The one thing that could be worse than your first day of high school was when your mom worked at said high school. Half the fucking school already knew who I was.

I fucking hate it.

My mom’s name was Raven Su-Bin Miracle-Paek. She and her best friend and my uncle, Uncle James, were in charge of the entire music department at Sparrow Valley High School; the marching band, jazz band, orchestra, and concert bands. This meant that I grew up playing the instruments my mom brought home.

Trumpet, cello, clarinet, violin, everything. I didn’t even need lessons because my mom already knew everything. I just watched and learned from her.

Oh, right.

My name is Amaryllis Callista Miracle-Paek. My family called me Lissie. I didn’t really like the nickname, but I was kinda stuck with it. In the end, though, I only let my family call me that. I lashed out at anyone who called me that without my explicit permission.

I was fourteen, a freshman in high school. My hair was as dark as the night sky, the same haircut that my mom always sported. My skin was pale, too, contrasting with my black hair and my dark brown eyes.

Sometimes, I felt like Snow White… if Snow White was a pissed off highschooler.

My moms told me that my birth-mother chose my first name. I didn’t know much about her. I’d only met her when I was a baby, so I couldn’t even remember her. But still, I liked the name she gave me. At least I still had something from her.

Not that I didn’t love my moms, but sometimes I got sad when I remembered that I wasn’t actually their daughter. My name was proof that my birth mom loved me. She didn’t give me away because she didn’t love me. She gave me away because she couldn’t bear to let me go but couldn’t care for me.

But on the first day of school, I wished again that she chose to let me go before I was born because anything was better than walking through the fucking halls of Sparrow Valley High School, everyone’s fucking eyes on me as they indirectly watched and whispered behind their hands.

I glowered at the braver ones who openly stared at my face, watching in satisfaction as they turned red and looked away.

Me, a freshman, scaring them, the upperclassmen.

I guess that was something nice on that otherwise shitty day of nightmares.

I made it to my first class twenty minutes early, ten minutes before the warning bell.

I blamed my mom. Because the jazz band practices were at seven in the morning, even if Uncle James was the one in charge of it, I had to be there at school with my mom in the outrageously early hours of the morning.

My mom wanted me to join the marching band, but so far, I’d been able to decline. I didn’t think I’d be able to say no for much longer.

As I neared my first class, my eyes caught on a piece of paper taped on the front of the door. It seemed that my first class of the day, as well as my first ever high school class I’d ever have, had assigned seats. I looked over the seating chart slapped on the opened door until I found my name.

Second row from the back, all the way in the back right corner of the room. Thank god I wasn’t in the front.

I made my way between the individual desks, all the way until I reached my desk. I took off my black bag and set it by the edge of the desk, pulling my phone from my pocket.

When sitting, I was in the back left corner of the room, by the windows. I liked that I could see the football field from my seat, and the park past the school grounds. The only issue I had was the fact that my first class was math.

I put in my headphones and turned on my single playlist on Spotify. I wasn’t the type of person to have separate playlists, so the one I had ended up with over five hundred songs on the only one I did have.

Ironically, one of my more pump-up rock songs began to play, as if even my phone knew just how stressed this first day of school had already got me.

But as the next few minutes and songs passed, the end of a song came and I heard the ten minute warning bell ring. Just then, someone settled into the seat in front of me. It wasn’t strange, seeing as I was sitting in a high school classroom and class started in ten minutes, but I became hyper-aware of this person.

Deciding to give in to my curiosity, I glanced through my dark curtain bangs at the student in front of me.

I was pretty sure it was a boy judging from the basketball shorts, really short hair, and the random sports team sweater.

But then again, I was dressed just about the same: shorts from the boy’s side of the department store, hair cropped until every strand was about two-or-so inches long, and the sweater my mom had given me. She told me that it was her favorite from when she was in high school, and I could totally tell why.

It was soft and thin, so even though it was still somewhat summer, I didn’t overheat while wearing it. The color seemed to have once been bright red yet had sort of faded over the thirty or so years she had had it, but the black embroidery of a single orchid was still vibrant and strong.

