I went to school the following Monday, still giddy from my accomplishment. I scribbled down any and every random thought that popped into my head, just admiring the sharp angles and smooth circles in the foreign letters. Very proudly, I showed one of my closest friends. She stared at me, clearly unimpressed and disapproving, and said something along the lines of, "You have a ton of make-up work to do for school, and you spent the day memorizing a fake alphabet?"
Well... yeah. I did. And I would do it again if given the chance.
At that time, my days were filled with severe, never-ending headaches and my nights were filled with vomiting and wishing I could sleep. I rarely had an appetite and was losing weight—right then I was probably down by five or six pounds, but I eventually lost about sixteen or seventeen—and to make matters worse, my hair had started falling out. When I felt absolutely horrible, I stayed at home, bored out of my mind and longing for company. When I only felt really awful, I went to school, where I was still miserable.
That Saturday, though, I was running on a little more sleep than usual and my headache was not as terrible as it could have been. Anyone in my shoes would have jumped at the opportunity to hang out with their best friend, regardless of the mountain of schoolwork they had building up at home.
My best friend and I had always been fond of walking—walking around my neighborhood, walking around her neighborhood, walking to the park or 7-Eleven or Mazzio's, always with an iPod tying us together, never letting us stray too far apart. On this particular adventure, we walked to the school that's conveniently placed next to her neighborhood.
We sat outside the main doors, on the dusty sidewalk and up against the hard brick wall, completely ignoring the bench that glared at us from just a few feet away. We each had a stash of loose-leaf notebook paper and an English-to-Kryptonian key we had printed off beforehand. I would write a note in Kryptonian for her and she would write one for me, then we would translate them back into English. We did this over and over until we no longer had to look up each individual letter as we translated back and forth. By that point, the hardest part of writing a note was getting the S's and exclamation marks to look right. We were bursting with pride once we got it all perfected.
This may have been one of our duller days compared to some of the other times we've spent together, but it's one of the best memories I have from that year, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
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