Highschool has got to be the world’s most overcomplicated trap.

The bell rang and the livestock that was the student body poured out of the classrooms and into the corrals we called hallways, to join with our herds and in turn be herded to our next period. Just to be clear, I included myself as one of the livestock. How could I not? Every day I felt my brain turning to mush as the teacher’s prepared us for the standardized tests. Hours of my life I’d never get back. I was a single step removed from chewing cud while waiting to be branded.

I wasn’t worried about the standardized tests. I’d pass. There was never a question about that. The subject matter wasn’t hard—it was just exhausting and redundant. And redundant and exhausting. Classroom time was consuming so much of my time and it wasn’t actually helping me.

I had no collegiate aspirations. I wanted to go to culinary school. No diploma required. I could drop out, get my GED, and start right now. Or in January. Probably. The point is, I’d be able to get on with actually living the life I wanted to live instead of this facsimile.

I had the resume for it. I worked as a cook most weeknights at Burning Love Bar and Grill. A real classy joint. Elvis themed. Can you taste the sarcasm and would you like fries with that? The menu was about as exciting as my classes. It was all I’d been able to get in Houston, being under eighteen.

Summer time I went and lived with my dad in Kerrville. A marine corp. buddy of his has his own restaurant. No name, no health inspectors, and no problems letting me be their chef during the summer. I could cook up all the game I brought in, serve it up however I wanted, and get paid. I’d learned a lot and had a guaranteed letter of recommendation from Mr. Yates, the owner.

The real obstacle wasn’t experience. It was Mom. She wanted me to go to college. Had her heart set on it. Dad might have been supportive of my aspirations emotionally. Financially, though? Mom was a lawyer and he was a retired marine on a fixed income. They’re divorced, just in case that wasn’t clear. Also, Mom was the money in the family. Dad’s greatest asset, his big old ranch, had been inherited.

 I didn’t want to start my professional life in debt, so dropping out wasn’t an option. I was saving up. I had a good amount already. It wasn’t enough. I’d need to be able to live on my own when I started my real education. Living with my mother was not an option. There was no way I wouldn’t hear daily about how I was wasting my time and could do more with a college degree.

The idea of spending four more years trapped in classrooms was nightmarish. I couldn’t let that happen. So my life had become an absent minded routine of getting through school so that I could go to work and save up until I finally had enough to break the cycle. Only the brief moments I spent with my friends at school made high school tolerable.

I caught a glimpse of red hair down the hall and felt my pulse pick up. Claire.

I had to focus to control my breathing.

Two weeks ago, she’d made me realize that I was being consumed by the drudgery of this routine. That I’d lost myself to it and was living for the weekends when I could either go bowhunting up in Kerrville or play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Two days out of seven should not be a reprieve. The thing was, Claire didn’t even know she’d done anything.

I’d stepped out behind the kitchen of Burning Love to catch a few moments away from the heat when I saw her. She was wearing a nice dress and was laughing at something someone had just texted her when she looked up. A nearly hairless Pitbull mix meandered around the corner. Her teats swung low and I could have played xylophone on her ribcage. Hell, maybe even her spine. Each vertebrate stood out like they were trying to grow into dorsal ridges.

I got ready to sprint down to her, to get between her and the stray dog, when Claire dropped to her knees. She made soft, happy sounds and the dog shuffled toward her. I stood there, transfixed as she let the dog smell her before slowly reaching out to touch it. The dog melted into her scratches, leaning its whole, bony body into her and wagging its entire back end. It looked up at her with the kind of adoration only dogs are capable of. Claire didn’t care that it was leaving dirt on her dress. Or if she did, it didn’t show.

A few more soft, encouraging words, and the dog followed her to her car and hopped right on in. According to her social media accounts, she’d named it Bella. I’m not a social media guy, I don’t know Face-tok from Insta-twit, but I’d followed Bella’s recovery under Claire’s care.  

I’d always been aware of Claire. Her bright red hair made her stand out all on its own, and one of the cuter girls in school. Also one of the shortest. It was what gave me a flicker of hope about asking her out.

Asking out a girl was hard enough on its own. Doing it while looking up at her because you’re barely more than five feet tall adds a whole extra layer of difficulty. Today, I was going to ask Claire out.

I made to go after her. Claire always left campus for lunch with some friends and then the rest of her classes were on the other side of the school from mine and she had dance when school got out. I only had a few minutes to accomplish my goal.

I passed by my best friend Emilio and his girlfriend Hope. Emilio’s the only other guy my age in this school who’s shorter than me. The both of them knew what I was up to and Emilio gave me a thumbs up while Hope shared an encouraging smile.

He was an artist and she’s a writer. Both had pretty big online followings and something I can only describe as a passion for anime. I liked some anime, sure, but they really like their anime. Emilio freaking taught himself Japanese and most of Hope’s fanfiction revolved around different anime series. I’d tried reading some of it once and really wished I hadn’t. It was well written, there are just some things I never needed to imagine Sasuke and Naruto doing together. Hope actually gets confused for Japanese instead of Vietnamese a lot because of her interest. Her trademark fox-ear headband probably didn’t help. Foxes were kind of her thing.

