First Day Blues

Owen Peterson was on his way to his first day of senior year. For any normal person this would be a very tense time combined with the anxiety of knowing that this is your last year in high school, that you are almost there and almost out of school for good and ready to move on with your life. The confines of childhood feel almost a lifetime away back from the awkward years back when it was hard to talk to the opposite sex. For Owen, however, things were a little different. He was not in the new car his parents got him for turning eighteen, he was walking; he was not taking as few credits as possible to just slide by, he was taking every advanced class he could get into; and there was one thing that separated him from the rest of his classmates, sometimes that stood out far too easily; Owen was only fifteen.

Granted, he needed to give himself some credit. Unlike the rest of his generation shoved into the awkward freshmen years he got to skip all of that due to a request from the school board. It was almost nice to think about the years of high school that everyone seemed to hate would only take him one year to complete instead of four. Genius, that was the term people liked to label him as, genius. For years, that term was okay to hear because it came with a smile and hug from his mother and father, but now things were very different than they were five years ago and the last time Owen heard the word “genius” without silently cringing.

It was not just his age that made him stand out as he approached the school, it was his appearance as well. Standing at only five foot one, the other fifteen year olds towered over him and the term “shrimp” was almost a given. His hair was red, like his fathers, and a mess of curls, like his mothers, and was far too messy for it’s own good. A birds nest was the analogy that people often used when comparing him to anything, his hair sat on top of his head like a flaming red birds nest. And Owen was okay with that, the height thing bothered him more than anything, that and the fact that he was a fifteen year old senior. On top of all of that and his health problems.

A doctor once joked that the chronic seizures were from his “enlarged brain unable to fit in such a small body.” His mom and dad, at the time, merely laughed nervously as they waited for some sort of explanation to what caused them. When no real answer came, medication was shoved in their face and they sent on their way, announcing that, for the rest of his life, Owen would be popping pills to keep his own limbs under control. On top of having an insanely high IQ, barely five feet tall, fire red hair, and chronic seizures, Owen knew that everyone knew who he was in such a small town. There was no avoiding it at this point.

Well, there is one more thing that I’m known for, but that is a little more under wraps than everything else. Looking up, he saw the huge school standing before him, people going in the building and standing outside, simply talking. In mere moments he observed meek freshmen, over-confident sophomores, impatient juniors, and relieved seniors. He may have been a senior, technically, but this was his first time even setting foot in the building. A knot formed in his stomach as he got closer and he waited for the stares, the glares, the weird looks to the kid that skipped from ninth grade and skipped all the way to the twelfth. Yet as he got closer he realized no one was even noticing him. No one looked his way and no one seemed to care when he walked up the stairs to the building. For a brief moment, Owen thought he was home free and that feeling that the next year was going to be terrible was wrong.

Until he found himself suddenly gravitating toward some locker. His left arm took the full force of the blow and he winced. What happened? Oh, someone pushed him. A shadow was suddenly standing over, leering over him and he found himself staring at a man older than him wearing thin glasses, cleanly dressed, with blond hair in perfect place. “Oh, so you must the genius the entire faculty is talking about.” He snapped. Owen did not say a word, he moved away from the lockers and was going to try and get away, since there was plenty of honor in just leaving, and just avoid the problem, but this guy pushed him back into the locker, a handle slamming into his spinal cord. “I was first for valedictorian, but everyone is saying that you’re going to kick my ass. I won’t allow four years of work to get washed down the drain by some little punk who’s balls haven’t dropped yet. If I were you, I’d watch your step around here. My friends and I don’t like show offs too much.”

With those words the guy and his friends were off and Owen found himself standing in the hallway feeling a little dumbstruck. Balls dropped? What a lame insult. If they’re going to insult me they might as well come up with something decent. So, he seemed to have found himself one enemy, but besides that no one seemed notice him. They all seemed distracted by something else, someone else apparently, as he listened to the conversations as he made him way through the hallway. Walking into his first period English class, he found that everyone was sideways glancing at a guy that sat in the back of the classroom. He hair was blond and spiked in all directions and he was wearing a long sleeved black t-shirt, that he seemed to be palming for some reason that Owen did not know, and faded black jeans. It took all of five minutes of merely overhearing conversation to know exactly who this guy was and why he was the center of attention.

That was Thanatos Lao, the new transfer student from the East Coast. He’s all alone, an orphan of sorts, or just staying in foster care until he graduates. He had to move out here because the only family that would take him in was here. Did you hear? Did you hear? That new guy, did you hear what he did?

Thanatos Lao murdered his father.

The very thought made a part of Owen’s stomach twist into such a knot that he almost missed his next class he was so sure he was going to vomit. He watched the way this kid moved, this guy, this guy who killed his own dad, and could not get his mind around it. Parents? Killing your parents? The thought made him want to crawl into a hole, not when he was hurting so much still, after five years, and the thought of having something in common with that guy made him want to throw up even more.

When asked about “parents” and “family” Owen often called himself an orphan as well, but he was more of a guardian to his guardian than the other way around. His grandmother was looking over him now, she was pushing ninety-five, and could barely remember his name. Every morning she would come into the kitchen and they would exchange the same conversation.

“What are you doing here, dear? Haven’t your parents come and picked you up yet?” His grandmother would ask with a toothless smile.

“No, grandma, I live here now and mom and dad are dead.” He would reply before giving her the medication that kept her sane-ish and locking her in the house. That was the way things were now, five years later, after his parents car accident.

That dream is the reason no one else in the family would take me in. As he leaned heavily against the door of the stall of the bathroom at the end of the day, he found himself thinking of that dream, of how he felt. He remembered, he was only ten at the time, but he dreamed it. A car in the wrong lane, the car behind them, being hit from both ends, and the fact that despite what everyone told him he knew, he knew that they did not die right away. Owen knew what he saw and when he woke up screaming, as his mother and father tried to calm him down, tell him that it was only a dream and that it would never happen. He remembered begging them not to leave, the friends they were going out to dinner giving him the crazy look, and as they left just having the most terrible feeling in the world as he watched them leave, knowing they would never come back.

Fighting back the taste of bile, he left the bathroom and was just about to walk out when he came face to face when Thanatos. His lower lip was bleeding and what looked like to be a black eye was forming. From behind him, there was the sound of someone snickering and then they shouted murderer. He flinched only slightly before he pushed past Owen to the sink. He ran water over knuckles that were scarred and scabbed, blood and dirt turning the water a deep red. When his hands were clean, he splashed the water on his injured face, leaning against the porcelain sink heavily. And all Owen could do was watch him, see that his movements were rigid, but not dangerous.

Without saying a word, he pulled a few paper towels from the dispenser and set them on the sink next to this new student. And Thanatos did not say a word either, he simply glanced to the side, his eyes as blue and as cold as ice, and they made eye contact. Owen nodded slightly, gave the tiniest of smiles, before pushing the door to the stall open and walking into the hallways. People were gossiping at the end of the school and he only heard half of the conversations. A rumor about a teacher and a student, the safety of everyone here with the new addition, and the whisper that his English class was going to have a student teacher for the second half of the year.

It’s going to be an interesting year at least.