Neru Sune
Location: Zeus High School – 4th Floor (Class 409)
Time: Noon
It was a strange thing to feel, this mixture of victory and helpless, strangled rage. He had never managed to drive off the devil teacher, not even once. To his knowledge, nobody else had ever managed to do so either. Pushing her back, even temporarily, was a feat worthy of song. That said...
...Neru was only able to keep his mouth shut by biting so hard on his inner cheek that he tasted the coppery warmness of his own blood. It wasn't right for her to take away his dream like that. And after all the time she spent belittling his nightmares, it was almost laughable that just a peak at one should illicit so powerful a response. How many times had she raked him over the coals for screaming at the wrong time, for not being able to repress a start or other somatic sign of pure terror?
Lady, you just got a peak inside there. That's my world 33% of every day.
...Again, he was able to keep his mouth shut, though there may have been a flicker of thoughts not completely concealed by his flashing glasses.
A few students stopped to offer consolations or congratulations. Neru did his best to pretend he cared. It was hard. The annoyance was giving him a head ache. Or maybe it wasn't. The problem with people like him was that you could come up with almost any excuse to do what you wanted.
I am in a good mood.
I am in a bad mood.
I need to relax.
It will make me feel better.
I'll get more done.
These thoughts and more swirled around Neru's mind as he walked out of the class room. He didn't bother heading for the lunch room. There was a reason why Neru was so skinny, he rarely ate in the first place, and today was no exception, he just wasn't hungry at all. Instead, he headed for his locker, sometimes that was enough. After a few attempts at spinning the rotary due to an unwelcome shake that seemed to start at his elbows and trebmble all the way down his fingers, he managed to unlock the door. Inside was the usual students mess of books, old notebooks, and a few less then stellar tests grades he had stuffed out of sight and hopefully out of mind.
If there was any selling point to his locker at all, it was it did not contain the stale mildew smell of unwashed gym clothes. Mostly because Neru so rarely went to athletics in the first place, and never bothered to exert himself when he did, that such normal teenage boy's effects were not present, What was there, and what he was going for, was his old rain coat, which he wrapped around his shoulders. It wasn't an especially cold day, but he was more interested in the extra pockets. With an ease and confidence born of long practice, he reached unerringly into an inside pocket and pulled out a ziplock back filled with coffee grounds and a plastic bottle of half empty coke.
The blue haired boy rather steadfastly ignored the beverages' stale flavor and warm room temperature, as he poured a half handful of coffee grounds into his mouth and then swallowed it straight down with a few mouthfuls of the less then delicious beverage. Some people called this particular maneuver a "coffee shot". There was nearly an entire pot's worth of coffee contained in the grounds, swallowing it with a caffeinated beverage stimulated the digestive system and caused it to mix in the blood faster. Almost immediately, he felt a surge of dopamine and serotonin.
Those who weren't "like Neru" would have trouble understanding this particular feeling, but to those in his position...
That of the addict...the painkilling rush of affirmation chemicals was familiar enough he could clinically both recognize and understand the process.
It was enough, barely. This process was known as "sublimation" It was actually used in methodone clinics. Because the human brain responded to the meeting of an addiction by releasing more or less the same cocktail of chemicals, it was possible to trick a more complex addiction with a simpler, less dangerous one. In this case, it helped that the coffee shot effectively did, to a far lesser extent, what he would have preferred.
...Still, the young boy couldn't resist grabbing a few eye droppers from the back corner of one shelf and loading them into his pockets. It was somewhat dangerous to keep "that" on his person, but most people, even cops, expected it to be in a from that could be smoked, snorted, or injected. It was actually somewhat hidden knowledge that carefully applied, one could absorb chemicals directly through the thin ocular membranes. As a matter of fact, the efficacy of such a strategy went up, as less was lost through the process of smoking, or blown away when snorted. It was slightly less efficient then injection, but syringes were an obvious piece of paraphernalia. Neru actually had the pieces of one sewn up in a jacket pocket for special occasions, but he kept it dissembled, separated, and sterilized for plausible deniability.
"Yeah..." He couldn't help but mutter to himself with a cold grin...."Gotta keep those eyes open...!"
With his mood much improved, Neru almost skipped off to the stairs leading to the school roof. There was sometimes things worth seeing up there, if you liked people watching, and there was some sort of athletic event that was happening now...or maybe it was later. Either way, since he was feeling good, it might be fun to overlook things from above.
Or maybe it was just kind of funny to think of the roof as a place to enjoy a small high.
Wise up!