Alexis walked from the classroom to her locker, down the hallway of CastleRidge High. She paused to look at a colorful flier taped to her locker door:

Metal Club seeking drummer. Auditions on the 1st of June. Got what it takes?

We'll find out.

Get your audition tape in Mrs. Jarves's music class after school.

PS. No weeaboo music. No dancing. If you like anything with the word "core" in it, don't waste our time.

Now, where did this come from? It definitely hadn't been there before her last class, which was incidentally her last class of the day. The flier had a decent drawing of a drumkit with floating drumsticks hitting a drum with a green "strike" effect. Alexis peeled off the tape and held the advertisement in her hand, staring in wonder. Perhaps, she thought, this is my chance.

Alexis hadn't been happy with herself lately, and she could have complained about any number of things—her lack of friends, for example, or the fact that she had been repeatedly told that she was a tenth-grader with the fashion sense of a 10 year old—but what kept coming up again and again in her mind was her plainness. There was nothing noteworthy about her. Her hair was boring, her eyes were boring, even here name was boring! And all of these problems had an obvious cause: Her parents. It was all the fault of their genetics and bad naming skills. Brown hair and eyes ran in the family, and her name? Alexis? Bore-ring! That was it, blame absolved. Only that'd have been too easy. She could only blame someone else for her problems for so long before she started to think that, whether or not it was true, just blaming someone else wasn't exactly improving her situation.

Standing there with that flier in her hands, all of the work she'd done convincing herself that her boringness wasn't her fault seemed shallow and childish. That was the old Alexis, though, who never did anything useful. The new Alexis had goals and ambitions, like being a metal drummer. It was perfect too, because metal was her favorite music. Although that was something she'd learned to keep to herself. The people in this school didn't know the first thing about metal, and probably couldn't name one single band. This was her opportunity to mingle with some actual metalheads. In her mounting excitement, optimism made her lose caution. Maybe a certain someone would maybe, possibly think she was cool? She swatted the thought bashfully aside, and it burst into a cloud of nothing. That wasn't gonna happen!

She could hardly manage to input the combination on the lock, she was so eager to get started. She threw the locker door open, sloppily crammed away her materials, snatched out her backpack, slammed the door shut, squeezed the combination lock closed, sent the dial into a spin with a slap of her hand and left it clicking as she rushed down the hallway to meet up with her friend, Isaac.