Ghost ⇔ Cake ✓

Sixteen: High School Dropout

The Hemmings family is a very proud line of generations full of scholars. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, entrepreneurs, the sorts. They excel in social etiquette and interviews. They get straight A's on all of their exams and tests. They succeed and succeed and succeed again until they can boast about all of their accomplishments, except for whatever reason people don't get annoyed, because their accomplishments are so great that they even don't mind listening to them.

That's why Luke could hardly blame his family for seeing him as such a disappointment. Jack as a corporate lawyer and Ben as a college professor (he's written three textbooks. One of them was awarded one of the best educational literatures of the year). His parents worked as managers in some foreign government corporation. They wore suits and dress shoes. Hair gel was a necessary accessory for daily function. The Hemmings Smile was always plastered like glue onto their faces, and they always got what they wanted in the end.

Luke didn't like school. He never had. He didn't like authority, like all other teenagers, and he didn't see the point of becoming rich and stuck up like his parents one day. He didn't want to read documents or go over someone's financial struggles based on poor spending decisions from their twenties. He wanted to play his guitar and sit on his couch like the lazy bum he was and watch television until he passed out from exhaustion. That's what he wanted to do.

His choices of best friends didn't help his motivation. Michael, despite attending class and keeping up his grades, constantly criticized school and called it "lame" on a daily basis. Ashton hardly ever went and usually didn't do his work the rare occasions that he did. Calum, as excited and enthusiastic as he is, was always too excited to leave to really enjoy being the in class. Luke was doomed from the start. School was never going to be and never will be something important to him.

Which is why he made his decision.

"I dropped out of school this morning."

Michael, who had been hanging upside down off the leather lounge chair in the corner, flipped upright and twisted to look at Luke with wide eyes. "You what?"

"I dropped out," Luke repeated. Calum, seated beside him on the couch, stared at him and blinked. Luke waited for them to say something else, but they didn't. Luke reached for the controller. "I think it's Harry Potter marathon weekend. Let's see if it's on."

Michael snatched the remote from Luke's reaching fingertips. "Are you insane?"

"What's wrong with Harry Potter?" Luke asked. Michael tossed the remote back onto the table with such force that the cover snapped off, batteries spilling onto the wooden surface.

"Something is definitely wrong with you, Luke Hemmings," Michael snapped. "This is the worst decision you've made yet. And you've made a lot of bad decisions."

"Not as bad as Ashton straightening his hair back in junior high," Calum remarked.

His memories have been coming back sporadically, bits and pieces when he touches certain things. He touched Luke's mother's straightener when looking for the hair dryer and found the unpleasant memory of Ashton with stick-straight hair.

"No, this is far worse," Michael said, and his green eyes burned with fury and disbelief as they looked at Luke. Luke picked up the batteries with careful fingers and began placing them back into the remote controller. Michael gazed at him. "Why, Luke? This affects your future, too. This isn't something temporary. You'll miss out on so many opportunities."

"I know the consequences of my decision, Michael," said Luke. He slid the cover back onto the remote. "I don't regret it. I wanted this."

Michael said, "You may look back on this in five years when all of us are in college and you're still here, in this house."