Chapter 2: 1: Glimpse

I’d be lying if, under this absolutely cool facade of mine, I wasn’t jittering out of my skin.

I’ve never been ‘the new kid in town’ before. Every year of my life until now, I’d been trapped around the same people, playing on the same street, spending nearly every day doing the same things over and over again. Only once, when I was ten, my parents took me on a trip to the coast, and I discovered there was a world outside Sulphur Springs. By the time I was thirteen, I was determined to get out. My town’s name predicted what kind of future lay ahead if I didn’t escape its gravitational pull. Then, just after I turned seventeen, I finally escaped.

You’d think, with five years to prepare for the plunge, I’d be at least a little ready. From day one, I could barely keep my head above water.

The story starts around when my mother decided to send me to live with my sister Amy, and Amy’s mother Samantha, in Garden City. A temporary decision at first, though with time, Sam and Amy made it feel more and more permanent. Not that that was bad—cities are cool and exciting, right? The first few days Sam planned a bunch of trips, taking us all out to the touristy stuff, from a candy shop in town where they let you try making your own ice cream, to day-long hikes to visit waterfalls and cedar forests.

Then, the lack of sleep stacked up, and all the trips became too much. Night was never dark outside my bedroom window since the street lamps outside flipped on at dusk. We did get blackout curtains, but then I was left with the anxiety that awaited me in the dark.

I had anxiety during the day, too. Anytime I wanted to get anywhere without a ride, it had to be on a public bus where random old people would just sit adjacent to you. There was this terrible old guy I’d run into around Sunday at noon who’d clear his throat so loud I could hear him through my headphones, then try to talk to me about my day.

Older adults didn’t seem to have the courtesy or understanding not to bother people with their headphones on.

Amy voiced a few times her worries that the transition from Sulphur Springs to Garden City wasn’t going well for me. With my classical flair, I’d smile back and say that everything wasn’t just fine, it was great.

Fake it ‘til you make it, right?

If putting on a cheery face for my sister wasn’t exhausting enough, there was the inevitable introduction of myself to a host of new peers. In the week leading up to my first day at East Garden High, I went with a proactive approach, beginning with what I could control: my looks. I ditched my Carhartts, traded out boots for kicks, and got my first, clean fade. For the first time, I saw someone my age with green hair at the mall while I was changing out my wardrobe. Inspired, I dyed my hair back the next day.

Asking to fit perfectly on Day 1 of junior year is asking for a lot, but maybe I could blend into the background. Maybe I could be the lone wolf people looked over and forgot about, instead of a sore thumb or a maverick.

My first day went from being forever in the future to literally next morning. I woke up an hour earlier than I had to, and spent so much time slicking my hair back in the mirror, Amy asked if it was falling out.

Fuck, I hope it wasn’t.

Amy volunteered to drive me to school, just for today. With deft automotive maneuvering you’d expect from a car commercial, she zipped through traffic and dropped me off at the curb in front of the school’s entrance—an entrance swarming with students. I gulped.

“Get ‘em, tiger,” she said as she put the car in park. “You got your lunch? Jacket?”

“Careful, sis. Someone might think you’re my mom,” I teased. “And yeah. Mac and Cheese from last night. Side of that apple Sam said I have to eat today or it’ll go bad and then society is gonna collapse or some end of the world scenario.”

Amy punched me hard—she was only five years older than me, but that hasn’t stopped people from mistaking her for a parent. She was one of those young adults who mystically had her shit together when people twice her age could barely keep their heads on their necks. Her 80’s taste in fashion didn’t help.

“Just be careful, little bro,” she said. “I know how scary it is, being the new wolf in school.”

“Hey, I got this.” I gave her my smoothest grin. Hopefully, she didn’t see my lips quiver. “Don’t worry about me. New me, new life. Can’t you tell from the hair? I’m like Toby Maguire in Spiderman 3.”

She smiled at my joke. “If you say so.” One last peck on the cheek before Amy ejected me out of her vehicle and into the wild, pubescent world.

