Red Hair, Black Soul (Red & Black #1)

02 | Murder attempt

Dedication goes to the first person who commented on RHBS. Guuurl, I love your comments, stay with Ada till the end! <3

P.S. Vegetarians unite!

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East Side High School in Ann Arbor is as terrible as I imagined it to be.

It's huge, built of red brick, with rows of red lockers on the wide corridors that are spotlessly clean. Everything smells of chlorine or some other cleaning supply. The students fill the halls, making me feel surrounded and suffocating me. I don't know if it's an American thing, but somehow, the concept of personal space doesn't exist here. You can be touched, pushed or rubbed against at any time. The constant rumor of people talking, laughing and yelling fills the space during every break. I'm positive that if I spend the whole year here like I'm supposed to, I'm going to go to the college completely deaf.

In the morning, I got my schedule and nothing more. No tour around the school. No explanation. Luckily, the principal was nice enough to tell me which locker is mine so that I wouldn't have to try every single one at school and type in my combination everywhere. My first class was Calculus, which only worsened my mood. I guess it worsens every mood every day, but I felt it with double force.

I can feel it even now, during the lunch break three periods later, sitting at the table by the window. The cafeteria's too packed to sit alone, so I share the table with a group of loud boys that look my age. I can't be sure, though, everyone in this school seems to be the same age to me. Maybe it's due to the fact that I've spent the past two years being homeschooled, but I don't feel like a senior now. The final year of high school has always been treated like a big deal by everyone but it's nothing special to me. I'm not looking forward to the countless parties that are sure to be thrown, not to the games of every possible sports discipline we have here, not to the prom. All I want is to pass all my exams, get the diploma and get the hell out of here, everything done while laying as low as I can. Scratch all of the events that were going to appear on the way.

I listen to the boys talking about something football-related and throwing perverse jokes from time to time. I don't mean to eavesdrop but it's quite impossible not to do so with the volume they're speaking with. In fact, they are so loud I can't focus on crumbling my cookie into little pieces, letting them all fall onto my tray. I bought it with the intention of eating it, but I'm not hungry after all. I just want to kill my time by doing something that would take my mind off the general topic of living.

My fingers itch to do something creative. I know exactly what they want, but I refuse to give it to them. I've been playing the piano less and less since we came here and stopped altogether, not being able to find joy in playing anymore. Everyone tried to encourage me to pick up playing, maybe search for some good music school in my surrounding but as usual, I didn't listen. Playing is one of the many things I've lost with my old life and doing it now only made it all worse.

Besides, wouldn't it be strange if a depressed kid found something that made them happy? It kind of doesn't fit the scheme.

The bell rings and I'm overwhelmed with the need to stuff the remains of my cookie into my ears to block out its horrid noise. For some reason, with the end of the break, everyone seems to get ten times louder and yell everything they didn't manage to yell during the past twenty minutes in a hurry. Mixed with the piercing sound of the bell ringing, the noise is almost unbearable. Due to being a musician, my hearing has always been more sensitive than most people. Spending the last year mostly at home, I stopped being used to dealing with a noise like that, which surely doesn't help.