1 Unbearable ordeals

Helpless, out of breath and confused. As she held the cold metallic handle of the bathroom door, she could hear the crackling of her tormentors. Their footsteps could be heard vividly and even counted if she was concentrating enough. But her mind was too fed up with everything. She watched the azure blue sky, vast and sunny through the tiny glass window of the washroom she was in. She felt insecure and uncertain of how to react to this situation. She rested her back on the bathroom door as she slowly slid down from it and sat on the cold floor staring at the space in front of her.

"Kaylee, why are you hiding?" a small charming voice lamented in a particular tone. "We just wanna talk, okay? What did you have to do with the accident? How did you know about it? You planned it, right?"

As Kaylee sat on the cold hard floor listening to the constant rambling of her oppressor, she was exhausted. She was debilitated and had had enough of her intimidators pushing her around but she silently kept quiet and felt a huge lump of bitterness stuck in her throat. She wished for a miracle as she gazed in the morning light, anything, anything at all so long as it would end her suffering she wished it upon herself.

"What are you girls doing here? Aren't you supposed to be in class?!," said Miss McAlester as she entered the bathroom. She knocked on the wooden door Kaylee was in and asked in a stern yet understanding voice, "Are you okay?.... Kaylee are you fine?. Do you need any help?..."

"Of course she's fine, what are you trying to imply right now? Are you saying we held her hostage or something like that?" Clare uttered with a significant rise in her voice.

"What!?!... I was trying to talk to her. Whether you held her hostage or not, is for her to say." Miss McAlester added while maintaining direct eye contact with Clare.

The alarming comment was followed by a dead silence in the bathroom. But the keen tranquillity made everybody nervous about what was happening around. McAlester looked at the girls with pure concern but her face was void of emotions, she knew something was wrong but no evidence had shown up yet to support Kaylee.

"We're sorry, Miss Mac we were just trying to see if she's okay. She has been in there for too long. We tried talking to her but she did not bother answering us." Sarah defended her friend while sounding humble. Sarah was Clare's friend for years and whatever Clare did she followed humbly like a slave. No opinions of her own, no open-mindedness, just following Clare blindly.

But Kaylee knew all of it all too well. She knew about how the reason why her bullies were on her throat. She knew why she ran away from them. But despite all of it, there was nothing she could do.

She stood up from the floor with her soul in agony and opened the washroom door gradually while facing the white tiled floor. Everyone looked at her with different sentiments. The mix of feelings showcased by their faces was evidence that made her wonder if her existence was even worth it. Miss McAlester said something to her but she did not seem to listen and focused on her thoughts two weeks ago. All she heard was, "if you need..... never hesitate..... and always ask" the others were all blurry in her mind.

After the awkward conversations, everyone walked out of the bathroom leaving Kaylee alone once more. Her vast mind did nothing but regret her decisions. She then took a deep breath while staring directly into her reflection in the mirror and went out of the bathroom with her hands clenched in little fists. The busy hallway was full of annoying, irritating and infuriating teens as some laughed and mocked, while others cried and yelled. She simply ignored these troubled teens and focused on getting to her locker. That was until she could feel all eyes on her. Eyes of disgust and ridicule, talks of hate and insult and actions of hostility and loathing made her feel inferior to most people there, even when she was the valedictorian for eight years straight. She still felt vastly inadequate but did everything she could to disregard the agitated teenagers.

Basketball players from the school team passed through her and hit her on the right side of her back with a sudden abrupt shoving. She fell mercilessly as she heard the rest of the students laughing at her. Once again she was on her feet and proceeded to her locker which was filled with letters. The words, murderer, witch and even ghost girl could be seen in clear bold red letters.

She ploddingly went back to class through the hate-infested teenage route and finally made it to her biology class. Although throughout the class, she did not concentrate. She focused on multiple of her thoughts but studies were not one of them. The remembrance of two weeks ago left her asunder. The time her life changed forever for the more threatening to most menacing. That Monday she woke up as usual ready to go to the same boring high school with kids from all over the place who feel like they are on top of the world. She despised it, but there was nothing she could do. Her scholarship and her dream university, DAU, were the only things keeping her going on and on. And the fact that she had to learn even if not herself at least for her grandmother who had sacrificed her life for her to be well provided for and dressed.

The same low enthusiastic appeal made her dress up and get ready for school then she headed down the curved oaken stairs for breakfast. And that's when it hit her. Her demise had started. She fell down the staircase for the first time as she saw it. Her heart rate accelerated, her face stuck and her eyes twitched as her fingers trembled in fear of the unknown. An image occurrence in her mind. But it wasn't a single image, it was a whole series of images like a short video of some sort. In the images, she noticed, a couple of things that she always wished never to pay attention to. Her neighbour fell down helplessly with a hot beverage in her hands as it flew in the air on the driveway. Then a certain peculiar girl who seemed like the class president dressed in full pink attire fell from her bike. An infamous student, Clare, was taken to the headmasters' office amidst a fully packed hallway. A naive boy getting beaten up in the library by another tall guy which she did not recognise and hearing that someone was suspended from a group of students. That was it. The start of her Armageddon, and the cessation of her monotonous world.

