HYDROPHOBIA ★

C H A P T E R 1

After all this time, the school still made them sit in a musty, dusty, crusty, fusty, busty, yellow shithole. Seriously. What kind of era was this? God, how she hated the school. And the vapes...! People used their colorbomb bars to cheerfully shit the bathroom and give everyone cancer. More or less it was either those white guys with bad haircuts that hung around the corridors, or the preppy girls with 7 inch long nails that carried around gummy bear flavor inside the stalls. She hated both, all of them together equally. This entire school was a big fat steaming pile of shit and she almost had mental breakdowns from the sheerness of it all.
Always on the bus the air was filled with whooping and the rattling of a large mass moving across cracked, broken road. It was also filled with the whooping and rattling of middle schoolers. It reminded her of the chuckling of hyenas. The bus, oblivious to its passengers, bumbled along the 20-30something year highway. She was alone in the fifth or sixth row. The rough gray beltless seats had several frayed edges which exposed the threads beneath. She wondered vaguely how exactly the buses were mass produced. How exactly were cars put inside malls?
This particular "she" was a girl with chocolate-brown skin, black hair with a few blonde streaks, brown eyes, and a nice complexion. In fact her name was Malaysia and she was going to high school soon, as was the rest of her grade. The thought of sharing a school with any of the gen z cringe lazy brainrot weird fortnite sad bully cry kids filled her with loathing and dread, like to the kind a condemned man felt awaiting his execution. She had thought about dropping out, yes, but her parents hoped she would become an engineer, and one could not get into the engineering profession with a middle school education.
She had a fairly common name. Malaysia was an island-country off the coast of Asia, she presumed. She hated geography, even though it was the least she could've done for her literal namestake. It was scrawled in sloppy cursive, in a blue pen, all over her birth certificate that had long gone missing. Malaysia's father had suggested it for...whatever reason, including naming her after his alleged dead sister back in his hometown. She had never met the woman; didn't care either. He had never spoken about her afterwards.
When she was 12, she got a bit bored of her name. It left her lips less and less, until one day they were pronouncing an entire new set of syllables, Yvonne. There was no meaning to it. It just sounded good. The teacher called her Malaysia. Her peers switched between the two. On times she caught the slip she would gently correct them with a "No, it's Yvonne, now," paired with a soft smile holding two thousand different meanings or, rarely, "Malaysia, like the country."
Malaysia/Yvonne blinked out the rattling windows; there was nothing else to do. Nobody to talk to because a) none of her friends took the bus and b) she didn't want to break her streak of 4 days without uttering a single word to strangers on the bus. She let her head fall and rest on the pane, which shook like it was about to explode. The weird contrast of green and blue of the landscape had never struck her as odd, yet here she was thinking how ugly the two actually seemed when you put them together. The bus had yet to make its first stop and it cheerfully zipped along the neighborhood, vetoing any other traffic that came to its lane. Cars surrounded them on all sides like a flock of pigeons swarming around a cracker. She briefly wondered if the bus driver was getting arrested. In fact, one of her classmates had been detained a week ago with much difficulty. The guy had come kicking and screaming. He had looked like...well, what she expected an escapee would look like when getting deported back to North Korea. Yvonne wondered if she was the one getting detained today. She shifted in her seat. It had been especially uncomfortable. Her mind had been especially uncomfortable.
The kids next to her bickered back and forth. Yvonne wished she could shut their yap. She thought they were arguing about Skibidi Toilet, although it was hard to tell. She thanked God transcripts didn't exist in real life.
os qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt.