Trouble Novel – My morning started out as a complete clusterfuck. Someone in the administration office saw T. Monroe on my records and assumed my older brother had to repeat his senior year. Since I shared a first initial and last name with my brother, I was the one put in those classes. It was an exact replica of my brother’s schedule from the year before. The problem with that was that I was a Freshman and belonged in exactly none of the classes on my schedule.
I’d spent the last couple class blocks in the office trying to get it sorted.That meant the first day of school was a complete bust and I’d have to start over the next day as the new girl in all my classes instead of being on equal new kid status with the rest of my classmates. “Go on to lunch and we should have you straightened out by the time you get back,” Susan Winters called to me. Honestly, I wanted to go home and restart my day. If I could go back a week, to when the school had open house, and I’d have at least one of my parents be available to take me, we would have known about the mix up in advance.
It could have been fixed before the first day ever started. Evelyn, my mom, had been too busy with her new biker boyfriend to take me and no one knew where my dad was, so that left me on my own to handle things, as usual. If my brother had been here, he would have handled it, but he left for basic training at the end of June and then went straight to his next training for whatever job he was doing besides being a soldier. I missed my big brother. I also missed my Uncle Bishop, but he was a nomad in the same club as the idiot my mother started dating when my dad disappeared.
Bishop, as everyone called him, wasn’t around that much. He had club family in West Virginia and South Dakota who kept him pretty busy. Besides, I wasn’t sure if he even knew that my dad dipped out on us. My dad was his half brother – same mother – and they weren’t really all that close since there was a twelve year age gap between them. That meant there was no one who could rescue me from this crappy situation and I had to stand on my own and get things done. Thankfully, the middle and high school shared a cafeteria, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know where everything was. I’d spent the last three years using the same space.
The difference, when I got there, was that I was mixed in with all the older students instead of being stuck on the middle school lunch schedule, which happened earliest in the day. I guessed the Freshman had a different lunch period too, because I didn’t see many of them. I got my food and settled in at a table with very few people. It was tough being the youngest person on the first day of high school while being stuck with all the upperclassmen who wanted nothing to do with me or any of the other babies of high school.
It was a small town, and a smaller school, so I knew most everyone there, especially since my brother was friends with a lot of the older kids. Knowing who they were and them knowing who I was were two different things, though. One person caught my eye as I sat down and I couldn’t bring myself to stop staring at him. He was a year younger than my brother, but still nearly four years older than me.
He was tall, over six feet, and while he was skinny, his broad shoulders tapered down into a trim waist. He filled out the back of his jeans really well though, especially for a skinny guy. He had a hat on, turned backward for everyone to see. There was some logo on it, but I couldn’t make it out from where I sat. It wasn’t until he turned around that I recognized him.