To puke or not to puke, that was the question.

Daniella fled the bathroom.

For a little while, all she could do was lie on the floor and wait for the Pepto-Bismol that she had taken on her arrival to kick in. Eventually, she was able to sit up and take in her surroundings. It was only the break room, but it helped that she knew the layout so well.

There were the two worn-out chairs covered in a floral print that had to have been the ugliest fabric Daniella had ever seen. She stared at the chairs, willing the spinning that was overtaking her head to stop.

After a few minutes of sitting, Daniella crawled over to the mini fridge that Jo stashed under her desk. It was full of Diet Snapple and Big Red. But Daniella would not be deterred by Jo’s horrendous taste in beverages. She was digging toward the back, hopeful. Daniella pulled back a few red cans and tan bottles until she saw the glimmer of purple.

Saints be praised.

There it was—a lone can of grape soda. Daniella cracked it open with a satisfying pop and reveled in the overly carbonated sugar as she took her first sip. If anything was going to bring her back, it was going to be this purple stuff.

Daniella belched properly in the empty room and—Oh my God—she could finally sit up and breathe without feeling like the world was going to end. Like the world was spinning out into eternity. It was one thing to know that the planet was hurtling thousands of miles an hour through space and infinitely spinning. It was another to have your body feel like it was hurtling thousands of miles an hour through space and she would keel over before the spinning stopped.

Daniella drank some more soda and, for a moment, believed that there was some good in the world. The next thing Daniella did was pull her bag down out of her locker, get out her phone, and switch from her personal account to her poetry account.

Daniella never left her poetry account open—ever.

Same way she didn’t let anyone see her notebook or touch her phone. Her safeguards were all in place for a reason. They were why she’d never gotten caught writing her poetry by anyone in her life. Not even her mother. Her personal account was DaniellaDaze, which was innocuous and perfect and what everyone would think her handle ought to be. It was the cool-girl-that-smokes-weed-and-drives-muscle-cars identity that she had willingly carved out for herself to get through the four years of hell that high school was. But her poetry account was something else.