Everyone in your homeroom knew how much you loved to listen to loud music, your volume was set to 100 decibels. You showed up late to lots of lessons, because you listened to music before you got there. You spent most of your time with your friend, Aspen. He tolerated you, at best. His other friends thought you were weird, not in the loud, funky way, in the quiet, distant way, and because you brushed off any severe situation like it was nothing. But you got along with him, and a few others.

It was lunchtime, you sat outside near the football pitch, headphones on, blasting your regular rock music. It was loud, and it drowned out the noise of everyone kicking around the ball on the field. You normally wore glasses, but you took them off because they were pressed against the back of your ear hard. The bell rang for the end of lunchtime and everyone was walking off the field in crowds, Aspen would’ve been in the corridors by now, rushing through the busy crowds to get to his lesson. But you waited till the song in your ears stopped playing. 14 seconds left, the music slowly faded out. You got up and started walking inside. It got louder when you approached the door were crowded at, and it got really loud when you were in the middle of the crowd, unbearably loud. The sound rumbled through your ears constantly, you heard ringing at one point, the sound was fading in and out, until…

Pop.

It went silent, what’s happening? You thought, your ears hurt, bad. You felt the pop, so you turned around, but someone was behind you, sticking two fingers up, in a ‘peace’ way, except, their nails were long, and they were aligned with your wide eyes.

Scrape.

You felt that too. You put a hand over your eyes, not wanting to be seen by anyone, you pushed your through the side of the crowd, heading towards the nurses office.

You pushed the door open, and the nurse looked at you in shock. The grabbed a bandage and pulled your hand to sit you down. You couldn’t see, you knew your way to the nurses office though. She wrapped the bandage around your eye, and guided you with a hand in your shoulder. She knew you tended to brush things like this off, so she just simply, waited till the corridor was calmer, and guided you to your next lesson.

She opened the door to your science class, and eyes turned, you weren’t aware.

Aspen was stunned stiff. You didn’t feel it, but there was blood trickling down your ears, constantly, and blood had already seeped through the bandages around your eyes. The teacher guided you to the back of the class and sat you down in a chair. How you were so calm, no one knew. There was pain there, you just couldn’t prove it. The colour had drained from the teachers face, there was a gap in between the bandages, he saw a glimpse of your eye, it was bloody, your iris shot around, desperate to see anything but blackness, what happened? Well, your eyes quite literally combusted, and you eyes had been poked, physically poked, by a pair of sharp nails. Everyone was shocked.