"Ugh," says Rio, who happens to be the group leader. Ivo doesn't know why – Rio's a total slacker. All he cares about is girls and sports. "This is boring! I don't want to write a play."

Ivo isn't the most confrontational of people. But sometimes, he just can't help it. "Oh, shut the fuck up, typhus dog." He isn't shy. He just doesn't see the point in talking if he has nothing to talk about, and he hates having friends. His notebook is covered in stickers he's collected over the years, and contains the project he's working on. While most people manage perfectly fine on their own, Ivo must use a magnifying glass to see the words on the paper. He can read Braille. As a kid, when he was still too stupid to think for himself, he taught himself using his father's computer. Ivo has never owned a computer. Humans are stupid and naive, and artificial intelligence possesses sentience. While everyone else gets tracked and hacked, Ivo remains off the grid altogether, unknown, the way he likes it.

"You are such an old man." Rio's cocky, and constantly shuffles his feet on the floor when he walks. Everybody seems to think that Rio's hot, and Ivo has to admit the man has an attractive voice. Ivo's voice is feminine, like the rest of him. Sometimes, when he answers the phone, people think he's a woman. Rio sits back in his chair, feet up on the desk in front of him. "What's your name again?"

It's a large class. Most of it is done in groups, and Ivo has gotten used to it. He adjusts his thick-rimmed glasses, which are falling down his face. With his glasses on, he can see very little through his good eye, and nothing through the other. Without them, he can't see a single thing. "Ivo Van Alst." In junior high, people called him Birdboy. Well, usually they called him "freak", but whatever. It's not Ivo's fault he looks so strange.

"Right." Rio snaps his fingers, removing his feet from the desk. "Ivo. You're from somewhere in Europe." It's not a quiet class. With everybody paired off into groups, there's a fair amount of socializing. Ivo wishes he could work alone. He won't look at Rio. Lots of people assume that because he's an introvert, he has to be shy. He's gotten tired of explaining the two are not mutually exclusive. He's not shy, but he's not outgoing either. They get back to work, not speaking unless necessary.

Ivo curses a lot, and lies a lot. Most people in America take this personally. He likes the cold, and sometimes wishes it was colder in Fairbanks. With a sensitivity to lights and sunshine, Ivo always wears sunscreen, even in the dead of winter. Pim, who had albinism too, swore up and down that sunscreen would give him cancer, but Ivo hated when his skin scabbed and peeled, and the sun gives you cancer too. Ivo gets a lot of attention for the way he looks, and it's not always positive. Words mean nothing. Nobody has anything productive to do.

Although Ivo has some light perception and can make out shadows and outlines, he tells people he's blind, because this is easier to explain. Despite not being able to see where he's going, Ivo refuses to walk with a cane unless absolutely necessary. He dislikes the questions it brings, and he's memorized all of the routes he needs. Even in childhood, he couldn't see well. It's better to be born blind than to lose your vision later on. Ivo has very good hearing. This is something Anika hates.

Juno meets Ivo after class. He's never asked her to. She's obsessed with him for no good reason. "Oh my God," she says, watching the students file out. "He's so hot. I wish we were friends." Juno is just like every other girl. She gets excited over guys who never give her the time of day. She's never had a serious boyfriend, but seems to think she'll be noticed by people way out of her league. She stares at Rio, who stands outside the classroom chatting with a group of students. She reeks of desperation, and no guy would want a girl like that. "You're in the same class," she says suddenly to Ivo, as if he doesn't know this. "Can you talk to him for me?"

Ivo wrinkles his nose. "Rio's a douche. All he does is sit around and think he's the king of the world just because he happens to play on the hockey team." He begins to walk, forcing Juno to hurry to keep up. Ivo always walks quickly, even when he's not in a hurry. Despite his short stature, he's very fast.

"He's hot, and friendly. I love popular guys."

Ivo wears sunglasses indoors. If the lights weren't so bright, he wouldn't have to. His eyes hurt, as they always do in brightly lit places. "He's a dickhead. We all know you're desperate, but have a little self-respect."

