A/N: This is an experiment of sorts that came to me out of nowhere one day. I don't really know how it'll work, since I've got so many details that need to be precise and coherent for everything in the plot to come together correctly. There's a couple of focuses in this story, as the summary might suggest, and more than likely things will jump back and forth between them until they finally connect, but not in a crazy abstract way, I promise. This is just a setup chapter - not much is happening now, but the plot will soon be speeding along with all the grace of a freight train. I'll do my best to make it work .

He had always been a little eccentric. He still smeared glue on the back of his hand and peeled it off like he was molting in order to connect with his inner reptile, and he still always had to have some part of his body in motion, whether it was his hands scribbling down haphazard (and often unfinished) notes in class or sketching epic Godzilla-esque battles in their margins. He still liked to compose silly little ditties that were usually about what he was doing at the time with horribly forced rhymes. A lot of things about him hadn't really changed over the summer, but then again, a lot of things had.

His eyes, normally bright and animated regardless of how he felt, had become lackluster, and so had the emotions inside him. He used to be boisterous and excitable, but now he had become somewhat reticent and, as his grandfather had noted in a conversation not meant for his ears, timid. Spencer Shay, timid.

Had his mother not died less than a month before, the notion would have been laughable. Spencer didn't laugh much anymore, either, and his lips could still only imitate a smile.

He woke up that morning, the third of September, with the same hollow feeling in his chest cavity that he hardly noticed anymore, and he'd gone downstairs to find his grandfather sipping coffee and his younger sister munching on a bowl of Cheerios. The scene was so inexplicably normal that he perceived for a moment himself being the puzzle piece with the awkward edges whose place had been forgotten after everything came apart.

"Spencer," his sister called out, the 'r' in his name coming out like a rounded 'w', and her petite face lighting up in a smile that was eerily familiar and left him taking longer to respond than he should have.

"Morning, kiddo." It occurred to him that her presence was an oddity at this hour.

"Your sister will be attending very her first day of school this morning," his grandad announced with a prideful tone as though he could see inside his head. He set a piece of toast and a glass of milk in front of him. Though Spencer didn't care much for crunchy bread, he found that he was good at keeping his body on autopilot.

"I'm going to kindergarten," his sister informed him in her best grown-up voice, and Spencer thought he saw her sit up a little straighter.

Kindergarten.

How had he forgotten? They'd just gone shopping for school supplies for the both of them last week - his baby sister had clutched her list of essentials like it was the most important document in the world, and he'd helped her dutifully cross out the items once they'd been found.

How had he forgotten?

"Kindergarten," he repeated to himself aloud, and his voice cracked in between the third and fourth syllables, like the word got stuck on its way out. He coughed to cover it up. "Wow," he said when he found the strength. "You're getting old."

"No, you're old," she giggled, her naiveté a sucker punch in the gut that struck him often nowadays. "I'm only four."

"What does that make me?" their grandad wanted to know, his fingers combing through his granddaughter's hair, and suddenly Spencer found his toast to be of more interest. When it was gone, he wet his index finger to pick up the crumbs. They hustled and bustled around him, his sister's tiny feet making tiny clack clack sounds in her new white Mary Janes that her grandad insisted made her look like a princess.

"Spencer," she said, tugging on his arm and transporting him back to reality. "C'mon. Grandad wants to take a picture."

She led him to the door where they were to stand, and something reminiscent to hurt crawled in behind his ribs when he had to get behind her on his knees to accommodate her short stature. He let his chin rest on the top of her head, gently, barely. God, she was tiny. So tiny, he thought. It was like seeing her for the first time all over again, except instead of being a screaming red-faced newborn with a misshaped head, she was a little girl in a brand new yellow sundress, beaming like she could take on the world.

"Smile, now."

He licked his lips and recalled that one picture day in Junior High, a bunch of older kids got in trouble for yelling 'sex' as pictures were being taken. When his photo got developed, his mother had remarked that he had never smiled so brightly in front of a camera in his life. He never told her why.

"Wonderful. You two are adorable together." Their grandad's eyes twinkled as he turned the camera off. Spencer's lips hadn't moved.

