The thing about surviving trauma was it came with certain perks,  i.e say you were an average student who didn't particularly like school you could choose to skip a class and hang out in the sickbay because ‘Who knows what kind of damage all that trauma actually did to you.’

And if you were like me and couldn't talk well that's just a bonus because no one expected an explanation from you. So yeah, I pulled a pillow from one of the empty beds and stacked it on top of mine. I fluffed up the pillows and climbed onto the bed letting the pillows support my back as I looked out the window. 

There wasn't much to see. A few students here and there and Baring ditching class so he could get dirty playing soccer with his friends. I pulled out a pencil and an eraser from my shirt pocket. Then with a sigh, I traced out the now-familiar outline. 

Drawing Baring started out as a hobby but after a couple of weeks, it started to feel like a reflex. Sometimes I could be doodling in my math book and by the end of class, it's a fully sketched picture of Baring's face with his wide goofy smile. To say that I was obsessed was an overstatement. 

Dr Getrude called it a coping mechanism. Of course, I didn't tell her I was drawing Baring's face all over my notebook. That would be crazy. I simply said, "I find myself drawing the same tree over and over again." 

She said I was hyper fixating on the ‘tree’ as a way to avoid dealing with what happened to me. But she doesn't know that I ‘deal’ with my trauma by drawing the soccer captain of my school. A guy I have never spoken to despite sharing two classes with. Ok, so even if we shared all the classes I still wouldn't have spoken to him because...you know. But details are not important. The fact is Dr Getrude did not know anything about dealing with my ‘trauma’ every day. Especially when it came to things like nurse ‘ratchet’(okay so her name is not nurse rachet but it starts with an R too) looking at me with eyes that screamed pity or when my ‘designated friend’ Fred sat with me every Wednesday because he has to pretend to care about me or when my father's wife says something motherly then acts like she stepped on a live grenade. 

Yeah, I dealt with it every day. And maybe drawing Baring, was one of those small moments of happiness that misguided motivational posters talk about. I looked down at the picture I had drawn. It was a carbon copy of the boy. I guess what they say is really true, practice does make perfect. Maybe that was Baring's secret to being the best player on the school team. Perfection and of course practice. 

I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. It was just for a few minutes but the longer my eyes were closed the more smoke filled my lungs. It felt as if someone was pouring smoke down my throat and trapping it within my body. The scent of smoke filled the room and for a millisecond I was there. I was back in that house, fast asleep while people died floors above and below me. 

I sat up in the tiny bed, dropping my sketchbook onto the floor and startling nurse ratchet in one fell swoop. Nurse Ratchet scurried over to me and handed me a damp towelette. The small white thing was cold and might as well be branded with my name on it because we did this all the time. She and I. I didn't make a habit of falling asleep in random places  but when I did fall asleep the taste of charcoal and the smell of burning wood and rubber always managed to wake me up. 

I wiped my face and cleared up any trace of sleep that still lingered on my it. Nurse ratchet looked at me with that wounded puppy look again. Then with a small wobbly smile, she offered me water and half of her sandwich. With the way, everyone was offering me water you would think I was walking around with a ‘Parched, dehydrated moron here. Please offer water.’ sign on my forehead. 

I shook my head and jumped off the bed. Whenever nurse ratchet got like that I usually escaped into the courtyard. And today was no different except... Baring limped into the room hands flailing as he tried to grab a hold of something. His two friends were bare-chested and unfortunately not able to provide much support for Baring. 

Nurse ratchet sprang into action leaving me standing in the centre of the room. Frozen in time. Motionless like every other time new people were around me. Nurse ratchet's voice buzzed in the distance as she asked Baring's friends some questions. Questions that they answered with equally distant voices despite being a few centimetres away from me. 

I noticed one of Barring's friend hand him his water bottle and without question or doubt, he stuck the thing in his mouth and dragged some water  into his no doubt dehydrated body. Barring's friends escaped into the wild leaving us three together. Nurse ratchet who was scurrying about with instruments I didn't know, Baring who looked like he didn't have a single care in the world besides just existing and me the awkward, traumatised mute who was slowly fading into nothingness. 

"Here. Drink this." Baring said, stretching out his hand to hand me his bottle. I looked at his stretched hand and back to my half-open sketchbook that lay on the other bed. I didn't know what the etiquette in a situation like that was. But Barring was looking at me like there was no wrong answer. In fact, he hadn't asked a question, he had just handed me his bottle and expected me, a random stranger to just...take it? Did this moron not learn anything in kindergarten? Stranger danger and all?

He tilted his head in an awkward position and smiled wider. There was something about the contrast between his white teeth and brown skin that just drew me in. And before I knew what I was doing I was grabbing his bottle. He didn't withdraw his hand until his bottle was safely in my grasp. Must have been a fancy bottle for him to care about it that much. 

"You can finish it." He said, smiling even wider. 

His eyes twinkled under the ugly fluorescent light and he never flinched when nurse ratchet took his ankle in into her palm. I contemplated opening the blue plastic bottle fully but something told me it didn't matter. If he had any cuties he wouldn't have offered me his bottle. So I pushed the nozzle thing between my lips and sucked the bottle dry. 

Baring smiled, "It's faucet 3 water. That's the best one in the school."

I mentally rolled my eyes at his immaturity. All water was water. There was no such thing as best water. I pretended to not notice nurse ratchet offer him the water she had offered me. He took it and drank the whole bottle. Huh, for someone going around giving away his water he was very thirsty. 

"Don't think I didn't see that." He said to me. 

I wanted to ask him what he didn't see but despite all my efforts I couldn't get my lips to move and it wasn't like I expected anything different. 

"You rolled your eyes when I told you about the water but the truth is you know it. Deep down. Everyone knows Faucett 3 is the king of faucets." 

I lifted my hand and squeezed my nose. He really was an idiot. I mean I was no Albert Einstein but Baring was an actual idiot. His shoulders shook lightly as he laughed then he fell on his back and looked at me from a weird upside down angle. Yup, definitely an idiot.