She stood up, took a deep breath, wiped her sweat with her palm and ignored it. She thought of it as ambiguity, maybe she had a seizure or maybe she was finally going crazy. All in all, she dispersed the "video-image seeing" and focused on leaving for school. She stopped thinking about it and focused on having breakfast.

But what she did not know was that that was the beginning of the trouble, and it did not begin normally. Since the crisis was unusual, everything regarding it was simply uncommon too. In the future, she would never understand why at the beginning, she saw a series of events. But she would not dwell on it too much since she would have more important things to worry about other than thinking about the past.

After breakfast, she kissed her grandmother goodbye on the forehead. As always as her grandmother told her to look at her physique and fashion while thinking about her olden days, "what is up with pants? Can't you try to look like a girl for once, come on Kay, what about a dress? At least a jumpsuit! Am sure the boys are definitely going to be checking you out when you wear that," she lamented while focusing on her work but tilted her head left to right constantly to indicate her disappointment.

"Goodbye, love you," Kaylee cried as she came out of the main door and shut it after her. She turned towards the morning bright sun and took in the smell of fresh grass in the morning. She walked to the driveway to get her bike and was caught unawares by the screams of her clumsy neighbour who was a business lady of some kind (she never bothered to ask). She wore a black suit and looked distinguished. Her golden hair was tied in a high ponytail with her hands full, of a briefcase, some papers and a mug with steam coming off it. Her right foot suddenly slid and she fell right on her face as the beverage started soaring through the sky and landed directly on the muddy ground.

Kaylee looked at her with pity and empathy but she slowly turned away, moved back and took her bicycle while the respectable woman sat down on the dirty ground. Her hands were on her face and all the business papers she had were filled with mud and hot coffee.

Kaylee didn't know how to help and she thought she was also getting late for school hence she just left her alone and let her sit by herself without embarrassing her by talking to her. She climbed her old second-hand bicycle which was two years old and drove away to school.

On the way to school, she was trying to figure out a complex equation she learned in algebra a few days back.

"Y equals X then M equals 17... It doesn't make sense!!!" She yelled to herself as she cycled much harder thinking the blood flowed to her brain. She then looked at the grey and rough ground below her and looked at the green grass and trees to her right. She noticed a girl who seemed very familiar on her left side a few metres in front of her. She knew that she had seen her somewhere but she did not know where. This certain girl who was in front of Kaylee had her brown hair tied in two ponytails and wore a pink cardigan and a skirt, she instantly realised it was the class president. She seemed to be cycling while having a hard time, her panting could be heard quite distinctly by Kaylee who was about one foot behind her by then.

Kaylee thought about her funny campaign for class president which was held in the school compound. Everything had gone smoothly until a monkey showed up and suddenly grabbed her pigtail during her speech.

Kaylee smirked as she looked at the class president in front of her with hopes that she got over the 'monkey incident'. Suddenly the class president started meandering on the tarmac road. Her bike went in a zigzag manner before falling and the young girl fell with it. And there she was, on the road with no one to help her while Kaylee tried to cycle faster so that the girl who had fallen could not recognise her and ask for her help. She cycled with all her might trying very hard not to crack up at the poor girl who had disconcerted herself.

She reached school while knowing it was going to be a heck of a day that involved people getting embarrassed and others trying to hide from embarrassment. She still had no idea what exactly was going on but the frantic way the day started proved to be uncanny. She bolted through the school hallway to her archaic blue locker into which she buried herself as she tried to look for her respective books.

The vigorous and rackety hallway was filled to the brim by teenagers who were engrossed in their smartphones until their little worlds were interrupted by the arguing of the infamous Clare and the headteacher. The once noisy hallway became as tranquil as it had never been before. The kind of silence that shatters eardrums. Everyone tilted their heads and focussed on the two arguing as Clare then entered the headteacher's office and the door was locked behind them.

And that was it. Kaylee had finally remembered it. Her heart skipped a few beats for a moment. Her mouth felt dry. Her pupils dilated as her feet and knees trembled in fear of WTH is going on. The fact that she saw what was going to happen scared her. She remembered how she was climbing down the oaken stairs and how the images came to her!! in her mind!! She thought about it but her thoughts were interrupted by the school bell which rang continuously for five seconds before stopping.

She swallowed a big gulp of saliva, drank some water then proceeded to her first lesson of the day, English literature. She held her one-sided black, ancient bag tightly as if she was hoping it could assure her that everything was fine.