Chapter One - It Must Be The Gay

Up. Down. Right. Left. Repeat. Rusty swung his head around, but the landscape didn’t change. Yup, it was the first day of the last year of his life, as he knew it. After that, it was all a blank, so you could say that it had to be a different life, one he had no idea what it was going to be like. So, senior year was like the last year of his life as Rusty Parker, the king of Sunny Hill.

“Would you stop that? You’re making me dizzy,” Dex complained.

To piss Dex off a little more, Rusty began swinging his head faster and then stopped abruptly. “Better?”

Dex shrugged and shook his head. Kane, as usual, rushed to his bestie’s help. “How about you go get us some sodas from the counter?”

“Am I your errand boy?” Rusty declaimed out loud, making heads turn. A few laughs here and there, and the usual. The interested looks from all the freshies and the others alike. So, business as usual.

He smirked and got to his feet.

And, after just a couple of steps, he promptly smacked into someone, who seemed to be not that well acquainted with his own feet because he landed on his ass. Rusty looked, slightly horrified, at how the guy’s glasses slid on the polished cafeteria floor like a curling weight.

Quick thinking was one of the main perks of the king of Sunny Hill. Without hesitating, Rusty threw himself on the glasses, protecting them with his body, and preventing any walkers from crushing them under their feet. Without changing his position, he turned his head toward the dude sprawled on the floor. He looked slightly dizzy and confused, but what truly registered with Rusty were a cute as a button upturned nose and a pair of the most hazel eyes in all hazel eyes history. He smiled. “Are you all right?”

The hazel eyes finally landed on him. “My glasses,” the guy stuttered.

“Safe,” Rusty replied. “They’re right here.”

More confusion rolled from the hazel eyes. “Um, could you please give them back?”

Rusty rolled to one side, gracefully uncovering his protected charge. Then, he slid them cautiously over the floor until he bumped the other’s hand with them. A sigh of relief left the guy’s lips, and Rusty found himself staring. Too caught up by the upturned nose and hazel eyes, he had missed that perfect Cupid’s bow arch.

The dude quickly put on his glasses, with the cautiousness and hurry characteristic to people whose proper navigation in the outside world depended greatly on such accessories. Then, the guy finally looked at him.

Rusty expected a ‘thank you’, but the hazel eyes just turned bigger, or maybe it was the glasses. Their owner pushed himself backwards on his ass, eventually bumped into someone, jumped to his feet and ran away.

“What the fuck?” Rusty asked himself out loud.

“Do you need a hand down there, or is the floor your most recent best friend?” Dex called for him.

Hadn’t anyone noticed that weird thing with the boy with glasses? Rusty turned toward Dex and Kane, but they seemed to be engrossed in something on their phones. Probably the class schedule for the semester. Nerds.

Disappointed that his valiant act had gone unnoticed - not by the freshman year and/or most girls around - Rusty dragged himself to his feet and sauntered toward the counter. He searched for the boy with his eyes, but he had already been swallowed by the crowd.

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