Disclaimer: Don't own the OC, Rooney, the Eagles, the song "Lonesome Day" (Bruce Springstein and the E Street Band, The Rising) or Christopher Ralph (not yet at least).

Author's Notes: First thing you should know is that I'm extremely sleep deprived right now. I had to stay at my work until 1:30 in the morning and didn't get to sleep until after 2 and then I had to work from 10:30 in the morning today until six. So I apologize for any overlooked errors and the ending. My goal for this story was to get a chapter out everyday, but it hasn't really worked out that way, but I'm going to work at least a little each day. This story is based on the movie Elephant. The movie deals with school violence and so will this story. I'm warning you now that three main characters will die. Sorry, for the long notes, but there was a lot of stuff I had to get out.

Lonesome Day

Chapter 1

Once I thought I knew

Everything I needed to know about you

But I didn't really know all that much

Ryan Atwood walked through the hallways of Harbor High School that were currently busting at the seams with the lunch rush with Rooney in a continuous loop in his head. Of course, it was just one song, "Pop Stars", and it wasn't even the whole song. These are the words of the pop stars The I'm so sophisticated money making machines The killers of rock and roll, kept on cycling through his head, as he stumbled around clusters of fellow students.

Seth had had that song playing on the way to school that morning and since Seth had been unusually quiet the song had a chance to ingrain itself into Ryan's head. It wasn't that Ryan had anything against Rooney, he didn't, it was just that he would preferred to have something else in his head. Something that was a little more his style, like the Eagles. He would have loved to have "Hotel California" in his head. Oh well, the side effects of living with an Emo geek.

"Hey Ryan, is Kevin Ziggers is in your history class, right?" Ryan heard Seth ask from just behind him and turned to see his almost brother squeezing through the crowds to catch up to him.

Ryan was surprised by this particular greeting and shot him his famous and so classic why-are-you-asking-me-this look. It wasn't necessarily the question that surprised Ryan (although, he was a bit puzzled by it), it was the way Seth went about asking it that surprised Ryan. Normally, it took Seth a good five minutes to get his point. Seth was without a doubt not acting, like the Seth, Ryan had grown to know.

"I'll take that as a yes," Seth stated making Ryan even more confused, "Was he in class today?"

"Why do you want to know?" Ryan asked, soothing his confusion with the thought that Seth's mind sometimes works in mysterious ways.

"You don't need to know," Was Seth's simple explanation.

Finally, realizing that he wasn't going to get a reasonable explanation for Seth's odd behavior (and for Seth that was saying something) Ryan tried to figure out if Kevin had in fact come to class. Ryan knew who Kevin was, he was the small dark haired kid who sat towards the back of the classroom and was constantly the butt of Luke and his posse's (of course they weren't really Luke's posse anymore) jokes and teasing. Sometimes it got so bad that Ryan broke his silence and told them to knock it off on a count of feeling sorry for the poor kid. Yesterday had been so bad that Marissa had been the one to yell at the jerks, "No, he wasn't," Ryan replied as he remembered thinking that Kevin probably hadn't wanted to show his face at school after the torture had endured the day before and frankly Ryan didn't blame him.

They reached Ryan's locker and he quickly started doing his combination, "Well, I'm going to go now," Seth said a little impatiently from over Ryan's shoulder, just as Ryan was about to roll his last number under the little white line at the top of the lock's dial. Ryan turned to look over his shoulder just as Seth disappeared into the crowd. He thought about going after him and to try find out what was going on, but decided against it. He didn't want to leave the building for some reason and he didn't think that The killers of rock and roll, had anything to do with it.