Indigo

I COULD’VE ADMITTED that my mental health was taking a turn for the worst. Or I could simply binge watch every single episode of Love Island 2019. Which was exactly what I did. The entire weekend.

Did this mean that I now had a ton of backlog on my assignments and studying that would only contribute more to my stress and probable acute depression? Absolutely.

Did this deter me from watching all fifty episodes and getting little to no sleep? Nope. Not at all.

I’d reached the scene where Curtis broke up with Amy, and actual tears started at the corners of my eyes. What the hell. This was just meant to be a stupid reality show you didn’t need three braincells to watch, and yet here I was making emotional connections with the people. None of these couples were real, anyway.

But then again, maybe my “reality detector” was broken, because I thought Kade and I were real. Turns out the only real thing was the fact that he had his tongue down another girl’s throat two days ago. I grabbed my pillow from the side of my bed, slamming it down on my face and holding it there as I proceeded to scream into it until my voice ran raw.

I wanted to get over him.

I needed to.

But I couldn’t.

It was an annoying paradox. The more I tried not to think about him, the more thoughts of him invaded my mind. And I hated it. God, I hated it.

I’d been this way for the longest time I could remember. I would always catch feelings way too fast. Hell, all a boy had to do was hold the door open for me and I was already planning the wedding. The feelings always came hard fast, but they left so torturously slow.

And with Kade…it was knowing that he’d always be there for me. Call it what you want, but it was nice knowing that there was one person in the world that would always be there for you, no matter what.

As expected, turned out getting little to no sleep for two days in a row didn’t fare well for campus on Monday. I was practically part of the Walking Dead cast when I walked into Bio 201, and Mae was quick to notice.

Her shoulder length hair was trimmed to perfection, pin-straight and perfectly unfrazzled. And with her light wash denim skirt paired with a crop top, she looked as put together as she always did. I couldn’t say the same for myself. I’d tied my hair into a tight bun at the nape of my neck to control the frizz.

“Um, no offense, love,” Mae started, passing me a cup of coffee, “But did you get hit by a bus on the way here?”

I accepted the cup gratefully, taking the time to stare down at my outfit selection for the day: a pair of denim overalls over an oversized black top. “I actually think I did a good job. Despite being half dead.”

“Oh, the outfit’s pretty.” Mae waved a dismissive hand. “I’m talking about the vibe. The eye bags and the general look of fatigue. I gave you two days to deal with the hangover, Indigo. Come on.”

I managed a smile, bringing the coffee cup to my lips. “I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours.”

Mae’s mouth hung open. “You’re exaggerating right? Tell me you’re just exaggerating.”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Let me guess. You’ve completely lost it and took some molly?”

I laughed. “No drugs, only Love Island and existential crisis.”

“Okay, but you better hope that coffee is going to buy you, I don’t know, some life? Because we have dissections next and our group is going to flip out when they find out there’s more than one cadaver on our team.”

Turned out Mae was right, because when I walked into the dissection hall, a hammering headache started at the side of my head, and it could mean nothing good. Someone slipped a scalpel into my hand and I found myself at the edge, closest to the cadaver. Dazed, I looked to Mae for direction. She just pointed in the general direction of the body’s back and said, “You need to open that up.”

I didn’t really want to open anything up, forget a dead body’s internal organs. All I wanted to do was lie down on a lone bench and close my eyes and feel the heat warm my ice-cold soul. It didn’t even have to be a comfortable bench.

 “Indigo,” Scarlett hissed, “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?”

I blinked, climbing out of my mind as I realised I’d just sliced off the wrong tendon. My face heated. “Shit. Sorry.”

“C’mon Gallagher,” Chad said, “Where’s your mind at?”

“Sorry,” I said again, “I’ll focus from now on. Sorry.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” Scarlett muttered under her breath, rolling her eyes.

The stench of the corpse was strong, and I’d just eaten. Snapping back to reality had also triggered my sense of smell, it seemed, and I was now very close to upchucking my breakfast bagel.

I held my breath and lowered my face closer to the body to get a better look so I could get a closer cut. Was that the right tendon? Everything looked so different compared to the textbook. I’d spent the most of yesterday trying to memorise the parts so I wouldn’t disappoint my dissection team, but right now, with my face two inches away from the cadaver, I wasn’t so sure.

I took a deep breath and brought the scalpel down, slicing.

“Indigo!” Scarlet hissed.

“Broooo,” Chad chimed.

“What?” I said, eyes widening. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Only just cut out the pulmonary tendon two weeks before we’re actually meant to, babe,” Chad said, dryly. He gently eased the scalpel out of my hands, replacing git with the laminated sheet of instructions. “You get the sheet from now on, alright?”

“…Okay.”

“Are you kidding me,” Scarlett cried, “You’re screwing up our group mark!”

