Alex’s POV

My alarm clock went off. Ugh. Why the fuck does school start so early? I didn’t want to have to get up at 6:30am so I could get to school at 8am. Like what the actual fuck. Who even cared about school anyway? Of course, Ash did. I got out of bed and sloppily walked downstairs, still in my pajamas. The first thing I actually saw was Ash sitting at the kitchen table with my mum, having a nice conversation and eating breakfast. She was already dressed and actually seemed awake. How the fuck was she awake right now? It might have had something to do with the fact that I stayed up ‘til 3am playing video games while she went to bed at 10:30pm. But I liked to think she was just some crazy morning person.

“Morning,” Ash chirped.

I groaned, “shut up.”

“Alex!” my mom scolded, “be nice to her!”

I plastered on a fake smile and got myself a bowl of cereal, “morning!”

“You have to leave a bit earlier,” my mom told me the devastating news, “you already have your timetable, but Ash still has to go to the administration office. New students that aren’t freshmen have to go get them.”

I sat down on a chair and started scooping the breakfast in my mouth, “ugh, fine.”

“I’m going to go get ready,” Ash put her bowl in the sink and ran upstairs.

I continued eating while slowly falling asleep again. Everyday I had been able to sleep until 1pm and now I had to wake up 7 hours earlier. What the fuck was this shit! I didn’t care about school anymore. I just knew that the band was going to take off, school didn’t matter at all. I didn’t need an education, I wasn’t planning on going to college anyway.

“Alex, you’ve got to be nicer to her,” my mum carefully told her, “she doesn’t have any family or friends here, they are on the other side of the world. You’ve got to make her feel more welcome.”

“I’m trying,” I raised my hands up in defense.

“Clearly you’re not. Whenever I see her trying to talk to you, you seem to snap at her.”

“She used to piss me off, but now I don’t know why I’m acting around her like this. I can’t help it.”

I saw my mum smiling at me from the corner of my eye. She got up and put her hand on my shoulder, “you’ll figure it out.”

She left and I scoffed. They always say opposites attract, but they definitely do not. Ash and I weren’t compatible, everything we did only resulted in one of us getting mad or annoyed. Our brains just didn’t work the same way. We will never be able to be friends.

I sighed and put my bowl on top of the one already in the sink before going upstairs. If I was going to please my mum, I had to get ready now.

I opened the door to the bathroom to see Ash putting on her makeup. She was concentrating on the mirror as she put some weirdass small brush close to her eyelashes. I walked in, put the toilet seat up, pulled down my pants, and started taking a leak. This was my bathroom, I got to do whatever I wanted here.

Ash stopped and briefly looked at me, “umm, ok.”

“What’s up?” I nodded at her.

“Umm, nothing.”

“Ok,” I finished off and pulled my pants up before flushing the toilet and walking out without saying another word.

----
Ash’s POV

After my awkward encounter with Alex, he managed to get ready pretty quickly, his hair taking the longest. The encounter only seemed awkward for me though, it didn’t look awkward at all for Alex. He just walked in and walked out while I was left confused. I had my brothers do that to me before, but they were my brothers, not some random guy who was a couple of months older than me and I had only know for a couple of weeks.

We did, however, get to the administration office before it got too busy. I was in all of Alex’s classes, except one. Great. At least I didn’t have to be around him in AP calculus, that would have been a nightmare. I also got my locker code, my locker being, surprise surprise, next to Alex’s. What was this! I didn’t want to be around him every school day. This was going to be so annoying.

We went to our lockers together and put in all the books we had already gotten a day prior. Alex was complaining about how many book we had, while I was surprised with how little we had. The books we always got in Germany were large and heavy. And we wouldn’t even use half of the books, but we were still expected to bring them to every class.

Fortunately, Monday started off with music class. I didn’t know what we were going to do, but I did know that even my brain didn’t fully work on a Monday morning. Starting off with something to do with Music sounded great. We entered the classroom, a few students already there and the teacher standing at the front, sorting something out on his desk. I looked around and saw many different instruments, my favourite being the grand piano.

“Yo, Alex!” one of the students called out, “how’s your summer been!”

“Good,” Alex waved back.

This seemed to catch the teacher’s attention, “Alex, great to see you back. I hope you’ve written some songs over the vacation.”

“Sure have,” he shook the teacher’s hand, “oh, this is Ash, she’s the exchange student.”

The teacher looked at me and held out his hand for me to shake, “hi, I’m Mr. Moore, but you can call me John. I don’t like the formal sound of Mr. Moore.”

