Middle Schooler AU. I has posted this before, but didn't like where the story was going so I made some slight changes here and there. Chapters, hopefully, will be posted every 4 days to a week.
"I'm sorry Matt, you're our friend and everything but you're a little too boring." Alfred says slowing, sharing a small smile. He looks around at the others. Arthur won't look up from his food. Neither will Andrea, Femke, or Matthias. Boring. The words ring in his ears. Boring. Matt wasn't boring, he was just different. Yeah, that's the word. Altered. Strange. Unequal. Variant. Anything but boring. He likes to think himself unique from his classmates. They seem to be carbon copies of each other. The boys play every sport in existence and own every sneaker in existence. And the girls? They seemed to be in their own little media filled world. I
n reality, they only knew him as that quiet kid who's good at drawing those Chinese cartoons. "They're Japanese." He'd say under his breath. "And it's called anime." And it was true, that he likes to draw anime. He'd spend hours on the same sketch until it was perfected. Then he'd bring it to school and show the others for them to coo over. He enjoys that kind of attention. But by the next day the spark was gone and he'd go unnoticed again.
Coming home from school, he threw his school bag on the couch and ran upstairs. He slips out of his uniform and into more comfortable. He lays back on his bed spread. For some reason he feels better in this environment then in his classroom. He opens his laptop, only to meet a blond hair and blue eyes. Matt stares at his reflection for a moment. "Me and Al aren't that similar..." He thinks. He wipes some hair stands away from his forehead. Alfred was loud, energetic and popular. Matthew was creative, kept, and foreign. Personality wise, they seem different but whenever they stand side by side people assume they're the same. It wasn't fair. He looked at himself one last time before turning on the power button.
Matt opens up Tumblr as soon as he opened his browser. He's greeted by a colorful gif in the background of the login page. He smiles. This is the exact reason he loves Tumblr. It's different, like him. Clicking Activity he found he gained 14 more followers, 2095 in total. Another reason to smile. He doesn't quite understand why he has all these followers or any at all for that matter. One day he deemed it was a damn good idea to write down his ideas and theories and Tumblr was the best place to do it. He decides to read some Fan Mail. One was from a guy in Australia. He felt overshadowed by his younger brother who always seemed to achieve more than he did. Another was from a girl from Hungary. Her parents and sister keep pressuring her into choosing a career she had no passion for. Matt shook his head. Usually he'd respond to these kinds of things but he had no ideas. He puts the thought off until tomorrow.
It's 10:00pm and that's Matt's curfew. He keeps thinking about those two kids. "What if they're in college and it's too late to change? No wait..." He tries to imagine what they look like, their family, how they feel. "Both will be brunette and green eyed but Liz will have a lighter shade..." The more he thinks, the more they sound like characters with fictional problems. He lets his mind create background, a setting and plot. In the morning, he'll start a strip based off of these "characters". "Yeah...I'll work on it for like a year. Then get it published. That sounds good."
-/-
5:00 am. He can't sleep. And it's not about the characters this time. It's about his friends. The last time he saw them was Friday and that's when he couldn't take it anymore. He blew up. You see, Matt loves his friends; they're just like him, different. But they try too hard to be different to point where it gets annoying. They want to be those outcasts you see in high school movies who always seem to win in the end. Why? He doesn't understand. Being the reject is NOT FUN NOR COOL. To have everyone look at you like you were some alien species. To have them completely ignore you. To have people talk about you behind you back is something no one should have to endure.
He brings his knees to his chest. He'd wouldn't be surprised if they never got rid of this "social outcast" thing. All Matt wishes for is a year, a month, or even a minute where people didn't think of him as less. He wants to be thought of like a classmate, an equal. He nevers wants to be thought of like the counter-argument, or the paper that never was, again.
So these are Matthew's thoughts just told in third person if you got confused by the writing style.