"I'm going to the bathroom," he told no one in particular, and his grandad said something about waiting in the car.

He had always been fond of small enclosed spaces as long as he was alone, and the bathroom was the smallest and most private enclosed space available with hardly a few feet between the toilet and the sink. But somewhere along the line growing up he became all arms and legs and that little bubble of space he used to fit perfectly in could hardly be called a crawl space anymore. He knew that, but wasn't sure why he bothered to try and jam his gangly self in there anyway until his knees jabbed into the knobs of the cabinet and his back was pressed against the toilet bowl because then he had to spend about three minutes just easing back up again. It was a good thing he didn't actually need to use the bathroom.

His grandad's voice proceeded three quick raps on the door. "Spencer? Are you all right in there?"

"I'm fine, Grandad. I'll be right out."

He flushed the toilet, lathered his hands at the sink, and scrubbed for an unnecessary amount of time before he rubbed his hands against his jeans to dry them. He was hardly surprised to find his grandad still waiting outside the door.

"You're sure you're okay." It was a statement, not a question riddled with concern - a refreshing change. Spencer had answers on the tip of his tongue, the ones he seemed to be always wanting to say. No. I feel sick. I'm tired. I'm so, so tired. Leave me alone. Don't ever leave me.

"I'm fine," he answered instead, the usual. His grandad's sigh was melancholic.

"It gets better with time, Spence. I think the new school year will be good for you, especially since it's senior year. It'll give you new things to focus on. More reasons to get out of the house. Maybe you can join a sport."

"Yeah, doubt it on that last one," Spencer mumbled, biting his lip. "Can we go?"

"All right, Spence. All right."

In some kind of crazy way, at the start of every school year, Spencer found himself having missed Ridgeway High School. The hugeness of the campus was overwhelming to see at first, especially with so many students in a concentrated area, and if there was one thing he could recall from his freshman year, it was the perpetual sense of claustrophobia in the hallways and the constant sensation of others breathing down his neck. Throughout the years, little had changed other than his height, and he took comfort in seeing the familiar sight of hundreds of students milling by the school swapping schedules and catching up with acquaintances.

The first day of school was always the loneliest. So many groups all congregated together, and he had never once fit into any of them. He could look around for people he knew all that he wanted, but they would just make small talk with him and move on so their friends wouldn't stand there feeling out of place when in fact it was he who didn't belong.

He adjusted the straps on his backpack, then untied and tied his shoe again. Anything to make him look busy. Anything that would help him pretend that he wasn't the lone wolf among hundreds of packs.

"Spencer!" A voice called out to him, and through instinct he turned. A girl with blonde, frizzy hair bounded up to him, her curls bouncing on her shoulders, and he almost wished he'd ignored her.

"Liza," he acknowledged. "How are you." It wasn't really a question, and he hadn't really meant it to be, but she answered anyway.

"Oh, I've been great - me and PJ spent every weekend at the lake together this summer. I had to teach him how to swim - can you imagine? A big, macho man like him unable to handle himself in the water." She threw her head back and laughed like it was absolutely hilarious, and it should have been but he just couldn't join her. "So what about you?" she wanted to know when she'd stopped. "What have you been up to?"

"Not much," he answered, the truth.

"Oh, well, it's good that you had relaxing time, then. That's what summers are for - kicking back before the mountains of work start again."

Before he had to respond, a pair of gargantuan arms wrapped around Liza's waist, pulling her backwards into their respective owner.

"PJ," she grumbled trying to pull herself free. "You're interrupting my conversation." She craned her neck to glare up at him and it was kind of interesting to see them together like that because Liza was only like five feet tall and PJ was her hulking brute of a boyfriend that had to be close to two feet taller. His chuckle sounded like a growl, and Spencer got an image of the big bad wolf licking his chops when he bent down to make their mouths meet. The better to taste you with, my dear.

"I should go," he said as they broke apart. They both appeared to have forgotten he was there. Her started towards the double doors, up the concrete steps and had just grasped the door when a hand caught his elbow. "Spence, wait."

