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Content (in order):

Alana
Alex
Angela
Brandon
Camille
Daniel
Diane
Elliot
Emily
Mr. Fulks
Hannah
Ivan
Kayla
Kevin
Mathew (or derivatives)
Michael (Me)
Seth
Steven
William
Author's Note



Alana:

"Damn it, we have to fetch Alana again?" I complained to the other six people as we walked toward the water's edge, stepping on the warm, silky, bleached sand. Eventually, the dry, soft sand gave way to rough, damper sand and we stepped on the threshold of heat and cold, approaching the ocean.

"Well, we don't have to, but..." one of the others started rationalizing. The reason why flew over my head, my mind was too preoccupied with anxiety from having to dip my feet in freezing water once more. It was Spring Break. The water wasn't exactly optimum swimming temperature.

Finally, my feet made contact with the water.

It felt as if liquid ice had engulfed my entire foot. I yelled an expletive, a reaction to the pain brought about by the water.

Then, a wave approached, covering me ankle-deep in water, soaking my black sweatpants.

"Auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh!" More expletives. I regretted wearing sweatpants to the beach, which quickly absorbed the water, making it stay long after the wave had retreated.

And suddenly, a barrage of icicles drench me. Christina kicked a tsunami in my direction. I froze instantly.

"I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna kill you," I shivered, as if I were a robot short circuited by water, my last words on loop as the others laughed at my misery.

And then a miraculous thing happened. I realized I could kick back.

So I did. With a flurry of Bruce Lee kicks, I unleashed a fury of water upon the others so great that others in the beach mistook it as the Second Great Flood and started praying to be spared of the cleansing. But today, there would be no mercy for the other six. For today's god was a vengeful one. And his forecast: pain.

By the time my apocalypse was over, everyone was drenched in chilling water. Like wet dogs, only considerably worse smelling. I could no longer feel the coldness of the water, and neither could anybody else.

So remembering why we got in the water in the first place, we completely submerged ourselves in the water. Alana floated in the distance, boogie board in hand, as if it was just another day.

Thirty minutes later, the cold returned with a vengeance. And everyone froze to death.

Except Alana.



Alex:

A flick of a switch and the lights turned off in the cold winter cabin near the ski slopes of Big Bear. The wooden walls were decent insulators to the frigid outdoor wind, but still allowed some coldness to seep in. Expectedly, the inside of our room was very, very cold, forcing all four of us to wear multiple layers of clothing.

Exhausted from a long day, I crawled into bed and threw the covers above my head. Closing my eyes, I slowly drifted to sleep.

Or at least, I would have, until Kevin's brother, Alex, crawled into my same bed.

"The heck? What are you doing?" 

"There's only two beds, Michael," he replied.

I sat up. Damn. There were only two beds. On the other side of the room, Kevin and a different, unrelated Alex were both already asleep, on the other bed.

"I got this bed first! Go sleep on the floor," I commanded

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No!"

This went on back and forth for five minutes before I finally conceded. He threw the covers over his head.

And the awkwardness started soaking in.

The bed wasn't exactly roomy, and Alex wasn't exactly the thinnest of people. If anything, he was quite obese, taking up 80% of the bed. I pressed myself against the wall, trying my best to avoid all physical contact with him.

I could not sleep. Not while this amorphous blob that snored like an erupting volcano lay beside me. I could not move. With the wall on one side and Alex on the other, I was quite literally between a rock and a hard place, but instead of a rock, it was a gigantic blob of flesh. I was disappointed I left my Pokéflute at home, it could have come in handy.

This was hell. In all forms of the word.



I woke up. And Alex was practically hugging me. I was surprised I hadn't died from suffocation.

I pushed Alex's flabby arm out of my way, which must have weighed a ton. I looked over him to see if anyone else was awake.

There was nobody on the other bed. Just a messy ruin of... Actually, nothing. No sheets, no pillows, just a plain mattress. I initially thought that the other two were already awake and just downstairs, eating breakfast, but that didn't explain why the bed across from me was naked.

And then, I saw why.

On my bed, behind Alex, were Kevin and other Alex, covered in a cocoon of bed comforters. All four of us were squeezed together in the same bed like sardines.

Other Alex was awake, shivering. I glanced angrily at him.

"...Why?" He looked at me only with his eyes, the rest of his body continued to shiver as if I didn't exist.

"It's so... c-cold," he said.

I had to put up with three days of this.



Angela:

The bell for class rang and the remaining students took their seats. Fourth period, on the first day of 8th grade. Science.

"Quiet down, class," the teacher started as he began to go through the syllabus. I glanced around the classroom, observing both the environment and the people that I would have to deal with for an entire year. A hexagonal island table with two sinks near the center of the room. In each corner, a door, two leading to the outside, and the other two leading to a closet and a storage room. An electronic record player and a Van de Graaff generator perched near a teacher's desk behind me. Bottle rockets behind a cabinet with sliding glass doors. I promised myself that I would somehow get my bottle rocket to be displayed in that closet.

I looked around at the students. They seemed like an okay group of people. Some athletes, some intellectuals, nobody standing out as either a delinquent or an exceptional.

But something caught my eye. A bright yellow backpack on the ground, with a small stuffed Pikachu clipped on a zipper, lying beside a boy with his back turned to me. Black, semi-frizzy hair that reached the back of his neck. A thin complexion. Short, like a garden gnome. I wondered why a boy would pick such a feminine backpack, and a bright yellow one at that. Not that anything was wrong with a boy picking a girly backpack, it just struck me as interesting.

But then he turned around. And it wasn't a he at all. It was a she. Named "Angela."

And my mind exploded.



Later on in the year, I had discovered that one of my half-friends, Theo, had a crush on Angela. I considered him enough of a friend to want to help him out, but not enough to stop me from teasing him about it constantly. When I saw Angela while talking to him during passing periods, I'd say things like

"Hey, there goes your future ex-wife." Or

"Dude, she's practically serving herself on a silver platter, go for the kill!" Or even

"Just give up, you have no shot." My split personality disorder certainly confused him, but I knew he was smitten. He just wouldn't do anything about it.