Juno scoffs, slapping Ivo. She does this a lot. He's never afraid to slap her back. When he walks away, she scurries to keep up, never understanding boundaries. It's really no wonder her parents never liked her. Juno's taller than him, but he's smarter, and doesn't spend all his free time fawning over other people. "I know you're blind, but you're not stupid. You've got to know an attractive person when you hear one." She walks noisily, rarely with friends or other students. Like Ivo, Juno prefers to be alone. Unlike Ivo, she couldn't make friends if she wanted to.

He shrugs. "I may be blind, but at least I'm not a total waste of space."

He's a dick. He knows this, and it doesn't matter. People need to be told the truth. Ivo knows all the best ways to offend Juno. She believes every lie he's ever told. "Sometimes," she mutters, shuffling her feet on the floor, "I wish I never came to get you off the streets. You're such an asshole, and for no reason."

Most people probably would feel guilty about hurting others, even unintentionally. That's a stupid way of looking at life. Ivo doesn't have the time or patience to sugar coat things - and hurting people's feelings is inevitable, and never bothered him. He's not affected by criticism, in the same way he isn't affected by compliments. The thing about other people is that they can't hurt you unless you let them, and Juno always lets them. The thing about not giving a fuck is that nothing can hurt you.

In his locker at work, Ivo has things he's stolen from the company. Everybody is incompetent here. It's a billion dollar company that certainly won't miss or notice a little missing stock. It's easy to get away with shoplifting if you're not an idiot. Money is worthless. You could have all the money in the world and still be miserable. If it weren't for dead, old, rich, white men, it would have no more value than any ordinary piece of paper. Ivo hates large corporations, and doesn't trust anything until it's proven itself to him. This is very hard to do. He's been a cynic for so long that almost nothing can change him. Before Pim's death, he spent a lot of energy talking about his mistrust for the government, vaccinations, and men in ties and coats. He never elaborated on why. If someone asked for a root cause of Ivo's cynicism, he'd say it came from his father. At the time of Ivo's birth, he was clean: but relapse hit quickly, and nobody ever spoke of it. Ivo has never touched drugs - but not because he hasn't been tempted. He never wanted to end up the same: worthless and forgotten. Pim was not a good father, and he probably knew this.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

In his adult life, Pim was known for his long-winded tangents and rambles. Once, he told Ivo about an encounter he had with the men in black, who always somehow disappear just as fast as they come. "Why do you think nobody knows for sure if aliens exist?" Pim said, scribbling on a piece of paper. "They don't want us to know about them. They're always watching us. They're even inside the computers."

Pim believed everything he heard. He wasn't always a paranoid man, but seemed to develop this trait sometime during the peak of his addiction. Ivo doesn't watch the news.

Like the man who raised him, Ivo pays for everything with exact change. He doesn't have a bank account, and likely never will. He keeps his wallet inside a fanny pack, and gets paid by his supervisors by check, cashing them at places like Walmart or the bank that issued it. Of course, it's rare for Ivo to step foot inside a bank; they're corrupt and dishonest, and will steal from their customers more often than they'll help them. He gets many strange comments; no one carries cash anymore except drug dealers and prostitutes. Ivo has been both of these things. In Europe, he could decipher bank notes by their color. In America, he deciphers them by how they're folded in his wallet.

Ciel smokes Viceroy. Ivo dropped out of high school sometime in his junior year, and has no plans to return to education. But everyone knows how it is. Even with a degree, or multiple, it's nearly impossible to get a job. Anyway, Ivo really has no ambition: besides moving off-grid and building himself a house. From a young age, he was forced into independence, cooking and cleaning for a man who didn't work, transporting himself to and from school, and working his first job at the age of twelve. No one ever questioned this.

Once or twice, a teacher would question Ivo about his personal life. He learned how to lie at a very young age. In the winter of ninth grade, he got suspended from school for fighting. In the hallway near a group of lockers, he glowered at a group of seniors, who all towered over him. "Hey, everyone!" one of the boys shouted down the hallway, gathering the attention of several students. "Ivo likes dick! Don't you, gay boy?" He'd pushed Ivo, knocking the glasses from his face and onto the floor. "Don't you? Do you want my dick, faggot?"

