A.N: The bold is sign langauge
I hastily screwed the lid back onto the orange plastic bottle, throwing my head back and dropping the white pill down my throat. Letting out a breath, I put my hands on either side of the porcelain basin of the sink as I felt the medicine start to take effect, my headache slowly starting to recede.
"Dude, you're going to get hooked on those drugs if you don't lighten up."
I looked up at my best friend Michael, who was leaning against the wall next to me.
I'll stop taking them when the pain in my head stops.
He ran a hand through his bright green hair, following me out of the bathroom.
"Fair enough. Hey, you coming to lunch today? Alice invited me to sit with her and her friends, but I'm sure she won't mind if you tag along."
Alice was a junior girl who had been crushing on him for the longest time. Everyone but Michael could see it and I was surprised she had worked up the confidence to even talk to him.
I shook my head, shifting my messenger bag over onto my other shoulder. The prospect of spending an hour listening to her awkwardly flirt with him was not something I found to be pleasant.
I think I'll just go hang out in the art room until next period.
"Alright, man. I'll meet you by the chemistry room, yeah?"
He grinned as I nodded, patting my back once before turning and heading off in the direction of thecafeteria. I paused a moment, listening as a door opened and closed in the distance, before making my way down the hallway. My bag bumped against my knees with every step I took, the bottle of soda inside no doubt being jostled around. I made a mental note to wait a few minutes before opening it.
The art room, my favorite room in the entire high school, was comfortably quiet today. The art teacher was probably in the staff lounge, like she was most days. She was a soft-spoken middle-aged women with bright red hair that had onlystarted to go gray in the past month or two. I liked her because she never made me answer questions in class; she knew how much I hated needing someone to interpret for me. The constant need to have another person voice my thoughts, feelings, and opinions. It's not like I had anything against Michael, my interpreter. He was my best friend. Before the accident, he was just another student in my history class. Then we were assigned to be partners for project and I found out that he knew sign language. At the time, it wasn't anything that I thought was important to remember, but then a few months later, I was begging my mom to hire him as my translator instead of someone I didn't know atall. Michael agreed and, after talking with the principle, we were put in the same classes so I wouldn't have to be taken out of school. At first, I thought he would only help me in class, since my mom also knew sign language, but we found out that we both shared a similar taste in music and started to spend every spare moment we had together. It was nice to talk to someone without needing a middleman for once.
I had just pulled my sketchbook out of my bag and turned to a clean page when the door creaked open. A girl who I vaguely recognized from my AP English class collapsed onto one of the blue plastic chairs, letting her backpack drop to the floor with a thud. She always sat in the back of the Literature room and never raised her hand, but always got the highest grade in the class. The teacher praised her work to no end when reviewing papers, always saying that she was the best student he had seen in years.
My pencil jerked across the paper when a loud smash came from where she was sitting and I looked up, furrowing my eyebrows. Her legs were pulled up to her chest and she was mumbling to herself, her phone a mess of glass and metal on the paint stained linoleum. Maybe it was a panic attack. Michael's ex-girlfriend had them, sometimes so bad he'd have to take her to the emergency room where they'd have to give her some sort of medication before she calmed down.
I had just decided to go up to her and check if she was okay when she suddenly fell to the floor, crying out as she hit the floor. Her black tennis shoes squeaked against she frantically crawled across the room until she was a few feet in frontof me. She hadn't seen me watching her behind a table, though, as herattention was focused else where.
"Leave me alone!" She screamed, tears streaming down her face. A jar of blue paint went flying through the air, followed by a number of art tools. I had no idea what she was aiming at, but I didn't want to get caught it the crossfire to find out. She was a sobbing wreck on the floor when the door burst open, her shoulders shaking as she snapped her head up.
"Ms. Parker, what on earth are you doing?!"
Principal Haverson looked as if he was going to explode as he took in the destroyed art room, storming over to the sniveling girl and harshly hauling her behind him through the audience of students that had formed. She may have been attacking nothing, but the intense terror in her eyes as she turned to look over her shoulder one last time was not.
