Birds || Fuenciado

Prologue

As a high schooler, you're likely to have a lot of problems. They're different for everyone, of course - whether external or internal, life will throw you as many curved balls as you can receive and then some that you can't, and you'll learn very quickly how much you didn't notice the times of kindergarten when life was at its simplest.

I have to say - I really enjoyed kindergarten.

It was great. No worries, no deep thoughts, no panics about the future...at such a young age you don't have to worry about where your next meal comes from, or how you're going to afford college accommodation, or what you want to do with your ridiculously short life. You just turn up at the nursery and play with blocks.

That's where I met Jaime, I suppose. At the nursery.

A chubby little kid with dark curly hair that was wild in what was half an afro, half not. He was kind of funny looking, I suppose - but I was hardly a stud myself, at the age of two and a half - slight and elfin with embarrassingly blond hair and a goofy grin...in some ways, we were weird enough to match. So we played with blocks together for a little bit one day - I don't remember whether or not I liked him, if I took to him, if we got along...we only played together once. He wasn't really a social creature, it turned out, and most of the time he liked to play alone, so I made other friends.

I kind of knew who he was, but all I knew was his first name, and even then it was vague. Once we'd finished nursery and moved up into primary school, my class was split into two because it was too big. I never saw or even knew the kids in the other class - in my group of fourteen other kids, I had my own friends, and I played with them at recess, not caring to socialise with the other ones. A few times I saw Jaime, but he was never playing with the other kids either. I always spotted him very briefly, when the end of recess bell rang, and he came trotting alone and silent out of the bushes at the back of the playground. I never knew what he'd been doing in there. Once or twice, it occurred to me to follow him in to find out - but I wasn't that curious. I just wondered how he managed to do it every playtime without being caught by the teachers. Primary schoolers weren't allowed to go in the bushes.

Two months after I started fifth grade, I was sitting on my own in my room reading a book. I didn't really want to talk to anyone that day - at recess, a new kid by the name of Keith Davids had pushed me over and laughed, and I'd scraped my knee and cried, and then gone and hidden (in retrospect, it was a silly thing to get upset about, but when you're ten, you take everything to heart). So I didn't really want to talk to my little brother Mike, when he came into my room - but I love my little brother, so I'd relented quickly.

"What happened to your knee?" He asked, brown eyes wide and innocent as he struggled up onto my bed, kneeling opposite me.

"I fell in the playground," I'd lied.

"Mommy can put a bandage on it."

"Mom is busy, Mike."

He'd pouted a little - not because he was sulky. He just tended to make that face sometimes, my eight year old brother, kind of like he was experimenting with facial expressions, testing out the ones he liked.

"Do you know Jaime?" He asked suddenly, and I frowned, putting my finger in the spine of the book I was reading.

"Who?"

"Jaime Preciado. He's in fifth grade like you."

"He's in the other class."

He pouted again. "Oh."

"I kind of know who he is, but we aren't friends. Why?"

"I talked to him today. He's nice."

"Talking to scary fifth graders?" I grinned. "When they're so much bigger than you?"