Ivo had lurched, pushing the bigger boy to the floor. Thinking back on it, he was probably seventeen or eighteen, and easily tackled by a fourteen year old. Ivo isn't especially strong or muscular, but he's easy to anger, and behaves rashly. He'd begun to punch the boy, over and over again, starting a chorus of teens chanting "Fight, fight!" This got Ivo going: the attention. The bully had punched him too, though if it was a fight, he clearly wasn't winning. Ivo fought a lot, growing up. They started in elementary school, and continued all through adolescence. Juno was always interfering. As a chant erupted around Ivo and the senior boys, she'd run over from across the hallway, through the throng of students watching, and yanked him off the boy. "Stop it!" His nose was bleeding, his glasses cracked and crooked. "Stop fighting!"

"Get off me!" The principal was approaching: a strict woman who never smiled, and whose hair was in such a tight bun it pulled on the skin of her face. Ivo swung his fist, hitting Juno in the face, hearing her tumble to the floor. "I don't need your help!" He'd wiped a dirty hand across his face, leaving a streak of blood. "Thanks a lot, Juno." He snorted, standing and flipping the bird to the older boy's back. "Now he's gone. Next time, mind your own fucking business." After pushing his glasses back up, he'd scooped up his backpack and walked away: past the crowd of onlookers, past the bully's friends, past the stern principal, and straight into the detention room. Ivo got detention for many different things. When it wasn't skipping, it was lying, or stealing, or fighting. Detention never made him behave any better, and so then he'd get suspended for days or weeks at a time, and Anika would scream at him, and he'd act out at school. It became a vicious cycle, really.

Once, he asked Pim how he met his mother, and he had no response. Ivo knows he was conceived after a casual hookup between junkies. He knows his mother signed over custody rights after his birth, and then vanished, never to be heard from again. Pim never shared this voluntarily. It's easy to learn things from people if you know their weak spots. Two years ago, after Ivo was outed to his aunt by a neighbor, Anika confronted him, demanding to know if it was true, if he really was a pillow-biter. Anika has never been shy about her distaste for Ivo, and found much offense in his retorts. He had a lot of retorts.

At home, Ivo takes a cigarette from the carton on the table. As usual, Ciel is in the living room; Ivo can hear him breathing. Most likely, the man is poring over a photo album of his wife and daughter, who are dead because of him. He does this a lot. It's a waste of time, really. Lighting up the cigarette in the kitchen, Ivo pushes his glasses up. "Don't you have anything better to do than stare at pictures of dead people?" It's a wonder, really, that Ciel hasn't yet told him to leave. Without Ivo, there's no way Ciel would stay out of debt, and he knows this. There's no point dwelling on the past. The dead stay dead. There's nothing after death except darkness.

Ciel has a job. This is what he says, anyway. He slams the photo album down with a sigh, sounding pathetic. "How many times do I have to tell you to stop smoking inside?" You could tell Ivo the same thing a hundred times. If it doesn't mean anything to him, nothing will change.

Ivo blows a smoke ring. "Or what, you'll kick me out?" Sometimes, he wishes Ciel would. Nobody in this house has any backbone. People just do what makes them uncomfortable so that others are appeased, and pretend not to be bothered by things that are terribly bothersome. No matter what Ivo says or does, someone will be offended. That's why there's really no reason to be politically correct. Ivo says what he wants without fear of retribution. He'd rather be right than liked.

It's cold in the house. Ivo would much rather be cold than hot. The lights are dim, and don't hurt his eyes as much as others. Ivo never turns the lights on, but uses candles when he needs to see. "The smell hurts Juno's head," says Ciel, like he gives a shit. If it wasn't for Anika's constant nagging, he never would have let Juno move in with him at all. "She's not feeling well today."

Juno's bedroom is across from Ciel's. Ivo's bedroom used to be the shed, but he insisted on turning it into a living space. It's preferable this way, having to leave the house to get to him. There's one small bedroom and nothing else, and this is where Ivo spends most of his time. "Too bad the world doesn't cater to Juno." Everybody pities her because she's dying. No one deserves special treatment just for being sick. The living room is messy. If it were up to Ivo, the house would always be tidy.

Ciel frowns. "Don't be an asshole, Ivo. Juno's dying." Everyone reminds him of this constantly. He hasn't forgotten, so the reminder is more annoying than anything.

"We're all dying." Ivo smells like smoke, and isn't bothered by it. "Some of us just die faster than others." He shrugs, letting ash fall onto the kitchen floor before wandering off.