Then, one day in science, we had just finished writing hypotheses for a lab experiment. The teacher was in the process of picking random people to state their hypotheses and picking other students from across the room to listen to the hypothesis and provide their input. The teacher looked at the other side of the room from us.

"Angela, please state your hypothesis loud enough so that..."

"Come on, pick Theo, he's on the other side of the room, it's perfect!" I screamed in my head.

The teacher looked in our direction.

"...Theodore can hear," the teacher finished. And I exploded in laughter. In the corner of the room, another friend of mine, who also knew about Theo's little crush, laughed, and the rest of the room sat there, confused, in total silence. A few whispered to their neighbors, asking what was happening. Theo sat there, red in the face. Angela was too confused to react.

Angela read her hypothesis and the class (teacher included) turned their head to face Theo, waiting for his reaction. He sat there, unmoving, embarrassed.

"How was it, Theo?" A voice in the corner of the room teased. And the class realized the situation and started giggling.

"...I won't ask what just happened," the teacher said. He moved on with the lesson.

Both Theo and Angela killed me soon after class ended.



Brandon:

The pings and pangs of paintballs impacting wood and sandy ground at a million miles an hour. I ducked behind a wooden barricade to avoid the bombardment of paint headed my way and waited until the thuds stopped and the air was calm once more.

I peered through a small slit in the wood, surveying the multicolored battlefield. Movement in the far corner, a blur of red cloth. Much too far to be my assailant. Apart from that, nobody was within my vicinity. My attacker was anonymous.

Then, suddenly, Brandon popped up from behind a wooden barrier opposite from me, his facemask and gun visible from behind the barrier's embrasure. He probably wasn't my attacker, since he was looking to his right, inattentive of my presence. Regardless, he was on the enemy team. And he was in firing range.

With lightning fast reflexes, I aimed my gun at him and fired rapidly, hitting him several times in the head and body. He had no time to react at all, and in a retreating gesture, he crouched to protect himself and observe the damage done to him. In the quick burst of action that must have lasted at most five seconds, I didn't notice whether or not any paintball capsules had actually burst, so I didn't know if he were eliminated or not. Just to be on the safe side, I kept my gun aimed at the loophole and waited for him to pop back out.

A hand popped up. He was covering the weapon slit to protect himself! What a moron!

I fired a single paintball, and the pellet drove into Brandon's hand, and he reeled back, shaking his hand, trying to brush away the pain. I laughed. He tried to block the hole, what did he expect would happen?

And then it hit me. Not a paintball, but rather, the realization of the situation hit me.

He wasn't trying to protect himself. He was raising his hand to signal that he was out.

Oops.

Expectedly, he was very, very angry at the end of the match.



Camille:

"Allez-y!" My French teacher said to the class after she assigned numbers to the class, and we rose from our seats and went outside to do an outdoor activity on the second day of school. We were to present a picture that we drew along with a short list of activities in French that we liked to do.

I looked at my poster. Hastily finished the night before, a messy array of text and stick figures. It was horrible. I didn't want to show anyone, especially since I would be upscaled by the many people that had actually put effort into their drawings

"If you're number one, make a line to the left, if you're number two, make a line to the right!" My teacher called out. I was number one, and I obeyed. The two lines faced each other, and we started conversing.

The person in front of me started talking, but because of the wind, I couldn't hear a word he was saying. So I pretended to listen and stealthily looked around at the people on the opposite line, looking for familiar faces. I recognized a few Freshmen I knew from two years ago, in French 1-2. A few upper classmen whom I also recognized from French 3-4 last year. Not too many new faces, or at least, none that I could find.

The boy in front of me finished and I mumbled my speech and threw a few grammatical errors here and there to test if the boy was really listening.

He wasn't. Every time I nodded as if I had said an important point, he nodded back, like a mirror image of me only less beautiful.

"Rotate!" My teacher called out and the line in front of me shifted one person to my right. A new face in front of me, a girl this time. She had drawn a collage of hot air balloons floating through a blue sky, which I thought was pretty nice. She talked a little louder than the boy before her, so I could actually pick out a few words from her presentation. When it was my turn to present, I once again mumbled my words. She didn't really pay attention to me, which was a relief to me since that way, I wouldn't have to elaborate on my awful picture.

One more rotation. I glanced at my watch. Only half of the period had passed by. I wish it would pass by faster. Then, I looked at the person that I would have to present.

A Freshman I didn't recognize. Long, straight hair that reached her shoulders. Thin, brown eyes. A nice smile.

"Oh my god. She's cute," I thought in my head. She drew a blue police box for her presentation, from a sci-fi show that everyone but me watched. What did they call it again? I couldn't remember at the time, so I decided it was called a "Tarp."

And before either of us could present, our teacher called us in and said that the person in front of us would be our partner for the next activity, much to my happiness. So we sat next to each other, me trying to act as cool as possible so as not to make a bad first impression (which, given my natural awkwardness, was an impossible task), and before I knew it, the rest of the period flew by and the end of class bell rang.



A few months and a few hundred conversations later, she invited me to watch "Warm Bodies" with a few of her friends, all of which, unsurprisingly, were female, meaning I would be the out-of-place male in an otherwise close, all-female group. For all intents and purposes, it should have been a very awkward night.

But much to my surprise, it was... fun. The night passed in a blur of in-theater yelling and commentary (much to the annoyance of the other moviegoers), followed by muffled laughter directed at nostalgic children's books and stuffed penguins in a bookstore (much to the annoyance of the other patrons), and before I knew it, to my disappointment, the night was over and I had to go home.

So I stepped outside of the warm, ambient bookstore and into the cold, late night. Twinkling stars danced over a cloudless night sky as the moon smiled down at me and a cool breeze blew through the sleepy mall. In the distance, the neon lights of stores flickered off like eyes closing for the night. I took a deep breath of cold, fresh air and sighed, smiling as I walked away.

It was the first time I was invited to anything outside of school in months. And I was happy.



Daniel:

Only hours after waking up, I dragged myself to school, groggy from lack of sleep. Just another day in my life as a night owl.