“Let us know how it goes,” she said, her voice almost lost in the crowd. The two of them were cute together. Our group’s resident power couple. They’d been together since freshmen year. My brother actually introduced them.

My brother did a lot for us that year, actually.

Our parents divorced the summer before I started high school. My brother, Seth, and his buddy Damien, took me and my friends under their collective wing. They showed us how to be us and still survive. They kept the bullies away from us nerds while we figured ourselves out.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Then they got into drugs. I don’t know which kind or the how or even the why of it. Best I could figure, Seth and Damien actually started dealing to make some extra cash on the side. Then Seth disappeared. So did Damien for a while before he popped back up like nothing had happened.

He was still around some. Not like he used to be. In fact, I could stand to see a lot less of him. Between the drugs and my brother’s absence…Damien wasn’t the same.

I put thoughts of Seth and Damien from my mind as I rounded the corner and came upon Claire with a pair of her friends. I was too late. Why did girls always have to travel in packs? Trying to subtly get one alone was an absolute no-go.

Sadie, her lean, dark-haired track star friend wasn’t a problem. She was quiet, thoughtful, and just all-around kind of cool. Way too into athletics for our niches to have ever overlapped or else we might have gotten along.

Natalie, her fellow dancer though, seemed like she was trying to embrace all of the negative cheerleader stereotypes at once, all without actually being a cheerleader. Pretty and perky, stupid and spiteful. Both were giggling at something Claire had just said and her face was broken into an adorable grin that gave her an almost kittenish look. The way her green eyes twinkled, the corners crinkling just so as she laughed, it made my stomach flip. I caught myself before I started to gawk.

I had to act confident. Not as if my legs were about to turn to jelly. I’d worn my good blue jeans for today and been sure to shave that morning. Did it even show? The testosterone fairy seemed to have this idea that it had made a mistake when handing out hormones. Instead of getting taller, I got broad chested and hairy. Really hairy. If I didn’t shave in the morning, I could buy beer in the evening without being carded levels of facial hair.

“Hey, Claire,” I said, hoping the trembling in my stomach and sudden weakness in my legs didn’t transfer to my voice.

Claire turned that smile on me and everything else fell away. It was just me and her and that smile. My heart skipped a beat. “Oh hey, Griffin.”

“What do you want, Hillbilly?” Natalie was holding one of those milkshakes masquerading as coffee from the café across the street from our school and she took a deliberate sip from her straw as she glared at me.

What was that about? I see a girl looking up at my while she’s sucking a straw and my mind goes straight to the gutter, which there was no way Natalie wouldn’t know. At the same time, the glare she was leveling at me was anything but erotic. I didn’t get it. What was the message that was supposed to send? Maybe it was “Look how sexy I am, now screw off?” Who the hell could tell?

I gave Sadie a nod in greeting and she returned it with a raised eyebrow. Whatever was going on with Natalie and her suck-straw-glare and myself, it seemed to amuse her. Happy to entertain.

I smiled at Natalie. “Nice to see you too, Natalie. Sadie.” Hey, I just realized their names rhymed. Heh.

Natalie looked less than amused. Her brow had furrowed. Clearly, I was not following whatever script she’d had in her head. Good.

I returned my attention back to Claire. “I was hoping you’d let me cook for you this weekend.”

Burning Love was closed Sundays. I’d gotten the owner’s permission to use the kitchen and let me have Claire there for a date. I’d bought several candles for ambiance and had some gazelle in the freezer I’d just hunted last weekend.

“Cook?” Natalie sneered. “Um, gross. We’re going vegan and I know you go hunting all the time. Are you going to gut a deer in front of her and char the meat on a spit? Don’t you care at all for the environment?”

I looked pointedly at her coffee milkshake. “You’re drinking a milk-based beverage from a plastic cup and straw.”

She gave me one of those uniquely teenage girl-looks of idiotic disgust. “So?”

So, she wouldn’t care or understand that I was doing far more for the environment than her. See, I spend summers with Dad, and there’s not a whole lot that’s in season then. Or most of the time when I can go up and see him. But invasive species and exotics? Those are fair game year-round. Hell, some counties offer bounties for invasive species like feral hogs. Then there’s the exotics, like the gazelle I had in the freezer.

Years ago, some rich guys with more money than sense thought it would be a great idea to import a bunch of African wildlife onto their private ranches. A few storms later and some of that wildlife escaped. People love to talk about protecting or preserving nature, but we’re really not keen on letting anything we think might be dangerous stick around, so there’s not that many big predators wandering Texas anymore. On a related note, you ever notice that there’s a real lack of domesticated animals in Africa’s history? It’s because those critters are freaking mean!

Wildebeest, gazelle, and other non-native animals were all roaming around the Texas wilderness without anything but hunters to keep their population under control as they competed for resources with the natural wildlife. Meanwhile, Natalie was halfway to choking a sea turtle when that straw of hers made it into the ocean and milk was about as vegan as filet mignon.

