Prologue
She was like a prozac flower.
In other words, she was fluoxetine, and I had become dependent on her. She suppressed the uptake of serotonin in my brain; she destroyed me from both the inside and the outside. She became my morning coffee, my daily oxygen, and my nightly slumber. I sustained on her taste, smell, and touch.
She became a necessity. My necessity.
I learned in an organic chemistry class that carbon has the ability to chemically bond with a wide array of chemical elements, and even other carbon atoms. She was like carbon – she fluttered around with the wings of a social butterfly, intoxicating every stranger that she brushed against in the hallways of William McKinley High School. She was, as everyone whispered carefully amongst themselves between classes, the capering rainbow that appeared on days that shone and days that showered.
She was that perfect in-between of sunshine and raindrops.
I didn't like to get attached, most especially to transfer kids. Why waste time on people who were eventually going to leave, anyway? It seemed like futile attempts at creating friendships that would never last.
But I was young, naive, and regretfully stupid. I was high off of the Freshman thrill of getting my first set of Cheerios uniform and catching stolen glances from every boy in my homeroom class, all within the first week of high school.
I was on a roll, and she broke it as easily as one, two – but she didn't need a three.
Halfway through the year, McKinley implemented its first ever exchange program with some oddly-named boarding school in California. When Principal Figgins announced it over the P.A. system on the first week of January, a sea of prim-and-proper wallflowers flooded into the room. I remember cocking an eyebrow, because I had never seen boarding school aliens before.
They were just as I expected. She looked like she was.
New teacher recruit Mr Schuester paired her up with me. Until today I still secretly cursed at his explosion of unattractive sponge-hair and nonexistence face whenever I passed him in the hallways. It had been three years, and it was a long time to hold a grudge against a person, but I hated him with a passion for practically implanting her on me
She came across slightly strait-laced like Rachel (back then I still used first names, unfortunately), but there was a wayward confidence in her that screamed Puck. She spoke with the snark of Coach Sylvester but was painfully likeable, like Finn. An air of comfortable familiarity did not encompass her, but instead she encompassed it.
It all started with indifferent hellos.
I began to refer to ourselves as 'we' on that day, and every other day that followed thereafter. During her predominantly uninteresting stay, we were always seen attached by the hips everywhere; for most of the times, we were inseparable, despite her sticking out like a sore thumb when we went out with my friends. Every evening there would be a horde of Cheerios at Breadstix, and then she would sit, conspicuously, within the ocean of red, right beside me.
In spite of the vast difference that was her and I, she was growing on me more and more as each day passed by. We walked to school and back home. We had homeroom together every Monday morning and ate lunch together at the Cheerios' table. In a sense she became integrated into my life and I wouldn't have been able to get rid of her even if I tried.
She turned into my light, my confidante, and my other half in eighty-six days, and I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into.
"Come on, let's watch a movie in the basement."
I grinned at her proposal; it was Guilty Pleasures Friday, and that meant mindless packs of sour patch kids and Mean Girls.
The Basement became symbolical to me after that night. There was a reason why I preferred lofts and apartments over suburban houses.
"I don't want the-"
I started picking at the candy, "The red sour patches, I know, I know."
"Hey, you know what, the yellow ones taste like pineapple, but they're supposedly lemon." She explored the bag with woe. "Crap, they don't have any oranges! They're the best; this is candy discrimination!"
I chuckled lightly and popped a red patch onto my tongue. "Maybe they just ran out of orange colouring at the factory."
"You wanna make orange?"
"How?"
Instantaneously, my tongue tasted a swirl of lemon in the strawberry that conquered my taste buds. She was soft and delicate, like a feather in the wind – if you didn't catch her quick enough, she escaped. I held onto her with both arms and had the desire to never let go.
We made orange, in my mouth and hers. She tasted like a goddess and I craved for more.
I craved for so much more than just a small taste of her.
It had been a weekend since we made orange together in the Basement, and after her Satan parents had rushed me out of the door when they caught our little orange-fest. I started to feel guilty, because the last word I said to her was "How?", and not anything else that could have held more meaning than "How?".
Monday morning came and I went to school alone for the first time since eighty-nine days ago. Quinn and Brittany greeted me with a questioning eyebrow and childlike beam respectively; we meandered through the hallways, like three ruling queens of one kingdom. The serfs interspersed and adhered to the walls, clearing out a path of golden water for us to walk on.
But what was royalty without my queen? I sought for her when she didn't appear for homeroom; her locker was still in tact, containing all of her books and pieces of lined paper, on which she wrote accidental, nonsensical lyrics that made sense only to herself and I.
'It started off with indifferent hellos, but ended with unseen goodbyes.' That was one of my favourites.
I found out later that Monday morning she was shipped back to boarding school Saturday night, a 'sudden decision' that her parents had 'made out of the blue'. There were traces of her laying here and there and everywhere in school; her locker became a shrine, an emblem of a lost soldier at battle. Every other Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday lost meaning.
She didn't bother looking for me, and so I didn't with her, either.
She gave me life, and then she reborn me into the person I am today. Santana Lopez: Judgemental Bitch.
Senior year – it has been three years since I last heard of her, but it certainly isn't the last time that I will think of her. She still hangs around in the murky corners of my mind, ghosting my moves with every single guy I've been with in the past couple of months and currently, Brittany.
Until today, I carry a piece of her with me. Not as baggage, but as an engraved tattoo that I don't ever want to remove. As the morning bell clamours through the hallways, people scatter to classes in flurry, but I stalk off towards my locker, a routinely task I do every morning.
I fumble with the tattered piece of scrap paper that stays hidden in between my biology and english books.
'It started off with indifferent hellos, but ended with unseen goodbyes.'
Below the childish chicken scrawls is my cursive handwriting.
'I will find you, Little D.'
Note: I've never liked writing in first-person, but I'm doing this thing where I try new stuff, so I hope it was alright and that you guys liked this. This was supposed to be a one-shot, but it's growing on me. Thoughts?