The midday sun's heat paled in comparison to my current mood: angry. Enough things had finally run through my mind since the moment I woke to turn me into a completely different being than the outgoing, somewhat idiotic tomboy my friends and brother normally knew of me. Eventually a monster, I growled spitefully at innocent inquiries of my health, snapped my teeth in the faces of friends, buried my knuckles into the metal of lockers (including the hinges, thus the blood on my fingers), and recklessly thrown my backpack and the materials inside across the concrete courtyard. I received many a concerned, shocked, and even scared stare from different witnesses of my gradually-building fit. Even the guardian I had obtained at the school gazed at me with lazy but worried eyes, the worry hidden behind a mask of apathy and laziness.

She had finally summoned me away from the unhelpful educational system just before gym class. Having just escaped the nurse's office after possibly receiving a concussion (which, later, I found I had not), pressure and fury had pulled me into her direction, and with casual but hurried steps we'd paced through the unglamorous gates at the campus entrance. No one had even noticed.

Nothing had been said as we'd strode over a busy street and through a wide Wal-Mart parking lot to reach the nearby Burger King, for "a break", as she called it, though the voice of reason (now a struggling whisper in my head) knew the true term was "ditching". For today, however, I made an exception. If I hadn't gotten away, people would have been hurt, no question.

Now we stood, leaning against the back wall of the fast food establishment, within the shadow cast by the building opposing the sun's light, making the heat a bit easier to bear, though she and I both did not help our own cases with my anger and her smoking. Too preoccupied with my own terrible thoughts to criticize her, I did not bitch to her about the cigarette held between her fingers. I did not gag as I watched her inhale and then blow away the smoke through her lips. I did not glare at her for her actions; I glared into the world for mine and the ones I had seen within my sleep. All the rage-provoking things that had haunted me since I woke...

My hands clenched into fists in the pockets of my hooded black jacket. The muscles in my jaw tightened. I felt my eyes burn with a sort of hatred and outrage that I only recognized as preparation to scream. And as if she had read my thoughts or known me since the day of my birth, my companion told me calmly, "Scream." The command was easily obeyed. A shrill, yet unusually deep shriek burst from my vocals, as I suddenly curled into a ball on the sidewalk, my fingers knotted into my hair in frustration. Whatever attention I attracted, I ignored, blatantly. However long I spent on the ground screaming my anger forth... I didn't know. Eventually I rose to my feet again and stood, inhaling deeply even though bits of the air reeked with the smoke from her cigarette.

I looked over to her, expecting another command. Surprisingly, she was giving a faint smile, the cigarette held unmoving in her fingers. I did not raise my brows as I normally would or question her expression, but instead, merely stared.

"So," she said, and her crystal eyes suddenly seemed to say that I was not finished, "how big of a rock can you lift and throw?"