Explaining all of that to her, however, was pointless. For one thing, it would take too long. For another, Natalie wouldn’t actually care. Further, calling her an idiot and a hypocrite wasn’t really an option either, because while she was those things, she was also Claire’s friend. You don’t impress a girl by being mean to her friends.

So, all I said in reply is, “No reason.”

Sadie let out a snort.

Not a dainty little snort either, but an unreservedly, I’m-trying-so-hard-not-to-burst-out-laughing kind of snort. She visibly struggled to keep her mouth shut and clutched at her sides. Natalie gave her a weird look, her brow furrowed. Clearly the two pompom-shaped braincells that comprised the entirety of her grey matter were struggling to figure out what was so funny.

Claire was also smiling and for a moment, I felt a sense of triumph. I’d done it. I’d impressed her and hadn’t made an ass of myself because of Natalie.

A shadow fell over me.

“Hey, Griffin,” Arthur said. “I did the math and something’s off. My character should have leveled up after we slew that dracholich in Terror Keep last weekend.”

Arthur was probably the biggest guy I knew. Bigger than anyone on the football team. Like me he was broad. Unlike me, his mostly sedentary lifestyle lent itself to a thick layer of fat over all his muscle. With his curly blonde hair and thick cheeks, he had a cherubic face. It made his almost perpetually intense stare all the more disconcerting if you didn’t know him. Kind of like Cupid trying to make your head explode with his mind.

Not only was Arthur the biggest guy I knew, he was probably the smartest. Like, card carrying Mensa-member certifiable genius. Sadly, he had the social awareness of a rock and about as much empathy. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things, he just struggled to relate to people instead of projects or tasks, especially if those people weren’t as smart as him, which was pretty much everyone. Fortunately for him, he was big enough that A) the only bully that had ever tried messing with him had found themselves shoved back in their own locker and B) he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the thoughts or opinions of his fellow students. Mostly.

He’d probably like to think that he was an emotionless robot, but the fact of the matter was, Arthur could be fairly sensitive. Arthur was a problem solver. If there was a problem, it needed to be taken care of right then and there and everyone around him needed to get on board with that. The only way to explain fast enough why I wasn’t up for talking about this now would end up ruining whatever romance might remain in the moment and probably hurt his feelings.

 It would take Arthur a while to realize that his feelings were hurt, but he’d be acting like it long before the processing center of his brain caught up. He wasn’t deliberately interrupting me, the big guy legitimately didn’t recognize what was happening right now. Any attempt to subtly shake him off would be completely missed and simply telling him we’d talk about it later would be met with sheer belligerence.

“I’ll double check before the game tonight,” I said with a grimace, thinking fast and hoping that would satisfy him. “Pretty sure there’s something the DM knows that you don’t there.”

He crossed his arms. “Like what? We cleared the Keep. There’s nothing left to do except…oh! So, we need to go back to the Barron to complete the quest and—”

“And come on big guy,” Mason, the last member of our gaming group said, coming up to put an arm around Arthur. “Griffin’s busy right now and we need to strategize for tonight.”

Thank you, Mason! Out of our group, Mason was probably the most socially well-adjusted. He divided his after-school time between marching band and teaching American Tae Kwon Do. That’s right, teaching it. It’s more impressive than I’d ever let him know, even if it is American Tae Kwon Do. The only reason I know the name of his shopping mall karate is because he’s pretty insistent on us getting the name right. I made a note not to tease him about the name for at least a month.

Mason gave me a supportive grin as he steered Arthur away. I turned back to the girls, all of whom now wore various looks of confusion on their faces.

“Um, I don’t think it would work out with us,” Claire said slowly.

Not maybe some other time. Not, could we do something else. That was a definite and definitive nope. Nada. Do not pass go rejection. It hurt. It hurt a lot.

“She has standards,” Natalie said, grinning. If her standards in guys were anything like those she had for her friends, she had a very sad future ahead of her. I didn’t say that.

It didn’t make any sense to me. How could she be so dismissive without even giving me a chance? What could I have done differently? Would anything have made a difference? Was it a high school thing? A girl thing? A me thing?

In the end though, none of that really mattered. As much as it hurt, I’d asked and she’d said no. That was all there was to it. The only real thing I could understand and control was myself and that meant I needed to respect her decision. I didn’t have to like it. I also didn’t need to be an ass about it.

“Have a good weekend then,” I said, mustering what dignitary I could while struggling to keep my tone and expression polite, then turned to walk away. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Sadie giving me a considering look.

I rounded the corner and heard a sudden burst of giggles from back the way I’d come. My ears burned. They probably weren’t talking about me, but raw as I was, it sure felt like it.

My phone chimed with a text message. I almost didn’t take it out of my pocket. It was almost time for my last class before lunch time and whatever it was could wait.

I did take it out though, and I froze right there in the hall when read it.

It was from Damien. He said, I know where Seth is.