Duo Maxwell's POV

I can remember the exact moment I fell in love. It was horrible. I think it was the worst moment in my life. No scratch that the worst moment of my life was after I fell in love, when I realized who I was in love with.

This isn't a love story. It isn't an adventure story with romance and handsome princes or damsels in distress. It isn't scary or dramatic. It won't be life changing and it won't give you the epiphany you've been waiting for. It won't be funny and it doesn't have a happy ending; it has no ending. This is my story, plain and simple. It won't be pleasant and I'm not about to sugar coat it for you. If you're still interested in what I have to say, well I can't stop you from reading, so here goes nothing.

It was my favorite day of the week. I don't care what anyone else says, Wednesday's are and will always be the best day. I like to call it hump Wednesday. You've just survived the two worst days of the week and you can only move forward from there. Monday - well I don't have to explain why that day is so horrible, I'm sure you can figure it out. Tuesday, well that's just a bad day. You already feel like its Friday by the time the sun comes up Tuesday morning. When Wednesday comes along it' s like you've accomplished some great feat. You're still alive and standing at that! You're probably wondering what's wrong with the other days. Well Thursday always lasts forever, always, no matter what. Friday is way to short. I don't like the feeling of being free and then realizing that my freedom is about to end. Saturday, well everyone's way too busy to really enjoy it. People cram so much stuff in a Saturday it surprises me that they can still move by the end of the day. Sunday. Sunday is the most depressing day of the week. It's the day you realize that the worst day of the week is about to begin and another week of torture is on its way.

Anyway, as I was saying it was Wednesday. If you haven't guessed already I'm in high school and it had taken forever to get to this point. Monday had given me a pop quiz in half my classes and a test in the other two. I may only have four classes a day, but sitting in each one everyday for an hour and a half makes me ill. Sitting still for 90 minutes to take a test or quiz makes me homicidal. Well I lived through Monday and didn't kill anyone, but Tuesday didn't get any better. It, of course, felt like Friday, but that feeling ended when my coach extended our soccer practice. It was early April and it was hotter than Hades outside. I would guess it was pushing ninety-five degrees. My coach is a true sadist. He will never cancel practice no matter what the weather is and if you don't show up for a practice you add an extra mile to your warn ups the next time you come and you can't play in the upcoming game. He doesn't take excuses, the only one he will even consider is if you lose a limb. If someone died, forget it; unless you're the one lying in the coffin you had better show up. If you're late, heh I feel for you. He makes you run an extra half-mile and do fifty-pushups...while balancing him on your back. Yeah, it's happened to me several times. I'm proud to say I am the only one who can do all fifty push-ups without collapsing.

Okay, I'm getting sidetracked, back to Tuesday. We had been practicing for over an hour and a half and I was running the ball down the field. I'm an offensive player and our team's main scorer. I was past mid-field when a defensive player came running toward me. Usually I'm quick to move, but I was really hot and really tired so I just kept dribbling the ball toward him. I looked down for a moment when suddenly I found myself staring up at the sun. I had just collided with the guy on defense. Real smooth, eh? Well my coach isn't one to stop the game for anything so as I lay there my teammates kept right on playing. After a minute on the ground I hoisted myself up and brushed myself off. The other team had scored a point and the coach was calling us all to mid-field. He said something stupid about how we needed to treat practice like the real thing because what we do here we take to the game. I looked around and I saw that everyone was pretty much in the same position. My teammates were all bent over resting there hands on their knees and panting. Everyone's shirts were literally soaked, myself included. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and returned to listening to my coach. He dismissed us a few minutes later and I was about to drag myself to the locker room when he called me and the defense guy I had collided with over. We both stood in front of him with a look of dread. He ordered Scott, the other guy, and I to do two stadiums. I almost fell over and Scott dropped his jaw. We had just finished almost two hours of backbreaking practice and were about to kill over and he expected us to run up and down six flights of stairs, twice. He told us to get to it, he didn't like whiners, so Scott and I started running up and down the stadium stairs. When we landed on the last step we had to lean on each other to walk to the locker room.

I gathered my clothes, knowing I wouldn't be able to change before I took a shower and I wasn't about to take one in the locker room. I said goodbye to Scott and walked toward the front of the building. I walked out of the school and frowned in frustration. I didn't have a car; I couldn't afford one. I had to walk to and from school everyday, because our school didn't provide transportation. Something about how not enough kids road the bus to keep them running. Figures, everyone in my school drove or had a driver. If for some reason they couldn't drive, or didn't have a driver they found a ride with their friends. I didn't have many friends. Wait, no, that's not right, I didn't have any friends. Granted I was the star soccer player and everyone seemed to like me, I didn't have, ya know, real friends. I didn't hang out with anyone outside of school and I really didn't trust anyone with my secrets. I was the one and only poor kid at my school. No one knew though. How could the star soccer player be poor? Well I am so get over it. Just to fill you in on a little history, I was born in Kentucky - I am not a fucking hick - but I lived most of my life in Georgia. I had two siblings, an older brother and sister. My sister, Renee was a good fourteen years older than me and my brother was ten years older than me. Needless to say we weren't very close. When I was four my sister moved out and married some red neck from Kentucky. For some reason, I don't really know what happened, we ran low on money and we moved to Florida. That didn't turn out too well and we ended up having to move in with my Aunt in Georgia. She helped get us back on our feet, but when we finally moved out and into our own place my brother ran away. He was only sixteen and he was into all kinds of shit. Not a month later we got a letter in the mail from my sister basically telling us that she hated us all, save for my brother, and that we could go to hell for all she cared. Later, I think I was ten, we heard from my brother. He came to our house and looked like he'd been hit by a truck. We hadn't heard from him in almost four years and there he was, bleeding and drugged up. My parents, being the saps they were, took care of him. My mom fixed him his meals and my dad got him a job. After a few months my parents decided to move into a bigger place, the rent on our house was almost up anyway. My parents saved and bought a house. It was nice and we were happy, though we never did hear from my sister. When I was fifteen my brother found an apartment that he could buy and my parents helped him move in while I was at school. On one of the moving days, though, my parents dropped me off at school like usual and went with my brother to help him finish moving his stuff in. They never did pick me up. They were in a car accident and it wasn't pretty. My sister showed up at the funeral, but she didn't recognize me. I didn't expect her too and I wasn't about to go up to her, as far as I was concerned I had no sister.

