Too Little, Too Late?

Trauma… That was the word that came to Chi’s mind when she thought of school. She took a deep breathe. This was progress for her. This would be the first time in a decade that she would be stepping foot in an educational institution in over a decade. If Megan the Stallion had managed to get her degree in nursing while pursuing her rap career and having no parents, then she could handle this. In fact she could more than handle this! She was getting a degree in creative writing from Cambridge University! An Ivy League! Something that she had been hoping for from a young age. This wouldn’t be like high school. She had left those cretins far behind. And most of them were finished with their studies anyway, starting families, having kids, whatever. She would sometimes see snippets of what they were doing in their lives on her f*******:. They weren’t there to call her weird or make her feel like everything that she did was crazy. I’m fact, she was going to be going to a school full of nerds! University students thought that having a collection of rocks that could be the fossilized excrement of dinosaurs was actually cool. Speaking of rocks, Chi took her lucky rock out of her pocket. It was confirmed to be petrified mammoth dung. A rarity that she had picked up while in Australia shooting the first season of Love Harder. That’s what Chi was…an actress. Something that she had always wanted to do. It had started by her starting a YouTube channel back in Zimbabwe. Who would have guessed that those god-awful videos when she would pretend to be in an imaginary world and enact it would lead to randomly getting cast in a show in Australia? Everything had changed when Love Harder had unexpectedly been a hit on Netflix. It was a show about a group of young misfits navigating university and first “grown-up” jobs together. Chi had played the part Michelle, a girl from Africa who was in Australia for the first time and found out she’s autistic from the university psychologist. Michelle’s life was nothing like Chi’s except for that fact. And that fact was that Chi was also autistic. The casting agent that had seen Chi’s YouTube videos had probably caught onto it, but on the set of Love Harder, Chi had been properly diagnosed by the set psychologist. It was during that time when Chi finally thought that everything was finally coming together for her. She was a successful actress and she actually wasn’t weird at all…just autistic. The universe was apologizing for all the kak* she had gone through in high school… If only Kai could see her now. Kai. Kai had been the perfect guy. The guy that girls couldn’t help but fall in love with. The only thing was that he was Asian before the yellow fever had really hit Africa. Even though he was popular and talented, at the time, the girls had preferred his white and black counterparts. Sometimes even saying hurtful stereotypes like “he’s cute but I’ve heard Asian guys don’t…” Kai had been a different type of stray from Chi. Even though Kai was popular he wasn’t really appreciated by the rest of the class. Theirs had been a weird friendship. Somehow they had ended up studying together in an empty classroom. Kai for some reason had checked out what she was doing on her laptop and seen her watching One Piece. That was before watching anime was socially acceptable and when it got you bullied heavily. So it was the little secret that Chi kept for Kai. They would hang out together for hours at Internet cafes after school to exchange anime and make anime music videos. They’d even started a YouTube channel together. Everything was amazing. Chi finally had a real friend…but then she went and spoiled it all by falling for him. Chi grimaced as she thought about the lengths that she had gone to impress Kai. Making lunch and dessert for two people then lying to him that her mom had overpacked food for him, walking him to his sports events when no one else would because she was “trying to lose weight”, laughing at jokes she didn’t understand…all for him to tell people that he wasn’t really interested in her like that when they asked if they were dating. And she had been so stupid and so desperate at the time that she had taken it. The disrespect and desperation had run through her veins. Maybe she thought that if she would continue to be nice that he would eventually like her back. So she had continued to pine for him and serve him until they graduated high school and he blocked her on all social media and changed numbers. That had been the most humiliating part of it. After all that work and what did it get her? He didn’t even have the decency to face her and tell her that he didn’t feel the same way. But that lemon had turned into lemonade because the pain of that entire situation had pushed her to start her YouTube channel and look where she was now. She was by no means an A-list celebrity but the same people who had mocked her in high school were the ones now telling people that they had gone to school with her. That is everyone except Kai. After all these years he had never unblocked her from his socials. I’m a moment of weakness she had used burner accounts to check if they still existed and yes they did, she just wasn’t allowed access. For a while she thought that meant that even in her success she wasn’t good enough for him. But over the years she had learned to value herself more. She wasn’t the awkward teen that everyone made fun of anymore. Chi took a deep breath as she parked her car in the student parking and took a step out. As expected, people flocked to her, taking pictures, whispering excitedly at the appearance of a celebrity. “I’m just here to learn,” Chi told them, trying to politely brush them off. But this was the booster her mood needed. f**k Kai. She was the s**t.