Sorry for the long wait. Just a lot of school issues and a scandal that I cheated on something (which I didn't, but it ruins your reputation with a class you're doing badly in anyway, so).

Your Time Is Gonna Come

January 1969

Xavier Rayze had no friends. Likewise, he had no enemies. To acquire either, one must put in the effort doing something spontaneous, like forming a relationship, good or bad, with anyone. Xavier, however, didn't care enough to try. He was quite content with that.

Felix Hardgrave, his camp counselor, couldn't get that simple fact through his thick skull.

"Xavier, dude," Felix started in his loud Alabama accent, his fingers tapping against his crossed freckled arms. He seemed to be trying too hard with his serious look, a look that came across more like a child imitating an adult. "You're scaring the new kids. They ain't used t' all your shit. Hell, I'm still ain't used to it none and you need to cut it out."

Xavier raised his eyebrows slightly, the only indication on his scowling face that he was following.

"I know that this here's Hermes cabin (and you're honorary Hermes since we ain't got a cabin for your ma) and we do pranks and harmless stuff-"

"They're not harmless." Xavier cut him off.

"What?"

"When you went into Demeter's cabin and glued every piece of furniture upside down with Hydra's saliva on the ceiling and Missy Farmer went in and a metal chair fell on her head."

"She was fine."

"Yeah. After a month of intensive care." It's not like Xavier knew Missy personally, but she was nice to him like she was nice to everyone. It always upset him, what had happened. "Or when you let loose spiders in the Athena cabin."

"They weren't poisonous," Felix countered.

"Half of them fainted and the other half had panic attacks," Xavier stated, remembering the screams of bloody hell. As he recalled, there were probably about two hundred spiders. Two hundred and fifty, tops.

He wasn't eager to discover where the pranksters had found them either.

"Look," Felix shouted, covering his face in his hands in frustration (or laughter. Xavier could've sworn his shoulders were shaking with laughter. Of course he would laugh. The sick bastard.) "This ain't about me. This is about you. You freak people out, man."

"That's not my problem," Xavier replied, conversationally.

"How that ain't your problem?" Felix asked.

"Don't you think it's kind of pointless to scare someone when they're already terrified of you?"

"Well, gee, Xavier!" Felix stood up and started pacing the floor of the empty Hermes cabin. All the other hyperactive sick puppies (along with an equal number of the garden-variety types) were out doing camp stuff: wreaking havoc on the sparring field, tending to the pegasi, sculpting busts, continuing Catch the Encyclopedia with unwilling Athena participants. Not that Xavier would like to join them; he'd probably be on a hill or behind a building sketching the camp's picturesque landscape. He just couldn't stand being the center of attention, even by one person. He found it suffocating.

"I just," he ran a hand through his tightly curled auburn hair, hair that was deemed too curly for a white boy but not curly enough to work an afro. "We get new kids everyday and it's a gradual thing that spreads across about a week called 'In-truh-duc-tions'. You ain't supposed to search their heads, or whatever the hell you do, and find out what their dead- I dunno- grandmother looked like! That's terrible, that's wrong, and I, I can't have these kids run to me like I'm their pa. That ain't my job. It's making me uncomfortable, dont'cha know?" He stopped pacing and stood in front of the seated boy. "Don't do this to me and don't do this innocent children. Don't impersonate someone's dead ma and maybe," he bit the inside of his cheek in thought. "Maybe I'll pay you or something."

Xavier wouldn't trust the integrity of Felix Hardgrave if he were the last sorry excuse for a human on the planet.

"I'll think about it," he said instead.

That seemed to please Felix enough. "That's bitchin', man! I'm counting on you." He reached out his hand as if to slap Xavier's with a high five but thought better of it and pulled it back. "I'll see you at lunch, then?" He didn't wait for an answer and opened the door of the cabin and slamming it behind him, a not-so-subtle way of saying he wanted to get away from Xavier as much as Xavier wanted alone.

Being alone bothered Xavier less and less as time went on.

