"What the hell, Ali! You're going to be late for school!" Jack Warden yelled at his 18-year-old son, Alian Warden. It wasn't a new thing for Ali. His dad had been yelling at him nonstop ever since his mother signed the divorce papers four weeks ago and took custody of Regee, his dog and best friend.
He had done a lot of thinking in those weeks and still didn't understand why they got a divorce. He never saw them fight or yell at each other. His mother was never the type to yell when she was mad. She would remain quiet for a day or two and then start talking again like nothing was up.
It was probably why he never heard their banter.
His mother always told him stuff, and she never mentioned having problems with his father. He thought of asking his father what happened, but he was either too busy yelling at him or sleeping or crying.
When his father told him they were moving to Indiana to start a new life two weeks after the divorce, it was even more shocking than his mother's leaving.
"What about my school and everyone I know, Pa?" Ali had asked, "You realize I just started my senior year? I can't just leave."
"I don't care about your school, Ali," his father replied, "…and everyone sure knows that shy Alian Warden doesn't have any friends. So, I'm sure this move won't affect you much. Heck, it won't even do anything to your social life."
"Where did you even get the money for us to move?" Ali asked. He had gotten used to his father's horrible remarks to him; it almost felt like a normal conversation.
"I know you haven't done something illegal, Pa."
He never got an answer, even after they left Connecticut and got to Indianapolis.
"Ali, come out of your room already!" Jack yelled even more.
"All right, I'm coming, I'm coming," Ali said, rushing out of his room, his shoes untied and his jacket half worn.
"Just saying you're coming isn't going to cut it, Ali. You need to be at the bus stop. You should have been there 15 minutes ago, and you know it doesn't go one way to school."
"It's not 15 minutes, Pa, I'm just two minutes late."
"It's the same thing, Ali. You're late."
"I could just take your car, you know," suggested Ali. "I can drive, remember? and it'll make things easier."
"Yeah, you're only saying you can drive because I thought you could drive, Ali."
"No you didn't, Ma did," Ali argued.
"Can you not have one of those episodes where you talk about your mother, Ali?"
"Why not? What's wrong with talking about Ma?"
"She's gone, Ali, we've been over this. I don't know why I have to remind you about that all the time."
"Just because your marriage didn't work out doesn't mean I can't talk about my mother."
"Get over here, Ali. Grow up for Christ's sake," Jack sighed. "She chose that damn dog over you and you still want to talk about her? Geez!"
His father was right; his mother did break his heart when she said she would never take him, Alian. Her reason was that he reminded her of her father. He had woken up every night to cry, but he never made his father know.
"I'm getting my oil changed today, Ali," Jack said, trying to divert the conversation. He didn't want to talk about his wife anymore; it hurt the two of them in different ways. "Luckily, it's going to be free since I'm going for a job interview at the gas station today."
"Pa, I don't want to go to school," Ali said. "Did you ever hear of someone that transferred to a different school in their senior year? Honestly, I can work too. We need money to survive anyway, and maybe move into a better house."
"No Ali, I am not going to jail because of child labor."
"Child labor? Pa, it's not child labor. I'm 18. What happens when I'm done with school, and you can't even afford my college fees?"
"We'll talk about it later, Ali; please go to school," Jack said. "...and please leave your phone on."
Ali knew things weren't getting any better and assumed they wouldn't because one didn't just go from having a mother and living in a nice home in a nice city to getting rejected by the same mother and having to move to an old house in a weird old town and expect things to get better.
The problem was only getting worse, starting with his new school, Oakwood High School.
"Ok, Mr. new student, introduce yourself," a red-faced man who was the teacher said when he walked into his first lesson of the day: Math.
"Er, hello, I'm Alian Warden," Ali said, looking everywhere but the eyeballs focused on him. Can I go sit now? He asked, turning to face the red-faced math teacher.
"Is that all you have to say to us?" The red-faced teacher asked. "You didn't even tell us where you transferred from."
"I would just like to go to my seat now, if that's OK with you, sir," Ali said.
"Sure, it's fine, they'll get to know where you transferred from some other time. Take a seat anywhere you want. We were just talking about algebra, which is the best topic in math."
The teacher was surprisingly nice, unlike the math teacher in his old school. The students, though, were not so nice. They had already started muttering, whispering, pointing, and giving him mean side glances. He worked hard to stay focused in class and distract himself from the fact that his first impression of the class was not friendly.
Even though chemistry felt like it would be much better than math, especially since no one noticed him walk into the class unless you wanted to count the weird-looking dude that just so confidently approached him.
"Hey my dude, I don't think I've seen you around here. You must be the transfer student the chem teacher told me about," said the guy. He wore loose, bright-colored clothing that didn't suit him at all. His hair was yellowish-gray and freaking long. Ali decided that it couldn't be his hair, maybe a wig. Concluding Ali's glance, he looked like a teenage hippie.
"Er, hello," Ali said finally.
"You know, when he told me that I was going to finally get a lab partner today, I thought he was messing around," the teenage hippie said, stretching out a hand for a handshake. "Nice to meet you, lab partner. I'm Jeremiah Paige."
"Yes, nice to meet you too," Ali said, reluctantly taking his hand. "I'm Alian."
"Hey everyone!" To Ali's surprise, Jeremiah suddenly started getting the class's attention. "Everyone, I have a lab partner now. He's a transfer student."
"Hey! What are you doing? Stop it!" Ali tried to pull him to a stop. But it was no use; everyone had their heads turned in his direction, and everyone but a girl with jet-black hair was sitting at the front and had her face buried in a book.
This was a very strange thing for Ali to notice because all he wanted to do now that everyone had their attention on him was punch Jeremiah on the nose and melt away.
What was even stranger was the sudden ache in his brain and a weird thought: "I'd punch him if I were you."
"F*ck!" Ali cursed at the mirror in the empty bathroom.
He had asked to go in the middle of a very boring chemistry lesson. The chemicals in the lab were somehow suffocating him, and it didn't help that they wore protective goggles.
They did mix chemicals in his old school, but they were never this intoxicating. Plus, he had never had such a weird lab partner with such long brown hair and who smelled of burnt grass—in a more relatable context, weed.
His first day wasn't going well at all. All he got from it was everyone acting and staring at him like he was some kind of outcast.
The one person he didn't see, though, even when he first walked into the chemistry lab, was the girl with the jet-black hair, who, for some reason, wouldn't turn to him. Then there was this same ache in his head every time his attention was drawn to her. He couldn't get flashes of her hair out of his mind and then that strange thought he had earlier.
It wasn't the thought that was strange, it was the fact that it came in a different voice, a girl's voice, a girl's voice telling him to go with his initial thought of punching Jeremiah in the nose kept replaying in his head. He splashed water on his face 20 times to get him back to his senses.
When it was lunchtime, everyone scattered in different directions. He wasn't sure where the cafeteria was, which was harder to find than the chemistry lab or the bathroom. He didn't want to follow the wrong group of people, and Jeremiah had disappeared.
Just when he decided on a group to follow, he felt a soft brush on his shoulder.