White.

That is all I see. White. The walls, the tile on the floor, the standard window pane. It’s all white. My chair is white. Leather. Uncomfortable. It crinkles when I move. So, I stay still. I have to stay still. The crinkles hurt my ears in the deafening silence. It magnifies each wave of sound so much it vibrates through my skull. It’s not painful, but I don’t like it. Therefore, I must be still. I mustn’t move. I mustn’t breathe.

Henrietta doesn’t like the crinkles either.

They give her headaches.

Henrietta doesn’t like headaches. At all. They make her angry.

I do not like it when Henrietta is angry.

Why don’t you like it? I don’t get that angry

I jump a little at the sound of her voice. Her high, shrill tone covered with a thick English accent and the after-effects of smoking cigars.  It echoes through the walls of the room, resounding in my ears far louder than the crinkling of the paper. I wince, an unwelcome shudder races down my spine as if a chill has passed through the room. My head hurts now.

I hear voices and muffled footsteps outside the big, white, mahogany door. The door is thick and heavy, so they must be close.

"We’ve tried everything"

"I know, but it’s dangerous"

What’s happening? Are they talking about me?

They must be

Henrietta’s voice murmurs as she leans in to hear what they are saying. Even now, I cannot move. But this time, instead of pain, it’s fear that paralyzes me. The voices continue through the door as I struggle to catch what they’re saying.

"It can’t be, you remember what happened last time we did nothing"

"He’s just a boy, he can’t handle this"

"It’s either this, or the house"

A pause. I hear an almost inaudible sigh from outside. It must be Mr. Smith, the English man.

"Fine, you’re right. Besides, he needs to go to school; he’ll fall too far behind"

School?

What are they whispering about?

Ricardo asks me, suddenly appearing, presumably from his nap. Ricardo is nice, a tall, tan gentleman with a slight Castilian Spanish accent, lost throughout the years of being in Korea with me. His voice is always no louder than a whisper. His voice doesn’t hurt, unlike Henrietta.

I can’t answer before the door pops open and a rigid, tan hand lays nonchalantly on the outside doorknob. For the first time since I’ve been there, I move. I face Mr. Smith, and his intellectually-challenged nurse, Pricilla.

“Hello, Kyungsoo. How are you feeling today?” Mr. Smith asks me. He has a friendly smile on his face. I turn to him. Before I could form a proper response to his inquiry, a familiar phrase and dialect slip out of my mouth, as if first instinct.

“Hello, Kyungsoo. How are you feeling today?” the words sound faint and monotone in my voice. Dead, almost. My hand clasps my mouth, my eyes gleaming with horror, the most liveliness they’d shone in weeks. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to be better by now.

You’ll never be better, Kyungsoo.

You’re stuck like this.

Henrietta was never wrong. Neither was Ricardo.

“Looks like you’re not doing any better, Kyungsoo. The nurse and I have decided to put you on a different medication. This one is very special, and hopefully, will make you feel a lot better,” Mr. Smith smiled at me with his warm smile. I hated that smile. It meant that for two weeks, I would feel like someone new.

Not new medication

I don’t want to feel bad

Bite him! Bite him!

He will hurt us!

I shake my head as Henrietta’s voice gets louder. I wanted to shout and tell her that I knew what was coming. But I was afraid to speak again. I was afraid to repeat words or sounds. I wanted to articulate accurately, not be forced into a humanistic version of a marionette.

I nod my head at Mr. Smith. He smiles as he writes down something in scrawl.

“This is a medication for Clozapine. Hopefully, you will be normal by the year and a half mark, or so,” he murmurs, handing me the piece of pristinely white paper.

I’ve decided I don’t like white anymore.

School. Even its mere presence in a sentence sends shock-waves down my body. It has since my freshman year of high school. I’ve never wanted to go back, however it’s always the same thing that draws me back, forcing me to deal with the consequences of returning to a place that feeds off of supposed intelligence and spews ignorance, a place that teaches one to be strong, wiser even, and to feed off those who you deem below you. And for what, to gain enough education to withstand the working force? Ridiculous. School may try to breed intelligence, but all it does is cause those who wish to find themselves stuck in the endless flow of the status quo. It doesn’t applaud differences, it silences them.

Especially high school.

The kids there are vile to each other. I see it happen all the time. Their snares, grimaces, snickers. If you are not deemed acceptable, they will either forever hold it against you, or ignore you completely, for you to find a group you belong to and stay with them.

But what happens if you are too different from the rest of the sect of human society?

Well, you become me.

My purgatory began the first day of my freshman year.

That year my parents decided to put me in a normal environment, they said it would be good to get away from the test and hospitals, and away from the nice home I stayed in during my eighth grade year. I immediately rejected the idea of interfacing with adolescence my age, for obvious reasons. However, my parents still ruled my under aged existence, therefore, I was enrolled for the fall school year.

I remember meeting him as though it happened yesterday.

It is the first day of my freshman year of high school. I hate school. I hate the halls. The stares. The teachers. I like the library, though. The librarian is nice. She reminds me of Henrietta.

She doesn’t resemble me at all.

