rolled her eyes. So at least I knew that someone other than me was feeling the same way. I smiled at her and did the same and she grinned at me, the freckles on her nose and cheeks scrunching together into a brown blob.
As I turned away from her to look at the endless sea of meaningless numbers and letters on the board, a small concertina of paper landed on my desk. Casting a wary look at Mr Fieldson who was still engrossed in negative powers, I unfolded the note under the table.
Are we still dyeing our hair and having that meeting after school today?
What with all the pressure still hanging over us from the end-of-term exams, I'd forgotten about our plans for the Christmas holidays. We'd been talking about them all through our previous lessons in excited whispers only a few days ago (earning ourselves a few near-missed detentions, I might add), but I was famous within my group of friends for not only being clumsy enough to trip over my feet no less than fifteen times while walking to school (Dylan was getting so annoyed at me that she had started counting whenever we walked together), but for having a memory worse than a goldfish with amnesia.
YOU ARE READING
Eve(-1)
Teen Fiction*COMPLETED AND EDITING* You can't often tell when you're internally breaking. Most of the time, you don't want to hear it. You say you're fine and hold your head high, trying to camouflage your pain and the approaching storm. But what do you do when...
