"All right, everyone," Ms. Dailey announced from the front of the classroom. I had been scribbling absentmindedly in my notebook, which probably wasn't the best idea since this class was proving to be considerably more difficult than what I was used to. Up until now school had been easy for me, but this was my first college-level course, and for the first time in my life, I had to figure out what studying was. "We have now reached the end of the first marking period. You may remember that at the beginning of the year I promised to assign you new lab partners at this point." Some of my classmates started getting excited, hoping they might be paired with their friends, while others seemed less enthused by the possibility of being paired with someone they didn't like. In fact, the biggest reason Ms. Dailey was changing our lab partners was because of the people who were unhappy with their current lab partners. "Now, I don't want to hear any complaints. These changes will last until midterm."

I snuck a glance at my current lab partner, Walter Addens, and felt relief knowing that I wouldn't have to sit by him anymore. He was a nice guy and all, but his short black hair was always greasy and he smelled like he hadn't been near a shower a day in his life.

"The list of your new lab partners is posted on the door. Be sure to look at it before you leave today. Seating arrangements will be changed on Monday." As if on cue, the bell rang. "Have a good weekend, everybody."

Ms. Dailey walked calmly back to her desk as the room erupted into chaos. Everybody rushed to pack up their stuff and leave.

"See you later, man." Walter gave a small wave as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. "Oh, and here's your pencil back. Thanks for letting me borrow it."

"No problem, Walter. Have a good weekend."

"You too, Elliot."

I sat back in my chair and watched the tall, lanky boy fight his way to the door. Getting to the door wasn't that hard, as his odor made people naturally clear a path for him. He would've been fine if he just started using deodorant, but unfortunately, I don't think he got that memo in middle school.

The side of Walter's face was still visible to me as he read the list. I watched him as his eyes scanned the paper, thinking his facial expression might reveal something about his new partner, but he remained impassive, turning to leave once he had seen the name.

I waited for the next throng of sweaty teenagers to clear out before checking the list. Other people tended to make me feel uncomfortable, especially when they invaded my personal space. I closed my notebook and slid it into my backpack at a leisurely pace. Then I sat back in my seat and watched my classmates with mild curiosity.

They were all crowded around the door, trying to find out who their new partners would be. A couple of girls squealed excitedly when they learned they were paired with their friends, and a few guys groaned in frustration at the names they found listed beside their own.

Ms. Dailey was infamous at Pinecrest for pulling stuff like this: "creative" ways to "inspire" learning. Dreading the work was one thing, but forced partnerships and having to be part of a team was quite another. Still, as long my new partner smelled better than Walter, I would be all right—unless it were Morgan Cook or Nate Anderson. Both of those boys hated me. They made it their mission to make my life an absolute hell, along with another friend of theirs, Cole. Thankfully, though, he was not in AP Chemistry.

The minute hand of the clock hanging on the wall to my right ticked slowly; it was fitting—sitting in science class feeling the actual, physical pressure of time. I had approximately seven minutes until I missed the bus and would have to walk the four miles home. Begrudgingly, I pushed my chair back, grabbed my backpack, and walked to the front of the room.

There was now a little more breathing room by the door, since most of my classmates had seen the list and left already, but I still had to peer over a few heads to find my name. It didn't take long for me to spot it.

Elliot Goldman.

I flicked my eyes to the corresponding name and was relieved to find it was neither of my tormentors. A few years ago, I was partnered with Nate for a biology lab. I ended up doing most of the work and later found that he had snuck some frog guts into my backpack when I wasn't looking. I tried to get the smell out for weeks but ended up having to get a new backpack. I was glad I wouldn't have to worry about what he might do with chemicals for at least a few more months.

Jordan Hughes.

Interesting. Jordan had recently transferred here from out of state. If the gossip about him was anything to go by, he was from somewhere in the New England region. New Hampshire, maybe? I wasn't sure. I found it kind of odd, though, that he would be transferring into AP Chemistry after having missed out on the entire first marking period. Advanced Placement classes were no joke, and if most of us were struggling after having been here for two months, then he was surely doomed if he hadn't been taking it at his other school.

For his sake, I hope he had been, because I definitely wasn't in the mood to be pulling all the weight in our labs.

At my locker, it only took me a few seconds to spin my combination into the lock. I lifted up the latch, opened the locker, and was about to reach for my textbooks at the bottom when the door was suddenly slammed shut. Someone behind me laughed.

Immediately, I was face to face with Morgan Cook, who apparently thought slamming my locker shut for the hundredth time was the funniest thing he'd ever seen.

"What're you up to, freak?" he said. He folded his beefy, gym-jacked arms over his chest. He was a football player, and while some of the students on the team remained their scrawny teenage selves, that was definitely not the case for Morgan, who had nearly doubled in size since the start of middle school. His impressive physique was likely the reason he was assigned the position of defensive tackle. There weren't many others on the team who could hold the line as effectively as he could. But it wasn't hard to figure out that the brawn was making up for lack of a brain, especially when he opened his mouth.

