What Goes Around (Comes Around)

A Day in the Life of Zoey Hyde

It all started in my English class, the English class I hated. The teacher was okay, but she gave a ridiculous amount of homework because we were an AP class. I had floated under the radar okay until Zac and Dad died....that's when the sympathy looks rolled in. 

A part of me wished that Mom had never told the school, that the news could have mysteriously gotten writer's block, that Dad and Zac could have just....vanished. 

But knowing how they died gives some closure. There's no aching mystery in my heart. There's no problem needing to be solved, it's just this gaping hole that can never be filled. I was a triplet with Zac and my surviving brother Zander. Zac was the golden boy among the three of us; he could play any sport, charm any administrator, make everyone his friend, and he did decent enough in his grades. He was the perfect amount of involved and beautiful for the entire junior class to like him. Zander was the pervert with a silver tongue. He typically had anywhere from two to six flings a month and it was known among the student body that he wouldn't say no to some alcohol. He was the party animal.

And then there was me. The smart triplet. The ghost in the back; the girl who nobody would notice if she disappeared. The girl who knew all the dirty secrets of the top of the food chain. The girl who was surgically attached to her computer. The only things I was (and still am) good for are programming, hacking, and being generally smart. Out of all the triplets to kill to create waves, it was the best to take Zac.

English, or AP English Language, as it was formally known, hosted a small group of AP students. A quarter were popular kids, the rest preppy kids, then me and like two other nobodies who happened to be smart. It was my second class of the day, right after Honors Computer Programming. 

The way the classroom was designed, the desks faced the wall adjacent to the wall that the door was on. The desks were all lined up in standardized testing format, not ideal for discussions, but the teacher, Mr. Morris, never had the incentive to change the desks. The room's walls held a variety of generic, colorful, English posters with various tips that we already knew. The walls were a pale gray color instead of a traditional blinding white color, and the white board was a regular white board at the front instead of anything high-tech seen in the elementary school. The students in AP sat in the first two rows with one seat to spare. It was a lonely and pathetic setting, a measure of the underachievers at my school.

It was here in the generically decorated, typically cold, dismally empty, emotion-sucking room that I would meet Parker Lovell.

It first started the week after everything had happened. I sat there in English, faking that I had read the assigned reading and that I knew exactly the reason why a character mentioned something, when a flash of walnut brown curls appeared in my peripheral vision like a deer darting from the woods.

I noticed a hand wave, and the strange, fleeting figure vanished. The off-key bell rang, signalling our monotonous selves to resume routine.

The rest of the day blurred by, AP Chemistry and Digital Arts fading into a background of noise and distractions.The brown curls hung in the back of my mind like a catchy pop tune.

It was only when I was laying in bed late at night after homework that I heard him.

"Help..."