I made my way to the northeast-most pillar of the large promenade in the middle of my school quad. As I got closer and closer, I saw my usual friends standing at their usual spots.

And then there was Daniel, standing there too.

I sighed. I had to put up with him again. He was becoming more and more of a recurring appearance. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't a bad person. I didn't dislike him just because he wasn't exactly the most visually appealing person in school (as if I would be one to complain about that, with my looks). He was just so... weird. Even by my standards, which are already plenty far from acceptable human behavior.

Eventually, I reached my group, just as Daniel reached into his pocket and pulled out a candy. He struggled to open the wrapper, his fat fingers shaking vigorously, pinching the zigzagged ends of the plastic-aluminum hybrid material until finally, the wrapper opened and the brown caramel candy shot into the air. Daniel froze and watched as the candy reached its peak height and dove into the ground. He did nothing to stop it as it hit the concrete floor and bounced underneath a table, landing at the corner between the table leg and the ground, a corner that housed a thousand dust bunnies, hairs, and crumbs of unknown age.

It was disgusting.

But Daniel still looked directly at the caramel candy. We had seen this look before.

"Dude... don't do it."

He glanced toward me, then quickly redirected his attention to the caramel on the ground. To me, it was a lost cause, but to him, it must have been unholy temptation.

He picked it up.

"Don't you dare."

He hung it over his mouth.

"OH GOD, HE'S GONNA DO IT."

And he stopped.

"Just kidding. I'm not that stupid," he said with a half smile and thin, smug eyes. I begged to differ with his statement.

"Phew. Thank god," I said.

"I gotta wash it first!" He made his way to the boy's bathroom.

I wasn't wrong.

He returned after a few seconds with wet hands, chewing something in his mouth. I hoped that it wasn't what I thought it was, but in my mind, I already knew. He'd done this stuff before, and he wasn't going to stop anytime soon.

He opened his mouth and there it was. Sitting in the middle of his tongue, a round caramel candy, shaped like a blood cell.

The force of my own palm hitting my face was so great, it left a mark visible for three days. I questioned how he managed to survive to see the 10th grade.



Diane:

Having just got my hair cut, I walked down the mall sidewalk with my parents and sister. My head felt immensely lighter, having cut a full two, three inches of hair off.

I looked around. Glass windows of various shops and restaurants to my left, with logos plastered on their interior faces. To my right, a wide, black parking lot, with various trees and shrubbery planted in islands of dirt and wood around the parking lot, giving it an appearance of a black savanna under a mid-afternoon sun.

Suddenly, a knock to my left. I looked and there was Diane, waving toward me. I hardly knew the girl, rarely (if ever) talking to her in school, but regardless, I waved back. Just as quickly as she caught my attention, she turned around and disappeared behind aisles of shoes.

I looked forward, trying to seem unfazed by the awkward incident that I had just experienced. But I knew what was coming. It was inevitable.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad slowly turn his head away from the girl and toward me, with the most mischievous grin on his face.

"That your girlfriend, son?"

"GOD DAMN IT, DAD, NO SHE'S NOT."

"Oh come on, you can be honest with us! We're your parents!"

"I am being honest, I don't even talk to her, she's just a classmate." Suddenly, my mom commented.

"She is pretty..." Oh no. Not you too. It's usually my dad that does this stuff, not my mom. My frustration was building.

"She's not my girlfriend, I swear."

"Son..." my dad started, "Are you gay?"

I have absolutely no idea how they came to that conclusion.

"No, dad, I'm not."

"You sure?"

"YES, I'M SURE."

"THEN WHY IS SHE NOT YOUR GIRLFRIEND. SHE LOOKS GOOD."

I felt like flipping over a table. Wait no. I felt like flipping over a goddamn tank.

The conversation went on 30 painful minutes. It lasted the entire car ride home and ended when I locked myself in my room and drowned them out with headphones.

This is why I hate talking to my parents about girls.



Elliot:

A ruined tower made of blocks, stretching to the heavens, standing on a lonely island of levitating rock and dirt, a million miles in the air, surrounded by nothing but empty void. This was our battlefield. Shotbows, singularity grenades, and Pokéballs. These were our weapons.

We looked upon our battleground, in a floating glass box some distance away from the island. Me as Finn, Ivan as Snake, and Elliot as some guy with red sunglasses. We were ready to duke it out. Last man standing, no holds barred, winner takes all.

The announcer counted down the time until the match started.

Three. Last exchanges of trash talk over Skype.

Two. Itching fingers hover over the WASD keys of my keyboard.

One. A last comment from Elliot.

"Did I mention all of you guys are faggots?"

And we teleported onto the island. And the fighting began.

Quickly, I searched for a good weapon whilst Ivan and Elliot immediately began exchanging punches, their clicks clearly audible through their microphones. By the time I found a grenade, Ivan had already died once, and Elliot was on the hunt for me.

I sprint-jumped to the tower to minimize my chances of death, just as Elliot found me.

"You're dead, Michael. You're dead, Michael." The only words to come out of his mouth as he punched me rapidly and I punched back. 10, 20, 50, damage quickly racked up and before we knew it, we were both at 100 damage and flying into walls at Mach 5 with every hit, obliterating them into millions of pieces. Every hit angled even slightly upwards sent the other person miles into the air. Every hit toward one of four openings in the tower meant instant death for the victim, who flew into the black void, falling to their death.

Elliot managed to get the first kill. Later, Ivan showed up, but I killed him twice with little to no effort. He was pathetic. Elliot killed me a second time, and I was down to my last life, while he still had all three. The odds were heavily stacked against me, but I have emerged victorious from even less favorable odds. I was used to making comebacks. Comebacks that my friends frequently referred to as "upsets" or "strokes of luck."

I quickly killed off Elliot, who was well past a thousand damage on his first life. The fight intensified in the middle of the tower as Elliot, on his second life, dealt swift hits to me, which I reciprocated. Once more, our damage counters racked up until both of us were back at a hundred damage.

Bam. A sharp left hook to my jaw and I flew out of the tower. Thankfully, I landed on the island's peninsula, barely avoiding death. I ran back to the tower, but Elliot was nowhere to be found.

