Nefarious

Chapter 1 - Willow

I feel like most people think they are worth something that they believe their fate makes a dent in the abyss of existence. Most people probably cannot deal with fact that their existence is meaningless, that one day someone will think about them one last time maybe about how they smiled or the piercing they got, and then they will never think about them again. People crave to be something other than their own name, not just smart or funny but truly something, a contribution. I myself, I have long dealt with the fact that with every artless step I take and every small critter I squash with my foot, my movements are useless and by the time that I finally die, no one would even bother to remember every time I hesitated to speak or the one time I broke down crying in the bathroom. In reality, it wasn't just boiled down to the fact that I had no interest or hope in myself, it's that throughout the 18 years of my life, no one else had any interest in myself either so maybe it was just meant to be that I wasn't worth anything.

What I feel about myself is quite literally ironic considering that for the past three years I had been obsessing over every intellectual capability aspect of myself so that I could get accepted into St.Alexius. When I had gotten my acceptance letter, that had barely missed the trash if it were not for the navy blue crest. Though I had originally planned to start senior year with my best friend Ilya, her family had decided to pack up their flock and scramble north to Boston. So instead of us going into our last year before graduation together, I had gone into it alone. At first it was truly chaotic, everyone behaved like pigeons trying to get the last piece of bread and of course the bread represented praise. Everyone was desperate to get praise from someone, whether it be their fellow peers or their teachers. Since St.Alexius was such a competitive school, everything was crammed all at once. Where at my old school it would take us a full day to complete a lesson, here it took a full day to complete five. Through the mind boggling workload of it all, I had still managed to not sit alone by myself everyday at lunch which was definitely a plus considering I had previously known myself to be insignificant.

The people at my lunch were as if someone took a knapsack and kidnapped every misfit looking kid they could find that lingered in the streets. Our conversations were almost entirely nonverbal and in most cases if lunch was not spent on our phones scrolling through articles about how millennials were ruining pop culture, it was then spent debating whether the school lunch food was made of organic products or not (most of us agreed there was no way they were). Our group of people consisted of Marie, who had transferred this year except instead of just coming from a neighborhood away, she came all the way from France and was always picky about the food. She spoke in a heavy accent, but despite that obstacle she could speak faster than most of us could think and usually was the main limelight of our table's talk shows. Across from me and Marie sat Viktor who was presumably the heir of some complicated insurance company. Viktor only talked when he disagreed with something, which was why he talked the most only second to Marie. It wasn't just because he was pessimistic or something like that, he almost entirely disagrees on everything no matter how small the topic. Though most people in our school preferred to eat in the lunchroom or the library, we ate in a small hallway that lead to the backdoor of the small gym where it was always constantly cold because of the lack of heaters. There, only janitors stopped by every once and awhile and it was so far away from the main corridors of the school that the sounds of everyone else seemed inaudible.

Even though us three had spent a month together in muted comfortable silence so far at lunch, we had not once hung out outside of school. In our conversations we had explored topics such as the debate if ants could be abused or what would happen if ladybugs went extinct but we had never went into the topic of hanging out together. It wasn't just because we didn't like each other but it was that we had no idea what to do outside of lunch, much less outside of school whatsoever. Eventually our internalized stigma that we were truly the most boring group of humans to exist got to Marie and so instead of her talking about food during lunch, it turned into her searching up fun activities to do on Pinterest which included knitting and making DIY tie dyed shirts. Needless to say, our group was evolving.