Emotional Blunder Chapter 2

{Hesitation}

Her pencil keeps on tapping on the clean slate of paper. The lead makes several small dots on the empty, clean paper; like a polka-dot pattern similar to the shirt she's currently wearing. Miku's wet hair was pulled back into a very loose ponytail, with a piece of towel covering her head. Her eyes were intensely focused on the paper laid down in front of her. Then, like an eagle finding her next victim, she instantly got to work.

Love is something that –

Nope.

She grabs her eraser and erases the whole sentence. She taps her pencil onto the paper again, creating more dots.

Love is –

Erase.

Love –

Erase.

Miku groans loudly and pushed herself back from the table. She hopped off from the chair and started prancing around the room, her head hunched over and her arms tightly folded across her chest. What should she do? What should she do? What should she write? She has no idea. She sucks at writing. What would Ring do? What would Ring write? Then, she stops. Her eyes twinkled.

Ring.

She grabs her beautiful Samsung phone with the dark green phone cover and turned it on. After scrolling several contact names, she comes upon Ring's name in the middle of her cousin and her old friend. She pressed the call button, brought the receiver to her ear, and waited.

She was sure that Ring's phone must be ringing. Ring's phone has to be ringing. It must ring for Ring.

Then, like the miracle of a box of cupcakes suddenly coming to her front door, the girl finally picked up and spoke, "Hello?"

"Ring, ohmigod Ring," Miku splutters, throwing herself onto her bed and groaning, letting out her frustration. "You have to help me with that English homework. I have no freaking idea what to write. You know how stupid I am. I suck. Please, please, please help me, love."

A burst of laughter could be heard from the other side of the line. "Dude, calm down, won't you?" After the laughter died down, Ring sighs for a while and asks what was the problem Miku was having. The latter immediately groaned, louder this time before she rolled off her bed and landed on the carpeted floor with a thud. "Um… Miku? What's the problem?"

"Everything," Miku whines. "I can't come up with anything! Absolutely nothing!"

Ring let out a small snicker. She clears her throat and made a humming sound, as if she was deep in thought and is stroking her invisible beard like she always does. "Well, for starters, why are you doing it now? Winter break isn't around the corner."

"I like doing homework when I'm bored."

"Well… Look for other homework. We got a ton, right?"

"I don't want to," Miku says as she gets up from the floor and sluggishly drags her feet back to her table. "I do the hard ones first."

"Quit doing the hard ones first, then," Ring hissed. There was the sound of pens being dropped, the shifting of papers and the slight sound of a music being played in the background of the girl's voice. Miku lets out a grumble in response. She could hear her friend sigh in exasperation for a short while. "Okay, look – this is the best tip I could give you. Just write down what you feel and think. That's what I do."

"What? I have nothing on my mind about this!"

"Well… What you feel, then. It won't be hard if you try to understand what you feel about this."

"… I feel complete annoyance at how I have to answer questions about love."

"See, that's progress! You can just say that love is something that bothers you," Ring's voice suddenly had a cheery tone to it, like she had gotten an idea and loved it. "Just don't forget to summarize on your opinion. Remember; no less than ninety words overall - wait, I thought you said love was a great thing?"

Miku perks up in her seat. She did say that, didn't she? "Um, well, I kind of changed my mind on the last minute... To be honest, it does give off a bad impression on me."

"That's... Odd. Did something happen?"

"No, nothing at all. Oh, and thank you for helping me with this question! Now, for the next one...,"

"Whoa, wait a minute, write that down first. And second, I can't help you until you finish the essay. Teacher told us to not help each other too much, so we have to rely on ourselves. That's why I said the best tip I could give you so you can survive this is that you should use your mind and feelings. And well, of course skills matter, but we're still schooling so mistakes are accepted anyways."

"… What?"

"Um, ignore what I said. Just try to follow what I said and do it like we just did earlier – but add a summary to your answer in each question. And make it look more like an essay, with paragraphs and no point forms. Got it?"

