It's all Inside

Prologue Chapter 1

There are 196 countries, 7 continents, 2,469,501 cities and about 600,000 towns that make up the planet with roughly 71 percent of it being nothing but ocean water and unmapped islands in between, few but in between.

Occasionally if you search globe, you are always going to see islands sprinkled about, and ones so small that believe it or not, people skim over them and ignore or forget that even the smallest things have a system of laws, people, culture, economy and social rules. Just because they are tiny specks in your eyesight doesn't take that away.

What about the unmapped islands? What kind of places are in the missing geographical markings? The bigger question would be though, do they matter? If it's not visible to you or a relative few people around you at least, what reason do you have to care? Out of sight, out of mind. We could slightly be aware of it, but that is as far as it goes, because in the end no one cares. In those days, it was okay not to. It was fine to live on straight and true, keeping our heads barely above the water, ignoring all that couldn't be dealt with.

It doesn't matter to everyone.

We don't have a reason to care.

So what about Juniper Brann, who sits in front of me in English 79? I wonder what reason she has to care? Maybe she stopped caring.

Maybe she stopped caring about me. In that case, I do what I always do. As she sits ahead of me, she doesn't realize that every time she lowers her arm under her desk to text on her phone, I could see what she does on that screen. At first I thought she was doing this on purpose, but a lot of what she had said to her faggot ass boyfriend in that conversation appeared pretty private, and now I assume she just doesn't think I'm looking, even though I am.

Ever since the class started about a week in, I've been reading her text conversations, observing closely, taking every detail in. One time she sent her boyfriend a pic of her chest. That was a lovely sight to behold. Other times they just flirt and tease each other, much to my discomfort. Yeah. Discomfort. If I ever told anyone what I've been doing here, they'd call me a total creep.

Because I am. It's true. It'd weird anyone out who hears of somebody doing this. It'd piss so many people off, and the more people that know, the closer a riot would come to my house and knock on my door and pull me out by my hair and stake a giant wooden whatever you call it through my chest and set it on fire and toss me into the lowest depths of hell they can find, and that would be that. Heroes one. Creep zero.

Lay my head in my arms on the desk. Try to fall asleep. Drown out the fucking professor and slip an earphone in. That's the way I like it.

About two thirds into class, Saeshwan waltzes in, wearing that famous white tee, happy to be, a young asian swan my majesty. Kidding. My rhyming sucks but point is he walks in and he can't find a seat. All the desks are taken by the Zombies and their hands moving a mile a minute. I glance at him and catch a greeting real quick.

When Juniper Brann's hand goes up, my head goes up. When the professor starts up his motor mouth about using adjectives correctly, my head goes down. Sleep will make everything not matter. That's the thing about sleep. If you can fall asleep like you want to, everything's better, and you can escape what you don't like. When you can't sleep, it's a struggle to escape. You're trapped.

There is a loud THUD on my desk, upon waking and looking up, its the (surprise?) professor, probably ticked off about how why adjectives don't matter to me. His eyes have that that condescending look, reminds me of the substitute teachers I had back in highschool. His white haired arms stout out of his coat, planted on my desk, gripping it like he's making a better point if he tries to intimidate me. The atmosphere in the class tells me I missed his warning.