CW - avi vomits again

Chapter 7

By the time I make it back home after my ‘great school day’ Joyce is frustrated at me again. Although this time I’m vaguely able to recognise that she’s just worried about me, instead of angry at me.

“Avi! What’s this about you leaving class in the middle of a test and not going to any of the rest of your classes all day? Did something happen?” She asks, her tone edging between frustrated and caring. It’s a weird mix, and I don’t like it.

“Felt sick,” is the best response I can come up with, before I immediately go back to hiding in my room. Letting out a long sigh, I go to my wardrobe, trying to find my dad’s old denim jacket - the one with the soft fluff on the inside.

And then I remember how I leant it to Chester. And how he never had the chance to give it back, because I was too busy vomiting all over the place and then avoiding him.

Sighing again, I go back to lying on my bed, trying to just sleep the time away. Once he gets home, Sam tries to encourage me to eat dinner, but for once I tell the truth and say I don’t want to risk throwing up again just yet.

And then the next day rolls around far too quickly again, and I’m back to avoiding both Joyce and Sam like the plague, which probably means Joyce is pissed off again, but I don’t care enough to do anything about that.

I bumble my way through the first half of the day, avoiding everyone and everything until the lunch break. I try to continue my avoidance tactics, but it seems that I forgot how persistent Jeremiah Kennedy is.

The moment he sets eyes on me, he makes a beeline over to my table, where I was trying to eat an apple without throwing it back up again. I only had one bite and then felt too fucked up inside to eat any of the rest of it, but I haven’t had anything that stayed in my stomach since dinner the night before last, so I need to try eating something.

“Yo Hendy! Where were you yesterday? The guys and I wanted to play basketball again but no one saw you all day!”

It would seem that Chester didn’t let his brother in on the details of yesterday morning then, which is good to know at least.

“Oh, sorry. I had a lot of…homework to do,” I lie, and annoyingly, someone actually calls me out on it this time. “Really? I swear you do zero work in all your classes though,” one of the guys I share English with points out.

It’s also then that I notice Chester standing slightly behind Jeremiah, and frowning slightly.

“You got a new hearing aid?” Jeremiah sits down next to me, dumping his tray on the table and grinning at me. Several of the other guys sit down around the table as well, striking up conversations with each other. Chester doesn’t hesitate to sit on my other side, boxing me in between the Kennedy twins.

“I own more than one pair.”

Jeremiah leans back in his seat, grabbing his own apple and munching on it happily. “Oh yeah that makes sense. Have you always needed them or did you like have an accident or something?” 

Chester hisses something at Jeremiah about not asking rude questions, but I just shrug. Of all the things that upset me to talk about, this one is the least bad. It’s only a little bit of a sore spot because it has to do with my parents.

“Born like this. My mum and I both had this.”

“I didn’t realise Joyce has hearing issues,” Jeremiah forges onwards, making Chester face palm. Chester knows Joyce isn’t my mum, but it seems that he didn’t tell Jeremiah that either. It’s good to know that he can keep things on the down-low, whereas Jeremiah seems to be a bit more…chatty.

“She doesn’t.”

Jeremiah opens his mouth to ask another question, but Chester interrupts before his brother can get a word out. “So Avi, if I wrote that bit down wrong in biology, can you take a look through my notes and see if I wrote anything else down wrong? I find it really hard to concentrate in lessons and often get confused on details.”

Shrugging, I find myself actually agreeing. “Sure. You have them on you now?”

Chester smiles, grabbing a book from his bag and pushing it in my direction. Opening it up, I scan my eyes over his neat writing, juxtaposed by the random doodles in the margins of each page. He clearly gets bored in class, which. Valid.

“Hang on, why are you giving Hendy your biology? Doesn’t he just sleep through the lesson?” Jeremiah points out, and I shrug again. “Yeah, doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes listen though,” I mumble, accepting a pen from Chester and crossing out a key term in a definition box.

“No wonder you’re in bottom set, you know this stuff but you’ve got half of it mixed up,” I point out, adding my own words to a couple of sentences of a description that Chester clearly copied from a textbook and didn’t understand, if the question marks surrounding it are anything to go by anyway.

Suddenly realising how I probably overstepped a million boundaries with defacing Chester’s work and what I said, I quickly apologise. Chester just smiles though, apparently not offended, so that’s good at least.

“Wow this make way more sense now, thanks Avi! You’re more knowledgeable than the damn textbook,” Chester says brightly, staring intently at the notes I reworded for him. Jeremiah raises an eyebrow at me, looking distinctly like his brother as he does.

“If you’re some kind of science brainiac then why’re you in bottom set with Chester? He doesn’t understand any of what the teachers say, but you seem to actually know shit about this,” Jeremiah point out, and I just shrug again.

“I get bad grades,” is all I offer. 

“So you need to work on your exam technique? Or is it like the other day, with the quiz?” Chester asks more quietly, referencing the panic attack that I’m pretending didn’t happen. I shake my head, “no, it’s not that. I just can’t be bothered. I don’t see the point in trying anymore.”

Jeremiah looks so utterly confused, cocking his head to one side. “The only reason I don’t skip every lesson is because of my mom - don’t you wanna like, make your parents proud and shit too?”

His words send a knife straight into my heart, and my fingers grip Chester’s pen so tightly that my knuckles pale. 

“No. Not anymore.”

A hand lands on my leg, resting there for a few seconds before retreating back. Squeezing my eyes shut, I release Chester’s pen, handing it back to him and standing to go. “I’ve got to get to my next class,” I lie, fully knowing that I’m not going to any more classes for the day.

I glance at Chester briefly, trying to figure out why he so deliberately touched my leg - to comfort me, perhaps? I don’t know. And then I grab my bag, filled with books and notes I’ll never look at again, before heading back to the car.

I make a pit stop at the toilets to vomit up practically nothing other than stomach acid, and then I head on my way like this is a totally normal day for me.

Somehow, my first day at this school was my best.

And now I’m back to feeling like shit and skipping classes. 

I should be grateful that I’m even allowed to go to classes at all, I mean the foster carers got worried that I’d blab to someone about the shit they’d pull, so they stopped letting me out even to go to college. 

So I should be glad that I’m getting a second chance to actually finish my basic education, and maybe even do well in it this time.

But instead, I grab the books filled with carefully constructed notes that I poured my life into, when I had nothing else to do except hide from those people, and I take one last look at them before leaving them on top of a random locker. 

It feels like a waste to get rid of them, and I kind of can’t bring myself to actually destroy them, so at least…at least this way, someone might find them, and have a use for them. Or they can just stay up there forever. 

Either way, they’re not mine anymore.