II

The following morning, Joshua woke up one eyelid at a time, and uncomfortably rested relative to the sleep he found in a typical night. It was not too unusual, as he did have a tendency to go to sleep later than midnight on a typical schoolday – a tendency he strayed from in order to reset his mind as quickly as he could from the tiring blue evening. He slogged each leg out of bed and sat up, when his eyes were dazzled by a thick ray of sunshine he had not expected to greet so early in the day.

‘So strange,’ he thought, that the sun should be so high in the sky at so early an hour; when the obvious cause of the paradox came to him as strikingly as the sunlight that was hitting his eye.

Joshua leaped out from his bed, seemingly in a single stride, into his bathroom, snatching and pressing the toothbrush to his teeth with discomforting pressure as he turned on the shower. Within seconds, Josh was cleaned, dressed and dashing to school, which was fortunately just around the corner from his house, passing as he accelerated through his front door the clock on the wall, with its damning declaration: 10:16 a.m.

The school porter let him in without as much as a glance up from his tabloid, and the steps came in sets of two and three as Josh rapidly ascended his school’s stairs. He was moving with such speed that few natural forces could have helped stop him, and those that could would still have done so with great resistance. Nevertheless, upon skipping the last two steps of the staircase leading to his school’s third floor, Josh, and all the velocity he had built up over the past five minutes, were smitten on the spot, and he was left static and dazed in his school’s hallway.

A teenage girl, wearing her long, blonde hair down to her elbows, was standing about a metre before him, suspended in taking her next step, but slowly tipping backwards into an idle stance. Josh recomposed himself after the sudden halt, and the couple stood facing one another, with any intermittent silence interrupted by Joshua’s panting. The girl’s mouth pried open, and eventually the two spoke.

‘Hello,’

‘Hi,’

‘Hi,’

‘Hello,’

‘Hi,’

‘Hello,’

The two greeted one another.

The girl was one whose face Josh recognised, though could not put a name to, as he had only seen her briefly during her recent presence in the school. 

She was a new student, transferring from another school into his year – the only new student he had ever seemed to notice in his six years in the school, for from the moment she walked into his Spanish class two weeks prior, she had occupied a place in his heart as an object of attraction and immeasurable beauty, unlike anything he had believed possible beforehand, and his gaze and thoughts gravitated to her since. 

She came from a foreign country, though carried no distinguishing marks that would help identify which one in particular, and although she spoke with a slight accent in her voice, Josh could not distinguish the language it was based on. 

Her presence was enchanting to him. Something separate and alien about her gave her an aura of mystery, like she carried around with her a universe of its very own, filled with unique wonder and possibility. Fortune never seemed to present them an opportunity to speak, and Joshua was not one to seek it out himself. It was presenting the opportunity now.

‘I am looking for the principal’s room,’ she said, a humble smile stretching her soft, caring lips, ‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘That’s not on this floor,’ said Josh, recovering only mildly from his panting and still breathing quite heavily. ‘Does your journal not have a map?’ he asked bluntly.

The girl squinted her eyes at him, confused, and set a little aback by his abrupt directness. Josh immediately noticed the crassness of his tone, and embarrassedly tried to recover the situation.

‘Each journal has a map,’ he explained in a calmer, more patient voice. ‘Here; let me show you.’ 

Josh removed his bag from his back and opened it up to take out his own journal, but upon opening it, he found his recklessness from the evening passed did not only cost him the first one and a half classes of the day, but that it also caused him to forget to pack anything into his schoolbag; anything, except for the single A4 piece of paper that bore that evening’s poetic patchwork, which made the sole contents of the bag. 

A little annoyed at his own carelessness, Josh concealed his vexation from his present company, concluding in his own mind he would drop by his house during the coming lunch break and get everything he needed then.

‘Sorry, I think I forgot my journal today. I can show you in yours,’ Josh salvaged, ‘—if you like.’

‘Yes please,’ the girl answered, and reached into her bag to pull out a much pristiner copy of the school journal.

She passed the copy to Josh, who opened it on the very front page, where a glossary of all the resources was shown. At the top of the page were the student details, which the girl had partially filled in.

‘Natasha,’ read Joshua, attempting to keep the words to himself while still saying them loud enough for the girl to hear.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, smiling politely.

‘Joshua,’ he responded, extending his hand awkwardly for a handshake.

‘Pleasure to meet you, Joshua,’ replied Natasha, with that unplaceable accent that added a pleasant excitement to the end of the sentence, where she repeated the name told her, both confirming her correct hearing of it as well as assisting in committing it to memory. She indulged the handshake, but with little enthusiasm to settle its inappropriateness.

‘Pleasure to meet you too, Natasha,’ mirrored Josh, trying to replicate Natasha’s way of saying the greeting. Her polite smile widened a bit in response, and Josh remained looking at her for a few silent seconds more, a cheerful grin exposing perhaps a little too much of his excitement at the moment he was enjoying so much. The two stood awkwardly for some five seconds, before Natasha took her own initiative, finding the glossary entry relating to the map on the opened page.

‘Page 411–412,’ she said.

Josh snapped out of his glimpse of fantasy and back into the present moment.  

‘Yes, yes,’ he aptly agreed, flicking away from the first page of the journal and all the way to the back, where the map of all four floors of the school was stretched across two pages. ‘You see we’re here,’ he pointed with his finger, turning the journal towards her to help her see.

Natasha regarded the position on the page and looked around her surroundings. She then took the journal into her own hands and moved over next to Joshua’s right, as he was better positioned for the map’s orientation. She placed the journal before the two of them, holding it with her right hand, and moving her left hand up onto the page, laying her finger onto the spot Josh had indicated with his own. Moving right next to him, he could feel each one of her movements touching him, and her standing so close to him alone caused his heart to beat a little bit faster.

‘Here are the stairs,’ she said.

‘Yes, those are the stairs,’ Josh confirmed, glancing quickly at the stairs he had only recently come up, and then quickly at Natasha, who appeared mentally absent, probably trying to imagine the plan of the school she had seen over the past two weeks and compare it to the map before her. Looking back down on her pointing hand, Joshua saw a curious black mark on the inside of her wrist, which he first dismissed to be a tarnishing mole on the surface of her smooth, cream skin, but upon inspecting it further, saw it was in fact a tattoo of a single, thick black dot. He found it curious, but did not bring it up, and his attention was quickly redirected even if he should have wanted to.

‘And we are standing this way…’ Natasha continued, ‘meaning I go down the stairs, then to the left… then there is the hallway… and the last room on the left?’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Josh, having heard very little of what was just said to him.

‘Alright, I think I can find it now. Thank you, Joshua,’ she said, clasping the journal shut and dropping it into her bag. 

She walked over to the aforementioned stairs and, just before stepping down, looked back at Joshua, who was still foolishly standing in the same spot where he had been smitten, and gave him another smile; though this one, at least to Josh, seemed far sincerer than her polite ones before, and it made her that much prettier that Josh became enchanted by it, and, as if in an instant, Natasha was gone, and he still remained paralysed in the hallway.

Eventually, Joshua’s muscles relaxed as he left his enamoured daze, and he returned to wandering the school halls. He took a look at the clock in the hallway. 10:36, it read, suggesting that the interaction with Natasha lasted only three minutes, though in Joshua’s mind it had felt much longer. The hour also suggested that there were only nineteen minutes left in his English class, and Josh concluded that since his bag was effectively a designated vessel for his English assignment, and since he had exhausted many nerves giving it undeserved attention the night before, it might be fitting that he at least submit it. Joshua mobilised himself, walked a few more steps forward, and strode into the room numbered 303.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5