Compilation

the quiet

11:54pm

it starts off as a hum – a low, reverberating purr at the base of the throat – before it snaps, rubber-band like, and roars so loudly it pierces through her ears and straight into her head. then, as abruptly as it started, it stops, and the engine rumbles away into the night.

the doppler effect, she remembers dimly. an image of a hand-drawn car with penciled rings flaring out around it flashes behind her closed eyelids. that stupid physics concept we learned last lesson where the car is moving towards you... then away... and the observed frequency increases while the object's sound frequency remains constant or something. the car on the paper expands and morphs into a plane, then a bird, then a boat, and she's long gone, floating among light waves and gravity and convoluted little equations.

12:32am

the melody hasn't stopped. the melody doesn't stop. i have an exam tomorrow, she pleads with it. they reply with crescendoing waves and cascading thunder. the storm spreads to her feet and she feels the familiar, numb tingling, like ants biting into her calves and thighs and she just needs to move. so she moves to hold the storm at bay. she tosses and turns on the bed as it bobs atop roiling waves.

07:30am

Nobody's there yet. Of course nobody is — she always makes sure to wake half an hour before schedule, to be at school half an hour before classes start, just in case. She's meticulously checked every item in her bag, thrice, just in case.

Red, raw bite marks dapple her lips and her nails are chipped and jagged. The clock ticks. She tugs at her eyelashes. It's the dread that keeps her on the edge of her seat — the dread that's at the tip of her tongue, at the edge of the precipice, teetering, waiting to crash over her. What are you so afraid of? she asks herself. She doesn't answer. She doesn't know. All she knows is the rain pounding away in her head, wahlah-wahlah-wahlah, and that familiar sensation of the screw wounding up in her chest. She clutches the phone in her hand so tightly her knuckles turn bone-white. Just in case.

3:34pm

"90. i got a 90."

i mean, really, what'd she expect? she'd barely studied for this test. actually, she had. she'd studied so, so hard, starting when the clock struck twelve until the first streaks of daylight filtered through the blinds, but she had just been so tired. the rustling leaves had thundered in her temples for hours straight, and she'd felt like she was bobbing up and down on driftwood, with crackling static blaring in her ears.

"well, that's wonderful! well done!"

he's a nosy man with red-framed glasses and a clipboard in his hands. he's nosy because all he does is pry and pry and pry, in order to fill the empty space gaping in his own life. he doesn't get it.

"it's not that good of a result."

she fiddles absentmindedly with the grass seahorse in her hands. there's a small dip in between the snout and the neck that she likes, because the rasp — the shkk — feels particularly good against the pad of her thumb. shkk. shkk. shkk.

"i think you're a little too hard on yourself, sometimes, but i assure you that you are perfectly fine. an average person doesn't do as well as you do. in fact, you are gifted!" he laughs as if he's said something clever. "so you see, you have nothing to worry about."

"okay."

shkk. shkk.

he slides a thin stack of documents across the table towards her. "here are your results from last week. you can take a look when you have time."