The best part of all was that it was two sizes larger than my size. The sleeves were long enough that I could hide my hands in them, and the hem was loose around the middle of my thighs. Not to mention, it was large enough to hide the bulge of my chest.

I guess I could be mistaken for a boy, I realized as I scrutinized the student in front of me, deciding not to label them as a him or her until I knew for sure.

I ducked back down behind my bangs when movement in my peripherals told me that some more students had wandered in. 

All of a sudden, the bell rang. Confused because I had checked the time not a few seconds ago, I checked again.

Huh? We still have two minutes until class starts. Why’s the bell early?

“Settle down, everyone,” a familiar voice said as the teacher walked in. “The bell’s early; no need for panic, you still have two minutes.”

I looked up and made eye contact with my teacher.

She winked at me, and I smiled.

This was my Aunt Pihu, the wife to my mom’s brother, Uncle Dylan. She’s been my family’s math tutor for years, ever since she started dating my uncle.

Today, she was wearing a simple burgundy blouse and dark blue skinny jeans that fit her frame very nicely, her hair tied in a simple low ponytail.

I pulled my headphones out and stashed them in the small front pocket of my backpack. I straightened right as Aunt Pihu called for the class’s attention.

“Alright, everyone,” she said. The class immediately went quiet. “Thank you. My name is Mrs Singh and I am very excited to have you all in my class.”

She then proceeded to take attendance, calling our names one by one. I learned the name of the kid in front of me when my aunt said, “Zephyr Lee,” and he raised his hand.

I immediately recognized him to be one of the top athletes from middle school. His name was well known by everyone, but this was the first time I had gotten remotely close enough to actually see what he looked like. Unfortunately, he had his back turned to me.

Not too long after, my aunt called my name and I raised my own hand. She gave me a smile before finishing the role call.

The next hour and a half felt like it passed in a whirlwind but was everlasting at the same time. Then, all of a sudden, I was making my way out of my math class and towards my next class.

I checked my schedule on my phone to remind myself where I was going next.

That was how my first day of high school went; math, biology, literature, and basketball before it was finally the end of the school day.

I wish I could’ve gone home, but unfortunately, the marching band had practice. That meant that my mom was busy directing them, and I was stuck at school until she was done.

Well, at least I had my cousin, Elias, who was stuck here, too, because his dad was the other band director.

That was how we found ourselves up in what they called ‘The Box’ at the top of the stadium, doing our homework as our parents instructed the marching band below us.

“Mikey, you’re still not going far enough forward,” my mom called out over the speakers. “And Angie, it’s hard enough trying to march and play at the same time, can you put away your phone?”

“Let’s take that again,” Uncle James said after a few more constructive criticism comments.

I looked up from the last problem of my math homework as the school’s marching band reset themselves to the top of their show. It was so exhausting how watching them march and staring at their dot sheets made me memorize their show. I wasn’t even a part of the fucking band!

I watched them rerun the show, humming along with the melody as I leaned back in my chair. I only had one problem left, but I was fucking bored. I’d finish it later.

“Mikey, forward more,” my mom called out once they’d finished. “Stephanie, can you straighten that line? Jose, same thing.”

“Let’s do a full run, guys,” Uncle James said, checking the time on his watch. “Last time, so make it the best.”

My mom turned to me as the band reset. “Hey, Lissie,” she said, holding out her phone. “Can you record this last run?”

I sighed, but still closed my folder filled with math homework.

“Alright…” I scooted my chair a bit closer to the front of the box and planted my elbows right before the windowsill. “Ready when you are…”

We got home a good twenty minutes before eleven. My brother and sister were both already in their beds. My mama kissed me on the cheek—I had grown too tall for her to reach my forehead in the past two years—and told me to shower and get to bed.

I could already see the look in her eyes that said that she and mom were gonna have a talk later.

So I took a shower, packed my things for the next morning, and went to bed.

The next day, my schedule was a bit different. It went history, photography (which was my elective), French (as all Sparrow Valley High School students were required to take three years of a language), and basketball again.

That was how the next few weeks went.

