Hi! Guess what, I didn't die. I've been thinking about writing this for over a year now. I actually got five chapters in and then started again. And again. And again. So this is the third or fourth try. It's pretty okay.

Disclaimer: The quotes and TLOZ do not belong to me.

Warnings/Story includes:

-Mention of drugs/alchohol

-Mature situations

-LGBT characters (two, to be completely specific, and no, they are not together)

"Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise." -Horace

This is something I need to do. Everyone has a story; some people want to tell their stories, but some would rather die than clue you in to what they've been through. This is a story that has both sides, I suppose, depending on who it is telling you. I'm one of the people who wants to tell. There are several people I know who might attempt to murder me for this, so...keep it to yourself. Or leave now if your mouth has no off switch.

Is this story important? No. Is it going to affect you in the long run? No.

Could you maybe learn something from it? Maybe.

Do I know people who could?

Absolutely.

This is, dare I mention, a story about high school. AKA, a story that those with a weak constitution might want to refrain from hearing. High school is not a nice place. No rainbows and butterflies, at least for some students. If you're old enough to wish you were a kid again, you're obviously also old enough to have gone senile. Being a teenager is rough. And it is one of the best experiences anybody could have. You learn a lot. If you don't die first.

If you are currently grimacing at the screen or the page or whatever, then don't think I've taken death lightly. I've seen plenty and I've come close to it a couple of times, as well. Teenagers die. A lot. Like so much you wouldn't believe it in the soft little world you live in.

Some people won't believe that others have a way harder life than them.

And some people with a tough life don't realize that others might have it tougher.

The latter people being, namely, people like me.

Link Ordon.

If you went to Hyrule Public High School at any time between 2012 and 2016, then that name just made a lightbulb go on in your head. And it might not have been a good one. Some of you may be envisioning the scene anew and wishing you hadn't. Some of you might be thinking "oh, yeah, I know that guy, he's the one who..."

If I can stop blabbing and get to the point though. Normally, I'm quiet, but I have a ton to say right now and can't stop talking. Please excuse me.

Close your eyes. Unless you're reading this rather then listening to it, in which case, obviously, don't. Envision a painting (not that I'm into art) in which the central focus is a truck (not that I'm into cars, I actually rather despise my own). Behind the truck is a house. Next to the house is a barn. Nice painting. Sloppy, but nice.

Now tear a hole in the canvas where the chimney is, splash some rust on the truck, dent it up some maybe, and ransack the house with your paintbrush. Rot some of the boards. Make the door squeaky (as if you could actually do that), and put a hole in the roof. Bleh. Do the same to the barn. Double bleh.

If you hadn't already guessed, you just painted my property. Put a sign in the driveway if you want. There used to be one there. I think...yeah, it was still there at the beginning of this story.

Which is where our story begins.

I, a miserable sixteen year old boy, was busy burning my toast, not combing my hair (uncombing?) and rushing out the door in clothes that I hadn't so much as glanced at prior to donning them. Miserable because: I was going to be late for school. On my first day.

Of course my satanic car was unwilling to cooperate (yet again), so I attempted to start it several times before it actually did. It kind of makes this sickening noise when you try to turn it on, like it's choking on a dead something. Over and over while your time to get to school is shortening exponentially.

You may be surprised, but it was nice to get to go to school again. I am one of the few teens who wait all summer for school to start, which, to some, is a little bit counter-intuitive. But I honestly enjoy the beginning of school, because playing video games at my friend's house and watching bad reruns on our prehistoric TV gets old real fast, and school is probably nicer than my house anyway. So I was excited and nervous and feeling like I was about to puke all at the same time, because I was finally speeding down the highway toward my junior year of high school.

I honestly don't know why I was nervous. I'm pretty popular in spite of the fact that I smell like a ranch, due to the fact that I live on a ranch, and have a phone that looks like it was an archeological find, and don't really understand most of the things that everyone else in my grade can't live without. I think Gran is rubbing off on me. I'll let the doctor know I'm catching something if I begin to feel the sudden, irresistible urge to bake cookies.

Tangent aside, for now, I arrived at school and found my class just as the bell rang. I didn't have time to go to my locker, so I slung my backpack over the back of the chair next to my friend, Sheik, and plopped down at the desk.

She tapped me on the shoulder. And poked me. And then straight out pinched me when I still didn't respond.

I looked at her with the most hurt expression I could muster.

"Where were you?" She asked under her breath.

"Sleeping." I rubbed the back of my neck self-consciously.