“Calm down, will you?” Mae cut in, “It’s one or two marks max.”

Scarlett’s anger at me fizzled as her eyes flickered to Mae. The piercing above her brow seemed to glint a little brighter. “Fine,” she huffed, “Whatever.”

Mae shifted he attention to me, offering me a small smile. “Where to next, Indigo?”

I coughed, nodding as I looked down at the laminated sheet. “Um…pulmonary artery.”

“I’m on it,” Mae said.

As much as I was thankful for Mae coming to my defence, Scarlett was technically right. I was costing the people in my group precious marks, and at this rate, it wasn’t going to be long before everyone in our group hated me. How was I so astronomically bad at this?

I’d cost them a few marks already, and we hadn’t even scratched the surface of dissections.

I needed to get my shit together.

*

If campus was hard, work was so, so much worse. There was a huge order for a wedding, and the bride had switched up on the type of flower at the last second. So now Kat was on our asses like a bloodhound while we tried to prepare fifty new extra-large arrangements. Mae offered me a thoroughly “over it” look from across the shop, where she was arranging the aurelias.

You thought a florist’s job was easy? Two words: weddings and funerals. Oh, and not to mention the cherries on the top, like birthdays and Valentine’s day and those little corsages boys came looking for around prom season. I’d spent more Saturdays working overtime at the shop than I’d like to admit.

“Indigo, sweetheart,” Kat said, breathing down my neck as she came up behind me from the storeroom, “you need to go a little faster. We need the order ready by tomorrow and not next year.”

Kat could’ve just told the bride that the order was close to impossible to arrange on short notice, but obviously couldn’t refuse the big fat paycheck that would come with this order. We’d even closed the store so we could have more space to work.

And you’d think Kat would try to help out since we were strapped for time, right?

Wrong. She just walked around making herself marvellously unhelpful while dishing out equally unhelpful orders.

“Faster, Indigo.”

“Mae, get the sheet of clear wrap from the storeroom.”

Mae nodded tiresomely and dropped the scissors in her hands as she dragged her feet to the storeroom.

“Indigo?”

I sighed. “Yes?”

“Don’t crush the flowers, alright? We don’t want them to get all spoiled and ugly. I don’t want to hear any complaints from the customer.”

I’d been with my grandmother in this shop for years. Because mom was always so busy with work, I spent most of my time with gran. I knew everything about flowers that there was to know. But I resisted the urge to offer some snarky reply to Kat, because maybe if I kept quiet, this whole ordeal would get over sooner.

“What happened to the eye candy that used to pop by for you?”

I frowned. Was she talking about Kade? Right when I thought I could get him out of my mind. I clenched my jaw as I focused on the bouquet in front me. “We broke up.”

“Oh?” Kat said. “That’s too, bad honey.”

I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“He was a little above your league anyway, if I’m going to be honest.”

I paused for a second, staring straight up at her. “…What?”

“Yeah,” she said, “A little advice? If you get with a guy who’s better looking than you, it’s always going to get to his head. You deserve so much better, honey.”

Needless to say, when we walked out of the flower shop at a little past six, I was fuming. I clenched and unclenched my fists. “That bitch.”

Mae grimaced. “What happened?”

I relayed the details of our conversation to Mae, who’s face dissolved into disbelief then annoyance. “What the hell? What’s her deal with you anyway?”

“I think she’s trying to push me to the limit, so I quit and stop hackling her about selling the shop back to us. Technically, it would be illegal if she fired me for no reason. And she knows that.”

Mae sighed. “Have you ever considering just…quitting? You shouldn’t be forced to deal with her crap. Plus, if you’re out, I’m out. We can get a job at Benji’s instead.”

“You can get a job at Benji’s,” I said pointedly. Mae’s uncle was the owner of Benji’s, the ice cream shop on fifth. A job at the ice cream shop was a dream, but there weren’t any vacancies. And even if there were— “I can’t let go of the flower shop so easily. It’d be like admitting defeat. I’m getting it back one way or another.” I turned to her. “Why don’t you just leave? You don’t have to suffer with me.”

Mae rolled her eyes. “I’m not leaving your sorry ass alone. If we suffer, we suffer together. You wanna get the flower shop back, let’s get the flower shop back.”

I smiled, and just for short time, my best friend was the Tylenol I needed. But inevitably, thoughts of my ex-boyfriend and the dwindling dissection and my annoying manager swarmed in my mind. Combined with my lack of sleep, they formed the recipe for the worst headache in the world. An idea, admittedly not the best, wormed its way in.

“Isn’t there a party at the College House this Friday?”

Mae glanced sideward at me, raising a brow. “Yeah, why?”

Maybe what I needed wasn’t another binge of Love Island. Maybe I just needed a… distraction.

“Let’s go,” I said.

a/n:

the next chapter is going to be wildddd.

until then,

stay gold,
yuen