I woke up early and got to school. I went through classes, copying down notes and speeding through my assigned homework. It was only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays that I was stuck at school until the ungodly hours of night due to the marching band. Luckily, for most of Tuesdays after school (as well as Thursdays), I was playing basketball on the girls’ varsity team instead of sitting around in the sun, watching a bunch of nerds prance around the football field.

It wasn’t until the end of the second week of school that I finally properly met Zephyr Lee.

This only happened because when we walked into math class, we found our desks grouped in pairs. However, both of the people beside us, who would have been our partners, were absent. What a coincidence that on this particular day, those two particular people chose to be absent.

What a mother-fucking coincidence, am I right?

“Hey, so I guess we’re partners,” he said as he gathered his things together and dumped them on the desk beside me. He then scooted half the way towards my desk, leaving the rest of the space open for me to move, if I wanted to. “I’m Zephyr, by the way.”

He stuck out his hand.

I looked down at it, surprised. I’d never met any high schooler who introduced themself by sticking their hand out for a shake.

Hesitantly, I let my slack hand drop my pencil onto my homework—I was getting as far ahead as possible—and slipped it gently into his.

His grip was firm and present, but not uncomfortable. It was as if the warmth of his skin (my hands were always unnaturally cold) brought a sort of confidence with it, because I found myself gripping his hand just as firmly.

After a moment, I pulled my hand back and tucked both of my hands into the spacious freedom of my mom’s sweater.

I flinched a smile at him.

“Amaryllis,” I said quietly.

He nodded. “Alright, Amaryllis,” he said. “Let’s get this done!”

I quickly learned how extroverted and kind Zephyr was in the next hour working on the partner classwork. It wasn’t that he never stopped talking. It was that what he said was actually engaging.

He said he knew my mama because she was his pediatrician, and he knew my mom because she was his older brother’s band director, too.

He talked about his classes, which he liked and which he didn’t. He asked what classes I liked and which I didn’t. Somehow, we had two more of the same classes and we didn’t notice.

In the end, we finished first out of the whole class, after just barely twenty minutes instead of the given hour. He raised his hand to tell Aunt Pihu that we had finished, and she smiled and told us to work on our homework now that we’d finished.

Luckily, we still had forty minutes left of math class, and I was past halfway on my homework. This meant that I was probably going to be able to get all of it finished during class.

After I finished all of my math homework not half an hour later, Zephyr drew back my attention. It was almost as if he’d waited for me to finish before distracting me.

“Everyone knows you here because your mom’s beloved,” he began, and just from the tone of his voice, I could tell that the coming question would hit me hard. “So… why don’t you have any friends?”

“Because I don’t want any,” I snapped.

His eyes widened at my sudden exclamation, but he had no other reaction. It was as if half of him expected this reaction and his other half was still skeptical.

“Really?” he asked.

I closed my binder with a loud snap that made him jerk back.

“Friends have no obligations,” I said quietly as I calmly put my things back into my backpack and pulled out my headphones. “They always leave and take your heart with them.”

As if to punctuate my words, the bell sounded. The bustle of the crowd drew our attention as they packed up to get to their next class.

“What’s the point, anyway?” I scoffed under my breath to no one in particular.

I didn’t expect him to hear me as I turned to walk away, so his response surprised me.

“The point is to have someone to trust,” he said just as quietly.

If I hadn’t spent my entire life fine tuning my senses, I wouldn’t have heard him.

But as his words sank into my heart, I acted as if I hadn’t heard anything. I only shifted my bag higher up my shoulder and stalked from the room.

Not before giving a tense, forced smile at my aunt, of course.

There was a football game that night, and Mama insisted that we all go to see how the band has come along. It was tradition for us all to go see the first and last home football game of the marching season, to see how much work they put in to get from where they started to where they ended.

I didn’t want to go. I was positive that Zephyr would be there, star athlete that he was, and I already had two classes with him on Monday.

But as I sat with Rosie using me as a jungle gym and Ben in my lap so that he wouldn’t become a jungle gym for Rosie, I kept thinking of Zephyr's words.

The point is to have someone to trust.

What’s the point in that? Trust had nothing to do with the fact that anyone can leave with your fucking heart in their hands.

Even my own mother left me. If I can’t trust flesh and blood, how could I ever trust someone I don’t know?

Trust, my ass.