"Oh, you know, just trying my best to avoid imbeciles like you," I said, turning back around and putting in my combination a second time. Once done, I tried to open the door again and was not at all surprised when he slammed it shut once more.

"You want to say that again, Idiot Goldman?" he growled.

"Was that supposed to be a clever insult?" I asked. "Because look, I can do it too. Morgan Cook? More like Moron Cook."

He didn't look happy.

"Actually, I think I read somewhere that guys with names that are more common for girls tend to be more aggressive and troublemaking than those with more masculine names. I personally think that explains a lot. Don't you?"

Morgan's fist strained at his side, and he was just about to cock it when the football coach walked by. Coach Hanover was an aging man with wispy salt and pepper hair. His eyes were recessed deep in his skull, and that, in combination with his low, bushy eyebrows and the wrinkles around his eyes, forehead, and mouth, made him appear all the more intimidating. As I wasn't in any sports, I hadn't interacted with him much, but he had been the gym teacher for my first year of middle school, and from what I'd seen of him, he was not someone to mess with.

"Cook!" His voice was like a bullet with how much power and intensity it held. It was so authoritative it could've quieted a whole pep assembly without needing to use a microphone. Morgan immediately straightened his spine and shifted his full attention to his football coach. Even I found myself standing a little straighter. "If you're not on the field by the time I get out there, I'll have you running laps. You know how I feel about tardiness."

"You've got nothing to worry about, Coach," Morgan said in a strong, sure-of-himself voice. Coach gave him a hard, warning glare before heading to his office. Once the older man rounded the corner, Morgan returned his glare to me. Just in case Coach Hanover was still in earshot, he lowered his voice so only I could hear him and grumbled, "We will continue this conversation later." Then he backed away and hurried off toward the locker room so he could get changed into his uniform before his coach made it back and decided to punish him for taking too long.

"Bye, Cookie." I waved, teasingly, my mouth distended in an exaggerated grin. Death wish or not, I couldn't help myself. Sarcasm was my only defense, and the mindless brute made comebacks way too easy. I spun my combination for the third time, this time successfully grabbing the textbooks I needed and shoving them into my backpack. Then I grabbed my hand-me-down dark-blue University of Michigan sweatshirt, tossed it over my head, and got the hell out of there.

I was just in time to watch the last bus pull out of the parking lot.

"Dammit," I said under my breath. The last thing I wanted to do was walk four miles home. I contemplated texting my sister to come pick me up, but then I remembered it was Friday, which meant she wouldn't be getting out of her classes at Kalamazoo Valley Community College until six. We were twins, but since she was smarter than me, she tested out of high school early and was set to graduate from college with an associate degree around the same time I was graduating from high school. If I waited for her to come pick me up, I'd be here for at least another three hours, and I definitely didn't want to be stuck in this hellhole for any longer than was necessary. It was bad enough we had to share the car in the first place, but her college trumped my high school. That, combined with the fact that we lived in a microscopic town in which the closest thing to public transport was an old farmer with no teeth in a pickup truck, meant that the school bus was the only other option for me. Now that it was gone, I was officially stranded and had no other choice but to walk.

At least it was sunny out, even if the early November breeze was on the bitter side. Grumbling under my breath, I pulled my hood up to fight the chill and quickened my pace. The sooner I got home, the better.

Pinecrest was a ridiculously small town in lower Michigan. I wouldn't be surprised if it came up under the definition for "the middle of nowhere." The only things we had here were cornfields and a dying downtown. Most people drove right through without realizing they had been here. Consequently, this meant that our school was too small to have all of the clichéd cliques. The largest class in the whole school, the sophomore, was only around fifty students. The only reason the class was even that big was because our school combined with another a few years back. As far as I knew, the other school had some financial problems and had to send its student body to Pinecrest so it could close its doors for good. Even though that practically doubled the size of our school, we were still small compared to most other high schools, and that meant everyone was involved in everything. There were cheerleaders who volunteered with the National Honor Society, jocks who were the lead roles in musical productions the drama club put together twice a year, and mathletes who played trumpet in the high school band. From what I could tell so far of the new guy, he'd fit in with any of the cliques.

It really made it difficult to create social boundaries, though there were still some who tried. I wasn't part of any of it, though. I hadn't jumped into anything when I was a freshman, and as a result, I always felt as though it was too late to join. Friendships were already established and I felt like I'd be intruding in some way. Besides, the only thing I was really interested in was cooking, but there was no club for that. I should probably be thankful for that, though. If there was, I would likely be the only boy to join, which would just give Morgan and his friends more ammunition to use against me.

In hindsight, I realized that I would have had a lot more friends had I joined at least one club, but there was nothing I could do to change that now. It was already senior year. I just had to suck it up for a few more months, and then hopefully college would offer a clean slate for me.

