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artificialqueens · 8 years ago

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Heal me, baby. (Biadore) Ch 1- Miri

AN: So this is the first fanfiction I’ve ever posted and I’m really nervous about the feedback, and if it’ll even get any feedback at all haha. Whether it’s good or bad, I’ll learn from it so hit me with it! The story is about Adore having a mental illness, PTSD from her last boyfriend, and maybe Bianca will help her get back on her feet again, help her feel again. I don’t know how often I’ll update it since I work and study but expect either twice a week (maybe more) if I’m not drowning, or once a week if I am.

English is NOT my native language, I’m Swedish/Palestinian so if any of the grammar’s off or something, putting that in the feedback will be great and also good for you guys, since y’all are reading it :’))) xxx

TW: mentioning about self-harm (only briefly, but I’m putting a warning just to be sure) TW: mentioning intimate partner violence. Nothing detailed, but again putting a warning just to be sure.

Adore took a minute in front of her locker to gather herself, to breathe and remember that she only had one more class before her day was finished. Today her class had a new teacher, they had driven their last teacher nuts and made her quit. Adore was kind of excited to see a new face in school, every day was just same old same old.

She took her history book and her notebook before closing her locker. When she turned around, Courtney was standing in front of her texting. ”Shall we…. Go…?”, she said sounding very distracted. Adore snapped her fingers to get Courtney’s attention and nodded. ”Hello, earth to Court. Yes we start in like a minute, we have to hurry.”. Courtney nodded and put the phone down before almost running to class.

They took their regular seats in the back of the classroom right behind Trixie and Katya. ”Well look at you today, Adore. Lookin’ fierce”, Katya said with a smile. Adore blew her a kiss before sitting down. ”If all of you could just shut up and not fuck this teacher up, I’d really appreciate it. Some of us are actually trying to learn stuff”, they heard Tatianna saying in the front. Courtney looked at Adore and did her best to try not to giggle. All their thoughts were interrupted by the door in the classroom slamming shut. In front of the door stood, what Adore assumed to be, their teacher. She wore high heels and a long dress that was cut so that you could see her legs, she wore stockings that made her legs look glowing and her gown was blue and simply to die for. Adore noticed her harsh make-up, with a very defined white line under her eyes and her bright red lips. She looked different from their class. Sure, they had Trixie, but Trixie was different. She was more surreal looking; their teacher was on the fine line of looking surreal and looking like a woman. The teacher walked to the front desk and dropped her books on the desk before looking at the class.

”My name is Bianca Del Rio, I’ll respond to Miss Del Rio only. It’s a matter of respect. If you respect me, I’ll respect you. I have patience but it’ll easily run out and I won’t be the one suffering, you will. Disturb the class, and you’re out. Same goes if you’re disturbing me but I’ll let you know before I throw ya ass out”, she said and took a breath. The class was in a state of shock. Going from a teacher that couldn’t even say ”please be quiet”, to this?

”Have I made myself clear?”, Miss Del Rio asked. The class nodded and their teacher started looking for a list of the names. ”When I call out your name, yell whatever you want, just make me understand that you’re that person”. She looked at the paper before starting.

”Courtney Act”, she called out. Courtney had gotten on her phone and didn’t notice Miss Del Rio talking. Everyone was looking at Courtney who had her eyes focused on her phone. Adore nudged her. She gave her a meaning look and Adore just looked back at their teacher that was currently staring at Court.

”Take your time, queen. We’re all here just for you”, she gave her a sarcastic smile as she said it. Courtney was shook. ”I’m here”, she mumbled. ”Apparently”, Miss Del Rio said back and wrote a green dot on her name on the paper. Then she continued. ”Willam”, Willam raised her hand and said yes.

”Violet”

“Tatianna”

“Gia”

”Adore”

Adore raised her hand and said yes and noticed that their teacher was staring at her wrist. Her sleeve had rolled down and all her scars were showing. She panicked and took her hand down and rolled her sleeve down.

”Adore, I’d like to talk to you after class”, Miss Del Rio said before marking her name with a green dot. Adore looked over at Courtney that had gotten back on her phone and sighed. ”Can you take a break for one minute, I’m freaking out. What if she gets me admitted somewhere, she saw my scars”, Adore whispered. Courtney locked her phone and looked at Adore.

”I’m sure she won’t do that, take it easy.”

Adore sighed again. Very reassuring, Court.

