The Alliance

Chapter 1: Dance-Off

Ugh. First day of school. And last day of my life.

I hated freshman year. I hated sophomore year. I was hoping that I would have an at least decent junior year. But I knew that that was way too much to ask for.

The day started out decently. I opened my locker for the first time in 3 months and it didn't smell like socks or anything. It was a mess, but the mess was a place so I lived with it. I had left myself a motivational message inside:

Dear Me, Luke Skywalker blew up a freaking death star. If he did that than you can surely deal with junior year... Signed, Jordan Akroinon.

Motivated!

Okay. Great. I pulled out my notebook, and checked off step 1: Motivation. Step 2, of course, was conquer all those scary syllabi the teachers give us. Yeah, it's syllabi. Deal with it. It's not syllabuseses...ses.

US History. AP Chem. Spanish...whatever number this was. And Music. Okay, yeah, not a bad selection of classes for this year. History and Chem I liked. Spanish was very good. Music was...uh, terrible but livable. My band leader never realized that I'm a CLASSICAL musician. CLASSICAL. As in NOT THE SONGS WE PLAY. Okay. Yeah. Maybe this day wouldn't suck after all.

Spoke too soon. Again. Before lunch, school bell sounded, and in an instant the halls were more crowded than Coruscant. I thought to myself, I got 4 out of 7 syllabi. Great. Step 3: Find Cole. Cole Bennett is my best friend. Okay, yeah, my only friend. He's a geek like me.

So, walking down the hall, scanning for Cole. Some jerk, who I identified as Chase Thalia, athlete and freak, purposely crashed into me and said.

"Great. Look who's back, it's dork boy."

Screw you, Chase. Now, Cole...

"Ugh. Nerd alert."

And there was Aidan Rigel, right on time. He's worse than Chase. Screw him too.

Abruptly and calmly, Cole saw me first and approached me.

"Hey!", he said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just Aidan and Chase. How was your last two weeks of break?"

"Awesome. I've been working on my calculus, and--"

We were interrupted when none other than Lukas Flare, who is, like, three times worse than Chase and Aidan combined, crashed into me, harder, and I came slamming down to the ground and almost lost my glasses.

"Watch it, you geek!"

I didn't think. I shouted back, "That's bullying, that is!"

Lukas froze, and turned back, giving the both of us a supercilious glare.

"What did you just say to me, you little freak?"

"Oh, it is on!" shouted Aidan, who ran up behind Lukas with Chase at his side. That...was the biggest mistake of my life...

Chase swept his short black hair up with his hand, and started glaring at his phone through his cool looking jock sunglasses. Already, the crowd had dispersed and formed a circle around the us, staring in eager anticipation.

After a few seconds, Chase got a cool song flowing out of his phone. And Lukas break-danced. Like, literally a cool-kid dance. It was obvious he was to renew our inferiority to him via a dance-off.

Lukas was wild. But it got even wilder when Aidan jumped in and "laid down" some moves in perfect unison, then bowed out in false courtesy.

"...what do we do?" I said fearfully.

Cole thought for a minute, and then his face lit up with an idea.

"Do you remember that hang-out we had, two weeks ago?"

With that hint, I knew what his plan was. "Got it!", I said, throwing my books aside. And Cole and I began our perfectly choreographed dance from our two-week-ago hangout. Man, the crowd went wild. I had never had so much support in my life. I had been used to only having Cole to keep me motivated, so this was pretty neat. It took three teachers and the custodian to finally settle everyone down.

"Not bad...for a couple of dweebs!", shouted Aidan back at us, much to the teachers' disapproval. Chase gave the "I'm watchin' you" gesture and Lukas just kinda glared.

Cole had kinda changed since the last time I saw him. He actually shaved, which is a first, and his lengthy dark brown hair wasn't as crazy as usual. But it was still pretty crazy. He was wearing long pants even though it was shorts weather, and that denim jacket of his, and he had gotten rid of his old worn out sneakers and was wearing reddish basketball shoes instead. I was wearing shorts and sandals, and my blondish hair was kinda getting disorganized. We are stereotypical nerds; I had the glasses, and we were both wearing Star Wars t-shirts for good luck. He had a One Ring replica hanging around his neck and I could see that Ollivander wand he made sticking out of his pocket. I had my Mjolnir keychain and my FANFICS FOR LIFE pin. Maximum nerdvana attained.

There were two areas open for lunch every day at our school. The outside patio with all the tables, and the school gardens on the roof of the building. The lunch tables were cool territory and were crawling with bullies. So Cole and I always went with the gardens. Third row down, lavender plants. I haven't the faintest idea why the Envi Sci class needed lavender, but it smelled nice so we always chilled by it for lunch.

Then one of those preps came up. It seemed like the criteria for being on the Student Council was being a prep and dressing like an 85-year old every day. And they were always passing out flyers and crap. You couldn't go into lunch without coming out with enough papers to wallpaper the gym.

"Jordan, and Colton?", he said.

"Jordan and Cole," Cole corrected. The guy seemed a little ticked off at that so he chucked the papers at us and stormed off. We had to scramble like mad-men to catch all the papers before they all blew off in the warm summer breeze.

"How rude," said Cole. "They toss these at us like we're trash cans."

"Yeah, and I'll betcha the cool kids get them handed to them on silver platters," I added. "But it's not like any of this stuff is worth reading anyhow..."

"No. Check this out."

He held up a flyer printed on soft green paper. It read:

School Music Competition, This Friday in the Auditorium, 7:00 PM. Sign up now!

"No. Absolutely not," I responded. I knew he was thinking to enroll both of us in the competition. He was the musician. I was far from one. But I knew there was no way of getting out of it. That's the thing about Cole that drives me crazy. When he has an idea, he doesn't just give it up. Maybe I give up too easily. But either way, I had no way out of this.