Priceless (A MIKA Fanfic) (Remake)

Chapter 29

I made my way to my next lesson, Art, still thinking about suicide. I hoped that something good would happen to me in the next lesson to convince me not to kill myself, but I knew that wouldn't happen. Nothing good really ever happened to me.

When I arrived at my Art classroom, I sat down in my seat, which was at the front of the room. In Art, we had to sit at long tables with other people, and there were a number of empty seats between where I was sat and where the other people on my table were sat. As I waited for the lesson to begin, I thought about how it was probably because nobody wanted to sit next to me. Mica wasn't in this lesson, so he wasn't sitting with me. He probably wouldn't have been able to anyway, though, because of the seating plan and the fact that we were pretending we didn't like each other.

After a few minutes, the teacher walked into the room and sat down at her desk near my seat. She took the register, and after that, she went over to the table in the middle of the room.

"Okay, class. Before you start today's work, I'm going to do a demonstration for you all." she told everyone.

Then she seated herself at the table so that she was facing a piece of paper. She picked up a sharp pencil from beside her, then looked up at the class again.

"Today we will be drawing our own optical illusions." the teacher said, receiving no response from the class.

She moved a picture of an optical illusion in front of her, above the piece of paper. It was a multicoloured pattern with lines that seemed to move when you looked at them. Then she began to draw, copying the picture almost perfectly.

When she had finished the demonstration, she instructed the class to get a copy of the picture from the table, then get paper and coloured pencils from one side of the room. She sat back down at her desk again, and I got up and retrieved a picture of the optical illusion from the table. Then I walked over to where the paper and coloured pencils were to get them, and I returned to my seat with them.

After I had sat back down, I began to draw the optical illusion on my own piece of paper. I looked carefully at how it was drawn and tried to copy it, and after about half an hour, I had produced a piece of work that somewhat resembled the original.

Then I heard my name mentioned in a conversation between some boys on the table diagonal from mine. They were laughing, and I saw one of them stand up. I knew then that they were going to do something horrible to me.

The boy walked over to me, and I felt myself freeze with fear as I wondered what the kids at my school would do to me now. But then something happened that I didn't expect. He raised his hand, and for no reason at all, he slapped me across the face.

I sat there, stunned by what he had just done as he walked back to his seat, laughing even more. Soon I was hit with the pain of the slap, and after checking if the boy and his friends were watching me, I moved my hand to my face to try and make it feel less sore.

I suddenly had the urge to start crying, just because of how awful everything was. Because the kids at my school genuinely thought it was acceptable to go up to someone that had done nothing to them and slap them across the face, for no reason other than to laugh about it with their friends. Because the teacher was sat in front of me when it happened, and she didn't say a word about it. Because I was a weak, pathetic person, and I let people do things like this to me because I couldn't say anything to them.

Then I heard someone approach me, and I turned to see who it was. It was one of the other boys on that table, a friend of the boy who had slapped me. As soon as he reached where I was sat, he grabbed my pencil case off the table and threw it onto the teacher's desk. Then he went back to his seat, where he laughed with the other boys again.

As soon as I heard them laughing again, I couldn't take it anymore. Tears spilled out of my eyes, and they kept coming no matter how hard I tried to hold them back. Wet patches started to appear on my work, ruining it. I hated crying at school, because people could see me, but at this moment it seemed as if nobody cared. Everyone was still working, and the teacher didn't even look up. The boys who had made fun of me were still laughing, and I felt awful.

"It's over now. You can stop crying," I told myself as I tried to stop my tears.

But it was no use. My throat felt dry, and my breathing was starting to speed up. I tried to focus on taking deep breaths instead, not wanting to panic. It had already almost happened twice today, and I had managed to calm myself on both of those occasions. I hoped I would be able to stop myself from panicking this time too.

I kept breathing in and out, over and over, and it worked. When my breathing was eventually back to normal and I was calmer, I managed to stop crying. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my blazer, trying to look as if nothing had happened. Then I shakily began to carry on with my drawing, hoping nothing else would happen to me.

At the end of the lesson, I waited until nobody was looking, then I grabbed my pencil case from the teacher's desk when I was getting ready to leave the classroom. I quickly shoved it into my school bag before putting it on my back, then I left to go to lunch.