"Bye." 

"What do you mean 'bye'?" Lucy scrawled furiously in the notebook and passed it back to the brunette beside her. 

"Me, my mom's bank card, and a long trip. I'm getting out of here." 

That was the last that her class had seen her before she decided that she would leave LA. Forever.

"So, you're saying that you're going to take your car, and skip town overnight?" 

"Exactly."

"No. Not exactly. That's crazy! And I have three brothers at home."

The brunette lifted the pencil to her lips and thought for a second, before madly scribbling sentence after sentence in the notebook. She was so focused she didn't even notice that the whole class was staring right at her. Lucy snatched the notebook back, to the brunette's dismay.

"You're absolutely f-ing nuts." Lucy whispered back to the brunette.

"What? Give that back!"

"You're absolutely. F-ing. Nuts. Annika." Lucy looked at the brunette dumbfoundedly. There was no way she could pull this off. 

"Is there something you'd like to share with the class, the two of you?" A tall man wearing a pair of wide-rimmed glasses stared back at the girls. A man who, to this day, nobody knew his name as though it was a secret sealed away and hidden for centuries. Maybe he was a spy, or an FBI agent, coming to expose teenage girls and boys for their search history. 

He looked pointedly at the girls, annoyed to disrupt the middle of his math class.

"Nope." 

"All right then, back to the lesson, I want you to imagine a world in black and white. Bleak and dreary, correct? Now add some colour to it. Olive-green leaves on the trees, and red woodpeckers making a home in its trunk." He snapped a piece of chalk in his hand and coloured in his tree.

"Do you understand a thing he said in the last half hour? I thought this was supposed to be a math class." Annika huffed. 

"What did you write in here? " Lucy's eyes raked over doodles of the teacher, a head too big for his body and eyes popping out of his skull. An alien in a mysterious dark suit with a UFO in the background. The initials of Annika's crush in a heart beside hers, and the crazy plan of how she was going to get out of this place.

"Shh." A girl in the front row turned around and made a show of putting her finger to her lips and rolling her eyes.

"Shhh." Annika mocked the girl in front of her, "Look how smart I am, I'm making sure the teacher knows that I actually give a crap. Screw you." She shook her head and curled her hair around her fingers. 

On the board, the teacher drew a chart beside his chalk tree, his lines waving with the curves of the chalkboard. 

"Math isn't all about the numbers. Forget about the numbers and solutions and the formulas. You don't need any of that. You need to know how to use what's given to you..." 

"I should've transferred out of his class long ago." Lucy looked at the clock, wishing she could make the hands move faster. Just a little bit. She closed up the notebook and gathered up all of her pens, sorting them back into her pencil case in order from lightest to darkest. 

"When are you going?" Lucy said.

"Tomorrow morning. It's either now or never." 

"And I'm guessing 'never' isn't really an option?" Lucy chuckled at how hard-headed her friend was. 

"Now you're talking." The bell rang, signalling that everyone was free to go from  ̶p̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶  school to home, but for Annika, hell and home were interchangeable.