“Yes she does,” I reply softly. I’ve learned to speak in hushed tones when talking to Henrietta and Ricardo.

Whatever

As I make my way down the halls of the high school, I see him.

A male.

He walked with such grace and fluidity, I forgot to breathe.

He was so handsome, sophisticated, and confident. It was as if the world faded around him to a dim shade of grey as I stood, completely unaware of the irritated adolescence passing by, scowls on their faces, in the center of the hallway. His eyes lifted up from the phone screen his friend was showing, and looked straight at me.

           The shock on his face was obvious. He looked around, slightly puzzled, before meeting my eyes. His features burned in my sub-cranium as I stared, unfazed by his look of sheer confusion. He shuddered under my gaze, a look of discomfort shading his incredibly interesting features. I felt bad for making him feel that way, but I couldn’t look away. He was more than just handsome, or y. His face was interesting. Different. Something about his features, his smaller nose, the vivacious curve of his mouth, the crescent moon shape of his dark brown eyes and the twinkle that radiated from them, all of it was mesmerizing to look at.

           My staring and the sudden elevation of the noise in the halls drifted both the handsome man and his friend away from me. As I turned around, unconsciously, I might add, I was faced with the sight of a black cotton T-shirt. Looking up, I now realized that that was the first time I ever exchanged glances with my one of my tormenters of three years. His face contorted into a vicious snarl as I was hauled from the masses, and into a depleted bathroom stall. The pain that was inflicted on me was surreal. So much so, that after five minutes, my delusions began to overcome me, and I lost consciousness.

Three years later and only two things have changed.

One, my age, obviously.

And two, my feelings for the boy I met the first day of school, Kim Jongin.

Three years have passed, and eventually, have turned into a monotonous spree for freedom from my oppressors. Every day, the same torture ensues. The beatings, the weird looks, the rumors, all of them spread like wildfire, from the very first day. For the longest time, I hadn’t the foggiest as to why they would relentlessly decide to cut me up and down at morbid and atrocious attempts of entertainment. Why would they target me? All I did was stall people’s line to class for a good five seconds, wasting away in the beauty of the mystery man. Then one day, everything clicked as I was being into a locker. It was the second week since I had come back from the hospital during my junior year. The words to this day ring in my head as drift in and out of consciousness every night.

“Hey, Tao. Do you know why we keep beating this retard up? Maybe we should just ignore him, the school’s onto us with him,” someone I didn’t recognize whispered; he must’ve been new.

“Dumb. We’re doing this because Kai instructed us to ‘take care of him’. He said something about this asswipe giving him a ‘weird vibe’,” Tao snarled at the younger kid. I kind of felt bad for him in retrospect, he probably never had to deal with torturing someone back in middle school. But at that moment, only one thing rattled in my brain as I tried to keep from screeching from the pain in my left rib-cage.

Kim Jongin, the man I undoubtedly was obsessed with, was the person behind all of this.

It didn’t really surprise me, in retrospect, how he was the puppeteer. Everyone at school loved him. He was dorky, y, incredibly intelligent, yet normal to talk too. He also danced. He was extremely good at dancing, everyone knew that. He dominated the school with an iron fist, from freshman year to our now senior year of high school.

And even through all this, you still can say you love him.

Henrietta’s voice isn’t nearly as squeaky as it normally is. It fades as though it is an echo.

Love?

“There is no way I love him. After all he’s done to me,” I try to reason, not only with her but with myself as well. Even though I knew the truth about him, he still was fairly decent to me, if I thought about it. What I had learned through years of listening to others had compromised my feelings, definitely, but to love someone that harms you, not ever that, but sends people to harm you?

What makes you think he hasn’t changed for the better? You’ve been away for a long time

Ricardo’s voice breaks me from the vicious train of thought my mind is taking.

“There is no reason to change for the better if you are only cruel to one person, especially if you haven’t been caught yet.”

There was silence the rest of the way home.

I sat in front of my old, wooden desk, my head pounding as I look upon my new medication. The tingling feeling that I have become accustomed to surges through my fingertips as graze the hideously yellow bottle. Clozapine. There are rumors as well as evidence to support my un-aptly hidden disgust for the English man who proscribed this. It’s offensive really. It is well known among the medical realm that clozapine is, for all intents and purposes, a last resort. To be proscribed with clozapine is not justified by the clichéd simile “a slap in the face”. It’s more like a stamp, provided by those who are supposed to comfort and heal you, that speaks volumes to all who can read the doctor’s scrawl. It says, “You cannot be fixed”.

You are beyond returning to normalcy.

But, if being normal means to be vulgar, contempt, closed-minded, even inhumane, then I choose to be different. Even if it means losing everything that makes a human different from the rest of the animal kingdom. Free will.

But why do I need to change? I’d rather go about my life, slowly losing my grip on sanity, than live the condemned life of an ordinary human being. Wasting away in life’s mundane crevices is a sickening fate, and to go through it alone? I’d rather die. I may be teetering on the fine line between reality and aberration, but I refuse to give up my pride.

However, I still long to be sane.

But that is folly. There is no happy medium

Oh Henrietta. Always the optimist.

