The Boy Band Who Adopted Me!

Chapter One: The Rabbithole

AN: UPDATED 11/9/20 This story is my secret, and my baby. I've been working on it for years, and I'm finally ready to re-publish it after having kept it to myself for so long. 

Thank you for reading. It has a lot of arcs, and chapters are like episodes. Each chapter is 7000-10000 words. I hope you love the characters the way I love them.

-duntouchme

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The bus jumped as it hit a curb. I smacked my head against the back of my seat.

What was it about school buses that made them feel like a personal hell for me?

Was it the cramped conditions, the heat, or the death grip I had on the seat back in front of me to keep from sliding everywhere?

I glanced from the window to the seat opposite me. The girls sitting there were whispering to each other and giggling in my direction. When our eyes met, they lowered their heads to laugh. This was the second time I caught them doing that.

Oh, right, it was the fact that on a school bus, there was no possible way for me to remove myself from situations where I was being treated like shit.

I removed one earbud. "Is something funny?"

The seats behind me erupted in snickers.

"No," one of the girls replied, "it's actually kind of sad. You're very depressing, with your whole..." 

She made a gesture toward me,  waving her hands in the direction of my body.

"...that."

I rolled my eyes. I can never get away from this stuff.

"If this is how you act when something is sad, you must be real fun at funerals."

The other girl piped in. "Ew. It's been ten seconds, and she's already talking about dead people."

Even louder laughter came from all over the bus. "Get her, Chloe," rang a boy's voice in the back.

I decided I wasn't in the mood to deal with people like these. I purposely turned away, putting my headphones back in.  If this is what the students at my new school were going to be like, nothing much had changed from my previous situation.

My parents enrolled me in this boarding school to 'keep me out of trouble', even though I never started any trouble. It was everyone else I knew who had a problem with me--it wasn't my fault that I had to leave, and now I was leaving my friends behind along with everything else. 

The bus jumped again. My suitcases clattered beneath the seat.

Summer was slowly dissolving before my eyes, and my best friends hadn't sent me so much as a text. They hadn't visited me in the hospital more than once, and they didn't bother to ask when I was planning to leave for boarding school in this backwoods town. It seemed like nobody really cared-- not even my parents, who had me sent here in the first place.

I cranked the music up as loud as it could go. If I was deaf by the end of this bus ride, I'd be content; after all, I wouldn't have to hear everyone laughing as I got off the bus. 

It was probably my fault that I was getting screwed with already. Everyone else on the bus was already wearing their school uniforms, but I had opted to change into them when I got there rather than spending the whole bus ride trying not to die of heat exhaustion under thick linen clothes that I hated. Thus, I was wearing black ripped skinnies, a ribcage-printed tank top, and a black hoodie. Serves me right, I guess.

~

At the end of the ride, I watched students get off the bus, one by one. One girl glanced back at me and gave a spiteful laugh as she went down the stairs. I stared back with the coldest, deadest eyes I possibly could.