A Few Hundred Poppies

1. Hershey's

To Ayman
for inviting me to her 6th grade birthday party and everything since :')

-

Edelweiss, England

On the 30th of December that year, I suddenly realised that I couldn't read anything when the letters were brought closer than a foot to my eyes. Dr. Amiruddin announced me blind by +1.75 the next day, and therefore I dramatically slipped a pair of silver-framed reading glasses atop my nose at the ball drop. Ironically, it was also the year I saw more of reality than I had all my life.

And that reality has a very mean sense of humour - having spent sixteen years in a town full of generic white boys, I could be found perpetually bored and prone to rejecting the few who asked me out, and when I'd said that I would like it if a transoceanic guy or two joined this school, I meant a Mexican ex-villain's only heir or something, so that I could fall in love, get ignored, get my heart broken and end up writing a good book.

Instead, life handed me an arrogant, outrageously handsome Pak-Korean asshole with an acquired taste for driving me insane, and left me to deal with falling for him.

It was the second Monday of the school year, halfway into August, and for the first time in three months, I was smiling at the bright poppies dressed in neons - crimson, azure and highlighter-yellow, growing in clusters beside the pavement. This overgrowth of California poppies was probably the only special aspect of my quaint, charming, boring town.

Mrs. Fuller next door was out in her lawn watering her prized beds of roses even though it'd rained last night. Her wispy greying hair stuck out in tufts at odd angles, making me feel better about the mess on my head. Droplets of water sprinkled onto my shirt like confetti, warning me to protect the large paint-splashed canvas in my grip from her hose.

The Art Club had demanded 'a portrait of the hottest celebrity you know, with a twist', and today was the deadline of submitting Benedict Cumberbatch's rakishly hot centaur doppelgänger. The actual deadline was weeks ago and I wasn't planning on doing the work, but considering that the Principal had lost her shit at how much I was slacking and threatened to kick me out if I didn't do it, it wasn't much of a bargain.

Gilded rays from the sun, sweet as they shifted from a blazing summertime sunlight to a softer autumn one, reflected off the puddles Mrs. Fuller made on the sidewalk. The recently developed fear of water immediately tried to creep in once again, and inhaling deeply, I tightened my grip on the edges of the painting and focused on the soothing taste of the Hershey's Kiss rolling around on my tongue.

The best car in EA belonged to the Principal: one of the older Aston Martins she'd inherited from a distant aunt (word gets around). So when a sleek black sedan with a Mercedes-Benz logo screeched into the driveway a moment after I'd walked in through the gates, startled eyes snapped to the scene.

"AH FUCK!" I screeched, jumping when the car zoomed past me at an incorrigible speed, barely avoiding a lame death at its tires. The audacity! It screeched to a halt in front of the school building, leaving me to stare open-mouthed in horror at my shoes, which were tainted brown with splotches of damp dirt.

Well, shit. The sneakers were made of the kind of fabric that's impossible to clean without baking soda and peroxide. Besides, after being thoroughly washed, these shoes made your feet itch so terribly in the middle of English class that you wished Shakespeare would shut the hell up.

Wait, my painting? Where's my painting?!

I whipped my head around in a frenzied search for the canvas, and froze with terror to find it lying face-down on the road, tire marks dominating the expanse of its dirt-splashed surface.