The White Mark

4. Chaos in her Mind

As the days got hotter and longer, time flowed by faster racing towards Thea's eighteenth. The day before her birthday finally made its appearance, Thea sat in English class. Her eyes trained on the whiteboard as her teacher, Mr Darby, wrote up their next assignment. She subconsciously chewed on the end of the pen she held between her fingers. Without much luck, she tried to ignore the pain bouncing off the walls of her skull. Her eyes tightly shutting closed ever so often, in an useless attempt to fight off the annoying commotion going on in her head. The throbbing headaches, accompanied by the occasional heat flashes, many sleepless nights and shaky hands have been intruding on her daily life quite often in the past few days.

The symptoms came and went every few hours and so Thea decided to blame it on the stress of her oncoming birthday. Her only medicine, apart from some painkillers, was distracting herself from what was to come and focusing her chaotic mind on other things. For example the English assignment. This unfortunately, quickly proved to be way too monotone a topic to stop her mind from wandering.

She daydreamed of the black mark due to paint her skin in only a number of hours. It would appear exactly at midnight when the darkness of the night led into her birth day. She tried to imagine the design that might appear, and quickly failed as her mind gave her nothing but a blank canvas. This was soon replaced by two green blobs of colour. They slowly reformed and shaped themselves, eventually settling on an image of a pair of breathtaking orbs, which lacked a face to reside on. 

The sudden, loud, high-pitched sound of the school bell, which unfortunately for Thea only intensified her headache, signaled the end of the lesson cutting off Mr. Darby mid-sentence. Thea gathered up her stuff swiftly, and shot Joseph, a boy who sat next to her in that particular class, a brief smile. She raced to the lunch hall ready to eat, relax and chat with her friends who were another short term cure to her headaches and millions of unnecessary thoughts. It was bad enough that no one from her close friend group was in her English class. While she usually, absolutely loved chatting to Joseph, recently only her closest friends effectively distracted her from the chaos in her head. 

She sighed in relief as she slid into her usual seat at their lunch table, dropping her bag harshly onto the ground. Chris who, so far, was the only member of their clique who made it there before her, looked at his best friend curiously, his eyebrows furrowed in concern.

"Guessing your headache didn't give you much of a rest during English?" He guessed, his lips forming a sympathetic smile. 

The brief shake of her head and the tears which unexpectedly welled in her eyes were a clear response.  Thea was so sick of this recent chaos and hoped it wouldn't impact on the birthday party she had been planning for months now. In fact, she suspected that it was the stress of getting everything set up and ready for tomorrow, as well as, the uncertainty of what was to appear on her skin tonight that was the cause of these unusual symptoms. The entire school's constant chattering of the upcoming Royal Ball, wasn't much help either. It was rumoured that the few chosen lucky girls would be receiving their invitations in the next couple of days. There was just way too much going on at once and the excitement and stress of these events, formed a massive jumbled up mess in Thea's head.

"Hey, it's alright T," Chris reassured lowly, laying his warm hand on Thea's own which rested atop the table. "In fact, I was just thinking of something that could take your mind of things."

Thea looked up at the boy's soft features, "You were?"

"Yeah, um, actually I was just thinking maybe we could do something after school today?" Chris suggested with a hopeful glint in his eyes. " Just the two of us. We didn't have a nice day out together for a while now and I thought it would be perfect to just go grab something to eat, or watch a movie, or whatever you like really.  Kind of the last time we can hang out before we're both adults."