It was second period. I sat to the right of Dominick who sat three desks from the front of the classroom and two desks from the windows on the far side that extended from approximately three feet off the ground to almost exactly a foot from the ceiling. Using the twelve inch by twelve inch tiles on the floor, one could easily map out to the nearest inch the exact location of each item in the room, except for Dominick’s desk that he set at about a forty-two degree angle off the mid-line of our row. I sat next to him despite his aberration from the linear nature of our classroom because he was taller than me and his dark hair filtered the glaring sunlight from the windows on the far side of the classroom. This, however, did not apply to the days when previously he had stayed up too late playing video games or hastily copying my homework for a first period assignment. Those days he would sag in his chair and the sunlight would escape over his head and dance in front of my eyes like that time we went to the movies and the projector broke, making the reel spin progressively faster until the only recognizable images were the flashes of darkness in between scenes.

 

      On this particular day Dominick had gone to bed at what he called a reasonable hour and I was saved from the misery of the blinding sunlight. As usual he was not listening to the lecture but instead carried on illustrating a cartoon strip saga on his desk that had been in progress since October. Each panel was approximately two square inches and each strip was four panels long. The desk was covered in thirty-two and a half panels that detailed the adventures of a pair of humanoid hot-dogs from Dominick’s favorite web series. He fondly referred to his magnum opus as “The Hotdaga”, a combination of hot-dog and saga, appropriately named for its main characters and the fact that the cleaning crew had wiped away the sharpie-d mural on more than one occasion, causing the epic to be split into episodes and, by January, into seasons.

 

      I watched as his fine-tipped marker scratched back and forth, etching onto the wood the latest installment of the series which took place on a beach. As he contemplated how a bikini would work anatomically on a hot-dog with legs, I listened intently to the lesson being taught on the bones of the inner ear. By allowing my eyes to idly observe the artist at work, my brain could focus on absorbing the information being recited by the teacher from the Wikipedia article she had read earlier that morning.

 

      I tried to keep my focus on the structure auditory ossicle but was consistently interrupted by the electric humming of one of the fluorescent lights overhead. I could tell by the frequency and intensity of the sounds that the light two desks behind me and one to the right was approximately a week away from needing to be replaced. The more I tried to focus on the lesson, the more the humming started to sound like a hive of wasps, hanging heavily from the ceiling behind me and writhing with thousands of tiny, angry bodies intent on making me go deaf with the rapid beating of their papery wings. I strained to keep my eyes on Dominick’s hand as it started blocking out a new scene on his desk but the wasps, having taken to the skies, were growing steadily nearer and it took all of my willpower and concentration not to turn around or to move away. The swarm hovered just behind my head and I could feel the movement of the thousands of tiny wings as some landed on my shoulders and face. I froze, not daring to move, and more wasps landed on me, feeling their way over my body with their twitching antennae. Two crawled over my lips in search of any leftover morsels from breakfast that morning and a few of their compatriots began investigating the insides of my ears. With the feeling of tiny insects crawling all over my body, looking for a way inside, I struggled not to scream or jump up from my seat in a desperate attempt to rid myself of the uninvited guests that now filled my ears and nostrils making it difficult to breathe or to hear over the sound of squirming bodies that filled my head.

 

      Without warning or apparent cause, the wasps evacuated out of the orifices they had claimed as their own and returned to their hive. The sounds of the world slowly came back into focus as my ears were cleared and over the retreated buzzing I could hear a new sound: the ringing of the bell announcing the end of Ms. Walton’s second period anatomy class. I remained in my seat as my classmates gathered up their backpacks and funneled out of the classroom. Dominick stayed by my side, stretching by reaching both hands up to the ceiling and leaning to the right, then the left, then back, then forwards. He finishes his ritual with an over exaggerated yawn. After a proper session of limbering, he turns to me and opens and closes his mouth a few times in a pantomime of speaking. I could not be sure if he was indeed producing sound as my head was filled with the deafening echoes of the swarm.

 

      It was in these types of moments that I was the most grateful for the fact that Dominick understood me better than I understood myself. He picked up my backpack and shrugged it over his shoulder along with his own then motioned for me to follow him out of the classroom. I stood up stiffly and shuffled along behind him. My skin was still crawling with the feeling of thousands of tiny legs as we walked down the hallway single file. I made sure to stay close to Dominick and wrapped my arms around my body. The idea of brushing up against another student intensified the phantom creeping and made me shiver with discomfort.

