"You're dead, Kavinsky!"

I slam his nerdy body into a row of lockers behind us, and the crowd starts hollering and clapping like we're WWE wrestlers giving them a show. But by now, the hallway was so packed that they had formed a barrier around us. There was no getting out of it now, I was going to have to give Kavinsky the beat down.

He'd brought this upon himself, you know? Made an idiot out of me in front of everyone. 

"Get 'em,' Kev!" Stinky Rogers shouts from the crowd, and he shakes his fist in the air.

"I'm sorry, but can you loosen your hold on my shoulders?" Adam complains, his Coke-Bottle glasses almost sliding off the bridge of his nose. "Your big, meaty hands are hurting me."

"Oh, sorry," I apologize, and I lower him slightly, "Is this okay?"

"What the shit!?" Brick Carver screams from my left, "Beat his stupid little face in!"

Oh, yeah.

I cock my fist back and knock the shit out of Adam, because that's what guys like me did. We beat up on lesser humans and made their lives miserable. For years, I'd been handing people the right hand of justice and making a name for myself. Nobody dared mess around with Kevin Quinn, the local anarchist.

Adam falls, he hits the floor, and he rolls around a little, holding his face when his nose starts bleeding bright red blood across the tile. It's dirty, it's harsh, but it's the circle of life.

"Next time, watch where you're going, freak!" I snap at him, and then I roll him over with my boot so that he's looking into my eyes.

The thing about Adam Kavinsky was that he wasn't your typical nerd.

I called him weak, but he wasn't really that small at all. Hell, at one point he'd been on the soccer team before he went nuts and started talking about aliens and space stuff. Now every time someone brought up something about little green men, he practically creamed himself.

So he was good-looking, the type of guy who girls brought home to their parents on Christmas-Holiday. Sweater-vests and long fingers, and hair that never sat completely smooth. I hated his stinking guts.

"I hope the aliens probe your ass tonight," he murmurs as he turns away from me.

"What did you say to me?" I demand, and I step closer to him.

"Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!" The bloodthirsty crowd chants around us, and I feel my heart begin to beat with the sound of their mantra.

"I said, I hope the aliens stick a probe up your anus--"

Before Adam can continue and I can beat the hell out of him, something happens. Something that I still think about for a long time, even years from now.

The floor starts to shake and roll beneath my feet like an earthquake was hitting the school. Kids start screaming and running when the lockers begin to slam open and close violently, and I feel my feet lift off the ground.

Like someone had turned off the gravity in the building. Just completely hit the off switch.

"Oh my God!" Adam screams, and his mop of unruly hair is sticking straight up as he scrambles across the floor. Or, at least he tries. He ends up rolling towards the pieces of his broken satellite and grabs what he can. "They're coming, Quinn!" He shouts back at me.

"Whose coming?!" I hold onto one of the lockers and scream like a little baby.

"They're here!" Adam repeats, "Extraterrestrial beings are on their way right now. We're going to make contact soon. Very soon!"

Gravity hits me like a ton of bricks seconds later and I crash to the ground, on my hands and knees when I hit the floor painfully. It takes a second for me to suck in a breath of fresh air, and when I do, I gasp sharply and look up in time to see Adam Kavinsky running with his satellite and aluminum foil. It's the last I see of him for the rest of the day.

Holy shit.

I slowly pick myself up, shaken and trying not to puke.

"Kevin Quinn?" A nasally voice demands from behind me, and I turn around.

There's an old, balding man that looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy standing there. Principal Jones had been leading Backwater High for the last thirty years, and he wasn't about to give up any time soon. We had a kind of love-hate relationship in that we both loved to hate each other. Oh, and I had egged his car one time. Rumor had it that it still stunk like shit to this day.

"I'm going to have to ask you to come with me," Jones tells me, and his lip curls into a sneer. "I want to discuss your detention schedule with you for this Summer since you seem to be so keen on fighting on the last day."

I'm startled for a moment, but then the last bell of the semester rings above our heads and I shake off my anxiety.

"Sorry, Jonesy!" I shrug, and then I walk past him like nothing. "That was the last bell. You can't do shit to me!"

"Quinn!" Principal jones screams, "I'm going to have a word with your father about this!"

Surprise, surprise.