I circled the tower several times, searching for him. But he was nowhere to be found. He was a ghost.

And suddenly, he gave his battle cry. The banshee in the shadows appeared and it's only words, the last words I heard through Skype...

"Hamburger Helper."

And he picked me up and threw me off the island, at a million miles an hour.

He did it. He was the last one standing.

The terrorists won.



Emily:

6th grade. My math teacher had told us about "World Math Day" and how she would award extra credit for the top three scorers in the class. I was good at math, but not to the point where I would actively try to be the best in the class (even though I could easily pull it off with minimal effort). Nevertheless, I played a few rounds just to test my skills, placing first in each game.

Then, in my last round for the night, an avatar caught my eye. "Emily." She hailed from the same school as me.

And I realized. She was Emily, the one at the top of the class leaderboard for World Math Day.

I can't let her win. I have to show my dominance.

Fingers hovering over the numpad as the starting timed counted down.

Three. I played an imaginary piano, warming up my fingers for the flurry of typing that was about to ensue.

Two. I cracked my knuckles dramatically, as if I were a hacker in an action movie, waiting for the signal to break into the FBI database within 60 seconds.

One.

And it began. Equations flew into my eyeballs, transmitted as light, which were quickly processed by my occipital lobe and solved by my prefrontal cortex, all in the blink of an eye. Five, ten, twenty problems solves in just under 45 seconds as Emily and I raced, leaving the other two competitors in the dust.

Ten seconds left. She had taken the lead by two problems.

Five. We were dead even.

Two. She led by one!

And it was over. I breathed deeply, both from mental fatigue and physical fatigue due to the ferocity of my hardcore keyboard pressing. I looked at the results page.

And I was in first place. The next day, during PE, I rubbed it in her face that I won. She denied my victory, claiming that "we tied."

But I didn't believe her. I relished in sweet victory.



Mr. Fulks:

The end of 4th period was quickly approaching. Our daily class news show had just ended, and Mr. Fulks had just turned off the projector. He sat in his chair, slouched back, lazily observing the class for the last few minutes of class. Everyone was preparing for lunch.

But not Matthew. He crumpled a line of athletic tape, turning it into a dense, heavy ball about the size of a palm. He carelessly bounced it off his hand, juggling it while alternating hits between the palm and the back of his hand.

Then, suddenly, he caught the ball. His eyes widened. He had an idea.

"Watch this, guys," he said to us. We directed our attention away from our conversations and toward Matt. "I'm gonna hit Mr. Fulks in the head."

And he flung it in Mr. Fulks' general direction. His gaze was directed to his computer, and he didn't see the ball coming. The ball flew through the air in an elegant parabolic arc. We watched where it would land.

And it hit Mr. Fulks right in the groin. His legs jumped up, as if by reflex, and he clutched the impact zone with a quiet but pain-filled wail.

We erupted into explosive laughter, as Fulks sat there, miserable. Others who had not witnessed the event looked in our direction, wondering what the commotion was about. Some judged us, but we didn't care. We had just witnessed comedic gold, an event that happens only once in a lifetime. And we praised its arrival with boisterous merriment.

"Well," I started, "You didn't specify which head."



Hannah:

My first real date. A memory that will forever be engraved in my memory. And not because of how incredibly romantic or successful it was, oh no. Quite the opposite.

It was the most horrific date to ever happen in the history of dating.

I had woken up late that Saturday morning, from a long night of doing absolutely nothing productive. Still groggy from sleep, I rubbed my eyes and checked my watch.

It was 11. We were supposed to meet at the theater in 45 minutes.

"Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god, OH GOD." The only words that ran through my mind as I leaped out of bed and ran to the kitchen.

I pulled out stuff from the various cupboards, fridges, and food holes in my kitchen and slapped three items together to form my breakfast, a less-than-meager ration of cereal doused in a tiny splash of milk. The milk didn't have time to soak into the cereal and make it soft, which was how I usually preferred it, but I was under immense time pressure. Whether or not my cereal was just the way I liked it didn't matter.

Two minutes flat, I swallowed spoonfuls of cereal like Pacman on speed, and I sprinted across my one-story house, into the bathroom to take a shower.

Showering usually takes me ten, fifteen minutes. But I managed to cut that time down by 87%, taking only two minutes to clean myself up. Shampoo, soap, scrub, soak, dry, comb, brush, teeth, mouth, wash, bam, done. My hair was still damp, but that didn't matter, I could stick my head out of the window and airdry it on the drive to the movie theater.

And then I remembered. I was 14. I couldn't drive.

Shoot. I had to wake up my mom, still passed out and sleeping like a hibernating bear, exhausted from working the night shift. I spared no time in waking her up gently.

"MOM, I GOTTA BE AT THE MOVIES IN LESS THAN 40 MINUTES AND YOU KNOW HOW BAD TRAFFIC IS ON SATURDAYS WE GOTTA MOVE MOVE MOVE GET UP OH MY GOD I'M GONNA GET DUMPED SO HARD," I screamed and her eyelids lazily rose up. She looked at me with squinted eyes, as if trying to process the zerg rush of information that had just awakened her. She rubbed her face, groaned in protest, got up, and slowly walked to the bathroom to change.

Poor mom. Working so hard to take care of me. But no time for sympathy now. Still clothed in only a bath towel, I had to pick what to wear, a job I stupidly did not do the night before.

I opened my closet.

It looked like a warzone. My sister must have gotten into it again. Or maybe I did try to pick my clothing last night and just did a really lousy job in putting the clothes I didn't like back. I really couldn't remember.

Whatever, I had no time to spend thinking about what happened last night. The important thing was this date, about to happen in 35 minutes.

I practically needed a shovel to dig through the massive piles of clothing in my closet. I couldn't find my "nice" clothes (as if I had any), so I pulled out a brown shirt that I had received from a science competition and looked for a jacket to wear. Two minutes of searching, and I couldn't find any. Any except...