Play it cool. What did cool even look like? I swung my backpack on one shoulder and dove into the crowd, pretending to know where I was going. Wrinkled in my pocket were my locker number and code. Locker 17. Low number meant closer to the front of the school, right?

The lockers near the front entrance started in the hundreds.

Sulphur Springs High didn’t give its students lockable anything, just cubbies. If you had something valuable, it stayed in your car (which most people left unlocked, anyways). So, once I found my locker in this maze of a high school, the dial lock proved a riddle. I wasted valuable time fiddling with it, spinning and respinning it over and over, until it finally unlatched.

“Thank the Moon,” I murmured, and immediately set to dumping out my bag. I’d barely emptied everything into my locker before a face popped past my locker’s open door.

“Oh, hello there,” a girl said. “You must be new. I’m Cheryl Maybrook.”

She was a stark, strawberry redhead, and, unfortunately for me, looked eager for a chit chat. Her skirt and blazer were matching, bright plaid patterns, and she had one of those backpacks in the shape of a cute, goofy cartoon creature from a Disney movie or something.

“Uh… yeah. How’d you know?”

“My locker’s right under yours. 18. I heard 17 got expelled last semester, so I figured I’d get the pleasure of meeting someone new.” Cheryl stuck out her hand. “You are?”

“Collin. Collin Thomson.” I shook her hand. “Sorry, I’ll get out of the way of your locker.”

“Thanks.” She had to crouch to get to her ground-level locker beneath mine. Every locker in the school was organized into two rows, so half the school had a top locker they could easily use, while the other half was stuck trying to push aside other people’s legs to reach a bottom one. Cheryl didn’t seem to mind. She spun her lock’s dial around and popped the door open as fast as I could blink. “You get a tour of East Garden?”

“Not really. I figured I’d dive right in. The layout of my old school’s not so, er, different, anyways.”

“Really? Where’d you come from?” she asked.

“Uh… just, y’know, some town out east. Probably never heard of it.”

To my benefit, the bell buzzed, killing the conversation before I could.

“I should go. Gotta find my first class,” I told her.

“Where’s your first period?”

I fished out another crumpled paper, this time from my bag. I smoothed it out best I could. “English with… Mrs. Lovett?”

“Neat! Me too. Good luck you’ve got someone you already know there, right?” Cheryl winked. “The class is on the second floor. The closest stairs to the entrance are a bottleneck, so follow me to the next one over.”

She didn’t lead as much as towed me along, pushing through the crowd like an ice breaker in the arctic circle. Clots of people clogged the hallways until a teacher came to disperse them. Somehow, despite all of this, we squeezed into our class before half the seats were filled.

“Take your pick,” my new friend said. Everywhere was filling up, minus the front row, which was the last place I wanted to be. I made a move for a back corner—a surreptitious choice—but Cheryl stopped me. “Except for there,” she whispered. “See that kid in the varsity jacket?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s one of Pierson’s packmates. Full name Pier Song Nguyen, but only substitutes make the mistake of calling him that. Trust me when I say that Pierson’s pack doesn’t play nice.” She leaned in closer, and I could smell her fruity mouthwash. “The jock-brain himself is one of the biggest jerks in East Garden. Every semester, he has a new girlfriend—absolute dump-a-holic.”

“How big is his pack?” I wondered.

“Literally the entire lacrosse team and half of track. Someone needs to knock him down a notch. A dozen notches, really.”

Okay then, I’d figure out a second best place to sit. As I decided, someone bumped into Cheryl, who then bumped into me.

“Move it, chipmunk.”

Cheryl turned to snarl—her round, sweet face turned nasty quick. The boy who bumped her wasn’t phased. Instead, he taunted her with a chuckle, then flicked his gray eyes to me. The way they lit up, with a curiously raised brow, told me the bad news. Like Cheryl, he must have realized I was new.

Before anyone could bump into us, Cheryl pulled me into a seat by the window, close to the front, and away from trouble.

"Speaking of Pierson," she muttered to me under her breath. I glanced at the rude dude who was now sitting in the back corner, flanked now by two of his pack. "Looks like the wad's here himself."

