It was my first day at my new school. It was terrifying being a student in an unfamiliar place. I had been at my previous high school for the last four years and I did not relish starting anew. I could imagine all sorts of horrors happening to me and I tried to not think about them as I walked in the doors for the first time.
It did not help that I had the tendency to overthink things. I was, in the words of my best friend, a stress head. I had been told over the years to chill, to take it easy, but that was easier said than done. I found that people were quick to dish out the advice without offering any practical tips as to how I could go about chilling.
Chill, Romy, I told myself, avoid thinking that everyone's looking at you.
It was true though. The other students were looking at me. That is, they were looking at me but no one was approaching to offer any help. Hey girl, you're new. Need a hand?
I tried to avoid feeling lonely and instead I focused on finding a sign that would point me towards the front office.
I was wandering down a corridor. The corridor was like any other school corridor: plain painting, unadorned except for the faded posters which looked like they were two centuries old. At my last school, we'd tried to make an effort to add colour to the walls. We had added new posters, we had added artworks and we had even painted the entire art block with spray paint in the style of Jackson Pollack.
The front office was still shut off. A small sign said they would not open until 8:30. I had a good twenty minutes to kill so I decided to go find a place to do some sketching. In all my fifteen years on planet Earth, it was the only activity which made me relax enough. It was calming. I wasn't the greatest sketcher. My drawings only sometimes resembled what I was drawing but it would keep my mind off things I would rather not consider.
