Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 30: A Bathroom Incident...

Chapter 30: A Bathroom Incident...

Mom and Dad had managed to convince me to take three days off school, but the inability to not leave my room was driving me bat shit crazy.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. If this was a normal day, and I was told to go spend the day in bed, I would have lapped up every second of it. But, since I was still recovering from a concussion, I was unable to watch anything on TV or my tablet. And forget about reading. I could only do my favorite activities for around three hours a day.

And it was killing me worse than the pain in my head.

I was so frigging bored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Really, the only highlight was when Bai Long Qiang came over after school.

"Ugh! I don’t understand this!" He grunted, throwing his pen down onto my desk as he spun around in my chair to face me.

"What are you working on?" I asked, turning my attention away from the riveting ceiling above me and to the brooding boy beside me.

"English. I swear to god, if we go back in time and ask the authors of these works what they were trying to allude to, they would have looked at us like we were stupid! Or was it a problem back then for people to not write what they are writing about?"

I couldn’t help the laugh that came out of me. I would fully admit that that was one of those things I thought, too. That it was nothing more than people in the present trying to make themselves feel more important than people in the past by attributing things to literary work that wasn’t meant to be attributed to it.

For example, the classic "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women in it merely players." You can go very in-depth in this, thinking... that everyone was simply playing different roles in different situations. Or, you can look at it as a statement. As far as Shakespeare was concerned, all the world’s a stage because he never left it. After getting married at 18 to a 26-year-old, he became a poet, actor, and playwright in order to put food on the table for his family.

The fact that we still study his work hundreds of years later meant that he was either really good, and his messages were easy to get across and learn something, or he really sucked, and people were trying to find a diamond in a pile of shit.

Either way, it was always others putting their theories out there, never him explaining what things were supposed to mean.

But... apparently, I went off on a tangent in my head again because Bai Long Qiang had his hand on my forehead, trying to make sure that I didn’t have a fever or anything.

"You back?" he asked, and I nodded.

"Sorry, I get lost in my head every so often," I admitted with a shrug. Hell, I was only six; I could own it for a couple of years before I was supposed to get too old for that shit.

"And I’ll always be here to help you come out of it. Now, are you going to help me with English so I can pass this assignment or what?" he laughed, grabbing the laptop on the desk and placing it on his lap.

"Fine. Hit me up." It wasn’t like I really had anything better to do.

----

With the Wicked Witch of the West disappearing, my time at school seemed to just fly by. The days turned into months, and the months turned into years.

The only thing I really remember happening at that time was when I was eight; I accidentally got locked inside the bathroom of our apartment.

Stupid me didn’t bring my phone, because I really didn’t think I was going to be in there that long and, since Mom, Dad, and I were spending more and more time with Grandma and Grandpa, I knew that no one was going to be home for a few days.

I could feel myself starting to panic as I realized that I was trapped in a room without food for god only knew how long. I knew I should be somewhat fine; at least I had water. I should be able to go at least two to three months with only water, and hopefully, someone would have noticed me missing way before then.

But it was enough to set me off.

My brain was not always my friend, no matter how much we seemed to get along. It started running through all of the different scenarios, from power outage to break-in. Hell, I think I even put together a plan for a zombie apocalypse sitting there on the cold, tiled floors.

I had no idea how long I sat there, rocking back and forth as list after list got made in my head about what supplies I would need and where. But it must have been a few hours before Bai Long Qiang burst through the door and picked me up in his arms.

"I am putting a fucking tracking device in you," he muttered, his face buried in my shoulder as he carried me through the ruined door and into my bedroom.

"I thought you already installed one on my phone," I answered, my head cocked to the side as I saw his panicked expression. It absolutely gutted me every time he made that face. And he only made it when I was involved.

"Fucking good that does when you don’t bring your phone with you," he snarled and held me tighter. I felt like I was a stuffed Teddy bear, only instead of my owner being a child, he was the big bad wolf.

"It wasn’t that far away," I said calmly. I wanted to be able to get one hand out to be able to pet his head, but that was just not possible. He had both arms pinned to my side.

"And yet, it was too far away for you to call for help."