“Ama, you going to be much longer?” my father called from downstairs.

“Yeah, just give me a sec,” I called back absently, fixated on my face.

“Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, his footsteps retreating. I made a face at myself, or rather the thing that was on my face. Sitting against my honey skin, just beneath my right eye, was a light, creamy triangle. Isosceles. Two arms pulled down to mid cheek, ending at my mouth, the third side spanning the length of my eye. It wasn’t blatantly evident, but it wasn’t invisible, either. It was the type of shade that almost blended in, but if you stared a second longer, you could make it out. It seemed to bleed from beneath the room of my glasses. I hoped no one would look at me too hard today.

Flipping my phone open, I saw I had about fifteen minutes before school started. I didn’t have enough time to try to cover it up, so I skipped down the stairs and into the waiting car. My father was inside, heavy house music rocking the car. He turned it down once I was seated beside him, and started off towards school. I looked out the window grimly, assuming normal position and stank-face. I couldn’t help my stank-face most of the time. My thoughts were just very intense a lot of the time and I just happened to be very concentrated on getting through them.

My father started off on some random little rant about nothing. I don’t know why he tried, but I suppose it was just part of the routine at that point. I come in, bitter mood as per usual, he tries to cheer me up, I cringe away and more into myself, he tries a little harder, or he sees the pointlessness and just turns up the radio. Sometimes I felt bad I wasn’t a cheerier person in the morning, but getting up was the worst part of my day.

The best part of my day was falling back to sleep.

Someone once told me that that was a sad sentiment. I wondered why. I thought it was perfectly fine to find the best part of the day when it ends and you finally get to relax. But then again, I’m a sad person, and participating in life has been harder in the past few months. I’d chosen to diet with my father for, and in keeping to a strict diet I had no business in being in, I had given away parts of myself I didn’t know I could give away by not eating. The diet was quickly becoming my worst enemy as it tangled itself in the already damaged parts of my brain.

I was glad I at least wasn’t dealing with ACTs. It probably wouldn’t have been hard (they weren’t when I took them), but it would have just been another thing to stress about. As if I don’t already stress. It never occurred to me that other stresses might increase in the future and this one would decrease, but boy did it take a hold of me.

The stress, it oddly made me feel invincible. “Ama versus (Her) Demons.” Like some kind of wild epic where I journey to the underworld or hell (my brain) and I fend off countless monsters until I find the prize (a better version of me), I come out more victorious and stronger than ever.

The car rolled to a stop in front of the school doors, then.

“Thanks, Dad,” I murmured underneath my breath as I slid out from the car. “Love you.”

“Love you, too! Have a good day!” he called back as he drove off.

“Yeah, I’ll try,” I mumbled to myself and looking up at the sky. It was overcast again. This was day five now. I didn’t like overcast skies; they made me uncomfortably apathetic. Sighing, I looked over to the tall building, where I’d spent the last three years of my life.

Today, I began my senior year. My last first day here. A lot of last firsts would be happening this year, or at least that’s what some people had whispered around the halls. I couldn’t find myself giving any less than a single damn about any of the dewey-eyed vomit.

Thinking about how some people actually enjoyed their time here made me cringe. I will look back at these moments and conclude that people who thoroughly enjoyed high school found their peak in high school, and thus must live continuously and progressively sadder lives in the future.

I stopped walking for a moment and looked up aimlessly. The warning bell had already wrung, but my class was just down the hall. I hadn’t expected my train of thought to be so cruel.

But this had been happening a lot lately. I assumed it was just me getting older, less sentimental, more realistic. Bitter and sharp like black coffee. Although I was only seventeen, I could promise you my brain aged to at least thirty.

I walked in just as the bell rang and sat down at the front. I learned that if I sat near the front and kept quiet, I was less likely to be called on. It’s not that I had some sort of anxiety about speaking up, I just truly did not have it in me to be bothered by trivial information they tried to cram down my throat here at the school. Other things preoccupied my mind, like figuring out college and more on how I was going to pay for it and where I might be living after I graduated and if I would have a job in the field I majored in.

