CHAPTER ONE

RYAN'S POINT

Disclaimer: I feel like I shouldn't write this. There's so much going on in my head, ideas and thoughts and weird chunks of some stories that I might write some time or other – to be honest, I'm feeling like a bomb that might go off at any moment. An idea bomb,ha ha.

All the characters of O.C are not my own.

Ryan had fallen in love in his first days in Newport and the experience took him completely by surprise. He felt as if he'd had this really weird dream that people were having sometimes, a dream that no one was able to explain properly, and than he'd woken up and there were chunks of it missing suddenly, big chunks even and now he just didn't get this, any of it. He remembered this bloke called Sandy Something telling him how much he was wasting his life and that he could do better and that he felt Ryan was a fairly intelligent young man loosing his way in life…(in fact, this wasn't altogether true, because he had never had a way in life and this guy was not even the first person to tell him how clever he was) and he could clearly remember his brother being taken to jail with a nasty you-all-will-pay-for-this-look on his face. Somehow Ryan must have managed to wriggle out of this whole thing, exept that he didn't know for sure what this whole thing was. Apparently, he and his brother had done something stupid (and at this thought Ryan vaguely remembered this really foolish idea that stealing a car had to be quite a cool thing to do) and now, suddenly, he was packed of to the Cohen's poolhouse. Cohen happened to be this guy's name, as he now knew.

Sandy Cohen was married to a woman called Kirsten, a kind and good looking mother, the sort of parent who would forgive her children anything, at any time or so it seemed to Ryan. Mr and Mrs Cohen had a son who was his age, which, as Ryan had learnt on his first day with the Cohens, was the only thing the two of them had in common. Seth Cohen was the sort of weirdo who wouldn't survive a single day in Chino, a boy with no interest in anything kids would usally do (if he was honest with himself, Ryan did not really know what rich kids in California were up to all day, but none of these activities involved reading comics like Seth, that was for sure).

He was just beginning to wonder how long he would last in this richer-than-rich county, when all this, his brother being packed of to jail, a complete stranger telling him how clever he was or being stuck with a nerd for he didn't know how long, took a turn for the better. Marissa was, it ocured to Ryan, everything he wasn't. For a start, she was rich or at least her family was rich and his wasn't. She was nice, he wasn't, nor had he ever found himself in a situation that had required being nice until he had started to live with Sandy and Kirsten. She was bright and good at school, he wasn't. Many people had told him he had hidden depths by now, but he had neither done anything useful with those depths, nor had he discovered what exactly his qualifications were. And,which was most important, Marissa had a boyfriend and…Well, it was quite clear he did not have a boyfriend, but he didn't have a girlfriend either. At least, he'd count Theresa, which he didn't.

She was another problem, Theresa.

Marissa was beautiful and it was sure to Ryan that her past was free of any frivolity or lust and noisy orgasms. His clearly wasn't, there was no point in pretending otherwise.

Why anything should have taken a turn for the better simply by meeting a girl who meant something to him, he had yet to find out, but it was fact. Apart from that, Seth and Sandy and Kirsten weren't as bad as they seemed from the outside. Yes, they were rich and posh, but they also were nice and understanding and helpful . Seth was indeed weird, but he was quite clever and –furthermore-deeply in love with a beautiful girl who would never in a thousand years look twice at him, so at least they had another thing in common.