The new teacher went on with the list and when she was done she got on with the lecture. They were talking about the second world war and the subject was heavy and class stayed silent and listened when Miss Del Rio was talking. After she was done talking, they watched an hour-long documentary before the bell went off and the entire class packed their stuff and got up. Adore had hoped that Miss Del Rio had forgotten that she’d asked Adore to stay after class so she gathered her books and pen and got up to walk outside.

“Adore Delano, I asked you to stay after class”, she heard her teacher say right before she exited the room. She halted and walked back to the front desk. She took a chair from one of the nearby tables and sat across her teacher.

“Listen, kid. I saw the fresh scars on your arm and I know it’s none of my business but, believe or not, I do really care about all of you. If there’s anything I can do for you, please tell me. Are you talking to anyone?”, Miss Del Rio looked truly concerned. Adore tried to smile. She usually hated when people would interfere with her personal life and ask questions but she really didn’t mind this.

She nodded. “I’m currently seeing the school psychologist, and that’s enough for me. At least for now. There’s really nothing for you to do. It just is what it is. But thank you, Miss Del Rio”.

Her teacher started packing her things. “That’s great. I heard Michelle’s supposed to be a good school psychologist, I haven’t gotten the chance to speak to her yet. Also, you may call me Bianca when it’s just you and me. When I’m talking personal stuff with the students, it might feel distant to refer to me as Miss Del Rio”, she smiled towards Adore and Adore returned the smile.

She had an appointment with Michelle in 2 minutes and knew she needed to probably run to her meeting since their school was huge. She put the chair back at the table and put her books under her arm and walked Bianca out of the classroom. They waved goodbye before parting and Adore starting walking as fast as she could to Michelle’s office in the end of the building.

When she got the door of her office he took a second to catch her breath before knocking on the door, harder than she anticipated. She opened and found the back of Michelle’s chair facing her. She smiled.

“I’ve been expecting you, oh late one”, she heard Michelle say in a deep voice while turning her chair to face her with a smile. Adore looked at her clock. She was one minute late. “Bitch, I’m usually way more late than this. It’s only a minute past 3”. She laughed and nodded while gesturing for Adore to sit down in front of her. She put her books on Michelle’s desk before sitting down and taking a deep breath.

“Tell me. How’s your week been?”, Michelle asked. Adore looked at her arms and sighed.

“I’ve been cutting more”, she said with shame in her voice. “Did anything happen or were there bad thoughts that clouded your mind again”, Michelle asked.

She nodded. “The latter. More memories are coming back, I don’t think I really forgot them I just think I’ve been repressing them. Trying not to remember them to shield myself from the pain but it’s just hard. It hasn’t helped. I still have problems with people touching me, especially men. Which is a huge fucking issue since I go to drag school and the building I’m in is specifically for drag queens.”, she felt tears rushing down her face and Michelle took a deep breath before she replied.

“Darling. This is going to be hard, what that man did to you when you were at your most vulnerable state is absolutely disgusting. It’s going to take time to repair from this, it might take years, who knows. It’s different for each person going through this. You must accept your limits and not push yourself to touch people, to be intimate with other people. You are not insane, no one thinks you’re insane. You feel damaged and that’s okay right now. That might be the truth, but that does not mean that you’re not going to heal”, she said and reached her hand out for her. Adore took her hand and wiped away tears with her free hand. Michelle’s thumb was rubbing the back of Adores hand.

“Does this feel okay?”, she asked and continued. Adore sniffled and nodded. She had gotten to know Michelle and had worked her way up from not wanting to touch her at all to holding her hand.

Adore knew she had a long way to go still. About 5 months ago, she had gotten raped twice by her boyfriend before she told Michelle that helped her work up the courage to break up with him, she then got brutally beaten and got help from Michelle to report him. She still suffered from the incident. She knew she had some form of light PTSD, she had nightmares some nights and got flashbacks at times, she used to feel nauseas whenever someone would touch her but she had gotten better at that, she had more of a problem with sleeping with people. She had severe intimacy issues and got afraid every time someone expressed affection towards her.

“You’re making progress, baby”, Michelle said and drew her hand back and relaxed in her chair. “Now tell me something good that has happened”. Adore smiled.

“Well… There is this new teacher. We had her for the first time today and I really liked her. I know It’s really inappropriate for me to say but she’s really cute. She has dimples. I haven’t gotten the chance to see her out of drag, but my stomach kind of fluttered when I saw her. I haven’t gotten that feeling ever before. I finally understand why they call it butterflies. It kind of felt like it”, Adore blushed as she was telling Michelle.

