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The student sat alone in the room, at the corner desk. It was a room filled with many of these desks, not ordinary ones, but slate topped ones. Three roughly triangular shaped sinks were in a triangular pattern in the room. A double whiteboard behind a teacher’s desk, an elevated slate desk with a piece of wood backing, and a row of windows towards the east made the room the way it was.
In front of the student was a set of beakers, filled with bubbling chemicals. Food coloring was in a box to his right. Everything was set. He knew what he had to do, and that was simple enough; pouring each beaker into the next in succession. It was a rather fun lab to watch from an audience, and that was what he planned to do.
As he was thinking it, it became real, and the room faded away. He was sitting at a slate desk, with the beakers upon it, on a black stage. The entire school had gathered in the audience of the theater to watch him. It was a nerve-wracking situation, and the student had some difficulty acclimating to this.
It was set, like he had thought before, and began to run through the process. Each beaker turned into another created a strong acid-like chemical that bubbled and steamed, and even changed colors according to the way the food coloring mixed together. Before the last chemical, he stopped, and made the biggest mistake he could have.
He stood up, and the audience cheered, but that was not the mistake. He shouldn’t have taken off his goggles. No one there knew why anyone would do such a thing, but somehow, the student decided to take a risk and do it. But there was no restraint. The crowd was roaring for the explosion they knew was going to happen.
Of course the student knew the explosion would happen, and had built a metal shield on the floor, and seeing this caused the student to find more realization in his sudden fade away into the theater. First, he set the beaker with the last chemical inside the shield, and then came back to the table. Dreadfully, he took the last beaker, somehow become instantly shaky, and he watched the fizzing orange liquid shaking and creating waves.
Again, something happened, and the world slowed down for him. The beaker did not go into the shield, but somewhere else. This was part of the will of the beaker, and he let it be. The student moved in realtime, and the liquid moved in slow motion. He watched the liquid moving out of the beaker towards him, but he did not do anything, did not show any fear. He simply laughed.
It was a laugh of disbelief, and that disbelief cost him. Things switched. The world became realtime, and he moved in slow motion. The beaker shattered, and more liquid flew up towards his face, towards his eyes. His confidence and sure attitude simply flew out the window, and desperation and a distressed attitude replaced them respectively. He knew, and lifted his hands up towards his eyes. But it was all a matter of seconds. The liquid was moving incredibly fast, streaming with a sonic boom towards him, and his hands, they seemed like creaky windshield wipers, struggling to clear the windshield in sleet.
Too late. The liquid entered his eyes before his hands could stop it, and that was it. The student saw everything before him, the now shrieking crowd, and then he didn’t. It went in. And it burned.
Then there was pain, a torment of no other, tearing apart his mind. He uttered a wrenching scream, tearing the minds out of the audience. The hall was silent, and his pain echoed throughout. Some of the audience cringed.
The scream echoed, again and again, as he continued, yelling like a madman about his eyes in an unknown language so foreign that it seemed similar. Inside him, the student felt like he was being burned on an oven that he was taped down to and all of this in his eyes. There was nothing, even as he opened them, and the tears streamed liquid out. But it was not enough.
Throughout the ordeal, he was like a prisoner of a medieval war, in a torture hall, being branded to scream like he did, but in his eyes, as well as thinking about something. It was truly nonsensical, having a wandering mind during an ordeal to this degree. He was thinking about the things he could have done, he should have done. What if he had kept the goggles on? He would have been safe, and there would have been no harm done.
He struggled off the ground, and opened his eyes. Although there was nothing he could see, he imagined the science room, and headed to where the eye shower was. It would all be over soon. He was walking, thinking that he was near the shower, and finally stopped. It was odd though, since he was not at the shower, and something had stopped him.
The student’s eyes were fully open now, although he was blind, and he groped himself down to his stomach, where he had been feeling a bit of discomfort. He grasped a cylindrical object, and felt its length, a pole in the theater, and he felt its depth, through him. The student brought his hand up, and felt his fingers, with a wet sensation. His pain from both situations forgotten, he began to chuckle, and laugh harder, but no one laughed with him. No one could see he had hurt himself further, but no one understood the laughter either.
He tried and tried, and finally, he got himself off of the pole and walked to the door of the classroom. He was walking, easy as if nothing had happened to him, and he fell. It was not a soft fall, but not a hard fall. Something was odd about it though, and he tried to find out what. He failed in that, so decided to get up again, but oddly enough had no strength to walk. When he finally did, he felt his legs crumble underneath him, and a sickening crack that ran up his spine but did not register in his brain. In fact, nothing registered in his brain. He began to lose it.
Laughing and cackling, the student sat on the ground, immobile. He laid down, still laughing, and heard nothing from the crowd but the echo of his own laughter, the sad, sorry laughter of the student who was so smart but yet so stupid. It was more thoughts and realization that came to him, and he began to curse and swear at himself more, loudly in front of the crowd.
Somebody would come now, someone to stop my words, to stop my pain, to stop my misery. The paramedics would come take me away, and in the morning I would just wake up from a dream, and nothing would have happened. Nobody dies in dreams.
“Over here!” a pause, “Oh my god, its worse now. Get him away.”
Footsteps, but they were not taking him away, no, that’s not what they were doing. They were, but nothing registered in the boy’s mind externally except for the thoughts of sad hope and horrible regret that the made up in the depths of his mind. He brought his head up, and banged it against the ground with all his might, since they would not help him. He banged, and banged, and the blood spilled out; the student died.
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