“At least he’s far away,” I assured her.

“A mile’s not far enough,” someone said behind us. Cheryl turned, recognizing our back neighbor, who was wearing some nerdy, inside-joke shirt with a science fiction, trashcan-shaped robot.

“Yeah, no duh,” she responded. Whoever the guy was, Cheryl clearly knew him, and they chatted up a storm. While they carried on, I lined up my textbooks on the corner of my desk, pretending to be absorbed by the need to get their spines perfectly aligned.

After the bell rang and the last straggler made it to the room, the teacher—who I had somehow missed sitting behind her desk—stood up and tapped the board.

“Alright, class. I see some familiar faces and some new ones. If you haven’t had me for English before, my name is Mrs. Lovett…” She pointed to where her name was chalked on the board, then began outlining a bullet list of things beneath it. “Homeroom is the first fifteen minutes of your schedule. Since our English class starts directly after, there won’t be a break before homeroom and first period…”

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I had to lean past the student in front of me to make out what she was writing down. Not that his head was big, he was just inconveniently placed smack dab in the middle of my field of view. My elbow bumped against Cheryl’s as I invaded her space. She shot me a glare.

“Sorry, can’t see,” I quietly apologized.

“Then ask him to move,” she responded under her breath.

“It’s rude,” I sheepishly mouthed back.

She elbowed me in the ribs to do it anyways. Sighing, I leaned forward and gently patted my neighbor on the shoulder. When he turned his head, my words froze in my throat.

I knew him from. I didn’t know from where, but somewhere.

C’mon, Collin, don’t be stupid, I told myself. Stop staring. Just ask the thing.

“Your head’s, uh, blocking my view. Could you move?” I blurted. Too… loudly. Someone nearby laughed. Stupidly, I gulped.

 

???? | ???? | ????

 

Idiot, idiot, idiot. For the rest of the period, I couldn’t pay attention to the teacher, caught up in the fallout of my embarrassment.

The mixed emotions on his face, changing from startled, to confused, to annoyed and finally dismissive, made me wonder if he thought I was an idiot, too. His cold gaze had pierced through me like I was being jabbed by icicles. Still, he complied, and with a grudging motion, moved his chair slightly to the left to give me a full view of the board.

Maybe he wasn’t, like, mean or anything, and just had the kind of default expression on his face the same way people unintentionally had a resting bitch face. The edges of his thin lips seemed naturally down turned, and I couldn’t help but notice how his top lip was thicker than his bottom one. Then there were his eyes that were a startling blue, somewhere between winter sky and a raspberry Icee, that could kill the words right before they left your throat.

Unfortunately, I survived the rest of English. Awkwardly, but still alive. The bell couldn’t have rung sooner.

“What’s your second period?” I asked Cheryl as we packed our bags. Over the course of an hour, my defensive guard towards her warmness had worn down to a clingy dependency on her presence.

“Art,” she answered cheerfully. “You?”

“Trig.”

“Ew. My condolences. Best of luck!”

After we parted, I trudged to my mathematic condemnation. Unlike English, we weren’t seated in rows, and our desks were organized into four-person pods. The teacher’s first order of business was making us take pastel colored cuts of construction paper and turn them into flimsy name plaques.

Inadvertently, I ended up seated back to back with the boy from English class that had blocked my view, close enough that if we both got out of our chairs at the same time we’d slam them into each other. Worse, whenever we had to look at the backboard, I had to turn my seat and lean past him again.

Though his eyes caught me off guard last period, they weren’t the strangest thing about him. His hair was stark white, whispy down to the nape of his neck. An intrusive part of me wanted to reach out and touch it—the strands looked like they had the texture of silk, inviting me to run my fingertips through them like the irresistible, soft fur of a feline that had a nasty temper (the cutest cats were always the most deadly). The smell of vanilla wafted off of his skin, probably from a shampoo or hand lotion.

When the bell rang, I realized I hadn’t figured out his name yet. By the time I gathered my stuff, he was already gone.

