Eva was doodling again.
The session being held did very little to capture her interest, but then again, no lesson had ever mattered all that much to Eva. The voice of the teacher just seemed to float in and out her ears every day; like a familiar buzz in the background that she could disregard effortlessly.
"Miss Carter," Walburga Vandenhoff, Eva's history teacher, called out mid lecture.
"Monroe," Eva corrected on reflex, the heavy disdain obvious in her tone.
"What?" Miss Vandenhoff asked sharply.
Eva was all set for retorting but when she felt several pairs of eyes on her, she faltered. There was a nauseating feeling kicking in and chipping away at her rigid posture. Succumbing to the scrutiny of too many eyes and unwanted attention, her shoulders slumped and she allowed her hair to fall around her like a protective curtain.
"I-um, m-my last nameâ i-it's Monroe. Monroe, not Hunt," she managed to get out in a quiet voice laden with self-doubt and uncertainty. She just wished everyone would look away.
Why couldn't they just look the other way? She all but yelled in her head.
"Would you care to enlighten the class about the topic we're on?" Miss Vandenhoff went on, deliberately ignoring Eva's words.
Too many eyes were on Eva, just too many. She could feel something simmering inside her and there was that feeling again... like she was a fish struggling violently on dry land, gasping for water; to be able to breathe again. She just wanted to crawl back into her bubble of safety and feel whatever shred of security she had left that Logan hadn't stripped away.
Swallowing silently, she let her eyelids fall a little lower and bent her head downwards, shrinking into herself as she muttered out a weak "no."
"Just what I thought," Miss Vandenhoff scoffed, a trace of smugness lining her expression. "Maybe next time there'll be less of the doodling and more of you paying attention?"
Eva nodded timidly in response, not meeting the teacher's eyes. "Honestly, why they even allow good-for-nothing students in here I have no clue..." Maybe Eva wasn't supposed to hear that; but she did. And apparently the rest of the class did too as Miss Vandenhoff mumbled to herself before continuing with whatever she'd been teaching.
She felt a light tap on her shoulder and when she turned to whom the hand belonged to, her eyes met with simple but kind green ones. "I'm sure she didn't mean that," the girl said in what she must have believed to be a reassuring tone.
Eva just furrowed her brows and looked away. She didn't understand the pity on the girl's face. Why was she pitying Eva for what the teacher had said about her being worthless? There was nothing wrong with it; not that Eva could think of anyway. She knew she wasn't much of anything, and that she'd never be. She'd known it all her life.
Her father had told her on too many occasions that she was going to grow up to be her motherâa waste of space, someone who could never get things done right. And Logan always told her that she would never amount to anything; that she had no future.
Eva knew what Miss Vandenhoff said was true; she was indeed good for nothing. And so the words didn't really have much of an impact on her... and yet the girl behind her seemed to feel sorry for Eva to be told something like that.
Eva wanted to ask the girl whyâ she wanted to ask her why she looked as if Eva shouldn't have been addressed like that but she bit her tongue and forced the questions down her throat. Her curiosity had always got her into trouble.
Besides, hadn't Logan always said it wasn't her place to be curious? That she mustn't ask questions? That worthless maggots like her didn't have the right to question what is and what shouldn't be?
And Logan was always right. Her mother had always listened to him, just like she'd listened to pa before that. And if her mother had believed they were right, then that was what Eva had to believe too.
There was a pang somewhere near Eva's chest at the thought of her mother, but she began doodling again in an attempt to shove that feeling back from the hellhole it had emerged from. Fortunately for her, Miss Vandenhoff didn't notice when Eva wasn't paying attention again.
---
The lunch bell had students spilling out of classrooms like streams, all rushing forward to form a huge ocean of people flooding the hallways.
Most of them just made a beeline for the cafeteria, or the quad if they'd packed lunch from home, but a few others had enough patience to stack away their books into their lockers before digging into their meals. A handful of others, however, remained loitering near their lockers, either not bothered to eat or already having snuck food into their previous class.
Eva was one of those who couldn't be bothered with feeding herself. It all really depended on her mood; her appetite was never a constant. She just didn't see how some of these students could eat three helpings and still be hungry. Even when she was hungry, she could only eat around half of what a girl her age would eat.
Maybe it was because she was so used to hunger that the feeling itself was etched into her being now and she refused to make that part of her dormant. She'd grown used to that dull stabbing in her chest when she craved food but couldn't ask for any because Logan was in a rotten mood-and Logan always seemed to be in a rotten mood. And just like everything else, it had become a familiarity to her; one that she embraced willingly when it was made clear that she just had to learn to live with it.