The main point in telling you all that crap is to clue you in that I take care of myself. I'm seventeen and I live alone in what would have been my brother's apartment. My parents' will didn't give anyone in the family a right to me and no one was about to take me in. My family isn't tight-knit and never really was. My parents willed to me what money they had and I sold their house and all their belongings, save for a few sentimental items, and moved into the apartment. I used the money I had to pay the bills and take care of myself. I've been like this for almost two years and I made a bargain with the school so they wouldn't leak my secret to social services or other students. I play for their soccer team in the spring, the basketball team in winter, and the rest of my time is spent with the chorus program. I don't mind. I work late at night so the extra curricular activities never get in my way. I work at an upscale restaurant in the heart of Atlanta. It pays well and I don't have to worry about my classmates finding me out because I work from nine to closing at two in the morning. It pays well and the boss is really nice. I work five days a week leaving the weekend open to cram in the sleep I had missed out on. All in all I live a pretty good life, except for the not having any friends part.

Okay so now that you know how my week started out and you get the basic idea of how I'm living let's move on shall we? Wednesday morning came along and I woke up at seven to do my normal routine. After showering I pulled on my sweat pants and gym shirt and started my three-mile jog to school. It took me a half an hour and I'm happy to say each time I go to school the time it takes is getting shorter and shorter. I get to school around eight every morning and change into whatever outfit I had managed to grab from home. I never take any books home, because it would be hell trying to carry them to school in the morning while running, so I opt to do all my homework at school, during lunch, in-between classes, and during classes. On Friday I bring all my books home to study and do projects, because Sunday I get to go to sleep early so I can wake up early on Monday and take my time getting to school. After changing into some baggy jeans and a black T-shirt I gathered my books and headed for the chorus room.

Every morning at 8:05 the chorus teacher makes me come in and practice whatever piece her class is doing. In preparation for the spring concert that was only a week away we were singing some sappy love songs and she gave me a solo. For some reason she thinks I can sing. I beg to differ, but I swallow my pride and do what she asks. My day continues on as usual and nothing really interesting happens. I already left the worst two days behind me and things can only get better right? Wrong.

At 3:30 my school let out and I went to the locker room to change for practice. After being late three times I decided to try my best not to be late again. That day I managed to be the first one on the field. The other guys followed soon after and we stood in front of the coach waiting for instructions. The coach was talking to another coach, the football coach if I made out right and they seemed to be in a heated argument. Soccer isn't a really popular sport in the Georgia, granted it's appreciated and all the schools have a soccer program, but the south focuses most of its attention on football. The football coach was yelling about how they had the field that day and our coach was yelling about how we had a game on Friday. I really didn't want to be there when my coach got through yelling so I motioned for my teammates to follow me and we set off jogging around the track. I noticed as we made it into our second lap that the football team had also approached the coaches and they followed our example and started jogging with us. There had to be fifty of us running around the track and when my team finished off out fourth lap we jogged onto the field and stood in three lines. For some reason the football team followed us and they also stood in lines next to us. As the captain of my team I stood in front of my team and was about to start stretching when one of the football players came up and stood beside me. Like all the football players he had all his equipment on and I could see a letter C sewed into his jersey, meaning he was the captain of the football team. I politely ignored his presence and took to stretching. I bent forward, touched my toes and started counting. The football team mimicked my example, as did my teammates. I started counting the odd numbers and as usual my teammates shouted out the even numbers. When I had reached five the captain standing next to me started counting the odds with me and the football team started shouting the evens with the soccer team. I was surprised needless to say but it continued with each stretch. After I had finished our usual set of warm-ups I looked over to find our coaches still quarrelling and sighed. As always I took things into my own hands - I'm the independent sort if you haven't noticed - and turned toward the football captain.

"Look," I said. "I want to practice and get outta here as soon as possible, so I'm gonna compromise with you. We'll give you half the field and we'll take the other half. The last half hour of practice we'll give you fifteen minutes to scrimmage and you give us fifteen minutes to scrimmage. Deal?" I put my hand out to shake and that's when it happened.

The guy took off his helmet and shook his head allowing his sweat to spray outwards. He then looked towards me and I did a double take. This was perhaps the hottest guy I had ever seen. Piercing blue eyes looked at me through dark chocolate brown hair and I wanted to melt. He held his helmet under his arm and grasped my hand in a firm shake. It was then, as his deep voice said "Deal", that I knew I was in love. I knew because when it happens you just know. It's one of those things you really need to experience for yourself, but I'll try to explain it to you. It was a feeling I got in the pit of my stomach and it worked its way up until I felt dizzy. My body got goose bumps even though it was over ninety degrees outside and my hand was shoot electricity up my arm. It was a wonderful feeling. Then the worst thing in my entire life happened. I realized I was in love with the captain of the football team. Shit.

Tbc...

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