Wayward Prince

Testimony 1.1: Steven

I guess everything started at the beginning of the school year. Ray and I were freshmen at Wayward Prep Academy. It's a two-year school for high school graduates that's supposed to give students the skills they need to understand what they want to do in life, or something to that affect. My grandparents established it after World War Two to help teenagers figure out life, I guess, and it's been booming ever since. It's kind of the family legacy. Ray and I knew we'd be going there before we ever went through kindergarten.

The first day of school I met a girl named Shelby. Well, we'd met through Telekinetics, the social media app. We'd been talking back and forth for over a year but this was the first time we'd actually seen each other in person. I already knew what she looked like from her Telekinetics page, but she was... she was really pretty in person. If I were into girls I probably would've fallen for her. She had this brown wavy hair with blonde in it, and it kind of reminded me of ice cream with chocolate and carmel toppings mixed together. She was pretty tiny--a lot smaller than I imagined she was--and when I went to hug her she barely came up to my chest, and I'm not even that tall for a guy. But she had this sort of energy, this light all over her face that just made her sort of... glow, you know? I think that's part of why I liked her so much. She was just always that person that could make you smile when you've had the shittiest day. I kind of loved her for that.

Shelby's important, but there's more to the story.

Anyways, Ray and I shared our dorm at Wayward, but he hadn't shown up the night before to unpack his stuff for the year. I actually hadn't seen him all weekend. That wasn't weird for him. Ray's really spontaneous, and he really hates having to sit still or being bored, so he's always with his friends doing crazy shit. Like climbing up cliffs or drag racing, that level of crazy. I usually let him do his thing. I don't really start to worry about him unless it's been a week or so since I've heard from him. But for how insane he is, he has a good head on his shoulders. He knows what he's doing even when he doesn't know what he's doing, you know?

So anyways, that first morning I got ready to early to meet Shelby in the courtyard. We got coffee and then had to go to class. My first class is cooking, which I found out I have with Ray. I found out because he came stumbling into the classroom half an hour late. The professor was just going over the boring, first-day-of-school shit, so he hadn't missed anything important, but he totally made a scene when he came in, like he was wasted or something. He didn't care. Being a Wayward... you get used to the attention at a young age. Ray loved being the center of attention, too, so he always did stupid shit like this just to make people talk about him. He found me in the back of the room and sat next to me.

I asked him where he'd been.

Tokyo. He was in fucking Tokyo. When I asked him why he went to the other side of the world for the weekend, he told me he liked the way they made their tea there. Apparently Japan has these tea-drinking ceremonies that he was interested in... So, yeah, that's the kind of person my brother is--the kind that flies seven thousand miles just to get a fucking drink.

Cooking was the only class I had with Ray on Mondays. We had swim on Tuesdays and computer programming and speech on Fridays, though in those classes we kind of stuck to ourselves. I know people say that twins are like, one person in two bodies or whatever, but Ray and I were pretty different. Really different, actually. He hung out with the jocks or the partiers or whoever could match his unstoppable pace, though no one could ever keep up with him for long. I've always been a lot... slower to things, I guess? I don't know if that's the right word. But I always take time to think things through. Ray just dives right in head first. My crowd was a lot different from his. I made friends with the nerds, the geeks, because they tended to think about things the same way I did. So, yeah, we roomed together and we went to school together, but Ray and I hardly ever saw each other. We only knew details of each other's lives if we really tried to sit down and learn about it.

Shelby was basically my best friend at Wayward. We spent the most time together. Half of my schedule was with her.

I met my boyfriend the first week there, in computer programming. Danny. He was wicked smart, but he wasn't cocky about it. Everyone in the class begged to partner up with him for group projects, but he never let that get to him. It was like he didn't even realize how intelligent he really was, or at least he didn't realize how it made everyone else around him act. That was kind of what drew me to him in the beginning. We were partnered up for some sort of project I had no idea how to do, and the first thing he said to me was, "You look like Captain America" and I really took that as a compliment because I had an insane crush on Chris Evans so I totally started blushing and he noticed and said it made me look even cuter. He asked me out for coffee the next week and we were together after that.

I miss him a lot, sometimes. I know I shouldn't. I know it's stupid. But I remember how good it was in the beginning with him and how he made me feel like I was the most important person in the world, and I just...

I'm sorry. I need a break.