Warning; Very mild profanity.

I would like to thank MorDeMor, just a fangirl, and TellNearaToWrite for their lovely reviews! My first reviews ever, oh golly gosh.

I'll try to making consistent updates, but I'm currently in college as a tiny freshman and sometimes my schedule just will not permit me. Thank you for understanding and enjoy!


"Hello Monday Morning, try and talk your way out of this one
For today's grand performance try and make the most of the love that's left

Trying to forget the everything that weighs you down"

- Monday Morning, Morning Parade


Monday Morning:

John Watson hadn't come from a large city, it was average, with a couple of family owned restaurants and a gas station on the corner. The houses that lined the streets stood with individual identities, like each had been constructed by individual families with individual needs and ideas, and added with garages, sheds, fences and hedges as afterthoughts years later. They were old houses, tired and peeling at the edges, but they were warm and loving; they were the gentle reminders of memory of his town. They were bookmarkers for children, lovingly worn pages for families- even if they were only dusty books on rusty shelves to the rest of the world. Home was home.

The school hadn't been privileged or pricy, it had never been particularly good at being a school, actually, but it still stood with stonish pride in its two floor high, field and a half long self. There was a gym, a cafeteria, a sports program and a music theory class in between the usualities of a school. The food suck, most teachers only taught for the paycheck, and school events were town events. The buses roared at seven-thirty, the bells rang at eight and three, then the buses roared again. They would file down and back along the dusty streets, racing stray kids with their bouncing backpacks gripping at their shoulders. Smiles and laughter and cries would burst to life each weekday at three like a steady heartbeat; through the leaves of autumn, the snow of winter, back to the thresholds of spring like a heartbeat.

And in the summer, there were always kids out. They were off their leashes and off to play, to find what adventure slept between houses and over the train tracks. Mothers did groceries and laundry on Fridays, and they would pass by the other mothers to gossip and gripe and reminisce. Fathers did the yard work on Saturdays, to pass along a drink or two over the fences to other fathers who were barbecuing, who were out tossing balls to their sons. And every Sunday the churchyard was full with stuffy shirts and mothy bibles, with boys pulling on their collars and, often, the neighborhood girl's pig tails.

The days were filled with light-hearted, stolen moments that could only be kept by a camera, and pressed flat in between a sheet of plastic and the embrace of cardboard. Laughter bubbled and was sept away by the wind, carried off under the branches, up over the trees, to the rolling clouds passing through a sky that always seemed so blue. Everyone knew each other, everyone smiled, everyone cared. People had their problems, sure, but those problems seemed to lessen and be forgotten all together with a chilled glass of lemonade in one hand, a good book in the other, and a warm breeze that washed the smell of flowers and chlorine and hot pavement over your skin.

Summer brought a certain life to the town. And that small town brought solace and ease to its residence in an otherwise worried, damaged reality.

People wanted for little else.

This new town that John walked through, though, wasn't the same peaceful place his childhood was attached to. It was identical around the corners; the houses were loved, the streets were a bit dusty, and the mornings here were filled with sun and wind and sky. But the shapes were odd, and the shadows were unfamiliar, and the angles seemed sharper. The houses slouched on their hills, above the cracked sidewalks and two-way street, isolated. Stone and iron separated families here instead of the warm browns of fencing. They grimaced down to John as he considered them and walked on by.

The town had every other intention of being exactly like his home… his old home— but intention only got you so far. The little boxes and single dusty street wasn't the outline of his forested valley, but an outline of a concrete jungle that stood and waited in a low city buzz miles away. It was the makeshift horizon behind the wall of suburbia. He could see the tops of hazy skyscrapers from his window back at the house; grey, sad towers that paled to the memory of green, misty trees.

And school. His new school. Harry had driven them up to look at it the Saturday before, his mother had insisted, well, bribed Harry with her previously confiscated phone anyway to take them up. The bribery worked, so they had gotten into the car and had taken the two minute ride up the road and around the corner. Then there it was. The school—the school had been—ridiculous is what it had been. Harry had scoffed and driven away without really slowing down to look in the first place, but John had stared and continued to stare into the mirror until the giant disappear around the bend, behind the hedge. His heart had sunken in, and he couldn't help to imagine how lost he would be in an ocean of new faces on the first day, and it most certainly was going to be an ocean of faces. This school held close to a thousand kids, not the steady eighty-six that had been in his last class. John Watson realized in a sudden sweep of anxiety just how much he needed to fit in. He needed people to be surrounded by, new people; people who smiled at him and laughed with him and who didn't look at him with so much fucking pity in their glassy, dead eyes.