 

      It felt like mere moments before Dominick led me into a new classroom and directed me to my seat to the right of Dominick’s who sat three desks from the front and two desks from the far side. He placed my backpack on the ground as I sat down gingerly. Dominick settled in his seat next to me and, as usual, angled his desk approximately 42 degrees off the mid-line and pulled out a worn notebook he used to sketch ideas for scenes for the Hotdaga. I felt a slight twinge of irritation rise up in my chest. Normally I could easily brush off Dominick’s inability to sit parallel to the rest of the class but that day my skin was still crawling with insects and my head was filled with buzzing and I felt an intense urge to stand up to correct Dominick’s orientation so that everything could go back to the way it was supposed to be.

 

      Tears welled up in my eyes as lagging students wandered into the classroom, chatting and dropping their heavy bags on the ground, causing vibrations to travel through the tiles and reverberate up through my legs. Between the crawling and the buzzing and the shaking, I wasn’t sure where I was, what class I was in, or who the man standing at the front of the room was. I sat with my hands clasped in my lap and my burning eyes fixed to the surface of my desk. Everything happening around me was moving in slow motion and yet everything happening within me was moving beyond the speed of comprehension.

 

      The twinge of irritation I had felt at Dominick’s nonconformity began to take on a life of its own. I felt the fever of its lifeforce in my chest which spread as it unfurled its white-hot arms and rendering me immobile with its binds. My skin burned and sizzled like I had been lassoed by cowboy from the wild west wielding a smoldering barbed wire snare. I put my head down on the desk to hide the tears streaming down my face. My brief reprieve was broken by a sharp poke to my left elbow, a cue from Dominick that the teacher was displeased with my lack of attention. I sat up and tried to focus my eyes on the whiteboard but the words began to melt and drip like candle wax, pooling in the marker tray and eventually spilling over and splattering onto the floor.

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      Despite Dominick’s efforts to bring me back to the classroom, the crawling and the buzzing and the shaking and the burning was too much to bear. I began flapping my hands in an attempt to cool them as they radiated heat, a feeling similar to that time I touched a lit burner on the stove. As I flapped, I could feel the heat dissipating from my fingers until they were no longer smoking. Feeling triumphant, I began to flap from my elbows, freeing myself from the fiery prison that had previously rendered me borderline catatonic. I flapped until my hands go numb and my skin cools back to room temperature. I came out of my trance to the sweet sound of silence that has usurped the incessant buzzing. And yet despite the much more favorable ambiance, something felt off. I raised my eyes from the desk and saw around me fifteen pairs of unblinking eyes floating in the stillness. The eyes at the front of the classroom seemed to be trying to communicate with me but they don’t speak English and I was unable reply. Thoroughly confused, I turned to Dominick for translation. He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head towards the door. I could understand this language and left the classroom as the hovering eyes turned to watch.

 

      The hallway was quiet and distinctly cooler than the classroom. The floor was made of the same tiles as the classroom, six and a half wide and over a hundred long from the back of the school to the front doors. I walked noiselessly through the corridors, past doors that hold back murmurs of activity, and through the open doorway that leads to the front office. The secretary looked up from her paperwork and greeted me with a smile. I liked her. She didn’t seem to be upset by my lack of eye contact as I signed myself out and nodded “goodbye”.

 

      The walk home was peaceful. I put on my headphones without caring which song played. It was less about listening to the music but rather not listening to the sound of the cars roaring by in the street or the young children playing on the soccer fields. I put my body on autopilot, my eyes looking ahead without seeing and my feet moving without direction. The songs playing into my ears all blurred together as a cacophony of words and music, pulsating with colors that swirled inside my head and in front of my eyes. This medley of sensations melted away the memories of the wasps and the burning heat from earlier in the day.

 

      I reached my front door without incident. Although I was feeling much more relaxed, my body and mind had little energy for anything more than walking and breathing. I steadied one hand with the other to work the key into the lock and then used both to turn it. When I opened the door, which was four feet wide and six feet tall, I felt the rush of cool air from the interior of the house. I liked for the house to be set to 64 degrees. Being cold was by far better than being hot. Hot meant being sweaty and sweaty meant being sticky and I couldn’t handle the feeling of being sticky.

 

      There were ten steps to the stairs, sixteen stairs to the landing, and seven steps from the landing to the door of my room. I walked to my bed, another seven steps, and grabbed a blanket. I laid face down on the floor underneath the blanket. I closed my eyes are breathed deeply while I ran my fingers through the tight synthetic loops of the carpet. The tugging sensation on my skin brought the feeling back into my hands and for the first time that day I felt grounded in reality.