Every time I thought about college, I would get anxious all over. College wasn’t a luxury I could casually afford, like a lot of the people in my town. My classes had taught me that in this school, being smart was a privilege of the well-off. I felt I shouldn’t be in the “smart” classes if I didn’t have the money to continue that education, but here I was anyway, stressing over where I would go after high school because all these classes ever taught me, aside from the balancing equations and learning the difference between what the author said and what the author meant, was what school I should be looking for. ‘College’ and ‘alternative’ did not exist in the
same sentence in these classes. These classes taught me how to shoot off to the stars with no funding to create a landing.

I quietly began to seethe in my own skin as my teacher droned on about vectors and vertices and what to expect this year in math. Calculus, I guess. Casting a quick glance around the room, I barely knew anyone. I recognized a few faces, but no faces I’d actually talked to or socialized with. Letting my eyes drift lazily to the window, the overcast illuminated the world in a pale, white gloom. This was going to be a long year.

 

Around fourth period, everyone went to the auditorium for a mandatory class meeting. I had a feeling I already knew what this was about, but it made me lurch with an odd curiosity anyways. Last year, it was suicide prevention, the year before that was depression outreach, the year before that was reporting abuse. Never about the problem here at hand, and this was no exception. This year, the class meeting was on gun control. Written in big, obnoxious letters across a screen a quarter of the size of a football field: ACTIVE SHOOTERS AND HOW TO PREVENT THEM.

The simmering anger that had ignited earlier had caught fire and was now at a roaring blast upon seeing this. I didn’t think my school had any right to be talking on anything since we were previously notorious for high suicide rates, high depression rates, and high abuse rates.

We’d had an active shooter here about three years ago, when I was a freshman, and our security had been embarrassingly ill-prepared. Two guards had taken off running without saying a word to anyone when they’d spotted him.

Without warning, a heinous, painful cramp twisted itself on the back of my shoulder. Specifically, beneath my shoulder blade. What an awkward area to get a cramp. I groaned inwardly but kept myself silent and turned up the music in my headphones. I wanted to drown out as much noise as I could at any given point during the school day. My eyes drifted quietly back and forth across the crowd to see if I recognized anyone, and luckily for me, I found Bond.

Bond was a tall, lanky middle-eastern mutt. He had jet-black hair that reached just past his shoulders and a solid gruff around his cheeks and neck.

I slithered through the crowd and reached up to tap the back of his head. He turned around awkwardly, startled. His glasses rested at the bridge of his nose, which gave him a sleepy, condescending expression.

“Oh, hey there,” he said, looking down at me.

“What’s up? What class did you come from?” I asked as I gestured for him to sit down on the end of a row that had not been completely filled yet.

“Calc 2,” he responded, plopping down beside me.

“Gross,” I said, scrunching up my face.

“I know, and I have the same teacher as last year,” he responded, a grimace on his face.

“Aw, Mr. Mc?”

“Yeah, Mr. Dick,” he said with a dark look. Mr. Mc was a notoriously hard grader who everyone strongly believed had some sort of personality disorder. He often times had a mood change by the day, and sometimes by the hour. They weren’t always explosive, but they were in no way inconspicuous. I never had the misfortune of having him, but I heard from Bond every other week about how Mr. Dick had lost his shit again. Maybe he wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t direct his anger at anyone in particular, but on the days he lost it, he would always start criticizing one person. So far he’d done it to Bond at least ten times throughout the last year.

“See if you can transfer to a different teacher or something,” I offered with a shrug.

“Yeah, I am, after this stupid meeting,” he scoffed as our row filled.

“So I’m not the only one who thinks this is an absolutely redundant presentation,” I said with a dark smirk.

“No, it’s stupid as hell. This school is absolutely ridiculous and the got damn leader of Retrovision,” he said bitterly.

“It’s a talent, it has to be,” I said sarcastically. “Even a two-year-old knows not to touch a stove when the fire is on.”

“Oh, quit your whining,” someone snapped behind us. I whipped around quick, my anger boiling over briefly and ready to explode at the degenerate who had the nerve, but it quickly dissolved once I saw who it was.

“Oh, shut up, Jo,” I said with a laugh as I smacked her knee. Jo was a short, light skinned girl, who was even lighter than me. I often teased her about how I was blacker than she was because I was darker, and I liked to joke with her about her personality being much too big for her body. She’d give me a death glare with a smooth smile and say something about my conceited ass or my confused ass, both of which were true at most given points.

She laughed and looked at me a moment, said what I had managed to avoid all day:

“What is on your face?”