My goddamn black parka. With a layer of cotton two inches thick. The jacket alone weighed six pounds. Wearing it made me look like a giant black sphere. Also, it was springtime, which, in San Diego, meant that I was going to melt while wearing it.

Slowly, my expectations for the date dropped lower and lower.

I slapped the clothes on just as my mom got out of the bathroom and I ran to the car, paper towel roll in hand to dry my hair on the go. Mom shambled to the car, sighed in exasperation, and started driving.



The car ride was an agonizing 30 minutes. At times, traffic seemed to slow to a crawl while time sped up. How I wished it would have been the reverse.

Eventually, I arrived to the front of the theater. We parked right next to her black van, which might have been sitting there for twenty, thirty minutes now. I thanked my mom, flew out of the car, and waved to the van. She and her mother waved back from the front. The passenger door opened and out she stepped.

"The movie starts like... now," Hannah smiled, a dimple on her right cheek showing itself. With thin, happy eyes, she looked at me as I nodded. Her long hair waltzed with the swaying wind, spinning and dancing along with the spring breeze. She was nothing short of spectacular. And she was mine. For now, at least.

"I know, I'm so sorry I was late. It's... a long story." She was wearing the hoodie I bought her for Christmas, with a picture of GIR drinking a milkshake. And I smiled at myself, remembering the story of how I bought it.

But reminiscing would have to wait. The movie was starting soon and we hadn't even bought my ticket yet. I paid for mine (she had already bought hers), and we brisked to the theater, to watch Insidious.



The scares from the movie started immediately after the trailers ran. And about fifteen minutes into the movie, the real horror of my date started.

I paid little attention to the actual film, instead thinking in my head,

"How the hell am I gonna make this romantic?"

And immediately, an idea. I'd put my arm over her at a really scary part. Couldn't be that hard, right? So when the monster jumped out of the screen, in one brisk motion I threw my arm over her and placed my hand on her left shoulder.

The timing was catastrophic. She sort of looked at me with a questioning expression, curious as to why I would do that. But she went with it, and she lay her head against my shoulder.

Not long after, my arm began tingling. It was falling asleep.

At this point, it was evident that divine intervention was involved in making this date the worse date ever conceivable.

I thought at first that I could tank out the discomfort, but as the seconds ticked by, the static feeling in my arm felt stronger and stronger until finally, I could no longer bear it. I readjusted my arm, much to her annoyance.

Five minutes later, I readjusted my arm again.

And five minutes later, one more time.

Already, in my mind, I'm making a mental note to never go on a movie date ever again.



Finally, the movie ended. We exited the theater, ate at Pat and Oscars for a bit, and then she left, picked up by her mother, who offered me a ride, but I refused. And as her black van drove away, I sat alone, beside the theater's fountain, observing the people around me. A few couples passed by and as I watched their subtle interactions, I thought,

"Wow. I really am too awkward to date."

Not surprisingly, she broke up with me soon afterwards.



Ivan:

"Dude, look at what I bought for a dollar!" Brandon exclaimed as he entered Carl's Jr and plopped a plastic bag on the red table. Ivan and I looked inside.

It was filled with white Peeps shaped like ghosts.

"They were 10 cents each!" Brandon was clearly excited at the fact that the neighboring Walgreens was more than eager to get rid of their unsold Halloween candy at discount prices. Brandon sat down and we returned to our discussion as Brandon pulled out a box of Peeps and opened it on the table.

"Want some?" He asked, holding the box out towards us. Ivan took one. I, on the other hand, have had several less-than-pleasant experiences with Peeps in the past, so I refused.

Over the course of five minutes, Brandon had opened every single box of Peeps on the table and had eaten at least one Peep from every package. Why he didn't just finish all of the Peeps in each box before opening a new one, I didn't know. But the sheer number of Peeps that he bought meant that quickly, our table was covered with boxes and white sugar.

Then, for some unknown reason, Ivan ripped apart a side of a box and with it, started cutting the Peeps into fourths. I was about to ask why, but then I figured out the answer. He was Ivan. And that was all of the explanation I needed.

Our talking and loud laughter continued as Ivan cut more Peeps into quarters.

Then, we saw the restaurant manager approaching us. And we became nervous.

"Shoot, nobody bought anything, they're gonna throw us out for loitering!" I thought as I quickly started coming up with a quick excuse on why we hadn't bought food.

"You, uh... you boys alright here?" The bulbous lady stood over our table like a monolith.

"Yeah, yeah, we're fine, we were just about to leave," Ivan responded.

"You guys doing any funny stuff over here?" She asked. I wondered why she would ask such a strange question. We visit this same restaurant every day after school, she knows that we're usually this loud. What kind of things would she think we'd be doing?

And then I looked at the table. Chaotic piles of boxes everywhere. White powder in piles around the table. Ivan holding a flat, card-like object. A few white lines from where Ivan had cut the Peeps.

Oh my god. We looked like cocaine addicts.

"Woah, wait, no, we're not doing anything!" I started and immediately realized that I sounded incredibly guilty. I thought about what life in prison would feel like. I didn't want to get raped.

"You sure? Because someone told me that you guys were doing some funny stuff here." I looked around at the people in the restaurant. A man in a fedora sitting on a table in the middle of the restaurant looked at us from the corner of his eye, watching the events unfold. I knew he was the accuser. I memorized the face, so that I knew who I would enact my revenge upon when I escaped juvenile hall.

"No, no, we're just... eating." Ivan finished. The manager raised her eyebrow in doubt and walked away. Ivan and Brandon quickly realized how suspicious we looked and we cleaned our table immediately.

And then we remembered the day our friend sniffed a line of salt for two dollars at this same restaurant a few months ago, at a table much more visible to the register. And we were relieved that we didn't get caught then.



Kayla:

Atop our tower of dirt and cobblestone, we looked into the distance. Kayla and I were the last two surviving members of our team (the rest them had died from horrifying accidents), and we watched the rest of the world like a hawk, waiting for the last competitor to approach us. The clouds drifted silently, solemnly beneath us, occasionally blocking our vision. Above us, endless expanse of space and cloudless sky.

We had built a Tower to Heaven. A majestic obelisk like a finger of earth and rock, reaching out to touch the moon.