Logan hated complaining, and Eva was taught not to anger him.
Just as Eva shut her locker door, she heard a voice behind her. She hadn't heard that voice in a long time, but it sounded warm as it had the very first day she met him.
"Eva?"
Eva thought she was wrong, that it couldn't be him but when she turned around to face the guy who'd spoken, there he stood.
Terrence. In all his red hair, freckled nose and pale blue eyes glory.
Two years. Two whole years had passed by since she'd seen him. When he didn't appear during freshman year after middle school, Eva thought that he'd decided to go to some other high school. And then he was a no-show during sophomore year too.
She could never really tolerate his attempts to befriend her during the entire period of primary and middle school, and though she found it a huge relief that he wasn't going to be there at every bend and turn of a corridor in high school, she'd soon begun to feel this odd sensation in the pit of her stomach... like an absence of sorts.
It had been odd to get used to Terrence not being there just about everywhere, for him to not pop up out of the blue when she was least expecting it, for him to not be telling her about his day until she got so fed up she'd ask him to find a hole and die in it.
But she'd learnt to live with it. Because Pa had left. Maâ something lurched violently in Eva's stomach at the thoughtâ Ma had left. And Terrence had left too.
So yes, she'd learnt to live with it because abandonment no longer came as a punch to the gut, but another prick of a needle. It stung for that first two seconds, and then faded away into numbness until there was nothing to feel anymore.
"Terrence!" She couldn't stop her shock from tumbling out her mouth or from spreading over her slack-jawed expression. She also realised that she was blinking way too rapidly to be considered normal.
"So she remembers," he grinned, and in that moment Eva could see the eight year old boy in him that she'd met for the first time all those years ago. Of course he was much taller now, and he wasn't all lanky limbs hanging awkwardly by his sidesâ he'd become fitter and looked healthy enough. Back then, his round eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets but he'd grown into them and those pools of warm blue seemed to be carved into his face like a perfect fit.
"What are you doing here?" She asked abruptly, for even though she wasn't much of a speaker, she tended to be blunt when she opened that mouth of hers.
"Decided to come back home," Terrence shrugged, the gentle smile on his face never wavering.
"Why?" As soon as the question left her mouth, Eva wanted to throw out her arms and grab it back. She'd been practising to not voice out her curiosity whenever she felt like it and she'd been doing so well tooâ and then Terrence had to come along and mess it up. She could only pray that she didn't make the same mistake around Logan.
"Because its home?" he quirked an eyebrow. "I don't knowâ the other school was pretty effective but I wanted to come back."
There were questions burning at the back of Eva's mind, hammering away at the walls in her head, clawing at her throat to be let out but she fought back with twice the vigour. The conversation had lasted long enoughâ longer than most of the conversations Eva found herself having within an entire month itself.
She knew what happened when the person on the other end of the conversation decided that Eva was interested in whatever they had to sayâ they thought it was a permit to chat her up anywhere at any time. And Eva couldn't have that.
So she nodded slightly and began to step back. "Okay," she nodded again, "I need to go do... something. Um... bye."
Terrence's short chuckle made her pause. "Still the awkward turtle with zero social skills..." he murmured to himself with a slight shake of his head, a tiny smile playing at the ends of his mouth.
Eva blinked once, opened her mouth wanting to ask him to elaborate on what he meant by that remark, but instead clamped it shut and forced herself to walk away. There was also that inexplicable feeling somewhere in the pit of her stomach... it was much more than surprise at the fact that Terrence was back... no, this felt like-like she was almost okay with him being back.
Eva let out a long, aggravated breath. First Maite, then Miss Vandenhoff and now Terrence. She couldn't wait for the day to be over so that she could just go home. Yes, she'd have to tread carefully around Logan but she was getting good at not angering him now and as long as she kept to herself and stayed out of his hair, it would go well for her.
And she'd pick going back to Logan over Maite's unwanted attention and Terrence's unwavering resolve to befriend her. She'd pick going back to Logan over everything else that gave her funny sensations and made her want to question certain things.
She'd pick the familiarityâ even if it meant pain. Because if there's one lesson that had been drilled into her body right down to her very bones, it was that everything in this world had to be dealt with by pain anyway.
------------------------------------------------------
Written on; 28th December 2016
------------------------------------------------------