I shook his hand and smiled. He told me to sit next to Alex as I already knew him. Students started pouring in and soon the class was almost completely full, the exception being one seat next to me and a couple more scattered around the room. The bell rang and John started going through the attendance. Well, until he was interrupted by Jack running into the room.

“Sorry I’m late,” Jack panted, “my car broke down.”

“Come in, Jack, you’re only a minute late, it’s fine,” John motioned him to come in. In my school in Germany teachers would already go ballistic if you came in a second before the bell rang. Now, don’t think all Germans are strict and mean, it was just the teachers I had. There were tonnes of other teachers who were a lot more patient, but they taught the standard classes.

Jack looked around the classroom for a seat and his eyes settled on me, “awesome, Ash is in this class!”

Everybody turned around to look at me and I groaned internally. Why Jack, Why! I didn’t want people to stare at me and ask me who I was. I was fine with being just another students who nobody cared about. Why did Jack have to be even worse than Alex? Couldn’t he just see that I didn’t want him around me? I wasn’t another one of his girls that couldn’t resist sleeping with him. He was just some weird guy who had skunk hair. Why did everybody think Alex and Jack were so cool?

Jack hopped over and took the seat next to me and winked, “I’m excited to spend time with you in this class. Maybe we can meet after school some time as well.”

I rolled my eyes and begged for John to start the class. Fortunately for me, he did.

“Welcome back to Dulaney High, everybody!” he cheered in a mocking way. This was definitely going to be an awesome teacher, “as I know, you are all excited to be here. Luckily for you, you don’t start with math like some classes do. Now, as I’m obliged to say this, I hope you have a wonderful senior year! So, umm, as Jack has already screamed out, like always, we have a new student in the class. This is Ash, she’s an exchange student from Germany.”

I heard a student snicker and make a Hitler mustache with their fingers, “Germany.” Some kids around him laughed along. But I was used to this kind of reaction. People only learned about the history and bad things Germans did. But most of them were ashamed of everything that had happened in the past. Other people just didn’t realise that.

“And that is the type of reaction I do not want!” John pointed at the student who immediately stopped, “we are here for music. Everybody is equal in my class,” he then pointed at me, “you, do you play any instruments?”

“Umm, yeah,” I pointed at the large black instrument behind me, “I play the piano.”

“Would you like to show us what you can play to start of the class?”

Everybody around me was looking at me expectantly. If I was going to play at Juilliard, I should be able to play in front of 23 other students. This wasn’t too difficult. But I was really nervous. My first class and I was already the center of attention. I did not like this.

I slowly walked up to the piano and sat down, adjusting the stool so I was able to play freely, “umm, nobody is probably going to like this.”

“It’s fine, just play,” John encouraged.

I thought of a song that wasn’t too long so the others wouldn’t be bored. Nobody liked classical music anymore, especially teenagers. I liked it though, I had been playing it since I was 5. it was always around me and just made so much more sense than pop songs to me. This was actually difficult to create.

I put my fingers down on the keys and took a deep breath. Hopefully I wasn’t going to screw this up. It was a pretty fast song to play, but I had performed it so many times before. Everybody was staring at me and I only got to play six notes before I got interrupted by the same kid who made fun of me before.

“Pfft, anybody can play that!” he exclaimed.

“Stewart! Shut up and stop being an asshole!” John threw a board marker at him before smiling at me, “go ahead.”

Ok, this was it. I started from the beginning and let my fingers flow along with the music. They knew exactly which note to play and when, my brain didn’t even have to do any work. I didn’t care what everybody was thinking of me right now. It was just me and my music. This was my muse; probably the only reason I hadn’t had a mental breakdown. As cheesy as it sounds, it was my life.

The song finished and I looked to see everybody gawking at me in silence. Was it that bad? I knew they wouldn’t like it. But suddenly Jack and Alex stood up and started cheering and clapping as loud as they could. This seemed to bring everybody out of their trance. I gave Jack and Alex a questioning look; I did not want them doing this. Why were they suddenly acting like they were my best friends when they literally made me cry only a couple of days ago.

“That was amazing!” John clapped.

I thanked him and shyly walked back to my seat. This was going to be the end of all the attention around me. But Alex didn’t let that happen.

“She’s going to Juilliard next year!” he shouted out of nowhere.

“Oh, is that so?” John asked me.

But Alex answered before I could, “they’ve been wanting her to join since she was seven years old!”

“Impressive. So, you’ve been accepted already.”

“Umm… yeah…” I mumbled. I just wanted everybody to stop looking at me. This never happened at my old school. Why couldn’t they just stop!

Notes

Nothing much happening yet... so yeah... How is everybody liking this so far?