Sheik made a sound like tch and laughed. She has the voice of a guy, but I don't mind. "Figures. The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken."

"Who's that?" the question was automatic.

"Samuel Johnson." Sheik loves to quote everything. Movies, books, poetry, Shakespeare, anime, whatever, if it vaguely fits the situation, she'll use it. I swear she just looks the stuff up. Sometimes she even creates her own poetry on the spot. It actually isn't bad. Better than I could do for a grade, with a week to think it out.

"But don't freak out or anything. Teacher's not here yet."

"I'd kind of noticed that."

I swept my eyes around the room quickly. No one I hated was here, so that was good. I saw Saria in the front row; she and I had been really good friends as little kids, but had grown apart in junior high. She was still about the same height as she was then, and, not to be mean, but she was totally flat-chested. She still looked like a little kid. But she's really nice and we always smiled and said hi to each other in the hall. Her hair was still dyed green. She loves green. So do I, but I would not dye my hair green. Not for a thousand dollars. Well maybe...

Next to the kid next to Sheik (whose name was Mido, by the way) was Elizabeth. She was one of the popular girls, despite the fact that she stuck to me like a magnet. Totally huge crush, since about the fourth grade, which is when, according to her, I became "cute."

Totally, sure. Whatever.

I didn't see anyone else with direct ties to me – there are a lot of people who I never bothered to get to know. I know their faces, but their names are lost in the blur of information that I have accumulated in my past sixteen years.

A gasp traveled around the room as the teacher strode through the door. I immediately felt two inches tall. The man (I checked my schedule, and apparently he was Gaepora, Rauru) was tall, with a round belly and white hair. He was bearded, too, and under his bushy eyebrows sat a pair of the most intense eyes I had ever seen. They looked like the eyes of a bird, pale and piercing. The man made himself even taller with the way he held himself, like nothing could upset or outdo him. He was the teacher. We were the students. He was the slave driver, we the slaves.

"O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on." Sheik muttered under her breath, staring intensely back at the man despite the fact that she appeared to be either cowering or submissive, chest nearly touching to the desk as she leaned over it, pressing her fingertips together (it was a nervous tick).

I stifled a grin. She was quoting Shakespeare's Othello, the line about envy. As I said, she would quote it no matter how contextual it was. However, if you were in front of this man, shrinking back under his overwhelming presence, condemned to a year of torture by the very person towering above you, the quote seemed very applicable to the situation. We could be the meat that was to be mocked. Who knows.

"Good morning," the man said, smiling. It looked warm enough, but I wasn't convinced, and I could tell that nobody else was, either. "My name is Mr. Gaepora, and I'll be your history teacher this year. I will be teaching you everything you need to know about the Hyrulian Revolution, the Great Wars, and your ancestors, be you Hylian, Human, Kokiri, Zora, Gerudo, Twili, Rito, or Goron, or whatever else."

I would tell you what else he said, but I realized after he listed just about every major race in Hyrule that this would be a badly summarized and completely unabridged speech. So I zoned out. Sheik and I folded little paper footballs and shot them through each other's finger goals, and if Mr. Gaepora noticed, he didn't say anything. At least we weren't vandalizing the desks by carving cuss words or innuendos with our pencils. My desk said stuff like "eat me" and "Gaepora is a..."

Ah, high school.

Despite my popularity, the clique that I fell naturally into was the misfits. The people who have a stronger friendship than anyone else does with anyone else in the school, similar simply because fads and modern times have rejected all of them equally. That, or people are afraid that their days will be numbered if they hang out with us; I have a couple of friends who would just as soon punch you as talk to you. They are extremely pleasant to be around.

These two people are, namely: Midna Twili and Ghirahim Diamond. They're pretty interesting people once you get over the initial shock of meeting them. Midna is what I would define as goth. She wears extremely revealing black leather clothes (either there's no dress code, or nobody pays attention to it, including teachers) and has tattoos in blue ink all up her legs and on her arms. Because she is a descendant of the Twili, she has fiery orange hair, red eyes, and pale, blue-tinged skin. She is a smoker and I don't want to know which other drugs she's tried. She can come across as extremely demanding and bossy and has beaten up her fair share of freshman and senior boys who won't take their eyes off her curves, but she is really very sweet, and if you get to know her, you see that side of her a lot.