John's grip flexed around his seat belt, his eyes unfocused out the car window.

He wondered briefly if it was easy to become a new person on such a short notice. He had seen Harry do it, he had seen his mother do it.

His sister raced the car up the drive, parked with a jolt and slammed the door behind her without so much of a word to John, to herself, to anyone. John hesitated to move.

Yeah.

Why not him.


He felt so small.

In reality, the building was only two stories higher than his old school, but it was considerably larger.

As John Watson first stood in front of the building that was to house the last year and a half of his high school career, his first thought was how he would ever find his way around in the place. God, he'd have to carry a map absolutely everywhere.

It was white block, with big black letters that spelled out the school's name over the entrance. The grounds were mostly grass, a couple of trees at the sides where the curvature of the building allowed a bit of grassy mall. John could imagine students rested and played there before and after the bells rang like in some teen movie; jocks wrestling with each other, the popular girls sunbathing under trees and giggling. There were some parts, though, were the ground was white brick, which matched the white walls, and wrapped itself into a place for a handful of tables and a flagpole.

The entrance was six wide glass doors that stood under an overhang that outline the second floor of the place. Early sunlight caught the window glass of all four floors and blinded the town it stood in front of.

John squinted the building a couple times over, noticing that the longer he stood there, the more stray people came and gave him odd looks.

Oh, he could feel the whispers of 'new kid' already.

John sniffed and shifted his backpack on his shoulders.

He had a tour of sorts planned for him at eight. It was a 'welcome to the school, here's where everything is and good luck' type of thing, and there wasn't anything in the world he was looking forward to the least. It got him out of his first class, though, and that meant he would have those fifty minutes more to calm his first day jitters.

That was at eight though. It was only just seven-forty.

What then, to pass the time. John mused, scrunching his lips to the side in thought. He glanced around the edges of the school and saw the corner of a rugby field peeking out to his left.

Oh yes.

John skipped into a casual walk. He had a tugging feeling in the back of his skull, because snooping around wasn't usually what normal boys did on their first day at a new high school, but boredom was boredom and there wasn't a fence keeping him out of the back of the building so it was all fair game. John stepped around the corner, out of sight and strangely, suddenly much more relaxed on his mini adventure. He stretched his limbs out in the sun and took in his surroundings.

The field was practically polished, even the bleachers gleamed. It was all green turf, perfectly painted school emblem in the middle and team colored detailing around the little stadium. John whistled and guessed that's what you get when a school had money. Lots of money.

He walked up to the field entrance and admired his view a little more closely. He had thought about joining the team, or trying out at least. He hadn't been bad at the sport back home, but little towns had a habit of only versing little towns, and this was a city school, the practice would no doubt be a bit more demanding and out of his comfort zone, not to mention the competition.

The anxious feeling in his stomach was sparkling back again.

John turned on his heels, thumbs under the straps of his bag, and his walked the sizable distance back to the main building.

There was a little more grass in the back, with stone picnic tables, metal dumpsters in the corners and another well sculpted patio that lead to three heavy metal doors consecutively. He looked them over and decided rather quickly that white stone was going to get on his nerves. He didn't really know why, but he was pining for a bit of red brick. It seemed less fake to him than bleached stone did.

He sighed and lazily examined his options. Right; back to the front, or left; between a fence and a wall. Left seemed more off-limits, John couldn't help himself.

The grass was overgrown and woven into the changeling, and the space in between the metal and white wall was barely big enough for a person to fit through. John figured this out right away as his backpack caught on the wall and kept him from exploring. He un-wedged himself from the space, shrugged off his backpack, dropped it in the tall grass at the mouth of the path and John shuffled his way through the alleyway. The wall scrapped and pulled on his shirt, the grass cut across his trousers and dirt shifted under his heels.

Beyond the fence was a lawn of unkempt shrubs that reached the wall of a distant track field. There was a line of sheds, and the land dropped to a slope further than that.

