All I Wanted Was You

One

Hayley's POV 

If there was anything I hated more than snooty people, it was snooty people at school. Actually, everyone at school was snooty. Nice people were snooty when they were at school. Snooty people were even snootier. 

"Do this, Hayley, don't do that! You're doing it all wrong, Hayley!" Oh, shut it. So, math wasn't my strong point. Neither was history. Or grammar. Or chemistry. Or... But did that mean everyone had to act like they were fricking Einstein around me? I didn't even know what they were all trying to suck out of me. My parents, my teachers... it was like they all wanted to transform me into some kind of... snooty smartass.  

That wasn't gonna happen though, and happily enough my parents had finally agreed to homeschool me next year. At least I wouldn't have to put up with all those disappointed teachers or the disappointed principal. The bad news was I still had to go through a whole year before that. Yup, a whole Freshman year in a whole new school with lots of people I didn't know, who were probably all snooty smartasses-or snooty idiots, same thing.  

I was all alone. My best friend had moved to another part of the city-thus, another high school-and all my other friends were either too young, had also moved away or hadn't been that much my friends after all. For the first time since first grade, I was alone in a huge and menacing school.  

I heard the first bell ring, announcing that there were only ten minutes left before the first class. My stomach knotted. What if I got lost? What if I embarrassed myself? What if everybody hated me?  

I took a deep breath and shook those scary thought out of my head. I would make it, just like I always did. I was a survivor.  

Most of the time. 

Josh's POV 

America was like... a huge, expensive, complicated jigsaw puzzle. And somehow I had ended up in the middle of it like a penny in a large pile of quarters... Sheesh, what was it with the metaphors?  

Sure, it would take some time to get used to spelling "neighbour" without a "U" or to the lack of freezing air to wake me up or to the shitty commercials-and I mean REALLY shitty-but the worst part had to be the reaction people had when I told them I was Canadian. It usually ranged between "Oh my god, it must've been so hard for you to live in that cold!" to "Do you have a pet moose?" I had lots of fun telling them about my Eskimo neighbours-ugh, NEIGHBORS-and the river of maple syrup flowing behind my house, but sometimes it scared me how seriously they took all that. I mean, to most of them it was like Canada was a different planet.  

And to me, America was like a huge, expensive-because here, everything was expensive for some reason-complicated and overpopulated jigsaw puzzle. But I had to get used to it, at least until college when I would finally be able to go back home and live by myself like a real man without having to follow my parents wherever their job led them.  

I hated this place. I was all alone. All my friends, gone. Poof. I was stranded in a huge new high school with no one to hold on to. I didn't know anything or anyone, and no one knew me. 

This time, I had a good reason to be pissed off at my parents.