misophonia | m.c

fight or flight

Cassidy let her hair fall over her shoulder as the teacher slid a test onto her desk. She picked up her pencil, taking a deep breath before scrawling her name on the solid line printed on the top of the packet. The classroom was silent.

Well, it was as silent as the teacher could get it. 

The blonde behind Cassidy was chewing a piece of gum,  the shaggy haired boy to her right was tapping the end of his pencil on the side of his faux wood desk, and the kid with the dark blue beanie seemed to be getting over a cold because every few seconds he would raise his arm to his nose and sniffle into his sleeve. There were sounds coming from everywhere.

The classroom definition of silent seemed to mean no talking. But Cassidy knew there were far more sounds than just the human voice.

Cassidy could deal with talking. Teenagers voices blend together when they're all talking, almost as if they are one loud sound rather than a hundred softer ones. Voices mask the other sounds bodies make.  But now there were no voices.

Her hand shook as it lowered a pencil to the first page of the test, her whole body felt like it was under attack. Every time that gum would smack in the blonde's mouth and every sniff beanie kid produced stung Cassidy's ears, made in the inside of her ears sting and the inside of her head throb with an oddly indescribable pain. In a flash she felt the urge to turn around whip her hand across the girls cheek and throw a box of tissues hard in the boys face. She wanted them to hurt, to feel what she was feeling.

Then, even faster than the urge had come, it vanished. A wave of fear replaced the violence, like it always did. It was a vicious cycle. Pain then violence then guilt. 

Fifteen minutes tick by on the school issued clock hanging above the door. Cassidy was still just staring down at her paper, she had barely written anything. Math had always been her worst subject, but it had only gotten worse as the sounds intensified. 

Tears threatened to spill from her eyes as she forced herself to skip to the next page so she'd have at least a little done when the teacher demanded the tests at the end of the period. 

Tick tock. Smack. Tick tock. Sniff. Tick tock. Tap. Cassidy's hands dropped her pencil, leaving it to clatter against wood and paper, and they smashed against her ears. Her elbows supported her head in her hands, her eyes squinted shut then opened slowly. She couldn't keep a fat tear from falling from her eye and splattering on question number twenty three. The girl couldn't help but wonder what other classmates are thinking about her, she sure looked like a freak with eyes puffy from tears and her hands pressed to her ears to muffle any and all noise.

Time just seemed to drone on, Cassidy wanted to scream and flee the room. She couldn't bring herself to say anything, she never could. She just worked with the pain pressing down on her. She always did. She knew it wasn't good for her, but what else could she do?

Math didn't make sense to her anymore. Her tears blurred her vision. Her mind could not focus on numbers and equations, it only seemed to think of the sounds assaulting her ears.

Her teacher snatched her packet at the end of the class, ushering her out the door. She had not finished, like always. 

Cassidy walked with her head down, hair falling in her face. She couldn't let anyone see her like that. Red puffy eyes, head still aching and ears still throbbing. The girl rarely spoke, but she knew how word got around the school when anything was wrong with anybody.   

She walked at a slow pace, practically a shuffle, close to the cement walls of the hallway. Her hair created a sort of curtain along the side of her face, hiding her brown eyes from the high school world. Her gaze focused on her feet, watching each step the black converse took carefully.  Cassidy wanted nothing more than to blend in, to fly under the radar. But she felt like every pair of eyes moving through the halls were glued to her.

All she wanted was to get to her locker and then pull herself together for her next class, but she kept getting stopped by other classmates cutting her path off.

After what seemed like hours of walking at the time, Cassidy spotted her locker at the end of the hall. 

Finally. She thought as her fingers gripped the combination lock. But her relief was short lived.

As soon as Cassidy popped the door open and managed to stand up straighter and look a bit more confident, she was blindsided. 

It was a blur of tan skin and dark hair. The boy had been jogging backwards, trying to catch a Frisbee flying through the hall, and had slammed into Cassidy's side.  With an oof! Cassidy fell back, landing flat on her butt. 

The girl dusted off her knees, but couldn't bring herself to get up fast enough. Cassidy stared upward, dumbfounded, at the dark haired boy who smiled down at her sheepishly. 

"Uh, sorry." He blurted before dashing away, almost as if he were the embarrassed one.. 

Just my luck. I try to get people to forget one thing I did and then something else happens to me. Cassidy thought out of frustration, her eyebrows furrowing together. She could hear laughs and hushed voices walk past her, but she just kept her now pink face staring at the floor. 

As she decided to get up and try to salvage the situation as much as she could, she felt two rough hands on her bare upper arms.

"Thank you?" Cassidy's voice trembled as she tried to turn around to face her helper, but the hands held her in place. 

"No problem, just don't fall again." A low voice whispered in her ear, the boy's breath playing in her hair. 

His hands dropped, leaving a warm feeling on her skin. Cassidy spun on her heels, coming face to face with the last person she would have expected to help her. 

"Michael Clifford?"