Hunting For Love

03

03
Mira

The day began with the clouded night sky. Already a couple days in the school year, Viktor and I were walking through puddles of water on our way to school and it felt colder than ever.

I felt that if I shouted, sound would come out almost silenced. The air was so cold, I could see my breath. Viktor was playing a game on his phone when we reached his school. We were already a week into the school year and things were beginning to get back to usual.

"Stay safe."

He didn't reply to that. He just smiled and kissed my cheek good-bye and went off to his friends. What a pure kid indeed. He'd never be mean to anyone, even when his friends are mean to him. He can defend himself, he just chooses the calmer, more quiet way to solve arguments. I have noticed that in him since he was seven.

I carried on to my school, hoping it would've changed a lot throughout the couple months while students were off. Fortunately, I got used to it's same old appearance and boring people. I remembered my Drawing's class teacher - Tsvetan Pepelyarski. He is one of the greatest teachers who not only taught me something valuable about drawing but ended up becoming someone I could trust in times as such. I appeared to be closest to him from our class and he did like me in return. I saw him as one of the most reliable people before it happened. Since then, people that were dear to my heart now seem as a threat, make my chest ache, almost scaring me. Panic attacks were the best way to handle any stress, vomiting in result.

Nevertheless, this year our Drawing's teacher was changed because student's have to learn as many possible methods, for every teacher teaches differently. I didn't know his name yet and my class were also pretty dissatisfied with the change. The teacher himself is probably good at what he does but we all preferred Pepelyarski having us instead.

Raya, Matvey and I sat on our usual place of the semi-circle of chairs - That was usually the right end, closest to the door of the room. The reason we sat there was not only because it was a good spot but because when another student or teacher entered the room, they'd see our drawings first, meaning that we would make a good impression to them. And yes, that does imply that we are the top three of the class. For the most part me and Matvey have this friendly competition going on for who is the best of the best but both of us knew I was the more creative and, in fact, the better one. His freestyle drawings included architecture and draperies, compositions that seemed dull to me but were undoubtedly well drawn. As for Raya, she doesn't perform as good as Matvey and I do at assigned tasks (but don't get me wrong, she still counts as one of the top three), instead prefers drawing her own things. She definitely enjoys working with colour. I, on the other hand, happened to be more of an illustrator and strictly studied anatomy, especially when we drew gypsum heads, where I believe I can catch facial features better than either of them.

The three of us would always form this inner circle where we'd discuss where are the mistakes on our classmate's drawings. We were pretty confident about our performance in comparison to the rest of them. I, personally, have also seen how the other majors do in regards of drawing – I didn't bother looking at the majors which didn't involve much drawing as Woodcarving, Metalworking, Toys, Silicate design or any of the two clothing majors. In fact, I only followed the Spatial design which has an open competition between them and the Illustration major of who draws better. I knew how they all drew and I can proudly state that we are doing the better job.

I had just left my folder and bag, taking my pencils, when the teacher entered the room. Me and Raya gave each other a judgemental look, neither of us understanding what the other was thinking.

The teacher was probably around his late thirties, silver haired with small patches of rough beard. He  walked in a slackly way, barely slouched as he was holding what appeared to be a check list with our group's name on it. Our group was only Illustration major so we weren't a big one; around sixteen of us.