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Chapter 1

Tyler Emery

Alexis nervously bit her lip, looking desperately around the room for some sort of savior as the decidedly evil Mrs. Locke glared down at her from her vantage point at the front of the classroom. "Well, Miss Ford? Do you or do you not know the purpose of photosynthesis?" Her voice was gravelly, like a bunch of rocks sliding down a ravine, racing to reach the bottom first. Her steel-grey hair was cut ridiculously short and reminded me of the helmet my grandfather wore in Vietnam. He used to pull it out of the attic and let me wear it while we ran around the house, pretending to shoot the Communists.

"Well.. Ma'am.. the purpose of photosynthesis is... well... it's..." Alexis was struggling under the flat stare of Mrs. Locke. Her knee was jumping up and down under her artistically-ripped jean shorts, and her sandals were clacking on the floor. Today she was wearing her favorite ones: pink with clear and gold stones.

"Did you not do last night's reading, Miss Ford? Again?" Mrs. Locke's pinched mouth became even smaller, as though she were sucking on a lemon, or looking at a bug that had dared to creep on to her classroom floor. This had obviously gone far enough.

"Did you grade our tests from last Friday, Mrs. Locke?" I replied to the cranky old woman that seemed to have the sole purpose of being the most despised teacher in the school, not because she didn't teach properly, but because she treated her students as if they were imbeciles direct from the Stone Age. Every single person in the room turned towards my desk in the dead center of the room covered in DNA models, cell diagrams, and posters depicting the phases of evolution for the common man; Alexis whipped around her honey hair that came straight out of a bottle, and beamed at me like she had won the lottery. Considering she was my girlfriend, she wasn't too far off. Mrs. Locke looked at me like I was truly the bane of her entire teaching career. Considering she was the bane of my high school career, she wasn't too far off either.

"Was I speaking to you, Tyler?" The elderly woman snapped, her voice coming out as clipped as a show horse's trot. For everyone else it was "Miss" or "Mr;" she even called my best friend Drew, "Mr. Meyer." But not me. Never "Mr. Emery." Just Tyler, as if my very name were an insult.

I leaned my head back further, my eyes sliding closed with thinly veiled annoyance. I was already slouching back in my seat, bored with every aspect of Biology 2, but speaking to the infamous Locke drained what little energy I had left. "I thought you were speaking to the class as a whole, seeing as you know that we all didn't even open the packet you gave us for homework, and we all know that you haven't even touched our tests since we turned them in." I lifted my head and met her eyes, eyes so grey they matched her hair, with mine. "Just to clarify."

Her skin that was usually the color of old parchment became the color of bruised peaches. It was truly better than most of the magicians that had dragged their sorry acts to rinky-dink Statesboro, Georgia. I wish I brought my camera.

"That is blatant disrespect, Tyler, and grounds for a referral," she spit out between clenched teeth. Her eyes narrowed into slits and her nostrils flared. Locke had changed from a magician to a buffalo.

I didn't even bother looking at her this time, just let my eyes slide shut. "Can we move it along then? Anything is better than sitting here and watching you bully my girlfriend."

The room was dead silent, as if all breath and life evaporated with my words. Like every butterfly, amoeba, and cell was holding precisely still, waiting for the blow out screaming that was sure to ensue. I dared to pop one eye open to see her painfully twisting her fingers into complex pretzel shapes. Her eyes were squinted shut and her breath was coming rapidly fast. "You aren't going to get away with that one, Emery." She gasped out, her eyes popping open like two peeled grapes.