Resurface

[How did your day go?]

Helia sighed, reading that text from her best friend. Even if she didn't tell, he knew. He knew there was something off with her

texts that he realised that.

She pressed the power button on the phone and let the screen turn black.

The girl was sitting on the floor of a pitch-dark room, which was hers, and lowered her head to her raised knees and covered them with her arms.

The last two weeks had been very difficult and hard for her. It wasn't at the level of living hell but just the entrance of hell.

The first two weeks were going good. She stayed with Kyohi most of the time and that princess b*tch and her side chicks didn't do anything to her. She thought they were done and won't do anything to them because they got scolded by the aunt. She was wrong. And naive.

The day the deputy principal, aka the aunt of 'princess Momo', went out to a teachers' conference in another city, b*tches took the chance.

It all started with Kyohi not getting important information about the class. It then quickly escalated to her not getting papers, being forced to do a task that was assigned to someone else and her belongings going missing and being found in trash cans or the pool.

The girl said it was okay and she was used to it but Helia wasn't. She knew exactly who was doing this even though nobody said a thing.

That trio would start laughing when they see Kyohi looking for the stuff they threw in the boy's washroom or they'd just say something to each other and laugh about it from afar when they saw the two being together.

Helia didn't regret the fact that she defended her friend on the first day at school but she got mad at herself for not thinking of the consequences. She shouldn't have taken Momo's power, or rather her father's power, lightly. That girl had the power to make people do this and had no shame about it. And now, her friend, who recently got used to not being bullied, gets back to her past nightmares.

And also because Kyohi was super kind, too kind for her own good, she let them do whatever they wanted to do and keep quiet.

When Helia persuaded her to tell the teachers, she said there was no use in that. As Momo said earlier, her father was an important person, almost like a true owner of the school and no one could go against him, except the deputy principal, who was the older sister of that man.

So even if the two informed the teachers, they wouldn't want to get fired, so they'd just brush it off or scold the two instead to stop spreading nonsense and deal with it themselves.

In just two weeks, Helia could visibly see the weight loss and the dark circles under her friend's eyes. Kyohi didn't smile much, to begin with, but she smiled less and looked stressed out. Even her black her lost the shine it once had. And she felt guilty about that.

She didn't know how to solve the situation. She sure had Vesper, but she didn't want to drag him into her mess. He was already stressed out from not being able to attend school physically and had to learn online despite the time difference.

After Helia stayed in that position for a long time, she decided to stop and lifted her head. She walked to the window of her room and opened the curtain with little sound as she could.

The light of a full moon entered the dark, not-so-well-organised room of hers. She then continued to open the window and let the cold air of the night engulf her being. She could only hear the insects singing in the garden since it was already past midnight.

The moon was brighter and clearer, along with a couple hundred stars surrounding them, compared to when she was living in the UK.

She stared at the moon with swirling emotions she didn't like to experience. These days went like that.

Sleep didn't come to her from stress and anxiety and, it was worse when her thoughts came to the one who was getting all the sh*tty treatment. When she started thinking about her, her brain began digging up memories of her being troubled which gave her an uneasy feeling.

Helia tried to hum the song she and Vesper used to sing when they were small, but the melodies weren't forming in her mind. She had never forgotten previously and even sang just before she parted ways with him, but now, she couldn't even remember the first tone of the song.

She wanted to laugh at her own stupidity but remembered her family was sleeping and she shouldn't wake them up.

Although she closed the window, and curtain and went into bed, she knew sleeping wasn't going to come anytime soon.

So she opened her phone again and went to the gallery to get some happy feeling in her and hope the stress would be blown away.

She scrolled countless pictures with Vesper that their parents took and let them take over her mind. She felt guilty for not telling her best friend but the feeling of wanting to solve this herself and do everything she could before asking overpowered it.

Looking at the photos slowly but surely, chased away the feelings she had to the corner of her mind and let the sleep come.

---

"Hey."

