Prologue (REVISED...again)
Me of All People
By: Right Away
Prologue
"Ugh. I don't want to do this."
I clearly remember myself saying that with great dismay when I was handed this journal that I'm writing in now. As of now, writing in the small notebook hadn't been as bad as I had expected. Although know I have a plethora of questions. Mostly about the personality degrading, soul crushing cliched house of blues that is high school. At least that's the adjectives that Keith used.
Oh, who am I asking exactly? Well anyone who will listen, be it a jock, loner, outcast, cool kid, rebel, nerd, geek, or any other trope I can steal from a certain movie that I'm not going to mention because Mrs. Crawyer, my new English teacher, told me that I had to cite my sources and I was too lazy to put that much effort in a personal note.
Let me get back on topic. Why am I asking exactly? Why should I bore you with my babbling babble, or my bantering banter? Well I am new here after all, with only stories from a friend to tell me what this place is like. He's got a year of experience here, so I took his word for it. I was however, starting to doubt Keith's wisdom. Now that I look back on it, Keith's wisdom seemed more biased and one sided now that I've experienced it for myself even just for one day.
Only one day and my opinion was changed. That is saying something. Here's an example.
The bell for third period rings and the halls flood again. I'm looking at my schedule sheet and I round the corner into f-hall and then it happened. I hit something, something that made me fall down on my backside and cause my bag to fall from my shoulder.
I, of course, heard some stifled laughs as soon as I hit the ground. That fact that they were stifled meant that whoever was laughing wanted to spare me at least some of the humiliation... I think. Either way, the laughs were expected. Something funny happens so people laugh.
What I didn't expect was a hand being held out in front of me. It had turned out that I'd bumped into a big guy wearing a letterman with patches of footballs and a kangaroo on the sleeves. Don't ask me why a high school in Texas has a kangaroo for it's mascot.
After a few seconds I took the hand and was pulled up, apparently with little to no effort on letterman guy's part. After being blindsided physically, what he said next blindsided me on a different front.
"My bad, man." He then proceeded to pound his fist against my hand which was still awkwardly open. He payed my awkwardness no mind as he brushed some dirt off my left shoulder.
What! No "watch where you're going" or some other form of emotional bombardment? To be honest I couldn't tell if he was faking or actually sincere.
I then noticed my bag come into view and a light pale hand holding it. A short girl with red hair was holding my bag out to me, looking up at me with green eyes expecting me to take it.
After another few seconds of awkwardness, letterman guy's attention went from me to behind me and walked over to a group of other guys wearing similar lettermans, whom I presumed to be his friends.
Red haired girl watched letterman guy leave and was still holding out my bag. I finally got my senses together and took the bag from her. She then turned around and followed letterman guy over to the group at the end of the hall.
Why this was such a big shock to me is that the eighth grade students of my class weren't exactly the friendliest people that I had the pleasure of knowing. Hard shoves in the hallway and a few insults muttered quietly so the teachers wouldn't hear were common occurrences during my eighth grade year. It's all behind me now... so it seems.
Either way I'm really starting to like it here. Keith can be really pessimistic about these kinds of things. I am really looking forwa-
~snap~
The noise caused me to look up from my notebook, diary, journal, thing and bring me back to seventh period. "World History" was written on the board at the front of the room, along our teacher's name that I am not going to try and pronounce in fear of an accidental profanity.
I had a good view of the classroom due to where the seating chart had graciously placed me, middle of the back row. Doctor Chives had advised me to keep a journal of sorts to help me ease in to the new school environment.
He should've touched on what writing utensils to use so this situation wouldn't happen
The situation being having to use an obnoxiously loud pencil sharpener because I for some reason hadn't thought to bring pens, which I will definitely start using soon.
“You just had to break didn’t you. You couldn't have lasted a few more seconds?” I questioned the inanimate, lifeless pencil with genuine anger.
That’s when I felt it. That awkward pressure that falls on you when you feel like someones looking at you. Looking to my left, I found the boy sitting next to me had been doing the same thing when I walked in here. Sleeping.
I then turned to my right and was met with a pair of familiar green eyes looking back at me.
The red haired girl from earlier had taken the seat that was empty at the beginning of the period. I didn't even notice her come in. She was staring at me with a blank expression and one eyebrow raised.
My eyes darted between her and my pencil as I tried to come up with some sort of explanation.
“M-my pencil, uh… broke," I said quietly.
She didn't say anything, she just returned to her notes. At least she’s not looking at me anymore. I took a peek at her notes out of curiosity to only see a bunch of algebraic equations. Long and synthetic division with fractions over 'x' appeared to be the subject.
I examined the strange arrangement of numbers and letters that always went over my head, out the window, and into a garbage can that was left outside for some reason.
As she worked through an equation I wondered why she was taking algebra notes in World History class. Kind of odd, that and also considering that that the equations she was working on looked kind of advanced compared to my math homework.
