Chapter 1
Thea's POV:
It was the first day of 10th grade. I wore an outfit that I liked - a cute summer dress, light green, with a pattern consisting of small, white daisies. My hair was up in a half-up half-down style, and I had a pastel yellow bow with polka dots holding it all together. I wasn't expecting much from today, but, oh boy, was I wrong.
I walk into my first class of the day, American history, and look up on the whiteboard which projects our assigned seats. It only takes a second to find mine, since I'm sat right next to the door. I sit down and start to organize my things - waterbottle in the top right corner, neatly folded up paper copy of my schedule in the top left, a pink mechanical pencil placed vertically, close to my body on the right side, my computer bag nicely propped up on the floor next to my chair, and to top it off, my favorite fidget in my hand.
Once the bell rings, the teacher introduces herself. I notice she has medium-length dirty blonde hair, she's wearing mascara, and clearly isn't too horribly bothered about looks since she is wearing a plain t-shirt with sweatpants. Inside my head, I very dearly hope that she isn't one of those teachers who lets students get away with anything and everything. Other than that however, she has a very chill vibe to her, and I'm getting excited for the rest of the year already.
I look around the room while she's talking and telling us all about herself. There are posters up on every wall - posters about civil rights, the 10 amendments, the declaration of independence, everything American you could possibly think of. I also see many people I've known since elementary school and beyond, but one particular boy stands out to me. His name is Aven. Long brown hair, red sweatshirt, grey sweatpants - basic, but oh, how I love long hair...
I had a 'kinda' crush on him last year. I only sometimes thought about him in bed, only sometimes looked at him in the hallway, or watched as he got off the bus. The only reason I stopped myself from having a full-on crush on him was because he was dating one of my friends - and every girl knows that you CANNOT want the boy that your friend wants. That would be breaking a major rule in girl code. I forced myself to stop liking him, and instead made some other...bad decisions.
Since then, they have broken up, she moved to another school, and we don't really talk anymore. I mean, we did only really talk in the one class we had together, so it's okay to like him now, right? Maybe, just maybe, something with him could work out this year.
The only problem with that plan though, is that I have bad social anxiety and have been diagnosed with selective mutism since the 4th grade. Basically what that means is that I'm VERY quiet. I rarely talk to people that I don't know. I usually don't even talk to people I do know. And it's not even that I don't want to talk to people, it's that I physically can't. Sometimes when I want/try to talk, it feels like a demon from the underworld is closing its grimy hands around my neck and yelling at me, saying that I can't talk. It's made life very hard, as you could imagine.
Usually, I'm able to write or type what I want to say, but when I'm having a panic attack, it's literally impossible to communicate at all. My brain just doesn't work. Like the internet wires powering my brain had been completely cut off from all social aspects of life. I hate it so much.
My brain clocks back in at just the right and wrong time when the teacher announces that we're going to get into partners to do a first-day-of-school activity. This worries me. Actually, it doesn't just worry me, it frightens me. I don't exactly have any friends in this class, and I'm definitely not the type to ask people to be my partner.