"Hey..." Kyohi gave a tired smile to Helia when they met at the school entrance.

Helia tried to say something nice, but she couldn't think of anything, so they ended up being quiet all the way to their classes.

As usual, Helia accompanied the girl all the way to her class, and when they were at the door, she asked, "Rooftop at lunchtime?"

Kyohi lowered her masked face uncomfortably and checked the people inside the class from her hair. She found most of them, paying attention to them, not quite hiding that fact.

"What's wrong?" Helia asked when the girl was hesitating to answer. She then saw Kyohi's classmate snooping into their conversation, so she grabbed the girl's wrist and brought her to the hall opposite the class and asked again. "What's wrong."

"You really shouldn't be staying with me." That was all the girl said with her looking down at the wooden floor. "If you stay by my side, you'll get bulied with me too."

"It's a little too late for that," Helia said firmly. Kyohi raised her head and made eye contact through the thick-lensed glasses. "And if you haven't noticed, I'm not that kind of a person."

The girl was about to say something, but Helia beat it to it, "I told you that we would end this, and I'm staying true to my words. I'm the one that caused it to resurface, so I'm sure I can make it all gone. It might take some time but I promise."

Kyohi's eyes watered, but before those tears dropped, Helia wiped them with a gentle smile and gave a comforting touch on the shoulder for reassurance. "Off you go. At lunch."

"At lunch." Kyohi repeated and with that, Helia left for her class and she entered hers. She walked to her desk with her head down and hid her face with her short hair until she reached for her desk, pulled the chair out of it and sit just to feel something wet seeping through the skirt.

When she sat up, she saw her skirt being slowly removed from the chair as if it was watching a slow motion in the movies.

Kyohi pulled the skirt from the chair just to see the skirt connected with the chair with mucus. She inhaled sharply and looked at the desk just to see the mucus all over it in a spiral form. She heard muffled giggles from her left, but she didn't care.

She carefully touched the yellow-transparent liquid on the two with the tip of her fingers and tried to calm herself when she noticed that it was glue. But the worst was yet to come.

The teacher walked in at the exact time as the bell rang and told everyone to settle down.

Kyohi still stood at the side of her chair when all her classmates were seated down and looking at her while smirking and giggling.

"I said settle down, Takanashi. I don't want to tell you again." Her homeroom teacher was a young male teacher who didn't have an interest in what the student did. When the girl still did not listen to his words, he shouted, "Are you dumb?! I told you to sit down! If you don't listen to me I'll give you a punishment."

Hearing that, the classmates giggled even more. They knew the reason she couldn't sit down and she couldn't tell, yet they didn't tell the teacher. It was none of their business. If she couldn't tell, that was her problem.

The teacher was about to shout again when the girl abruptly grabbed her bag and ran out of the room without saying anything. The giggles stopped, and only the sound of Kyohi running in the empty corridor and the male teacher scolding her echoed.

Helia was just staring into the door when she saw someone looking like Kyohi running with her bag outside of her class, followed by a loud scolding. From the corner of her eyes, she saw the b*tch trio giggling and knew her eyes saw the person she thought she saw.

"Teacher, I'm not feeling well." Helia raised her hand and frowned while she showed her caressing her stomach.

Ms Hara rolled her eyes before permitting the girl to go to the nurse's office.

But the teacher stopped Helia before she got to walk out of the class from the back door. "Where do you think you are going with your bag, HE-LI-A?" Ever since her pronunciation was corrected by the girl, she began emphasising it.

Helia looked down at her bag and fast walked to the teacher after she cursed under her breath. "I think IT came..."

Ms Hara froze for a second before she told her, "You better come back and not sneak out of the school, otherwise, I'm calling your parents. You cause a lot of troubles already."

"Thank you, Ms Hara." Helia gave a surface smile to the teacher and walked out with her hand, still on her stomach.

'Since when, b*tch? When have I caused trouble apart from day one?' She rhetorically asked the teacher in her head before she rushed to find Kyohi.