I sighed with an eye roll and said, “I’ve been chosen.”

“What’s on your face?” Bond asked, turning to inspect me a more closely.

“I’m almost surprised you didn’t notice especially since you were looking right at me, but then again, it’s you, Bond.”

“Oh, you can go to hell, Theodore,” he scoffed.

“I’ll see ya there, Helen,” I winked at him.

“When did this show up?” Jo asked, lowering her voice. The presentation was beginning, and though none of us really cared about it at all, we just took our conversation to a group chat.

Me: Since, like yesterday.

Jo: You have any idea what it is?

Me: A triangle. I don’t know.

Bond: No idea where it came from?

Me: none at all.

Bond: Maybe you are the Illuminati’s chosen one lol

Jo: Better watch out for the dudes in the black suits.

Me: You two better have my back. Remember, left hand, right hand?

Bond: Which hand am I again?

Me: Left hand, because you’re fucking stupid but I still need you lmao

Jo couldn’t help her laughter behind us.

Bond: Listen here you little cunt. I don’t need to hear from a two bit, half runt, mutt like you questioning me on my intelligence and getting the nerve, coming from her own mother’s ass mind you, to try to come at me when—

I reached out and put a hand on his phone, and said with a snicker beneath my breath, “Relax, you win.”

Bond and Jo were the only people I was on par with in intellect, in my opinion. Most of everyone else were just stupid or didn’t have enough motivation to try to be smart. The other parts of everyone were various people of astronomical stupidity or a devious type of intelligence. Needless to say, I didn’t associate with anyone else. I sat back and turned up the music as I tuned out the presentation. I wondered about the myth of Azazel. Lately, the myth of Azazel had been rearing itself up in the oddest ways.

There had been a lot of heinous murders all over the world with some strange symbol carved into each body. I was never one for mysteries or murders or anything of the sort, but I thought it odd how it consistently persisted and in a different place none the less. Like that strange ‘S’ every school kid in America has drawn at least three times.

Carved into every body were a series of letters that strangely resembled a triangle with some sort of wing. A lot of speculation pointed to the idea that the symbol somehow represented either Azazel or Azrael, or the Twins of Destruction. The only reason it was on my mind now was because there had been four “Azazel” incidents across the world since the year started. The year before, it ended at ten. I wondered how many this year would end in. I wondered what those psychopaths could be thinking. The leading idea behind the incidents were rashes of Azelian cults. The Azelians were notorious for worshipping Azazel as the “supreme being”, but they hadn’t ever actually been convicted of any particular crimes.

Apparently, some police station up north near Maine had raided a cult’s meeting place and taken them in under accusations of murdering someone in Canada. They just kept leading them in circles.

The presentation drew to an end, of which the principal explained why we now had clear backpacks. Before everyone left, everyone would need to take one variation of the bag with them, whether they wanted it or not. I guess we were allowed to wear our own bags to and from the campus, but during school, we had to use those ones. I thought it was weird, and kind of stupid, but I didn’t have it in me to try to be all social justice warrior about how things in the school were adjusting as a result of outside factors.

I took the satchel looking bag and continued on with Jo and Bond.

“What do you think about these Azazel things?” I asked mindlessly.

“What? About the murders and stuff?” Bond asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think they did it,” Jo said without hesitation.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, that’s not their way. Azelians are pretty nice people, you know. They’re all for the good of things and were even up there in validating women’s rights first and stuff like that,” she said, looking up and out. “Besides, they worship an angel. I don’t see how they could be killing people.”

“You think they know who’s doing it then? Apparently the Azelians they have in custody are just like, ‘did you do it?’ ‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, who knows?’”

Bond let out a quiet laugh and said, “Yeah, they probably know who did it.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah, why else would they be talking like that?”

“I don’t know, to mess with them?” I snickered.

“That’s a ballsy joke,” Bond said beneath his breath.

“You gotta be ballsy to worship an angel of destruction like that,” Jo chimed in. We laughed a little more and headed to the cafeteria. I felt lucky to have the same lunch hour as them. I didn’t know what I would have done otherwise. I wrote off the Azelians like I did any other religion: there’s no way to tell what’s real and what’s not and I didn’t care either way. Life was what it was and treated people how it wanted to treat them. Everyone was entitled to finding their own way to some form of salvation however they saw fit.