Future Traded Yestoday

11

My best friend- the one that just joined our group- plays games constantly. Not the kind of games that the other kid the same age as us plays either. These aren't games to keep us from overworking or to just mess around.

He's on his phone at lunch- or any meal, actually- and during practice and sometimes during class when he mentally taps out. He's always sitting in a corner alone somewhere, and has refused to be on camera whenever they're brought out.

This never really bothered me before. He always has been on the quieter side, save for his moments, but this time was different. This time I didn't have time to try and force him to give me attention because I've been working my butt off to keep my place in this group.

And he's just sitting there.

I heard the Japanese guy ask him why he even auditioned one day. My best friend finally looked up from his phone and gave him the most confused look ever.

"You had to audition?"

"We all did. How'd you get here if you didn't?"

"I was at a school volunteer event and they convinced my mom to bring me here after I rejected them."

At that point my mind was brought back to the rumor I had brushed off long ago. The rumor that the school was trying to find people from the street to bring them in. Which then brought me back to the story that our unspoken leader had told me when there was only three of us.

He had said that he was walking somewhere- I forgot that details- when someone approached and asked if he'd join. I think. I think I also remember him accepting because they gave him toast, but I definitely remember him saying he auditioned.

Or maybe his first week was his audition.

I think it might have been, based on how our unspoken leader then butted in on their conversation and told him this was his audition. Which just made me even more frustrated with him because I didn't want him to leave us. I finally have something- well, someone- that reminds me of home, and he doesn't even want to stick around.

So that night, while he was in the hallway talking with one of our teachers, I teamed up with the other kid the same age as me and the youngest. And we stole his phone.

We hid it in the bag of the guy from Chicago because he never cleaned it out or really touched it at all, and also because we knew he was hopefully just awkward enough with him that he wouldn't dare. This also meant that even if he was kicked out tonight, he'd still have to come back to us and maybe we could plead for another chance for him.

When he did come back from the hallway, he sat on his bed, let out a sigh after a second, and continued to sit there. We watched him until our attention span ran out, which didn't take very long, so we started fighting over the showers and stretching out a bit more before bed.

I was the last one to go through the shower, expecting to have to be completely silent when I reentered the room because everyone would be dead asleep. Finding my best friend with a phone flashlight on, bent over a textbook with papers all around him was new.

I sat down on the bed, careful not to mess up his papers, and asked what he was doing. He whispered something about trying to figure out the math and how it was ridiculous that we were doing senior level math.

Considering I had given up complaining about the level of math we were doing a long time ago, I helped him through the worksheet we had all done during lunch while he was playing a game. It took almost an hour just to get through those ten questions, so I made him go to sleep with the promise of helping him out tomorrow because there's no point trying to understand math when it was this late at night.

No one knew what our teacher had said to him, but he didn't notice his phone was missing until he went to call his parents days later. By then we had all taken a turn helping him out with catching up to where we were, and he was catching on a lot faster than any of us thought.

Maybe he had been paying attention a bit while he played his games.

Just as we finally got back into a solid rhythm, one that now included performances for a children's tv show and preparing for those along with promotional videos, a new guy came. He had rumors around him saying he had chose this over university and had come in singing, so I was already intrigued.

At the moment, he's the oldest in our group, and there's a joke going around that he's the oldest student in the building. Or maybe it was a rumor someone had started.

This school has never been the best at keeping track of what's real.

Naturally, no one told him that if he sang in the shower that we would all hear him. So when he first went to shower we all came out into the hallway and the other students eventually joined, knowing a performance was about to start.

And start it did. Everytime he entered the hallway, someone started up the chorus of what he had sung in the shower. Our group may or may not have been behind most of this considering the rest of the school still didn't care that much for our secluded group.

With everything we had to do it wasn't like we had too much time to think about it anyways.