11 Days With Keira Rudd

1: The day I've bumped into Keira Rudd

"The day I've bumped into 
Keira Rudd"

[Day 1]

The pleasant chirping of birds and the warm rays of sunshine striking over my pale skin remind me that I'm still alive. Still alive in the world where I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by family, yet feeling the loneliness creeping inside me.

Riley Young, a sixteen-year-old boy with a unisex name who is attending senior year in High-School. My expectations were too high when I entered through the front doors on my first day of school. I'd imagined being one of the popular boys with my thick, black glasses resting on my nose and those hazel eyes hiding behind them. A not too bulky, but also not too skinny physique with black frizzy hair which I'd styled in an angle of 90 degrees pointing towards the sky.

My first mistake.

My very first day of High-School wasn't even close to what I've imagined. Actually, it was farther away than the distance between the moon and the earth, which is exactly 238.857 miles.
It didn't take long before I bumped into the most popular guy in school, Michael Todd, who labeled me as an awkward freak and the school nerd to which title I'm still living up to. Being labeled is hard, but growing out of a label is even harder.

My second mistake.

"Riley! Dude! Wake up!", my best and only friend Jake White shakes my shoulder and I open my eyes, staring at him with a confused expression on my face.

"What?"

"It's time to go. Mathematics is going to start in about sixteen minutes and we don't want to be late, do we?", he asked and I nod without responding to his question. Of course, living up to the label of being a nerd is more difficult than it sounds. Being in class ten minutes before lesson starts, doing all your homework and studying when others are spending time with their friends is hard, but I don't have any friends besides Jake anyway.

I would rather be known as the school nerd than don't have a name at all.

"Today we're going to analyze formulas with not only one consonant, but two which makes it a little bit more difficult", my teacher explains and loud moans fill the air. Mathematics is one of the most hated subjects in high school which I can't fully understand. Numbers are always the same, they won't change for anything in the world, unlike people. They say one thing and mean the other or they are friendly to one person and harsh to another.

One day, it will be us, the smart ones, who are going to be on top of the social ladder. Imagine me being the head of my own, successful company with Michael Todd being nothing more than a simple employee. It's going to be me who will laugh at the unfairly good-looking boy with blue eyes and blonde hair.
Why is it always that good-looking boys are also extremely talented athletes? Not only that all girls like him because of his extremely and annoyingly good looks, but also because he is captain of our soccer team which gained him quite the impressive popularity.

Genetics are so unfair.

Did you ever watch a nerd running 5 miles around the soccer field? No. I don't think so because we would immediately give up after 1 and a half miles before collapsing.
People tell me that it's all about practice, but that is not true. Genetics are the key to their victory which remembers me of today's newspaper article.

"At the most elite level, the victory is contested by those with the best genes. Those who do not understand the power of genes might argue that the medal podium for runners should reflect a rainbow of diversity, as no country or region should have a lock on desire or opportunity. But just the opposite has happened in track and field: running has become almost segregated by ancestry. Genetically linked, highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, and lung capacity are not evenly distributed among the world's populations."