Just kidding. It was a simple dirt tower, five blocks wide, five blocks long, and two blocks thick, supported by a column of dirt a single block thick. It looked awful.

But it was practical. Throughout my long and hardened Hunger Games career, I have used a tower similar to this to win five games with little to no effort. Armed with nothing but snowballs, wheat, and the pixels off our custom skins, we waited.

We camped on top of that tower for an entire hour, with no action.

And finally, the last survivor made his way toward our tower, wearing a mix of iron and diamond armor. Fool. His armor will mean nothing when gravity is his killer.

But, a few chunks away from the tower, he stopped. He looked up at us. And he didn't move.

"lol fuk dat" He typed.

And he built his own tower, several chunks away from us, not bothering to try and attack us. We waited 30 minutes. No movement. An hour. Nothing. Two hours. And he still sat in his tower, doing nothing.

Our own tactic, used against us, with incredible success. The irony stung like a skeleton's arrows.

As if cruelly teasing us, he happened to build his tower such a distance away that our snowballs could not reach him. Even if they could, they would be completely ineffective because he built a room around himself.

Three agonizing hours passed, and I couldn't take it anymore. Kayla and I still wanted to win, but she got sick of this waiting game and went AFK to eat, or paint her nails, or whatever things girls do in their spare time.

I took action. Using the remaining dirt blocks we had stored, I made a crude bridge to the other tower, slowly, to avoid him noticing and minimize the risk of attack. Once I got there, I figured out I had a big problem.

His tower was a much lower elevation than ours. I would die if I tried to land on it.

Damn it.

Thwack! An arrow impacting a person! I jumped, in surprise, but I realized that neither me nor the last competitor had been damaged.

Uh oh.

I looked behind me and saw a skeleton that managed to spawn in the middle of the bridge I had created. He was firing arrows into Kayla, one every few seconds.

I sprinted toward the skeleton, hoping to punch it out of the sky, but by the time I had killed him with my bare fists, Kayla had already died.

Oh boy, is she gonna be mad to find out that she spent five hours of her life on a Hunger Games match that she didn't even win.

The match went on for an agonizing seven hours, like some sort of psychological torture. Seven hours of an impossible stalemate, and I had enough.

I killed myself.



Kevin:

English, 8th grade. Our teacher was absent, and had a substitute filling in for her. A substitute that we as a class, were far from strangers with. In fact, he had substituted for our class so frequently, he knew most of our names by heart, and groaned every time he had to put up with our class antics.

And boy, would today's antics be interesting.

We were supposed to be reading a book, but our substitute was incredibly tolerant, so we just spent the period doing nothing productive, with little protest from the sub.

Kevin and I were sitting on the ground, discussing. Tori and a group of girls were talking nearby.

Soon, Kevin complained of a "cherry, strawberry-like scent" wafting in the air. He looked behind him and saw the girls, applying pink lotion to their hands.

"Ugh," he said, and turned back to face me. Tori noticed Kevin's actions.

"What, Kevin?" She sassed. Kevin turned back to look at Tori.

"I hate that smell. That... reek... ugh."

"It's strawberry lotion."

"It's girly, frilly crap, that's what it is." Tori scoffed at Kevin's response.

"Well, I guess it'd fit you perfectly then," she shot back.

"No, it wouldn't. I'm a manly man, with no need for that womanly filth."

"Whatever." And Kevin turned back to me. I thought that the little comedy sketch was over. But I was wrong.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tori standing up, pink lotion bottle in hand, approaching us. I could have warned Kevin that she was coming. But I didn't. I wanted to see how this would play out.

"Now, where were we, Michael?"

She opened the bottle and poured some of the lotion on two fingers.

"I don't really remember," I responded.

She stood right behind Kevin. He didn't notice her. She slowly reached her finger out, as if trying to rub some lotion on Kevin.

"Oh, right. Manly stuff," he said as he turned to face Tori, thinking she was still sitting at her desk. But she wasn't. She was directly behind him, with her fingers to the side of his face. Fingers, which Kevin turned right into.

His mouth rubbed against her fingers and the lotion stuck to his lips. Tori reeled back, not expecting Kevin's movement.

Immediately, Kevin shot up. My eyes widened in amusement at the scene unfolding before me.

"Oh god!" Kevin shouted.

"Ewww, I touched his lips!" Tori wailed.

"I can taste it! The frilliness!" He made spitting, raspberry noises at the ground. Slowly, the attention of the class turned to the two. I was about ready to burst into laughter.

"I think my finger went inside his mouth!" Tori screamed as Kevin faced Tori, horrified at what she just said.

"Oh god... I tasted Tori... YOU TASTE HORRIBLE, TORI," He screamed as he scraped his tongue. Tori rubbed her fingers against her shirt in an attempt to wipe the spit off her hand. She rubbed with such ferocity that her shirt could have combusted right then and there.

I wish I had brought a camera.



Mathew (or derivatives):

The three of us walked down the all-too familiar street that we traveled every day after school to return home. Matthew, Ivan, and I talked about things that other people would consider crazy while we slowly made our way down the road. Just another boring day.

Suddenly, a brief honk of a car behind us. I expected it to be any one of our parents, probably trying to give us a ride. As if we weren't dependent enough on them.

But boy, was I wrong. I turned to face the source of the sound.

A pitiful, brown chihuahua stared us right in the eyes, standing in the street, unwavering to the presence of the lengthy line of cars behind it.

I did not expect to see this dog today.

Another honk. Startled, the dog quickly looked toward the car, then panicked and hurried to the center of the road. The road that was incredibly busy immediately after school. The road that had an endless number cars rushing through it in both directions.

My friends and I didn't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, or scream at the horrifying scene that could happen right before our eyes.

The dog made it safely to the small concrete island in the middle of the road which divided the two opposing lanes. The red stoplight in the distance meant that there were less cars on one side of the road, but on the other, fierce rapids of iron and rubber. The dog stood in the island, idle, while we screamed at it from afar.

"We have to save it!" I cried.

"You go save it, I'm not running in the road!" Ivan snapped.