Liza stood there shuffling her feet and rubbing her lips together. She couldn't look at him. "I...I heard that your mom died. I know that she was sick for a really long time and...I don't know. I just wanted to say something to you."

He waited, but for once there wasn't a surplus of words to drown him out. She appeared lost, and her eyes pleaded with him to say something.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay." And he stepped through the door.

He could feel her eyes on his back through the tinted window, watching him go.

The rest of the school day passed in a blurry mess of bells and winding hallways. He got lost twice, once on the way to a classroom he already knew, and was late to every single one of them. School started too early and ended too late - his teachers were lucky he was even dressed, let alone lugging his bag full of binders and textbooks on his back.

Lunch was his solace. It was the quietest period of his day, even at the peak of socialization for the average school day. Everyone was still talking, of course, but at least at lunch he couldn't be certain of what they were saying.

Not that he didn't have an idea. Phrases such as 'leukemia', 'just about a month ago' and 'the poor boy' had been floating around the halls and classrooms only to dissipate when he got close. They all knew. Of course they knew. What had he expected? He chose a table alone, isolated - might as well make it easier for them all to see him - and ate the bologna sandwich that his grandad had thrown together while he'd showered and dressed. It was dry and had no taste; he'd have to mention the mayonnaise next time.

There was no sign of Liza at all for the entire duration of lunch. Not that he looked for her - why would he look for her? He wondered if she was avoiding him, if maybe she was sorry, but he couldn't find anything for her to be sorry about.

Spencer had always liked art. He liked the way you could never quite go wrong with it because there was no right or wrong. Not like with the ovens in his cooking class - one could go very, very wrong with some of those settings, apparently. Art was more about expression and not instruction, and where it was his last class of the day, he was ready for something a little more open-ended.

He'd forgotten the smells of an art room, of dried paint and clay, ink and charcoal, and just about any other tool of the trade. The scent almost knocked him over in the good kind of way, the kind of way took the tension that was wound like a spring inside him and eased it to loosen up.

He had never been much for large social circles, and it had never mattered to him that much that he was not really close to anyone, but he would have thought that after four years at Ridgeway, he would know more faces. Most of them have appeared to be foreign, save for a flicker of familiarity that he possibly fabricated on the occasion that someone approached him and said they were sorry for his loss. It had happened six-and-a-half times, the half being when a girl had gotten out of her seat in English and met eyes with him but had stopped halfway to his seat when the bell rang and Miss Briggs slammed a ruler on her desk to get the class in order.

It was sort of unfortunate that he managed to remember that evil incarnate of a woman, but names and faces of his classmates mingled in his head, unmatched.

Some kids in the corner of the room began to discuss in heated whispers the rumor that the new art teacher for that year went into labor the previous week and that they'd be stuck with a crotchety old woman who had just gotten out of rehab after experimenting with prescription drugs. That proved to be half-true - she was definitely crotchety and old. No one was going to ask her to affirm the second part to that rumor. She didn't have much to say to them except that every art supply they could possibly need was in a cabinet at the back of the room and that they could keep things to a dull roar if they cleaned up after themselves two or three minutes before the bell.

One by one by one, people began sifting through the tools of the trade, and he shifted from foot to foot as though he was impatient with the slowness of the way the line moved, when in actuality he hadn't a clue what he was looking for, a revelation that left him staring blankly at the cabinet's contents long after everyone had chosen a seat and gotten to work.

The immaculacy of plain white paper eventually won him over, and he helped himself to a few sheets. Everyone else had started in, and he stood there with suddenly clammy hands as the realization set in that he was going to have to sit down amongst complete strangers who may not have been strangers at all.

He eventually settled down at a round table adjacent to a kid who may or may not have had a face beneath his shaggy, mahogany hair. Spencer watched as the profile of a dragon took shape across the page in no time at all (just as he used to be able to do, a part of him dares recall).

By the end of the period, the faceless kid had drawn three dragons and a knight to fight them. There were no marks on his papers at all, but he crumpled them up and threw them away anyway just for good riddance.