In the silence, Xavier walked to the back corner of the cabin where his bag and bedding lay. He unzipped his bag and took out a brown sketchbook. There were disconnected pages jammed between connected pages, pages full of failed ideas and scratching out. He never considered himself to be terribly sentimental when it came to material things. His ideology was that the end came for everything; no one could carry 'precious items' beyond the grave.

His sketchbook, however, was different. It held his ideas, his dreams. Dark as they were, he could never bring himself to toss them in a bin.

Leaving his bag open (no one bothered to take anything out of it anyway. Who wants the wrath of Ghost Boy?), he opened the door and headed out.

He walked down the field where other campers were dueling and trudged up a hill. He was mildly happy that no one had tried to stop him as there's always that one kid who wanted to involve him in underwater basket weaving with the naiads, mostly as a joke.

He stopped at the top of the hill. It was cold outside, and the shade blocking the sun's rays only made it cooler. Although he's never admit it to anyone, he got cold. He wasn't dead. He felt heat as much as he felt a wind chill.

He sat, took out his notebook, and hummed "House of the Rising Sun" as he sketched the Demeter kids practicing some type of interpretive dance causing flowers to spring up in patterns around them. Xavier didn't know much about plants, but he was certain that pansies weren't supposed to just blossom in the dozens in winter.

"Pansies don't blossom in the winter. They're spring plants," a light voice muttered.

Xavier turned around slowly. He'd like to say that nothing surprised him, but voices that appeared out of no where, behind him, would make his heart skip a beat just like any normal person's.

A girl sat, her creamy brown arms wrapped around her knees. She had a thick build, similar to one of a chubby swimmer. She wore something like a school uniform, a long-sleeved white shirt (Peter Pan collared) and knee-length navy skirt that matched the bow wrapped around her loosely curled black hair in color. Her blue eyes, a little unusually wide, stared at Xavier's drawing, down at the dancers, and back.

"They don't blossom in the winter," she repeated. "They're not supposed to. I read a book on them. They'll just die." She seemed genuinely concerned at the notion. Plants dying.

"Don't be too worried about them," Xavier said, wondering if he'd ever seen this girl before. There were so many kids in and out of the Hermes cabin he felt no need to keep track. "Plants have no concept of death and dying. Feeling sorry for something that can't feel is a waste of time."

"Are you a plant," the girl said quietly.

"No," he answered. Why was she still here?

"Then how can you say how much they feel?" she finished. She no longer seemed to want to talk about the subject any longer. "You make their limbs look stiff," she said, pointing at his page. "They dance gracefully, like ballerinas. Not robots." She attempted to take his pencil and correct it.

Xavier scowled and snapped his book shut. "What do you know anyway?" he said loudly, harsher than he meant it to.

The girl shrugged, seemingly not bothered by his outburst. She brought her hand back and ran it over the stiff yellowing grass around her. "You come here often," she said, her eyes searching his face. "Alone."

"Yeah," Xavier answered, not liking where he figured this conversation would go. "What of it? I don't bother people with my company and I'd prefer it if others did the same."

"Am I bothering you?" she asked, braiding some of her long black hair absentmindedly.

"Yes," Xavier said tersely, standing up. "Very much so." All his three years of living here and no one had bothered him on this hill. People, if they knew any better, knew it as "Rayze Hill", never used by the camp and always left alone. This girl must have been new if she decided up and waltz up after him. An action, he believed, was unacceptable. "And I'd really like you to leave."

The girl pointed to her right cheek and dragged her finger down to her neck. "Where did you get that scar?"

Xavier had had it. "Get. Off. This. Hill," he said slowly.

"It doesn't have your name on it." The girl said this mostly to herself, not really making a move to get up.

Pacing, Xavier took two deep breaths, trying to keep his frustration in check. When he opened his eyes again, he looked into the girl's wide blue eyes and searched. Finding what he was looking for, he smiled and spoke in a voice, deeper, older, and heavily Spanish-accented. "Do you honestly want to go down that route, Shannon?"

