Along These Trodden Paths [Camren]

Chapter Two

High School isn't really anything like they had expected. The Juniors and Seniors look at Freshmans as though they're something unsightly that the cat dragged in- kind of ridiculous considering they were in their position only a couple of years ago- and take to jostling them in the halls. 

The older boys check them out in particularly unsettling and leering ways throughout the first week of school, as if evaluating the new stock that's just arrived. Deeply intimidated by this, and used to the lanky, hairless boys of middle school, not these beefy, hormone emitting young men with their large hands and strong jaws, Camila, Lauren, Dinah and Normani begin to travel in groups or at least pairs whenever they can, arms linked in unity.

They quickly find themselves overloaded with work with teachers seem completely unsympathetic to their transition into High School. In fact, many of them clearly find joy in giving long speeches the first day of classes that leave the students pale faced in anxiety over the workload ahead. 

Receiving homework from almost every lesson of the day rapidly becomes the norm, often including essays due only within a day or two. Camila can tell it's really starting to stress Lauren out; as someone who's cruised through schoolwork all her life, finding herself barely treading water comes as a shock.

Thankfully, there are some highlights to finally starting high school. They have the strange thrill of getting on an actual school bus- following the strict hierarchy of younger students at the front and older students at the back of course- when before they only walked. Camila used to call for Dinah, who lived in the same neighbourhood as her, and then the two of them would trot around to the more upmarket streets that Mani and Lauren lived on so the four of them could make their way to school together.

On the morning of the first day of school, Camila had woken up to her alarm expecting to find herself in a pool of her own blood. Instead, she'd felt pretty normal, aside from a slight heaviness in the pad she put in her underwear before bed.

"Urghhh." It's strange that no matter how much you've been looking forward to something, when it comes to getting up in the morning, it immediately becomes hugely less appealing. Camila rolls over onto her stomach, breathing in the familiar scent of her bedsheets. Somewhere outside the proximate bubble of her senses, the sound of the shower whirring and groaning to life can be heard. The plumbing in their house had been faulty for months, but over the summer Camila had adjusted to not waking up to the rattling of the pipes when her Mom went to work each morning.

"Noooo." She mumbles into her pillow. It was unnatural for her to be awake this early. Two months of lie ins had made her complacent.

Eventually, it's the uncomfortableness in her underwear that makes her drag herself up and head to wash her face.

A small house means one bathroom. Which means stepping across the dripping wet floor that her mother has kindly left her.

Camila was a person who hated asking for help, she didn't like people knowing her business and kept things to herself- often self detrimentally. Therefore, the previous night, unlike most teenage girls, she didn't go to her Mom as soon as she'd discovered that she'd finally, finally, started her period.

(The fact she didn't exactly want to speak to her parents at that moment only reinforced this decision.)

Instead, she'd scoured her desk drawers for her secret stash of sanitary towels and fiddled with unpeeling one and correctly putting it in her underwear.

"How do people wear these things." Camila mumbles for the second time that morning. "It's like a freaking diaper!" There's a moment of anxious hesitation over what to do with the old one before she hurriedly raps it in toilet rolls and shoves it to the bottom of the bathroom bin.