I wanted to run out into the street and heroically sweep the dog up, away from incoming traffic. I briefly imagined tomorrow's newspaper headlines, praising me as a hero and a humanitarian, before realizing that I could unintentionally spook the dog into the other lane, bringing an unhappy, bloody end to this story.

So I did nothing. Nothing but yell panicked cries at the dog every time it made so much as the slightest movement towards incoming traffic, like a cheerleader screams at their team when they're down a hundred points.

Matthew had other ideas. He whistled loudly toward the dog and the dog turned its head toward us.

"Here, doggy!" Matthew bent his knees and patted his thighs, as if beckoning the dog to come here.

To our left, the stoplight turned green, and a wall of traffic was fast approaching.

The dog still looked straight at us, as if considering walking toward us.

"OH GOD, DON'T DO IT DOG," I screamed. In my head, the scene ended only with the screech of a car suddenly coming to a stop, and a brown chihuahua flying through the air like a baseball hit out of a stadium. Only redder.

Thankfully, Matthew was ugly enough that the dog became repulsed by him, and faced the sidewalk opposite of us.

The dog stepped off the island, into the asphalt river. To his right a gigantic blue Hummer sped down the road, on a crash course with the dog.

"OH JESUS!" We all screamed.

A horrifying skidding noise. And the dog was a goner.

...Or so we thought. The screaming iron box of death managed to stop mere inches from the dog, while the dog stood motionless, like a deer in headlights. His short, poochy life must have flashed before his eyes, but when his vision returned and he realized that he was mere inches from the car, he panicked, and ran to the other side of the street, unharmed, quickly disappearing behind an intersection.

To this day, the status of the chihuahua is unknown.



Michael (Me):

I was six years old, and had just moved to America. The Western world was a bit different from the slightly less-developed Philippines. The weather was much kinder. The people were whiter. The malls were bigger. Much bigger.

So big, in fact, that one of the earliest memories I have of American life was being lost in a gigantic indoor mall.

As a child six years of age, I was of course, naturally curious about the rest of the world, even more so that my world had just completely changed. So the first time my parents took me to the mall, I was mesmerized at the sights and sounds. I listened to the conversations of adults around me and even though I couldn't fully understand some of their words, I imagined what they could be talking about.

"Did you see that one thing Chris did at his mom's house? He got in so much trouble, he got ten spankings. TEN."

"Yeah, I heard they got a new SpongeBob TV to match the SpongeBob walls."

"I'll talk to you later, first I have to finish my burger and kill this evil bear."

Obviously, I was a strange kid.

I walked beside my parents, immersing myself in the beauty of everyday life. The clean white tiled floors and the ceiling that seemed to hover miles above my head, with a skylight above to let in the warm, white sunlight. Store after store, one after another, decorated with signs of various colors, advertising their products.

Suddenly, a screech to my right. I looked toward the source of the sound...

And my jaw dropped. An entire rainforest greeted me, with a gigantic blue aquarium containing various colored fish. People ate various foods under green vines which hung from the ceiling. Near the entrance, a gorilla stared at me, mouth agape, boasting huge, white teeth. In the distance, a man yelled "Volcano!" as he served a massive chocolate cake topped with ice cream and a sparkler. "Rainforest Café," the sign read. This wasn't Rainforest Café. This was heaven.

I let go of my dad's hand and walked toward the restaurant. I must have spent ten, twenty minutes just observing the restaurant, in awe of everything, from the small beanie frogs, to the talking tree. Everything was... amazing.

Before long, a staff member approached me.

"Hi there! Do you know where your parents are?" This was the first time someone here had talked to me, so I was quite nervous. I didn't respond, instead opting to look down at the ground, avoiding all eye contact.

But I understood her question, and soon after, I looked behind me, toward the spot where my parents were.

...Or, at least, where they were supposed to be. They had vanished.

Quickly ignoring the lady, I hurried to where my parents should have been and looked around. They really weren't there. I climbed atop a planter, hoping for a better vantage point, but to no avail. All I could see were the many lines of people moving briskly, chaotically, through the mall pathways.

Then, I remembered advice my dad gave me when I was still in the Philippines.

"If you're ever lost, just stay right where you are, and we'll find you."

So I did just that. Only, I took it more literally than intended.

I sat right in the middle of the walkway, right where my parents had last been, much to the annoyance of the shoppers. Quickly, like a clot in a bloodstream, the density of people around me increased. Various people complained.

"Hey! Watch it!"

"What the...?"

"...Weird."

But of course, I couldn't really understand them, so I kept sitting, legs spread out, palms behind me resting on the ground, relaxed as ever. While pedestrian traffic came to a near standstill.

My parents found me a few minutes later. My dad told me "never do that again."

Never to stray from him, or sit in the middle of a crowded walkway? I didn't know which.



Seth:

I leaned forward, left leg in front of me in a running position. Directly to my right was Seth, in a similar position. In front of us, an obstacle course of tarp and wind. Air filled walls and pillars of cloth protruding from the fluffy ground.

It was an inflatable obstacle course.

"Three!" The announcer shouted towards us, wearing a light blue MESA shirt. Around us, on the campus of Chapman University, few students watched us. A handful stared in anticipation of the raw athletic competition that would soon be displayed to them. Behind us, a line of impatient students, waiting to take their turn on the trench run.

"Two!" A plan of attack developed in my mind. I would vault over the low inflatable wall, barge through the inflated noodles, and sprint to the finish line, leaving Seth in the dust.

"One!" This was it. This was my moment of glory. Everybody else in the area ignored us, going on with their normal lives.

"Go!"

And we ran to the course and nobody cheered. We quickly approached the first obstacle: the wall.

I tried to do some sort of parkour vault over the castle wall, planting my left palm on the top of the wall and throwing my legs to my right side, like I had seen a thousand times in YouTube videos. But at that time, I had no idea how to do parkour.

I overestimated my left arm strength and I flew to my right, into Seth's lane. Seth had somehow gotten over the wall before me despite his clearly inferior speed, but his foot clipped the top of the wall and he landed stomach first on the inflatable ground.