"… Kind of."

"Cool. Text me if there's anything."

And the call ended. Miku took the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen that showed a picture of Ring, her name and the red rectangle with the words, 'Call ended', before it faded away and returned to her home screen.

Well. Looks like she has to handle this alone for the meantime.

"Stupid Ring."

"Have you guys listened to their newest single yet?" Rin heard her friend, Teto Kasane, who was enviably the most popular and liked girl in their grade, ask as the girl was busy preparing things needed for her to do a braid on her next victim. Rin's hand reached up and she felt the braid Teto had done for her – It made her feel girly, which was kind of unlike her, but it made Teto happy so she was rather accepting about the offer. "Not yet," Rin replied, knowing that Teto was once again talking about one of her favourite bands. The others shook their heads as well. The bright pink-haired girl beamed at all of them and then she called over Kaiko Shion, who was busy arranging her books into her bag. Kaiko was undeniably the smartest girl amongst them all, even in their whole grade, and she was usually the one who shies away from people – but not tonight, apparently. Kaiko was dressed in lace lingerie and black stockings which is very unlike her. Puberty, Rin couln't help but muse inside her mind. Kaiko stopped arranging her books and obeyed her friend's orders. She sat down in front of Teto and let the girl take a bunch of her short blue hair and twist them together.

Lily Kirishima, the most mature girl in their group, was wearing a blank face as usual as she peeked from behind her mobile phone. "What was the name of it, again?" She seemed to ask Teto, who gladly replied the question. Lily formed her lips into an 'o' shape before she hid herself behind her phone again and began tapping on the screen rapidly. Then, after a while, she turned the phone around and showed everyone what was on her screen – a group of boys, dressed in black jackets, some in white vests and overall wearing skinny jeans and boots, some sneakers. They were posing on metal barrels and chairs against a grunge-ish background. Teto squealed, making some of them flinch, especially Kaiko who grimaced when Teto accidentally pulled on her hair. "Ah, sorry, Kai-chan… They're just too cute!"

"It's okay," Kaiko says, smiling slightly. "I understand, anyway. I love them too."

"Oh, speaking of love," Meiko Kurosaki chimed in from the bed. She was covering her eyes with cucumber slices until a few minutes ago, when she stopped to check her Instagram. She rolled over so she was on her elbows, looking directly at them. "Have you guys done that worksheet yet?"

Kaiko slightly gasped along with Teto. "No, not yet…," The blue-haired girl trailed off, looking slightly embarrassed at the mention of those questionable queries Miss Jill had put for their homework. "How should we even answer them?"

"Well, I'm going to talk about how love is really stupid sometimes." Rin suddenly proclaims as she leans back into her beanbag and takes out a couple of chips from the bag in her hand. She popped them into her mouth. Teto slightly frowned. Rin looks down and saw that some of her chips had gotten onto the carpeted floor. "Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. I'll pick them up later."

"Oh, okay, I didn't notice that anyway," Teto replied, going back to put the finishing touches to Kaiko's braid. "It's just about what you said. It's…. Well, not unusual of you to say, but since we're growing up and all, I thought you changed your opinion on it."

Rin stopped chewing on her chips for a while. She paused and let her annoyance settle down. Every time there was their monthly sleepover, the topic of love will always come around. She doesn't despise it – just tired. There are more things to talk about, like their friends, what annoys them, the teachers, their classmates and schoolmates. Yet here they go again, talking about boys and girls having romantic attraction towards each other. It's not like she doesn't want to talk about her feelings, either; she's just not comfortable about it. It's like they're forcing her to dig up her other side. On another note, every time they're talking about love, Teto always seems to dominate the topic – big-eyed, small, white-skinned, smart, childish and with a cartoonish voice, there's hardly any boy who dislikes Teto to an extent. Rin loved the girl, true, but knowing that she's such a perfect, popular girl who's friends with a blond idiot like her… Well, it just makes her self-esteem lower a bit.