The girl, Shannon, gasped and her eyes went even wider than before, bulging slightly. She opened her mouth a few times to speak but eventually decided against it.

Xavier allowed himself a small smile of victory.

However, Shannon wasn't standing up and leaving either. She bit at her lower lip for a few seconds before she looked into Xavier's eyes, or the eyes of what he was displaying. The eyes of her long deceased and decaying corpse of her grandfather.

"They said you could do that, look like the dead and whatnot." She spoke softly, as if she could feel the annoyance pulsing from Xavier in waves. "He died when I was this much." She held up one finger on her right hand and a peace sign on the other making the number 'twelve'. "He died in a storm."

Xavier's face flickered between his own and her grandfather's before settling back to the pale-faced boy's for good. The boy sat down slowly on the yellowing grass and made a motion for her to go on, a good deal suprised at her reaction, the first that was never a scream.

Shannon wasn't the best at reading emotions, but she decided to believe that he wasn't just goading her on, wanting to know what had killed her grandfather. He seemed curious, but not thanatophiliac about it.

Her grandfather's death was a strange one. Sr. Jose Soldevilla was a lucky man. He rose his way through the ranks of Cuban society. He was charismatic and, from stories she was told by her father, had a way with the ladies that seemed to be a certain gift. He had a an insatiable thirst for the finer things in life which led him to leave, change his surname to Walker, and establish himself in Florida during the 1930s, America's Great Depression. Not letting that stop him, he led an organization that went around swindling people out of their hard earned money obtaining an easy life.. He had enough lackies to spare if anyone became suspicious of his tactics.

"He wasn't a good man," she started. "He didn't care much for people at all. He especially hated my grandmother, though I've never discovered why. My father looked like her and I look like my father, so he never liked me much. He called me stupid."

"Good riddance to him, then. You can't exactly apologize for being a girl."

Shannon hmmed in response. "He went out yachting when his boat got overturned after having an arguement with my dad." The argument was about her. "His body got all mangled and bloated since they didn't find him for days. The people who found him said it looked like he was killed before he hit the water. They just don't know who did it. All I'm saying is that you did give me a fright, but nothing more. It's not like we were ever close."

"There's just no getting rid of you, is there?" Xavier asked, no where near as harshly as he had spoken earlier.

"You're just up here by yourself and everyone down there thinks I'm," she waved her hands around as if looking for the right word. "Weird. Wild. A spaz."

"No, just weird." Xavier smirked, but it was so quick you could hardly say it was there. "My mother is dead. My foster mother." He chucked sadly. "Here I am with the ability to resemble the dead and I can't even conjure her up and look at her face in the mirror."

"Sorry," she said.

Xavier shook his head. "Nothing to be sorry about. Death is inevitable; it would've happened eventually." He looked down the hill and saw the group of dancing teenagers had grown to include two satyrs, ten Dryads, and Apollo kids holding a decent tune singing "Incense and Peppermints" while clapping their hands.

"You know," he started. "You're the first person to not bug out when I did that."

"And you're the first person to to talk to me longer than five minutes," she said, chewing on some hair in her mouth. She clapped her hands. "We could be like Two Musketeers. Two freakshows against the world."

"Tempting," Xavier admitted. He handed her the sketchbook. "What was that you said about them looking too stiff."

Shannon took the book and started to erase some of the sketches. "Consider me your new teacher."

"Considered," Xavier agreed. Maybe he could handle having a teacher. He might even think about doing spontaneous, like making a friend.

Okay, so the ending seems kind of rushed. From the submissions, Xavier and Shannon seemed to be the two loners with some of the most issues. I added some extra things to a character (which I hope the creator doesn't mind). First I was like, they both like drawing. Then it grew from there.

And everyone should stop and go listen to "Incense and Peppermints" by Strawberry Alarm Clock (that name tho). It's on the archive . gov website in case you ever want to get into a classic psychedelic pop moment.