notes: this whole thing is 100% true, if you're interested in knowing that.
"So high school's comin' up, yeah? In two months or weeks or somefuck."
Wendy turns around, smiling. "Yeah, Gajeel. It starts in a two weeks, five days, and exactly three somefucks. And you're just making my nerves ever so better."
"It won't be so bad, y'know. The school shit. Ye scared?"
"Were you?"
Meditatively, he bites down on the studs of his leather cuff. "I dunno—I wasn't like you much. They were scared of me already. Plus I didn't even show up until…" Gajeel counts months on his fingers. "Uh, Marvell, whaddaya call the break in November where you eat the turkey stuff?"
"Um…Thanksgiving break?" Wendy's only half-listening by now. Without thinking, she tucks her thumbnail between her lips and gnaws on the jagged edge, until a piece comes off in her mouth. She realizes what she's doing. Alarmed, she stops.
"Yeah: till then I smoked in the woods, till Natsu whupped my ass and turned the principal on me—bastard—and I got escorted to class by the office lady. Threatening charges or shit: truancy, she said. Big, pretty word. Truancy...Shouldn't that be a boy band?" he asks, eyes lit.
Wendy ignores him. Gajeel is always obsessing about names for bands.
"I'm terrified," she admits. "It's not good; I have dreams of things and can never sleep anymore. Gajeel, I haven't talked to any of my classmates in months. And it's not like they know me in the first place! What if…what if they play a game and I can't answer a question? Or," she says, "what if I get lost, and someone has to help me? I don't want to be that kitten, anymore! I don't want to be the stuttering, pitied, plain-faced…there's a word for awkward person, isn't there? I can't remember...But I want to be confident, and have, like, and archenemy plus a ton of friends who invite me to things when I'm lonely. Or one. One would be so great, I can't even wish for it too hard or else I can't even handle it! But…" She drops her head into her hands. "Ugh. I'm garbage with people. This is gonna be a garbage year."
Gajeel hasn't even blinked through her speech. Now he merely shrugs his shoulders and says nothing except: "Yep, prolly if ya don't get lucky. And you ain't the lucky kind."
Fourteen years of being lonely, she wants to say. None of the years different. That has got to be some kind of record...Am I in stasis, or something? Is this the way is was supposed to be for me?
But Gajeel, however much he listens, is just a brother, not a god. No one has all the answers, and Wendy resigns herself to that. Knowing wouldn't make it any better, either—or any less her fault.
People make me nervous, she wants to say. People put me under pressure. People don't tell me how to make me like them, people look at me, and people remember every little bit of what I do wrong.
Over fifteen hundred people work or study at her new high school. Fifteen hundred stares. Fifteen hundred eyes tracking her and measuring her and finding her wanting.
"You'll get to come home, though, at the end of the day. S'not so bad if you can take it a day at a time. You got me and mom and Natsu at the end of it—you can handle us, right?"
"Yes," Wendy says. And it's true: she never feels nervous with her family. They are her peace of mind, the three of them: people she can spend hours and hours and hours with. People she can freely talk to. They are gentle and kind and the reason Wendy can't bear to leave home: Who will hold her at the end of the day, if they aren't around to do it?
Gajeel chucks her under the chin. "Look, don't be scared 'cause of me. I'm just messin' with you. Everything could be fine…ye never know till the last second 'bout this kinda stuff."
"School could be fine," Wendy echoes—
but it sounds hollow even to her.