Her eyes snapped open and she sat up with a breathless gasp.
She looked around wildly, frantically feeling every inch of her body for the suffocating pain she felt moments ago, only to feel absolutely nothing. She took a deep breath to calm her chaotic nerves and tried to focus on where she was and after gathering her disoriented thoughts, she discovered she was surrounded by a thick foliage of trees and she was sitting drenched in a river. She looked around in confusion, desperately trying to remember what happened since the last thing she felt was the inability of breathing. She sat soaked in the river for a bit more when her eyes widened in horror.
She remembered.
She remembered being at her local park after school, sitting on a bench and reading a book when it was snatched away from her by a group of kids that she recognized as her classmates from school. When she politely asked for the book back, they laughed at her and threw the book in the lake behind her. Letting out a frustrated sigh, she clenched her hands, told herself it wasn't worth it and started gathering her stuff and started walking away from them, knowing that there was nothing she could possibly do but avoid the situation. She had to get home anyway, her mother will worry herself sick if she wasn't home in time for dinner like always.
As she was walking she could still hear her classmates footsteps not far behind her so she sped up a bit, hoping that by her being unresponsive to their bullying, they'll leave her alone but that just seemed to give them more of an incentive to bother her. She could hear the childish taunts about the way she dressed, her high grades in school, and comments about her hardworking single mother. She abruptly stopped, spinning on her heel to face her verbal attackers when she heard Kazumi (most popular girl in her school) call her mother a dirty whore.
"Say what you want about me, but leave my mother out of this!" She screamed at them.
"Oooh! Someone's got spunk, huh? How about you show us some more of that." Yuichi, captain of the swim team, said.
Quickly understanding the underlying meaning, she turned and ran - only to bump into Yuji who was Yuichi's younger brother and the co-captain of the swim team. He must've snuck up behind her when her attention was on Kazumi and Yuichi. She struggled out of his grip which was incredibly hard to do since he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than her so she did the only thing she could think of.
She kicked him in his prized jewels.
He let out a strangled groan, dropping to his knees and when his grip on her weakened, she pushed him away and tried to run again but she didn't get very far when she was pulled harshly by her backpack. Yuichi took hold of her and started backing up towards the lake while she tried to get loose but his grip on her remained tight. "You stupid bitch. Have fun with the fishes."
And he threw her in.
Water immediately rushed into her lungs from her automatic response of trying to get oxygen into them. She choked and desperately tried to swim up, breaking the surface momentarily to call out to her classmates for help, pleading that they wouldn't leave her here, that they would save her because she couldn't swim. But they didn't. They laughed and pointed fingers, recording her frantic struggle to survive when she finally went under again. The lack of air burned her lungs and she cried for God to save her, for her unknown father to help her, for her mother to comfort her, but no one ever did.
She drowned.
She fucking drowned.
She died, but here she sat perfectly fine and breathing. Alive.
She laughed, feeling relief flood through her body as tears of joy streamed down her face. Thank God. She felt happy, so happy that she got up on her stiff legs and danced in the river, cupping the water with the palms of her hands and throwing it into the air. She felt light, free, like nothing could bring her down, like nothing could possibly make her unhappy. But, of course, those are the famous last words and when she took a breather and went to take a drink from the lake, she finally saw what she looked like and she let out a startled gasp before screaming.
Sitting comfortably at the top of her head was a pair of cat ears. She touched them, pulling at them to see if it was real and when she felt the stinging sensation from her scalp, she knew it wasn't fake. Becoming distracted by the ears, she failed to notice the tail swishing lazily behind her but when it tapped against her leg and she finally saw it, she did what any normal and sane person would do in her situation.
She fainted.