Chapter 2: A Lot Like Me

I don't know how good this chapter is. It feels mildly filler. I mean, obviously, it is, but it also does explain some things about him and his school and stuff, so...yeah. I think I'll leave it.

I sat down at my desk, taking a breather as I listened to the whispers filling the classroom around me. My stomach growled as I seated myself, letting me know that I'd missed lunch and my body wasn't happy about it.

I ignored it, hoping nobody else had heard. I was in luck – nobody seemed to be paying me very much attention, which was the way it always was in school.

Sometimes, I would get shoved in a locker or thrown into a Dumpster or a couple older guys would kick my butt, but most of the time, people avoided me.

I put my arms on my desk and rested my head on them, a wave of dizziness washing over me. My stomach growled a little bit again, but I took another deep breath. The dizziness didn't entirely vanish and nothing could satisfy the hunger, which I couldn't really help, especially not on a day like today.

I slid my arms out from underneath my head, resting my forehead on the cool desktop. It made me feel a little better. I breathed in deep again as the door swung open and the teacher walked in, running a hand through his graying hair and going over to his desk. I lifted my head tiredly and watched him give a stern glare to those who were still talking and then he began to call roll.

I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt this tired. I glanced down at my notebook to keep myself awake and saw the latest page I'd been working on. It was covered in X's, all written neatly in pencil, all on the lines of the pages. I quickly flipped back to what we'd studied last class, hoping nobody had seen that. The X's were a private thing and, besides that, they would just have been too hard to explain.

I took another slow breath, hoping fresh air would wake me up. I turned my attention back to the teacher, shoving the X's out of my mind. I was only allowed to stop thinking of that kind of thing when I had to listen to teachers. I knew my grades were already okay, but I also knew those little red letters at the tops of all my work pages meant absolutely nothing.

Nothing would change for me, no matter how many A's I got. I was still going to be the screw-up of Berk High, the freak no matter where I went.

"Hiccup Haddock?" I heard the teacher call.

I raised my head quickly and I heard a few people in the back begin whispering again.

"Having a nice nap, Haddock?" one of them called.

I flushed a little. So some people had noticed. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be noticed or whether I wanted to blend into the background. Both options sounded equally terrible.

The teacher sent the boy who'd spoken a glare and I turned in my seat to look at who had spoken. Oh, of course – Snotlout Jorgenson, the school's worst, meanest bully. He told tall tales to try and get dates and, when he wasn't doing that, he was probably beating up and stealing from a couple five-year-olds.

And, for some reason, he seemed to love to taunt me.

See why being noticed is just as bad, if not worse, than being invisible?

I wouldn't have thought, when I moved to the small town of Berk two months ago, that I would find anybody who was interested in me – as a friend or boyfriend or anything, which was fine. It wasn't like I was looking for that. But what I was looking for even less was him. He used every chance he had to heckle me in the classes we had together – he'd corner me after school almost every week to punch me a couple times and call me stupid and useless and then he'd let me go.

It wasn't like I couldn't deal with him – in fact, I'd probably handled him better than the last kid he'd bullied like this had. From what I heard around the school, I gathered that kid had gone about two weeks like this and then had a mental breakdown. But I was used to dealing with bullies. I had quite enough of them in my own head.

"Hiccup Haddock?" the teacher repeated sternly, adjusting his spectacles.

"Here." I hastened to speak before Snotlout could.

He nodded and moved on down the list. I flipped through my notebook until I found the page of X's, neatly added two more to the growing page and dated the top, so I could remember what I'd done to earn the X's.

As my stomach growled a little and a few kids near me chuckled at the sound, I flushed and added a few more X's to the page.

The teacher had by now finished roll call and he cleared his throat, getting ready to teach. I quickly flicked the pages back, displaying the last page of notes I had on this class.

As he began to teach, I saw signs of inattention around the room – people fidgeting in their seats, others whispering to their neighbors, pulling out cell phones and passing notes…

This was the way it was in my school and probably every single one; the students barely listened and the teachers barely cared, this one in particular. He tried to be stern, but the truth was, we all knew he was heading for retirement soon anyway and that he was only clinging on for a couple more years.

He noticed the signs of inattention the same way I did and raised his voice slightly, sending glares all around the room.

I hastily turned my attention back to him, snapping my notebook shut. I couldn't afford to think of anything else right now.

I'd only been here two months and I'd already made the decision that art was my favorite class. Today was simple: we could draw anything we wanted, anything at all, just so long as it was drawn.

The woman at the front of the room looked too young to be teaching. That had been my first thought when I'd stepped into her class. With her long brown hair, sunny smile and clothing that looked like she'd stepped out of a magazine, Ms. Delaney appeared, at first glance, to be one of the students.

Her high-heeled boots clacked on the floor as she walked around the room, making sure everybody knew what to do.

I picked up my pencil and rolled it in between my fingers. I loved drawing and painting, but I wasn't very good at it and I didn't have the money to buy myself the things I needed to draw every day. At the beginning of the year, Ms. Delaney had given us all sketchpads to use for class assignments and for everyday use. I rarely ever used mine, because I rarely ever had the time, but in her class, it felt like time and space didn't matter. I had breathing room here. I had everything.

It didn't matter that I wasn't any good.

I stared at my pencil for a few minutes, trying to think of what I would draw. At first, I just penciled a few strokes, but with every brush of the pencil on the page, the drawing grew and grew until I realized exactly what it was and that I didn't like it one bit and that I was going to throw it away right now.

"Oh! Hiccup!" Ms. Delaney appeared at my side, smiling. She had invited us to call her by her name, Carol and she called her students by their first names as well. She often walked around the room, offering encouragement, but this was the first time she'd done it to me.

"Oh." I was about to slam my sketchbook shut when she glanced over and saw it.

"Oh, that is so powerful!" she congratulated. "May I see it?" Whenever she spoke, it was like she didn't know what declarative sentences were; she always added exclamation points to the end of everything she said.

She'd only seen a little bit, so she hadn't seen what crouched in the shadows at the forefront of my drawing. I really didn't want to make her ask questions, but I wasn't sure how to handle this. "Um…"

"Oh, I just need proof you've done it, honey." She informed me.

I shrugged and mumbled, "It's nothing, it's just not very good."

She leaned over to look and drew a breath. "That is actually very good."

My face heated as I stared down at the drawing myself. The boy in the drawing crouched in the shadows, his head in his hands, his knees drawn up to his chest. The shadows were made up of hands that reached out to punch him, kick him, grab him, or jagged teeth with lips that spewed hateful words.

I hated the drawing. I kept looking down at it, feeling the scowl twisting my face, feeling an inexplicable and unreasonable desire to shove the book away from me, to rip this drawing into little pieces and to not ever let anybody see it again.

It took me a minute to realize that it wasn't the drawing – it was the boy I hated. And the reason for my hatred was because the boy in the drawing looked a lot like me.