I understood then that, in a way, Jordan was in a similar position to me. He was the new kid. Neither of us was previously a part of any extracurricular activities here and, as far as I knew, he hadn't joined anything yet. I guess he had an excuse, though, having just transferred to Pinecrest. I'd been here the whole time, so I didn't have an excuse.

Jordan was friendly and charismatic enough to join anything and be accepted with open arms. He made people laugh effortlessly, he was kind, he paid attention in class, and he was toned enough that he had probably been some sort of athlete at his last school.

I only hoped that he wouldn't turn out to be like Morgan, Nate, or Cole, because that would make for a miserable rest of the semester.

ø

After what seemed like hours of walking by nothing but cornfields and dirt roads, I was relieved to finally reach my neighborhood. It was around twenty houses in total. They were all clustered on a few small streets off the main road, so it was sort of like a little suburb. I only knew a few of the neighbors, though my parents probably knew more of them.

Once I turned off the main road, it only took a few more minutes to reach my house. There was nothing special about it, really. It was just like all the other houses here: white picket fence, pale yellow paint, and dying flowers in the boxes beneath all of the first-floor windows that could be seen from the street. Well, the dying flowers might be specific to my house, since nobody in my family really took the time to take care of them.

It was a good neighborhood, though. We had lived in it for as long as I could remember and had never had any issues worth worrying about.

My mother had grown up in this area, though she had moved as far away for college as she could without actually leaving the state. Once she got together with my father and realized how many job opportunities were a reasonable distance away from her hometown, however, she ended up convincing him to move back with her, start a family, settle down.

My mother had a degree in mechanical engineering and was currently working for a company called Kalamazoo Area Research and Development. My father was one of the higher-ups at an accounting firm called Steinmetz and Happel LLC, which had a location up in Grand Rapids. I wasn't sure of his exact title there, but he made good money. So did Mom. With how much money they both made, I had no doubt in my mind that they could afford something less plain than our small suburban home in this small, boring town, but the location was what kept us here.

It took my father less than an hour to get to work every day. My mother and my sister could both get to Kalamazoo in about a half hour, and we were close enough to the high school that I could walk home if I needed to. So instead of using their hefty paychecks to find us somewhere more exciting to call home, my parents chose to live frugally and save up for our college funds and for their own retirement.

No one else was home yet—both my parents were working late tonight, and my sister wouldn't be home from community college for a couple of hours still. I tossed my backpack on the couch and plopped down beside it. It was only a little after four o'clock, so I figured I would watch a little TV before starting dinner for my sister and me. However, there was nothing good on, so I left it on a random channel and pulled out my smartphone to play a game before noticing it was down to only seven percent battery.

Sighing, I got up off the couch and made my way upstairs to find my charger. In my room, I flopped stomach-down on my mattress and reached for the charging cord, which was plugged into an outlet on the far side of the bed. Finding the end of it, I plugged in my phone and left it on my nightstand to charge.

Returning to the top of the stairs, I paused in front of one of the pictures hanging on the wall. It was of my sister, Eleanor, and me playing on the beach when we were around four or five. We were fraternal twins but back then we looked nearly identical. We were practically inseparable too.

Unfortunately, we had grown apart significantly over the last few years. Ellie turned out to be a lot smarter than I was, and while we were both sophomores, she had taken an exit exam to get out of high school early. The classes offered at our school were never a challenge for her, even those like calculus or Advanced Placement literature. She was eager to move on to bigger and more challenging curriculums, so she took a test that proved there was no use in making her stay and sit through lessons she already understood. Now she was racking up as many credits as she could at KVCC.

Apparently, she wanted to wait until she was the same age as the other incoming freshmen before she started university. Not that I blamed her—I wouldn't have wanted to be the only sixteen-year-old on a college campus either. We'd be turning eighteen in December, so we'd both be heading off to university next fall, provided I got into one. I was pretty sure Ellie would have enough transfer credits to have sophomore or junior standing her first year. I'd have a few transfer credits from my one AP class, assuming I passed the test at the end, but not nearly as many as her.

Speaking of which, I still needed to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life so I could decide which colleges to apply to and get my applications together. It was hard, though. I didn't like to think about the future. This was one of the biggest decisions I'd ever had to make and it was stressing me out every time I tried to think about it. What if I made the wrong choice? What if I hated my major and ended up wasting a bunch of my parents' money? I knew for a fact that they wanted me to go into something technical or business related, but I honestly didn't think I would enjoy that. In that sense, I felt like an outcast in my family—my mother, father, and sister were all heavily left-brained people, whereas I didn't like all of the analytical, academic things they did. I wasn't interested in being a mathematician, or a scientist, or a businessman like they wanted me to be. The only thing I knew I was interested in was cooking—which I knew would not make a stable career—and with the deadlines for applications coming up fast, I was running out of time to come up with a plan.