Red haired girl seemed to have finished her equation. The answer being 5x-17 with a remainder of 3/x-3... somehow. She then skipped a line and began to write down what I assumed to be the start of another equation.
I decided to leave her notes be and turn my attention back to the pencil that interrupted my own note taking. I would have turned around in my chair to sharpen my pencil that sat on the window sill behind me, if not for what I saw in my peripheral vision. Red haired girl had stopped writing, and it looked like she stopped only after one short line.
What ever caused her to stop had somehow caught my attention. Instead of assuming that she stopped to listen to the lecture on classroom rules and regulations like a normal person, I of course had to figure out what had caused her to cease her note taking.
I looked over to her notebook paper and read her last line of words in my head. They read, "It's easy to listen to a lecture and do algebra when you're a multitasker."
"..."
I read it again, and a third time to be sure I read what I had read correctly. After the third time I looked up to see with her eyebrow raised again, this time with a small smirk. Her smirk seemed to grow at the same rate as my blushing did, which didn't help at all.
She turned back to her notebook and wrote something else down. This time I kept my eyes glued to my desk, not wanting to pry in her business and embarrass myself further. My view of the desk was disrupted as she put her notebook and pen on my desk. Now that the notebook was placed directly in my field of vision, I decided to read what red haired girl had written.
"My eyes are hazel by the way, but green was close."
At least my handwriting is legible. Specifically, the portions of my notes that feature her in them. I couldn't help but chuckle at the words she wrote. At least her sense of humor helped quell the embarrassment I was currently putting myself under. I grabbed the pen and wrote a response one line space down from her last.
"Name is William."
I picked up her notebook and pen and placed it back on her desk. She then wrote something down and placed it back on my desk.
"Caitlyn. Has more of a ring to it than red haired girl, don't you think?"
The color red was a color that I was getting to know all too well, a large amount of it appearing on my face. Caitlyn was seeming to enjoy my turmoil more and more as the history class went on. She sure had a sense of humor, one that I quickly caught on to.
"About earlier..." I heard her say. It sounded like she was starting to go into an apology of sorts. I put together that she was apologizing for the little collision that I and letterman guy had in f-hall.
I raised up my hand as I said, "No need. It was an accident. Letterman guy even apologized for it."
"Letterman guy?" Caitlyn said quietly. She bore a look that looked like she was deep in thought, thinking about something. Something that she was so close to putting together. This look was soon replaced with one of realization.
"Oh! You mean Daryl." She paused for bit and rolled her eyes. "I keep telling him that he needs to watch where he's going. Not everyone is as big as him."
"Friend of yours?" I asked.
"He's my older brother," she rather flatly.
Sensing the tension in her voice, I did my best to turn things around... at least for her brother.
"I'm sure he didn't mean it. I wasn't exactly looking where I was going either. Besides, he apologized and even helped me up. He seemed like a nice guy." I said trying to improve the image Caitlyn was painting of her brother. With my experience limited to a minor collision in f-hall, I had little to work on.
"Eh, I guess you're right," Caitlyn said. Her mood had clearly softened and she seemed much happier. "Daryl might be a bit of a dunderhead, but he's still my brother all the same."
Seeing that she was in a better mood, I grabbed my pencil and turned around in my chair to face the pencil sharpener that rested on the window sill. Just as I was about to sharpen my broken pencil, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Turning back to Caitlyn, I saw that she was holding out her pen to me. "Keep it," she said. "More reliable than a pencil."
"Y-yeah," I said stuttering a little bit. Taking the pen in my hand I clicked it a few times before using it to write another sentence in my journal, diary, notebook thingy.
-A Few Years Later-
"High school isn't as bad as most people think," a purple alicorn read to herself quietly. The notebook she was reading had a purple aura surrounding it as she held it in her magical grasp. The writing looked like it was written fast and was a little sloppy. The E's looked like C's if not inspected closely, among other things.
"Hey Twilight," the alicorn heard behind her. She quickly put the journal back in the cardboard box she had found it in, next to the desk with those black boxes on top of it. Turning around, she saw a rainbow maned pegasus flying in the door way.
"Come on, Twilight. William's gonna show us our rooms," the pegasus said before flying back into the main room.
After the pegasus left, the purple alicorn closed the box and straightened it like it was before. As she began to walk away, she looked back at the box. She noticed that it had black writing on it that read "HS Stuff". She almost mistook one of the F's for a T, and the S's looked like 5's. Ignoring the penmanship, she made a note to memorize the box that contained the journal. She had a horrible feeling in her stomach for invading William's privacy like this, but something wasn't right.
The way William wrote and acted as described in the writings she found were much different than how he had acted before her not a few moments ago. Something was up, something that he was keeping from her and her friends. She didn't like to pry into such things, but seeing as the situation deemed him a... necessary friend to have, she believed it was justified.
Didn't help with the guilty feeling of snooping through his things though.
