As Told By Tuck & Axel

How It Began

Chapter: How It Began

Author: Axel Otto

My name is Axel, but if you ask anyone besides Tuck, they'll tell you my name is Otto. American high school boys have a very hard time calling each other by their first names, so my own was quickly forgotten and readily replaced by my surname, kinda like some cult initiation.

To get the formalities over with, I moved to The U.S. at 17. One day my father took a job for the embassy and the next I was no longer a German citizen. In a matter of a week, I was officially an American teenager, and trust me, it's just like all the movies say it is. The place is a fucking war zone.

One thing is for sure, and that is without Tuck, I never would have made it out alive. So I guess this is where our story begins--an underfunded, over crowded, dirty and dingy public high school smack in the middle of suburbia, Pennsylvania.

"Watch it, punk!"

And yes, someone did actually say that to me. (Which may or may not have had something to do with the faded leather jacket I was wearing.) I ignored the prick and pushed my way through a group of decent looking senior girls whose hungry-for-fresh-meat eyes followed my every muscle twitch as I moved by them, smiling to myself secretly.

Maybe American high school wouldn't be as shitty as Degrassi described it after all. I was just praying I wasn't about to get shot, stabbed, shanked, or worse. However, if it weren't for the public high school system (cue cringe), I never would have met Tuck, and after that, the risk of getting shot was worth it. Which, conveniently, leads me to my next point.

I made it to my first class of the day, holding in a groan of annoyance as I shuffled to the back of the classroom past the usual back-to-school conversations between over excited girls in mini skirts and the boys who didn't have enough balls to talk to them and just tried to look up into their coochies instead.

My effort to distance myself from the overtly dramatic scene of the American high school classroom was to no avail. Once the bell rang, all 17 students were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the front of the tiny classroom so Mrs. What's-her-name could put us all in damn alphabetical order, claiming she'll get to know our names easier that way. I would never understand why teachers did that shit. Why on earth would it help you to memorize my first name by seating me alphabetically by my last name? It still boggles my mind to this day.

Anyway, I was placed in the far right hand corner with the rest of the unfortunate students whose last names belonged to the tail half of the alphabet. I was stuck behind some guy with a full head of deep brown hair and directly in front of whichever beach-blonde bottled dyed bimbo he was dating. The two were in an obvious argument with me seated directly in-between them, which, let me tell you, is not a comfortable position to be in as a normal, everyday person. But as a German boy in an American classroom, speaking all English at school for the first time ever, I was genuinely afraid I was about to be involved in some lover's spat turned shoot-out/medieval duel. Hell, this was AMERICA. The only shit I knew about this place was from what I watched on Teen Nick.

"Baaaby, come on, you know they're lies!" The Bimbo whined, leaning over her desk, placing her hands on the back of my chair in order to make sure "baby" heard her. I slunk deeper into my seat. The Brunette in front of me ignored Blondie's pleas, which of course only caused her to push it further.

By some act of God she had maneuvered herself so she could grab baby's shoulder to make sure he heard her. Her breasts were now spilling out onto the back of my neck and upper body, simultaneously turning me on and creeping me the fuck out.