Michelle smiled. “Well, maybe it’s not ideal since she is your teacher but you’re also in college and you only have her for one semester since history isn’t your major. So never say never? Right now, I’d say hold on to that feeling. You’re moving forward, you’re starting to feel something for someone again. That’s only positive”.

Adore closed eyes and for a second imagined her and Bianca holding hands. She wanted to get to know her.

#adore delano #courtney act #heal me baby #miri #biadore #college au #rpdr fanfiction #bianca del rio #lesbian au

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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Trapped between Israel and Hamas, Gaza’s wasted generation is going nowhere

By William Booth and Hazem Balousha, Washington Post, August 6, 2017

They are the Hamas generation, raised under the firm hand of an Islamist militant movement. They are the survivors of three wars with Israel and a siege who find themselves as young adults going absolutely nowhere.

In many circles in Gaza, it is hard to find anyone in their 20s with real employment, with a monthly salary.

They call themselves a wasted generation.

Ten years after Hamas seized control of Gaza, the economy in the seaside strip of 2 million has been strangled by incompetence, war and blockade.

Gaza today lives off its wits and the recycled scraps donated by foreign governments. Seven in 10 people rely on humanitarian aid.

Young people say they are bored out of their minds.

They worry that too many of their friends are gobbling drugs, not drugs to experience ecstasy but pills used to tranquilize animals, smuggled across Sinai. They dose on Tramadol and smoke hashish. They numb.

Hamas has recently stepped up executions of drug traffickers.

Freedoms to express oneself are circumscribed. But the young people speak, a little bit. They say their leaders have failed them--and that the Israelis and Egyptians are crushing them.

Why not revolt? They laugh. It is very hard to vote the current government out--there are no elections.

“To be honest with you, we do nothing,” said Bilal Abusalah, 24, who trained to be a nurse but sometimes sells women’s clothing.

He has cool jeans, a Facebook page, a mobile phone and no money.

He and his friends get by with odd jobs, a few hours here and there. They worked at cafes during the busy evenings of Ramadan in June. They will help an uncle in his shoe shop as the school year approaches in August. They make $10 a day at these kinds of jobs, a few coins for coffee and cigarettes.

“We are the generation that waits,” Abusalah said.

Reporters asked a 25-year-old college graduate, who got his degree in public relations, what he did for a living.

He answered, “I stare into space.”

Raw sewage washes onto the beaches. The water looks blue at the horizon, where Israeli gunboats lurk, enforcing a six-mile blockade. But the surf line is a foamy brown.

The rappers of Gaza see this as a metaphor. They are literally trapped in their own excrement.

Most young people in Gaza have not been out, either through Israel, which is almost impossible, or through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been mostly closed for the past four years.

Electricity service is down to four hours a day. The young activists in the refugee camps who dared in January to protest power cuts? They were hustled off to jail.

In the dusty gray cement-colored world of Gaza, now sputtering along on Chinese solar panels and Egyptian diesel, young people spend their days, day after day, playing with their phones, their worlds reduced to palm-size screens, to YouTube videos and endless chat.

Unemployment for Gaza’s young adults hovers around 60 percent. This is not just a dull World Bank number. This is a stunning number, the highest in the Middle East and among the worst rates in the world.

Think-tank scholars warn that Egypt’s youth unemployment rate of 30 percent is “a ticking time bomb.” In Gaza, the jobless rate for young people is double that.

The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says what happens in Gaza is all the fault of Hamas, a terrorist organization. Hamas leaders traditionally blame the Israeli blockade for their problems. Gaza is allowed no seaport, no airport and limited exports, mostly fruits and vegetables, alongside some furniture and textiles. Lately the pressure on the strip has only gotten worse, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently slashed payments for Gaza’s electricity, to squeeze people to reject Hamas.

Gaza’s young people describe their lives as a kind of sick experiment.

The literacy rate in Gaza is 96.8 percent, higher than in the West Bank. The “Palestinian engineer” was once the gold standard in the Middle East. In the past, immigration was the door to life. That door has slammed shut. Few get out of Gaza these days.

Yet the universities of Gaza are still pumping out graduates by the thousands, even though the least likely person to find work in Gaza today is a college graduate, especially a woman.

The most recent surveys reveal that half of the Gaza population would leave the enclave if given the chance.

“I don’t believe it,” said Mohammad Humaed, 24, who studied cinema at a university but works a couple of nights a week at a coffee shop in a refugee camp. “All the young people would leave.”

