This and maybe the next two chapters are just going to be to set up the story and introduce important characters. I'm really excited to get this started because I have some big plans for this. Now without further adeux I present to you the first chapter.
Jessica and Rory Connors watched their youngest son, their wonderful mistake, leave for his first day of school. They'd dressed him up nice, with a sweater vest over a white shirt and brown pants. Little did they know, he would be wearing something similar to this for his whole life, rather than the athletic clothes his parents were used to seeing on their kids.
Noah was the youngest out of five. Jessica and Rory had agreed on only having two children. But lo and behold, six years before Noah was born they gave birth to triplets Grace, Lance, and Seth. A year after overcoming the initial shock of suddenly having three additions to the family, Jessica decided she wanted to even out the amount of boys and girls in the family. So they tried for a girl. And got a boy. He was named Derek, and five years after him came Noah, the mistake, who at this moment was a lot better than a mistake to them.
Noah was different from his siblings, or at least it seemed that way. His parents hoped it was just a phase. While his four siblings played three sports each, all of which they were good at, when his parents signed Noah up for Junior Soccer, which was basically just a weekly gathering of four year olds who ended up playing basketball or football or tag instead of soccer, Noah would sneak off to read some book that was meant for first graders.
They stepped inside as the bus turned around the curb, and soon both had left for work, I say both because to afford a family of five both of Noah's parents had jobs with late hours.
Meanwhile, Noah's bus ride wasn't going as planned. Tyler Smith was sitting in the row across from him, and they had different ideas of what to do on the bus. As the young bookworm was just opening his book, the aspiring pro-athlete was throwing around a football.
"Catch it!" Tyler exclaimed a couple seconds after his football sailed over Noah's head and out the window. Noah continued reading, and Tyler wasn't very happy. Rather than throwing around a football the red track suit clad boy spent his bus ride glaring at Noah.
Maybe Noah wasn't that much at fault for hating sports, since all it took to ruin his social life in elementary school was failing to catch a football, and a wannabe athlete who was somehow popular.
Tyler wouldn't ever physically harm Noah or bully him too bad, but ever since the first day he'd made sure that everyone knew how terrible of a person Noah was. And he was popular. In school people tend to stick with popular kids, and so it was that Noah spent his free time at school or at home reading, honing his sarcasm, not having friends. Some of the unpopular kids would have been willing to befriend him, but Harold always tried to find proof that Noah was an idiot compared to him, Cody talked about all of the hot girls, especially Gwen, too much and Sam hadn't looked up from his game boy in years.
Tyler eventually switched schools in third grade, but Noah didn't care enough to try and lift himself up the social pyramid. So Noah remained an outcast. A few kindred souls reached out to him, spoke to him, but he rejected them, turned them away with a sarcastic reply to whatever they had to say.
But he learned the hard way that he was not only an outcast, but an easy target.
Duncan was the new kid in fifth grade, and the word on the street was that he had been sent to juvie for a year. He had skipped the first two days of school, and on the third day he had to leave early because his Mohawk went against the dress code. He was the first real life bad boy any girl had ever seen;everyday his shirt seemed to have a skull or some sort of dead person or murderer or murder weapon on it. After a week of girls crushing on him it seemed inevitable that Duncan would be the first fifth grader to have a girlfriend.
During the first big partner project for Social Studies, Noah was partnered with the buzz-cutted (he'd got a buzz cut when the school didn't let him have a Mohawk) rebel. The first words Duncan spoke to him were," You're a nerd, you can do it all."
Noah deadpanned back,"You're an idiot, you can fail this class." Duncan was baffled. No kid would ever say anything remotely offensive to him if they knew what was good for them. Especially not someone whose brain probably weighed more than the rest of his body.
While Duncan considered what to do about this, Noah requested a partner change, and since the smart-alec had already out witted the teacher in an argument about working with a group before, she placed Duncan with Gwen and Courtney.
The next day at lunch Duncan decided to teach the brainiac a lesson. As Noah walked towards his table in the corner, his book in his right and his lunchbox in his left hand, Duncan shoved him back. Noah, who was much skinnier than the punk found himself on the ground, and his lunchbox in Duncan's hand. "Later, loser."
Noah wasn't going to let that incident phase him. Shrugging, he sat down by himself and read, until his empty lunchbox was thrown at him by Duncan. That was the first lunch less day of many for the sarcastic boy.
Fifth grade had been one of the worst years of Noah's life. He was bullied at school everyday, and his home life wasn't much better. It wasn't easy being the youngest out of five. And by now it was known and accepted that Noah was the black sheep of the family. He was smart, his siblings weren't. He was weak, his siblings weren't. And on days when Noah had actually let the bullying get to him, on days where he got home and cried for hours, no one noticed. Between having no friends at school, and having his parents never home, and his siblings either playing sports or doing whatever teenagers do, Noah was alone.