Chapter 1: Just Another Nerd’s Day in Hell Look, I’m gonna be straight with you—I’m that guy. You know the one. The lanky dude with decent bone structure who somehow still manages to look like he was assembled by someone who only half-read the instruction manual. Yeah, I’m tall, but that just means there’s more of me to be disappointing. My body’s got all the muscle definition of uncooked spaghetti, and my posture screams "I live in my gaming chair." Even Tommy Chen from my neighborhood—this absolute unit of a kid who looks like he bench-presses Twinkies—could probably pull more girls than me if we’re talking pure physical appeal. And that’s saying something, because Tommy’s got this unfortunate combination of patchy facial hair and the kind of confidence that only comes from being genuinely good at something nobody else understands. But whatever, I’m not here to roast Tommy. Kid’s actually pretty cool when he’s not trying to prove he’s better at coding than me (spoiler: he’s not). The real kicker is my family situation. I live with my mom—she’s an ICU nurse at Mercy General—and my two half-sisters who treat me like I’m some kind of social liability they inherited trying to hide the fact that they love and care about their loser brother. Which, technically, I am. See, I’m not actually related to any of them by blood. I’m what you might call a "rescue case." Here’s the fucked-up origin story: my biological mom died in childbirth, and she never got around to telling her best friend—my current mom—who got her pregnant. Everyone just assumed it was her boyfriend, but plot twist—mom didn’t have a boyfriend. She was working as a high-end escort, made what my bullies euphemistically call an "oopsie," and couldn’t bring herself to terminate. Honestly? Props to her for that choice, considering the alternative would’ve been me not existing to narrate this shitshow. So yeah, I’m living this weird adopted-but-not-really-adopted life with a family that loves me but also kind of wishes I’d figure out how to be less... of a loser. The crazy part is, I’m actually smart as hell. Like, scary smart. I’m ranked second in my class—only behind Lea Martinez, who’s basically what you’d get if you fed a calculator nothing but advanced calculus for sixteen years. I can hack into pretty much anything with a Wi-Fi connection, reassemble computers from spare parts, and I once wrote a program that automatically generated fake sick notes that were good enough to fool the school’s system for three months. But here’s the thing about being smart in high school: it’s completely fucking useless unless you’ve got the rest of the package. Intelligence is like having a really nice car with no gas—impressive on paper, worthless in practice. You need to be hot, athletic, charismatic, or at least interesting to look at. I’m none of those things. Which brings us to right now, flat on my ass next to the cafeteria’s overflow trash can, marinara sauce from today’s "Italian dunkers" slowly seeping through my hoodie. The entire junior class has their phones out, and I can already hear the TikTok sound effects being added in real-time. "Bro, he straight up bounced like a basketball!" "Someone needs to put the Windows shutdown sound over this!" "WorldStar! WorldStar!" "Thirty-seven thousand views, easy." The ring-leader of today’s entertainment is Jack Morrison, who looks like he was photoshopped by God himself and then given a personality by a team of teen movie writers. Dude’s got the whole package: six-foot-two, linebacker shoulders, jawline that could cut glass, and hair that defies both gravity and logic. He’s basically what happens when good genetics, personal trainers, and wealthy parents have a baby. But here’s where it gets really fucked up: our families have history. Jack’s mom runs the hospital where my mom works, and she also happened to be my biological mom’s former best friend... Turns out Mr. Morrison was one of my birth mom’s regular clients back in the day, and according to hospital gossip that somehow infected the entire school social ecosystem, she completely ruined him for other women. Like, psychologically broke the man. He literally couldn’t perform with his own wife anymore because my mom had set some kind of impossible standard. Any normal couple would’ve just gotten divorced, but the Morrisons have too much money and social standing to let something as trivial as sexual dysfunction destroy their perfect suburban facade. So, they stayed together, and Mrs. Morrison channeled all her frustration into a decade-long vendetta against the dead woman who broke her husband’s dick—and by extension, me. She was convinced I was Mr. Morrison’s secret love child until a paternity test crushed that theory, but by then hating me had become like a hobby for her. The woman still has to work with my mom every day and pretend to be professional while secretly orchestrating my social destruction through her golden boy son. It’s like a really twisted episode of a CW drama, except instead of everyone being attractive and well-dressed, it’s just me getting bodied by a trash can twice in one day. "Is he gonna cry?" someone shouts. "Nah, that’s just grease from the fries!" "Yo, this is definitely making it into the senior video!" I can see my sisters across the cafeteria at their usual table. Sarah’s doing that thing where she hides behind her AP Psychology textbook like it’s a shield, probably calculating how many therapy sessions this moment is going to cost her. Emma’s just staring at her phone, scrolling through Instagram with the kind of aggressive focus that means she’s pretending this isn’t happening. They’re not rushing over to help—that would be social suicide and they’ve got their own reputations to maintain—but they’re not laughing either. It’s that complicated family thing where they care enough to be embarrassed for me but not enough to actually intervene. I don’t blame them, they’d be bullied too, trust me, this school’s fucked up. My phone is lying about six feet away, screen-down on the linoleum. I can already tell without looking that it’s got a fresh spider web of cracks spreading across the display. That thing has been through more trauma than a Marvel superhero—every crack tells the story of another time I became someone else’s content. "Damn, Morrison, you really sent him flying!" "That’s what happens when you walk behind the wrong person at the wrong time!" "Natural selection in action!" Jack and his crew are eating this up. I don’t call them his "posse" or "gang" or anything like that out loud—learned that lesson the hard way when I made a West Side Story reference last month and ended up sharing lunch with this same trash can. These guys take themselves very seriously. I pull myself up, doing that awkward thing where you try to look dignified while picking french fries out of your hair. My backpack is halfway across the floor; contents scattered like a yard sale explosion. Great. Nothing says "respect me" like crawling around collecting your notebooks and geometry homework while two hundred people film it for posterity. The worst part? This is the second time today. The first was during passing period between third and fourth block, courtesy of Brad Kowalski "accidentally" shouldering me into a locker bank. That one didn’t go viral because everyone was too busy getting to class, but this? This is prime lunch-period entertainment. I gather my shit and make my exit, walking that weird speed-walk that’s trying to be casual but is really just controlled fleeing. The laughter follows me out into the hallway, echoing off the walls covered in college prep posters and anti-vaping campaigns that nobody reads. Here’s the thing that keeps me going: I know this isn’t forever. I know there’s got to be something bigger out there, some cosmic joke I’m not in on yet, some twist that’ll make all this suffering worth it. Maybe it’s college, maybe it’s some dramatic glow-up, maybe it’s just the sweet release of adulthood where none of these people matter anymore. Right now, I’ve got sixth period Computer Science with Mr. Peterson, who’s probably the only teacher in this school who doesn’t look at me like I’m a walking liability. Plus, Tommy’s in that class, and he owes me twenty bucks from when I helped him debug his final project. Small victories, right? The hallway’s mostly empty now—just a few stragglers and the kids who eat lunch in the library because they’re either too broke for cafeteria food or too weird for cafeteria social dynamics. I fit into both categories, but I usually risk it anyway because the WiFi in the library is shit and I need to upload my latest project to GitHub which I did for fun and out of boredom. My phone buzzes. Three notifications: two from group chats I’m not really part of (probably memes about my latest performance art piece), and one from an unknown number.