She felt disgusted that even she was envious of her own best friend. But she couldn't suppress the feeling.

After a while, Rin spoke out loud, "Never changing my mind. Love is stupid, and I'm going to answer just that."

Teto and Kaiko let out spontaneous small sighs. Lily simply looked up from her phone with her blue eyes seemingly drilling holes into Rin's very soul. Meiko, on the other hand, went back to being on her phone. Rin bit into another chip she's pulled out from the bag. She'll work on that worksheet some time later this week.

The tip of the brush marker was pulled across the paper smoothly, letting the bright red ink flow out and taint the white surface of the paper. Bits of rubber from erasers were pushed and blown aside, and 0.2 leaded black pens were left uncapped. Ring stopped her colouring and raised the brush marker up from the paper. She squinted at the small corner of her drawn character's hair. Then, ever so slowly, the tip lowered and as soon as the ink filled out the empty space, she pulled it away and capped it close. Putting the brush marker aside, she took the sketchbook and raised it up to eye level.

It was a picture of a girl and a boy, sitting together with their backs touching. The girl had her head looked down and the boy's gaze was staring straight into empty space. One was smiling, the other was timidly covering her mouth. Both have red streaks across their faces, showing that they were obviously happily and shyly trying to accept their relationship - thus shown by their hands being laced together.

Moderate.

She needed to fix on her inking. Her colouring's still pretty sloppy, too. Brush markers are still not in her area of expertise, it seems, even after they're used for several of her recent drawings. She placed the sketchbook down and turned to the small cardboard box beside her. Inside, there were several papers, a box of colour pencils, a roll of A5 paper, bits of eraser that she had pushed into the box, drawing pencils and a newly bought box of watercolours. She needs to use them soon, so she can get out of her boring comfort zone. Plus, this pose... She doesn't particularly like it.

But Ring is pleased to see how their expressions turned out. It made her feel a bit... warm inside, like she wished that the girl in the picture was her.

Ring flips the sketchbook closed and put her pens away, stashing them into the said cardboard box. She stretches her arms and legs then pushes herself off from the floor cushion that was the only think keeping her comfortable. Ring moved over to her study table and stared at the contents spilled onto the wooden table. There were her textbooks, notebooks and several notices from her school about upcoming events. Her eyes trailed up to the bookcase screwed on to the wall – where her diary was located. She pulled it from the rows of novels she owned and flipped the pages open until she came to the most recent one – that was about the worksheet Miss Jill had given to the whole class.

Surely it's not just me overthinking this, Ring said as she scanned through her diary entry. She'd talked about her suspicions on why Miss Jill had made the decision to ask such questions. She'd even talked about how she should answer the questions; whether she should lie or simply speak the truth. She'd talked about why the class has to go through this kind of interrogation. On and on she wrote, until three in a half pages were filled with things regarding Miss Jill, 'love', her classmates and… Well, her supposedly having a secret admirer, as told by Rin. Ring looked at a sentence. What did she think of love, she wrote, was that although it can be a pleasant feeling, it can be truly deceiving and may be the root of intense hatred towards someone. Ring paused, then she closed the book and slipped it back into the rows of books, between a mystery novel and an action genre novel.

Honestly, she doesn't want to think about the topic 'love' any much more than usual. It makes her mind scatter. Besides, there's that new watercolour set just waiting to be used. She could just finish that worksheet in the last minute, like she always does with the other worksheets.

She sighs and stretches again. Better get back to work to get her art block away.

Hello, everyone! After some time I finally managed to finish the second chapter. On this chapter, I aimed to focus on what our three main girls think about love at first – like, based on their past experiences. So I hope I managed to achieve that goal. I'm actually looking forward to writing the third chapter so I can breach my writer's block, so I'll probably get back to using Word real soon.

The new school term is starting in a few days, so I might not be too active in writing and updating, but as I said, I will try my best.

Please bear with me!

AIKU