I’m pulled from the confines of my mind by the ring of the grandfather clock that resides in my family’s extravagant house. The large bass that vibrates the wall with it’s monotonous bellows echoed frivolously due to the lack of patrons in my house. It’s always been this way. We cannot afford the lifestyle my parents crave, therefore, we must build a stable façade, and by doing so, my parents work whenever they can to afford the nest sports car, or luxury boat.

I look back down at the medication in my hand, which is now shaking with indescribable emotion.

I am not scared. Nor am I anxious.

So why is my hand shaking?

I twist, with great difficulty, the child-proof cap off, and poor the pills onto my now clammy hand. The pill is small, circular, unlike the others; it is only to be taken once a day. I shove it my mouth, my gag reflex completely used to the mountains of pills it’s seen over the years.

Fatigue takes over me as I glance over the bottle once more; searching for a sign I’ve messed up. But I already have, haven’t I? I chuckle to myself in disbelief of my current situation.

As I lay down, hoping sleep will greet me with open arms for what lies ahead, I hear the faint voice of Henrietta, her words protrude as I fall deeper and deeper into the well of unconsciousness.

In the story we can swing on a moon

And ride the horse on the rainbow

Make friends with a sun

And catch the feather of a fiery bird

Close your eyes “Bye-bye”

The library of Panam High School is filled with works both past, present, acknowledged, amateur, published, and unpublished pieces of literature that graze the tops of the ceiling. Every shelf is stacked neatly by the lovely librarian, Mrs. Choi, and is where I spend most of time at school. Before, during and after class. Today was no exception, as I strode towards the standard mass-produced double doors that lead to the wonders that beseech me to read.

“Good morning, Kyungsoo. Welcome back, I didn’t know you would be returning so soon,” Mrs. Choi greets me kindly. I simply nod, afraid of repeating her words, and swiftly abscond to my corner, stacked high with medical texts and biographies on famous scientists. My spirits lifted upon my further inspection.

Nothing had been changed.

That’s wonderful. How long do you plan on staying here?

Ricardo’s voice shone through my bliss with a slight hint of nervousness. I had arrived to school an hour early to avoid my tormentors; however, Ricardo had suspected someone was lurking behind us.

“Until it is time to leave,” I reply, in the softest of whispers.

I suddenly lost all urges to educate myself further, instead, I lay in my corner, head between my knees, praying to any being that exist in a spiritual realm that I keep what breakfast I could eat, in my digestive track.

I make my way through the cursed halls to my first class at an excruciatingly slow pace. The halls have never been shorter as I force my steps shorter, postponing the inevitable. Being hit by swinging backpacks and bumps into strangers was nothing as my head reeled of past occurrences with my returning to this hell.

Maybe they’ve forgotten you exist

Henrietta’s voice sounded faint and slightly dizzy, perhaps from all the teenagers maneuvering around each other simultaneously, thus colliding with the only thing creating friction to the current.

My body.

Swarmed by a mass of the student body, I’m forced to speed up, into my egregious fate. Shaking, I walk hesitantly through the door, completely oblivious to Ricardo’s musing of being confident. What would the normal teenagers say in a situation like that?

. That. .

“Less vulgar, please, Henrietta,” I whispered to myself.

“Who the is Henrietta, Bug-eyed freak?” came a snarl behind me. I stood, frozen in a mix of complete consternation, fear and utter abhorrence.

I had let my guard down.

Blood. The very word can make you tingle with raw emotion. A carnal desire we have inside ourselves emulates through us as we look upon the red, sweet liquid. But this carnal instinct, why is it there?

Is it because we desire to kill?

Or do we desire to heal?

“Principal Kim, come quickly! Kyungsoo is bleeding badly from his skull!”

“What is wrong with you guys?!”

“What?! What did you say?! I’ll tear you to pieces for spouting like that!”

“Is he still conscious?”

A plethora of voices muddled together came through at once. The ground is soft. Am I outside?

“Move, children.”

I recognize that voice.

“Mr. Kim?” I try to articulate.

“You’ll be fine. Don’t worry, Kyungsoo. Tao, Sehun. My office, now.”

You’ll be fine Kyungsoo

Yeah, they’ll get theirs

Thanks… I thought as the lights faded once again to atramentous black.

The luminescent bulb that hung above me was on it’s way to being the most irritating thing about today. Not the beating, not the teacher’s sympathy, not the disrobement.

The ridiculously bright florescent bulb.

I lay in silence as the nurse checks my bandages once more, a standard check-up before returning home for the day. I was more than familiar with the kind nurse, and vice versa. After a thorough examination, she swiveled around in her chair, facing her desk.

“You’re lucky today, Kyungsoo. It could’ve been a lot worse,” she drawled, hands folded across her chest.

“I am fully aware of the situation, Miss. Im. However, I disincline to acquiesce your request to stay for further treatment.” I said, quietly getting up from the cot to grab my discarded clothes, which had been carelessly strewn about the floor. Probably from me.

“I don’t understand?” she deadpanned.

“It means no. Besides; I’m late for a special appointment.”