Ghirahim is, nicely as I can put it, creepy. The first time I met him I was extremely confused by his means of communication with me; it was a kind of strange cross between "Don't look at me, I'll kill you," and "Please go out with me or I will continue to spazz out and invade your personal space." But I eventually got to know him and he, like Midna, is really nice after a while. He just comes off as a little more aggressive. He, again like Midna, is tattooed, but it is only a small diamond on his left cheek, and his white hair falls over that side of his face most of the time. He really likes to wear white, purple, and red, and I have never seen him not wearing one or some combination of those colors.

The other people who sit with Sheik and me are Malon and Ilia, the artistic and horse-loving pair (Malon's a singer and Ilia likes to draw), and Beth, the diva, who I cannot avoid. She's like my own velcro shadow, clinging to me whenever and wherever it's possible. Mikau sits with us on-and-off, but he mostly hangs out now with his garage band.

"Hey! Link! Sheik! Over here, guys!" Malon called, waving us over to the table where the group was seated. Mikau was sitting with us today, and gave both Sheik and me a "brofist" when we sat down. Although Sheik changed two years ago, a lot of people still act like she's a guy, which she doesn't really seem to mind at all.

"Hey guys," Sheik said. I'm normally a man of few words, so I let my best friend do all the talking and introductions.

"Hi!" Ilia and Beth responded immediately.

"Hey," Ghirahim muttered, staring broodingly at his sandwich.

"Yo." That was Midna.

"Did you guys have a good summer?" Malon inquired. "I sang at the County Fair, when we took the horses and cows."

"I rode for 4-H and entered the art contest," Ilia added.

"Got super irritated by my cousins," Midna grumbled. "Zant came again." Zant was Midna's overly aggressive and annoying second cousin.

"Same old, same old," I said, and Sheik nodded. The two of us play video games literally all summer. We've done that since elementary school.

"Well," Mikau interjected, "I was hooking up with a new girl."

"Really," Sheik asked dryly. "And would you so kindly venture as to tell us whom this may be?"

"She moved in down the street from Lulu, so I met her last Saturday. She's a total hottie. I haven't exactly hooked up yet, but nobody else has, either. She's like a total introvert or something. I've never seen her outside, and Lulu says she hasn't either."

"Fantastic," Midna said.

"Wait! You haven't heard the best part yet. She's actually enrolled here!"

"Name?" Malon inquired.

"Zelda Harkinian."

Midna visibly tensed at the sound of Zelda's same.

"Know her?" Sheik asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

"She's in my second hour LA class," Midna said reluctantly. "The teacher already loves her. She wrote the most beautiful, Stephen Frost, Edgar Allen Poe crossover poem ever. It was about herself, because that was the assignment, and she made herself sound so noble and regal and enigmatically broody and mysterious and crap like that." Midna made a gagging sound. "She made my poem look totally sucky."

"Look who's made another friend," Ghirahim remarked sarcastically.

"People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives," quoted Sheik. "J. Michael Straczynski said that."

"Who the heck is that?" asked Ghirahim, at the same time as Midna growled "Are you making a remark about my writing?"

"He's a writer and producer and that's for me to know, and me alone," Sheik answered both of their questions with one sentence.

"Anyway," I interrupted, "what's she look like?"

The bell drowned out Mikau's reply.

As I puttered into the driveway that afternoon at around three, I was greeted by joyful barking. I drove slowly, cringing as my suicidal collie, Epona, leaped around in front of the car. I rolled my eyes. If I had been a serial dog killer, it wouldn't have taken much to get this one.

I slumped down in the only nice piece of furniture in the house, a newish looking sofa, and was immediately kissed all over my face by an overenthusiastic dog tongue.

"Stop! Stop! Alright, alright," I laughed, fending her off with my arms. "I get it. Go away." Every time I start school again, she acts like she hasn't seen me in a million years. I guess it's short-term dog memory or something. She finally gets used to it by May, and then, after summer, she spazzes out all over again.

Gran was nowhere to be seen, so I supposed that she was either asleep or shopping for more cookie supplies. Since she wasn't there to pester me, I dragged myself up the stairs and slumped down in my bed, which squeaked as it bounced. My room is small, and contains a bed, a lamp on a bedside table, and a desk. And a closet and a window, but those were there when I moved in. As teenager's rooms often are, mine was cluttered. Shirts littered the floor, games and comic books were strewn across the desk, and my chair was under the window. For some reason.

I sighed and rolled over. Uneventful day at school.

Little did I know that by the next squeak of our front door, the boring humdrum of my everyday life would change forever.

Okay. So: Sheik is a girl here because Nintendo DID announce formally that Sheik is female, so ha. In my original, she was a guy. It's hard to write her as a girl.

Please review if you want this continued.

Thanks for reading,

Squeeb