The space was secluded, and it wrapped itself around the wall of the school that eventually let out to a grimy box of pavement in where the walls bent inward. There was another metal door, shut with a rusty looking bolt and lock, a pipe that went from the roof and disappeared into the ground and cigarette butts that littered the floor and gathered at the storm drain in the middle.

It had been a long time since the place had seen any attention, or cleaning, but it was strangely cozy, tucked away in a corner the rest of the world didn't care to see. John ran his palm along the top of the fence until he was standing in the middle of the edge of his square. Further on the white wall ran on for a while and cornered and disappeared but the fence ended and connect to the school wall, hindering him from continuing his journey. It was okay though, John thought. His little pavement island of solitude was enough of a final destination.

John leaned back on the fence for a while, just letting his thoughts swirl around his head. He turned to look behind him and felt a sense of calm spread over him, a more affective calm than he had found anywhere else in his depressing new town. One could sit for hours here, and just think, and never be interrupted.

John Watson was a country type of guy, it's where he was born, how he was raised. If there was a choice between harsh concrete and breezy grass it was the grass every single time, but there was something about cities that could make him stop for a moment, make him feel at peace. There was a charm.

The school and his street were situated on a small hill in the hoard of houses that foot-hilled the actual city a few minutes away. So John's new life was set in a way, that, when he was in just in the right spot on his little hill, he could see an expanse of space, just space with sky, like back home.

So when John turned around, the space he had found became that much more lingering.

The houses below his hill stretched outwards, and grew smaller and smaller as they lined the rises of high-rises and condos, then the skyscrapers tapering off in the middle of the city which grew taller and taller above the rest of the world. It wasn't grass and rolling hills that lead to mountains, but John could appreciate it just the same. It was majestic in its own private right, and he couldn't deny it took his breath away.

He crossed his arms on the fence and just—stared for a while. He felt the coolness of the metal on his forearms, the sun was warm on his skin, the wind was gentle and tussled his blonde hair. He could feel his nerves relaxing, finally, and all his nervous energy seeping away into the lifting autumn air, out to the view.

He was so relaxed, in fact, that when his vision was suddenly obscured he shrieked and flailed backwards to the hard ground. Adrenaline raced through his as he torn for his eyes, trying to rid himself of the sudden, blinding material wrapped around his head. The attacker gave and he gripped the thing in his fists, holding it as far from his body as possible till his vision came back. His eyes flew open.

It was a scarf. A soft, knitted blue scarf that the wind caught playfully and pulled in his hands.

John's eyebrows bunched together, and his breathing and pulse rate returned to normal as he stared at it.

A scarf?

John slowly eased into a sitting position, rather than an attack victim stance, and leaned over to examine his finding.

It was actually two types of blue, striped down the length. A lighter tone, and darker shade following each other to the ends. He felt the material between his fingertips.

John's first instinct, after assessing the danger of his aggressor of course, was to look up to figure out where the scarf had come from. He got to his feet, brushed off the back of his pants and look up as far as he could up the solid white wall. He could see the edge of the roof; empty. The windows were each closed and dark, shades pulled.

John looked around him, to the locked door and deserted alley, out to the city, then back to the scarf in his fingers.

A bell rang out and he nearly jumped out of his skin again before he composed himself. He glanced at his watch; seven fifty-five. John sighed and rubbed his eyes.

He took one more look at the scarf, then up to the empty roof, and after a moment shrugged it off as a mystery for the books. The garment had probably been riding the wind of miles, it could belong to anyone, or no one at all.

John was half turned and about to drop the odd length of cotton to the filthy ground, but his mind changed at the last minute. His eyes lingered on cotton, then he was clutching the thing above his head as he inched back through the fence and wall before he registered what he was doing. He placed the blue scarf into his side backpack pocket before throwing the sack on his shoulders again. It was blue, and he felt oddly wrong just leaving it there.

John made his way back to the front of the building, past the patio, past the field, past the dumpsters and the doors, and the nerves sunk back with vengeance with each step.

He never had liked Mondays mornings. Nothing exciting ever happened to him on Monday mornings. Then again, nothing exciting really ever happened to him, but there was something specifically vicious about a Monday that expertly drained away his energy.

But today had its own special malevolence to it. This Monday was the first day of the rest of his life, and however melodramatic that was, the thought was never as solid in John's mind as he shifted through the bustle of strangers and filed through the glass doors.


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