I walked into the main entrance of college and immediately a wall of anxiety crashed into me. My breathing turned shallow and my eyes were stuck to the floor. I felt my face turning bright red and I tried to remember that I didn't care what the people looking at me were thinking about me because I hated them. But I still did. I still heard their crude remarks and it made me feel physically sick. Normally I just went straight into college by the art block to avoid the kind of people who would judge me, but they are doing work on some of the doors or something so me and Icarus had to walk in the normal way like everybody else. I wanted to go and hide in the toilets, but I knew that there would be even more reason to be anxious. I found a cleaning cupboard and shut myself in it.
I didn't even want to think about them. 'Them' being the people who went to my junior and secondary school, and now college, who made my life a living hell. I don't want to pretend like I'm some heroic survivor of a brutal bullying through my adolescence. That's not what this is. This is the group of people whose soul purpose in life is to get under as many people's skin's as possible, in order to separate the strong from the weak. The long - tempered from the short - tempered. Those who could hide their emotion, and those who buried it so deep they let it eat all the way to their emotionally numb minds until they snapped. Coming into the school a term after everyone else, and coming from a foster home where I'd been allowed to nurture my introverted personality ever since I moved in, I was a target as soon as I stepped through the doors to school.
Icarus opened the door cautiously and slipped into the cupboard too. "Oh Carmen" he sighed as he pulled me into him for a hug. I just buried my head into his shoulder like I had done so many times before. He stroked my head like he was my big sister and told me the general "It's going to be okay," and " don't worry" that you say when someone is being emotionally unstable and you don't know what to do. "How do you do it Icarus? How do you face them everyday when all they do to you is try to find new ways to provoke and criticise you?" Icarus just smiled at me and pulled a bottle out of his bag. He gulped down the clear liquid as if it was water, before offering some to me. I took it, but I winced as the bitter taste of vodka ran down my throat. I was one of those people who loved the effects of alcohol, but hated the actual taste. It meant house parties were pretty boring, but at least it lowered my risk of becoming an alcoholic.
A couple of minutes later the bell for first period went, and me and Icarus waited for the corridors to clear before going to art. We turned round the corner of one of the corridors, and we were confronted with a group of five or six teenagers. Shit. Anabelle, a girl who is infamous in college for making people feel insecure, was blocking the corridor along with her gang of cheerleaders and American footballers. She was making out with a boy called Jim. Jim was the typical football captain, head boy kind of person. I didn't know him, but its kind of hard to not acknowledge the existence of the person half of the girls in my school had had a crush on at some point. I know some girls who would murder just to get his number. I didn't know anyone else, apart from another boy called Toby, who was known for being tall and for being a dick.
I might have stopped dead in the corridor if it hadn't been for Icarus gentle pushing his hand against my back. I didn't like people touching me. Even with Icarus, sometimes I would get a bit worked up about the idea of someone else touching me. We awkwardly slipped through the middle of their group and I thought we had been the first two people in college to get away with intruding in on their conversation. That's when Toby yelled. "Oi slag" Toby laughed as a plastic bottle hit the back of my head. I carried on walking, but Icarus had turned around and was glaring at them. I turned too and told them to fuck off. Anabelle, who had now stopped attacking Jim, looked at Icarus instead. "stop staring at me queer" Anabelle sneered. For a moment, I thought that Icarus was going to respond with a sarcasm or something, but he instead, he just winked at Jim, who then turned bright red and avoided Icarus' eyes. I laughed at the thought of Icarus having an affair with the cheerleader captain's boyfriend. Icarus spun back around and did his 'I just burnt you so I'm going to walk like the Nicki Minaj' walk.
