This toilet cubicle was becoming too much of a friend to them. They could recognise their scrawls on the wall, always in thick black print, some still keeping their chemical stench even days after they first wrote them. Some of them were poetry - dismal, dark and fairly short - keeping with the spirit which they usually brought with them, almost locking it inside the cubicle with them as they secured the door’s lock. Already, their pen was in their hand, their fingers fumbling with the screw-cap. Currently, they were participating in a long-running conversation over the shit state of their IT course, and how they’d been messed about by the school, with an unknown but opinionated student, over the course of several days. It’d reached from the near-top of the wall down to the toilet-roll holder, around the circular plastic container and then across, towards the door, twisting and turning to make room for a few mysterious stains and choice curse words, in all sorts of delightful colours.

Moving away from the conversation, their pen found the opposite wall, and began to move of its own accord, as their mind detached itself from their body and wandered around the school bathroom. When they’d entered, it was buzzing with conversations, with a few students stationed around the sinks, who they’d barely seen through the haze of ash-grey smoke which surrounded them. Already bored with their immediate surroundings, their mind pushed through the bland door with the cracked window, expertly fixed by black tape and a sign from the caretaker, gliding through the corridors until they found another door, phasing through a few Year Sevens and continuing to move until they found the area around the back of the Arts building.

They should’ve been there. That was where they belonged. Instead, they were cooped up in this toilet stall, the door locked with their bag leaning against it, keeping themself away from all the people who made them laugh and smile on a daily basis. It… it was stupid, when they stepped back and looked at themself, but it was how they’d survived for most of this year, and it was how they planned to get through the next as well. Who needed a good support system of friends and a safe place to stay every break and lunch? Not them. They could get through all of this on their own - they didn’t need T, or Cleo, or anybody. Miss Denn wouldn’t notice anything - nobody would notice anything. They would go back to Year Seven, back to when they were a nobody in a sea of blue-blazered nobodies.

A sudden buzz in their inside blazer pocket brought their mind back to their body, their eyes adjusting to read the poetry they’d started. It looked too long for a cubicle wall; if you took away the actual words, it looked like it belonged in an anthology, like the ones they were meant to be studying in English. Shaking their head to try and clear it of its fuzzy ambience, they pulled their phone out of their pocket and checked the dim display, their eyebrows raising when they saw who the top message was from. Biting their lip, they swiped across the screen and let their eyes flicker over the one-sided conversation. Were… were they really being missed? Not even missed, just plain noticed?

Something twinged inside their heart, something which hadn’t moved in a while and, they felt, probably shouldn’t have been moving at all, but it twinged all the same. With some grim determination, pulled up from the depths of their previously-weakening resolve, they unlocked the cubicle door and stepped out into the dismal bathroom.