Economists use the term ”de-development” to describe what is happening.

Young people in Gaza have a joke to say the same thing.

They say their unemployed friends “are driving the mattress,” meaning they spend their daylight hours sprawled in bed.

Two years ago, the United Nations warned that Gaza could become “unlivable” by 2020. U.N. officials recently said they had been overly optimistic: The place could collapse next year.

This is the generation that grew up immersed in the rhetoric of the Hamas version of the Palestinian resistance, a moralistic message of piety and opposition to Israel hammered home in Hamas-controlled mosques and military-style summer camps for children and teens, who were taught first aid and how to throw a grenade.

But in many interviews, in their torn-just-so jeans and fresh white sneakers, Gaza’s young people today say they would rather fight for a job in Tel Aviv than fight Israelis.

“If the borders were open, I’d work in Israel in a minute. I got absolutely no problem with that. Everybody would work in Israel,” said Iyad Abu Heweila, 24, who graduated with a degree in English education two years ago but now spends his days hanging out.

“I have no achievements,” he said.

Heweila asked if he could make a confession.

“I know it’s bad, but sometimes I wonder, if there’s another war with Israel, maybe there would be work for translators?” Heweila asked.

“That is sick, I know. I tell you this to show how desperate we feel,” he said. “I want a job. I want money. I want to start my life.”

This summer the nights are inky dark, now that power service has been reduced to three or four hours a day.

Every evening a group of friends gather on a rooftop. They sit on cheap plastic chairs or pieces of cement block. It is cooler up there. The night sea breeze rattles the fronds of date palms, and you can hear some Hamas official on a radio program playing in a nearby apartment. Nobody on the roof pays any attention.

Asked what he did that day, Ahmed Abu Duhair, 25, said he slept until late afternoon.

He lives for the night. “Just talking, laughing, smoking on the roof to make us a little bit happy before we die,” Duhair said.

“We are closer than brothers,” he explained, as they passed the water pipe around and took deep huffs of apple-spiced tobacco. “We’re not lazy guys. We’ve been working since we were kids.”

They began to tell stories about their first jobs, selling cigarette lighters in traffic, helping vendors at the market. Asked how old they were then, they answered they were 8 or 9 or 10.

They were envious of their friend Tamer al-Bana, 23, the only one among them who was married. Bana has two young children and a third on the way. He had to borrow $7,000 from a relative to wed, a debt that would take him years to pay off.

If the young men on the roof are desperate, so too are college graduates. Mona Abu Shawareb, 24, graduated with a degree in psychology a year ago but hasn’t gotten her diploma yet because she owes the university money.

Shawareb tries hard to keep busy. She takes free English classes at a Turkish charity; she volunteers at an organization that works with street youth; she did an internship with the U.N. refugee agency and learned Microsoft Word and Excel.

But like many unemployed young people here, she lives on the Internet, feeding friends and followers a stream of updates on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Snapchat.

Like most women in Gaza, Shawareb dresses conservatively when she leaves the house. But she confessed that when she looks at the Internet and sees women in the West running in athletic clothes, “I feel envious,” she said. “I want to jog.”

Mohammad al-Rayyas, 25, said his heart aches for Cairo, where he received a degree in accounting. In the two years he’s been back home in Gaza, his life has stalled.

“It is more than boring,” he said, struggling to find the words. “It is very slow. The time. It seems different here.”

He has tried to find work in his field--at businesses, banks, international aid agencies. No luck. “No wasta. You know what wasta is?”

It is an Arabic word that, loosely translated, means connections or clout, and it often underscores a system plagued by corruption or nepotism.

Rayyas is unique among his contemporaries. He’s traveled, he’s gotten a taste, he’s lived abroad.

It is a cliche to call Gaza an open-air prison, but to many people it feels not only as if there is no way out, but also that the walls are closing in.

Gaza is just 24 miles long on the coastline--less than the length of a marathon. At its narrowest it is just four miles, an hour’s walk.

The enclave is surrounded by Israeli perimeter fence, bristling with cameras, watch towers and remote-controlled machine guns. On the Egyptian border, once honeycombed with Hamas smuggling tunnels, there is now a broad buffer zone, scraped clean by bulldozers, as forbidding as a no man’s land.

And the sea? Gaza fishermen are blocked by Israeli gunboats and forbidden to venture beyond six miles. For young people, the sea that once brought relief is now so polluted by untreated human waste that the Health Ministry has warned bathers to stay away.

#Gaza #Hamas #Palestinians

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