I've never been especially fond of football players.

I mean, sure, they're part of high school life, but to me, they're obnoxious, self-centered, and annoying.

They're not especially fond of me, either, but that has more to do with my brother than anything. They get frustrated with his permanent cheerfulness, the way he never shows up to practice, or a million other things. Then, angry and unable to take it anymore, they beat the shit out of me. It's not exactly my favorite part of the day, if you know what I mean.

Once, I told my brother that I'd been beaten up. He freaked, threatened to quit the team, until I soothed him and told him it was just a prank and that I'd fallen down the stairs. When the other players found out, they beat me up again. Those guys should seriously be in therapy or something.

A million times worse than the football players and their anger, though, is the cheerleaders.

Somehow, in some microscopic details that I have yet to observe, I look like my brother. So, naturally, when my brother shoots the girls on the cheerleading squad down, they always insist on asking me out in his place.

I have yet to say yes to any of them, and that makes them furious. And, being the stereotypical high school popular girls, their fury usually ends in a slap and a handful of rumors about me. If rumors were true, according to the most recent one, I would be a fag that was in love with his brother.

That rumor stung, a little, because when my brother heard it, he didn't talk to me until two weeks later- when he overheard the cheerleader confessing to it being a lie. Then pretended that he had never ignored me in the first place.

I just really don't understand what any of the other people around me are thinking. I've been accused of thinking too much, and maybe it's true, but maybe I think just enough to make up for the obvious lack of thought that the people around me seem to exercise. The cheerleaders, the football players, even the people who turn a blind eye to what their fellow students do to others. What are they all thinking?

I can't even begin to comprehend what could go through their minds. What do you think when you're pushing someone down the stairs? What do you think when you're ruining someone's reputation, and, consequentially, their whole high school career?

'Children are mean', I read once, 'because they simply can't understand how much their actions hurt others yet. But adults are worse, because they understand how much they hurt others and carry on with it anyway.'

I don't want to grow up, but I don't want to stay in this hell either. It's a miserable, lonely place that I want to escape, but I don't want to escape to a world where you can watch someone hurting someone else and loving their pain, loving how deeply they'll be wounded. If there was a way to make things perfect, to escape what happens, I would.

Sometimes I wonder what my brother thinks when he talks to the people he calls his friends, the people who beat me up and spread vicious lies about me. Does he even know?

Does he even care?

I don't know, and somehow that's worse than knowing. If I knew that he didn't care, I could put him out of my mind, shut him out of my life, and carry on with things. But as it is now, I can pretend that he doesn't know about how awful school is for me, just like my parents- one a drunkard, the other a certified slut- and carry the small hope that they love me.

I want to believe that they do, but I'm forced to accept that they don't- when they never cook me dinner, when they never ask me how my day was, when they don't bother to spare a glance at my black eye- a million little things let me know that they don't care. A

If I didn't have my friends, I would be so alone, and I don't want to be alone.

Sometimes, thinking about what would happen if they all left me, I feel like my chest is constricting and I can't breathe. For someone who doesn't have any strong bonds with their family, like me, that would be the lowest point of their life. If I woke up in the morning, without being able to go to school and listen to my half-sister chatter on about fish and the latest 'manga' (or something like that) she's read, without that familiarly strange ritual of my best friend groping every male in touching distance.. I would be so alone.

I don't want that to happen. I don't want to be alone.

"There's been an accident..."

-/-/-

A/N: So! This is hopefully gonna be a long, long high school AU fic thing. Yeah, it'll probably star Matthew Williams, or Canada. I'm just adding my fic to the large, large collection of AU-high-school-Canada fic things.

''orz

But hopefully it won't suck! c: (Rating may go up later on, but I'll tell you if that happens beforehand.) There's also a slightly edited version of this on my livejournal, where I'm listed under the same username (Cornavey) and it's more Matthew-and-his-family based.