In a flash of events, I flew to his side and landed on his back, in a sitting position. He gave out a gasp of brief pain, but I paid no attention to him. I got up, and ran through the rest of the course, passed the finish line, and screamed.

"IN YOUR FACE, SETH," I said as I looked behind me. But he was nowhere to be found. I made my way to where I had sat on him in the obstacle course and there he remained, lying there, grasping his chest.

He was in pain for the rest of the day. The next day, he found out that I broke his rib by sitting on him in an inflatable obstacle course.

He hated me for a solid week.



Steven:

The park wasn't busy, but there were a bit more people than I'd like it to be, since we were filming a parkour  video and I didn't exactly appreciate being the center of attention, but regardless, we had a job to do. And we only had three days to finish it.

Steven was the first to arrive at the park to film. I don't know how long he waited, but he must have stood in the shade of the rec center for at least fifteen minutes, based on the look on his face. Tripod in one hand and camera bag strewn across my shoulder, I walked toward him.

"Sorry I'm late, took me awhile to figure out that you already left," I explained.

"It's fine."

I looked around. Malik hadn't arrived yet, which was a little inconvenient, but in an attempt to smother the awkwardness between Steven and I, I explained that we could film some things while we waited for him.

So we did. Small things, like the introduction and some narrative parts, but thankfully, it took long enough so that barely any time between Steven and I was spent making awkward, unproductive conversation.

And when Malik arrived, shortly after I filmed the last part Steven could do on his own, the fun started.

A few simple vaults over a worn, green picnic table underneath the shade of a nearby tree. A sideflip that made the others around us gasp in awe. It was great to do parkour outside.

When we finished filming the difficult parkour parts, we filmed Steven's attempts to do parkour, to add comedic value. I didn't have time to plot out every shot down to the second, so of course, we had to do a fair amount of improvising. One of which, involved Steven rolling over a picnic table.

I quickly demonstrated how I wanted him to do it. Just step on one bench, gently do a barrel roll on the top, step off the second bench, and walk normally.

But somehow, Steven botched it up. Instead of landing on the second bench with his feet, he overrotated, rolled off the table, landed flat on his shoulder on the bench, kept on rolling, and tumbled onto the hard concrete ground with a sickening but muffled thud.

Then, as if nothing happened, he stood up, dusted his shoulder off, and said,

"How was that?"

Malik and I just sort of stared at him for a few seconds, amazed that he could take such a forceful impact and shrug it off as if it were nothing.

"Are... are you okay?" Malik asked, concerned.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You sure?" I questioned. No way in hell could he be fine.

"Yeah. So what's next?"

Amazing.

Soon after, on Facebook, he posted about how he had bruises on his shoulder and stomach. And I felt bad.



William:

I was minutes away from leaving for retreat. I was a year late, compared to all of my other friends, so of course, I knew absolutely no one here. Standing on the side of the street, awaiting the tour bus that would take me away from familiar territory for four days, I listened to the voices of the various people around me, not bothering to decipher their words, but rather, just observing the sound of their speech. The scent of pizza danced in the air, under the cold winter sun.

I looked behind me to make sure that my belongings were still there. My duffel bag, holding all of my clothes and other necessities was still there, right beside my suit carrier, protecting the fancy clothing I would wear for the one formal night we would have.

Beside my clothes, stood William, talking to a small group of people. Finally, one familiar face, if only vaguely familiar. I didn't really talk to William much, but I talked with him enough to consider him a friend, so I hurried in his direction.

And immediately, the temperature of the world dropped a full 20 degrees Celsius, as a cold layer of awkward frost set in.

I didn't bother with any introductions. Not a single "hello," or "hi," or even a simple "sup." I just walked in and integrated myself with the social membrane.

And conversation immediately came to a standstill. They had detected an awkward antigen in the form of me, and they attacked silently in their minds, wishing that I'd leave.

"So... pizza's good, huh?" One of them started, looking toward me. Oh god. The painful small talk that I was all too familiar with. William nodded, in blind agreement. Anything to get me to leave.

"Yeah. What brand is this again?" I knew it was Papa John's, but anything to push this conversation forward. Anything.

"I think it's Papa John's," William replied.

"Oh, cool." 15 seconds of pure, concentrated awkwardness passed. "I've never had Papa John's before." A blatant lie.

"It's pretty good," one of them responded.

"Yeah." The conversation fell like a lead balloon. As if it gained much height to begin with.

One of them glanced at their watch. Sign two of an awkward situation. I went through my mental checklist of awkwardness, trying to predict what their next move would be.

Probably a "Yeah..."

William looked up, then at the ground. "Yeah..."

Bingo. Three in a row.

And before the awkward meter reached critical levels, the bus pulled in to the street. Just as I entered without introduction, I left without saying bye. I'm horrible with goodbyes.

I quickly placed my belongings in the bottom of the bus. I got on, and took my seat in the center of the bus, strategically picked to minimize attention towards me. I took a deep breath.

And exhaled. The awkwardness had ended. And yet it had only just begun.





Author's Note: Sorry if I mess up on some of the details in the stories! I'm basing this entirely off my memory, which is far from perfect.

A pretty fun project to work on, even though I spent more time writing these than I did studying for finals that are coming up in four, three weeks. But whatever, I say it was definitely worth it.

Sorry if the story I wrote about you isn't as good as you expected it to be, the difficulty level on writing these varied between the names. If I really knew the person with the name, then it was a piece of cake to write something good, but if they were barely someone in my lives, then it was damn near IMPOSSIBLE.

And I'm also sorry if you submitted a name and I didn't end up writing about it. Might have been because I didn't really have a memorable experience with anyone with that name, which happened for about 40% of the names submitted. Then again, 50% of the names submitted were sent by an obvious troll too, so there's that.

But yeah, I really liked doing this project. A nice little switch up from the usual fictitious stories I write. I'd love to do more work with reader submissions, so if you have any sort of idea for me to write, send it to the Ask Box!

Special thanks to Nevin, LJ, Alex, Kevin, Matt, and Rhys, for helping me on some vocabulary during English!