 

???? | ???? | ????

 

Third period wasn’t an improvement in my schedule—gym. The gym lockers were tinier than their hallway brethren, with grates on all sides that aired out everyone’s sneakers and BO. My locker was so narrow, I could barely cram my school bag into it.

“Need help?” someone behind me chuckled.

I was too determined to squeeze my stuff in to spare a glance. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask about your looks.”

That made me turn around.

To my misfortune, it was that intimidating kid from first period that Cheryl warned me about, who’d pushed her aside and given me the uncomfortable stare-down. Pierson. Lazily, he leaned on the lockers beside me as if lounging upright was a thing, close enough that I could not only smell his deodorant but identify the brand. The height difference between us wasn’t dramatic, maybe by an inch or two. Still, it was enough to leverage against me.

“Funny,” I frowned. “Unless you can make these flute lockers wider, I don’t think you can help.”

“I could,” he teased. “But that would be destroying school property. Grounds are off limits for that kind of behavior. Hey, that looks like some serious bite marks on your shoulder there. You a tough guy?”

“I need to finish changing,” I said, pulling on my shirt quickly.

“Well, if you ever need a bigger place for all your stuff, athletes get bigger lockers in their own room. Showers, too. You play sports at your old dig?”

“Used to play rugby,” I shortly answered. “Quit after the first concussion.”

“Nice. Hey, I captain the lacrosse team. We could use a player or two to replace the seniors we lost,” the bully smoothly offered. “Course, if you’re scared of getting back into contact sports, the track team could use some spare bodies.”

“I’m not a great runner.”

“There’s always JV.” After a minute, tapping the upper row of lockers with his fingertips, he relented. “See you in the field, newbie.”

The gym teacher waited for us outside on the track. His name was Coach—literally, Mr. Coach, like the bag brand. A whistle hung around his neck and he wore a classy, black-and-white referee shirt. Like a stereotypical PE instructor in their late 40s, he had a beer belly poking out from his shirt, and a coffee thermos that didn’t look as if it had been washed since Tom Brady started his NFL career.

We lined up as he called us by our last names. When my name was mentioned, almost everyone paused their whispered side conversations to size me up.

Just normal high schooler behavior.

“We’ll do some cardio for today,” the gym teacher announced. “Warm up stretches first. Toe touches. Knees straight.”

I worried that for the rest of the period, I’d have to deal with more of Pierson. Instead, he was too busy rallying dude bros to even spare me a look. When he wasn’t kicking it with his like-minded crowd, he was teasing girls with side comments and ‘accidental’ bumps. Instead of being offended at his intrusion, some of the girls swooned in response. He had that sort of charm where what would have been bullying came off as a twisted form of flirting.

“Oops, didn’t see you there,” he said to a girl at one point. “Hard not to trip on those long legs of yours. You play basketball? No? You must be a cheerleader, then.”

The more I watched, the more spiteful I got. The guy had what most people wanted but never got: good looks and a comfortable spot in the limelight. Of course he was an alpha. How could he be anything else?

After stretches, we ran laps on the track for the rest of period. I turned off my mind and focused on the pounding of my feet on polyurethane. East Garden High’s main field was on high enough of a hill, wind swept up its side and carried off the heat rolling off my back and shoulders. It took the rest of my thoughts with it.

The only thing that broke my running groove was the gym teacher’s whistle. We regathered, some of us sweaty and panting, others looking like they hadn’t bothered raising their speed more than a trot. Tomorrow, Mr. Coach told us, we could expect to learn the rules of pickleball, and then dismissed us to change back to our street clothes.

As I changed in the locker room, I realized the mistake of wearing a white shirt on my first day; my perspiration was going to leave visible armpit stains. Disgusted, I pulled at my sleeves and waved my arms around to try and air-dry the sweat faster.

“Need a stick?” Pierson was stationed beside my locker again, bouncing deodorant in his hand, occasionally flipping it like a pinwheel in the air. “I don’t mind sharing.”

Yeah, uh, no flipping way.

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