ryker & kinsie

one

one. messin' with me :: northern faces

Kinsie McAdams felt her eyes get droopy in her physics class. The more Ms. Sandt droned on about the absolute pressure formula, the more Kinsie was ready to be done with science. Forever.

She sighed loudly as she jotted down the terms that Ms. Sandt wrote on the whiteboard. She glanced at the clock. One minute left. She didn't know if she could handle it.

"There may or may not be a pop quiz on this information tomorrow," Ms. Sandt said as the bell finally rang. Kinsie quickly gathered her books and pencils and shoved them into her backpack. She slung her backpack over her shoulder her shoulder and rushed out of the classroom, avoiding eye contact with her fellow classmates.

Kinsie made a stop by her locker before leaving the school. She pulled out all of the books she knew she had homework in (all of them) and shoved them in her backpack. Her backpack felt so much heavier than before. She closed her locker and began to make the journey home.

Kinsie plugged her headphones into her phone as she walked. She scrolled through her playlist, not really paying attention to where she was going. She suddenly felt herself falling backwards as she had ran into something hard. She blinked her eyes as she sat on the ground and looked around her. There was a couple across the street trying not to laugh at her. They weren't 'trying' very hard.

She looked in front of her. She had run into a tree. A tree. How could she be so unaware of her surroundings? She was morphing into your everyday teenager - constantly on her phone. She adjusted her headphones and picked a song before shoving her phone in her pocket and continuing to walk home.

She hummed along to Foster the People's 'Miss You' as she walked. After about fifteen minutes (around five songs later) she was running up the stairs of her house into her bedroom.

"How was school, honey?" she heard her mom ask.

"I ran into a tree," she replied after throwing her backpack in the corner by her bed. She walked back by downstairs, intending to look for a snack.

Instead, she found her older brother, Kaiden, eating a bag of Cheetos. "Did you say you ran into a tree?" he asked with raised eyebrows. Kinsie nodded, stealing a Cheeto from the bag.

"God, you are so fucking weird," he rolled his brown eyes.

"Kai, it wasn't my fault!" she responded. "It came out of nowhere!"

"Whatever you say, sis," he held his hands up in surrender and continued to eat the Cheetos.

Kaiden and Kinsie were in the same grade, even though Kaiden was 13 months older than Kinsie. Their parents decided to put them in the same grade, to make it easier on themselves. Kaiden could drive, but Kinsie refused to ride with him, because he always had his crazy friends with him.

That and the first and last time she drove with her brother, she nearly died. Kaiden had, what you would call, a need for speed.

Kinsie stole another Cheeto and headed back up to her room to start on her homework. She needed to study for that pop quiz or she would fail. She barely registered what Ms. Sandt was even talking about.

She rolled her chair up to her desk, opened her laptop, and clicked the Spotify icon on her desktop. She put on a classical music playlist and pulled out her physics textbook and notes to start with.

This was going to be a long evening.

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Kinsie was staring at her physics textbook, completely lost, when her mom called her and Kaiden down for dinner. She wondered why she decided to take physics as she walked down the stairs and sat at the table.