Meant to be Broken [boyxboy] [Watty Awards 2012]

Chapter One

"Ives Milton Fay, if you don't get up right now you're going to be late for school!"

Beneath the layers of sheets on his bed, within the shadowed and cluttered confines of his lair-like bedroom, Ives growled and rolled over, clamping a pillow down over his head in an attempt to muffle his mother's insistent banging on the door. He was in no mood to spend all day surrounded by packs of drama-hungry teenagers and control-freak teachers and faculty members who never seemed to actually have control. All he wanted to do was lay in bed all day. Just like he had done for the past month.

That option quickly died when Lisa Fay entered his room, stumbled around the random collection of things scattered all over the floor, and took the pillow away from him. "Up," she commanded.

Ives groaned and rolled over, rubbing his face with a hand sporting nails covered in chipped black paint. "I'm up," he grumbled.

"Hurry up. Your sister is waiting." She tossed the pillow to the foot of the bed and made her way carefully back out of the room.

With a sigh, Ives sat up and shook his shaggy black hair. It took him a minute to find his favorite pair of old jeans and a black tee-shirt amid the mess, and even longer to locate his backpack. Eventually, he finished getting ready and went to the kitchen. His sister was waiting, swinging her car keys impatiently and texting someone on her cell phone.

"All right, let's go," he said, stopping in front of her. He couldn't help but notice how her shorts were probably too short for the school dress code, and that her skin-tight spaghetti-strap blue tank-top definitely was. "You know they're going to make you change, right?"

She scoffed as she led him out to her car, passing their mother in the living room where she was watching the news and smoking. "I'd like to see them try. No authority over seniors."

He shook his head, rolling his blue eyes – which were tinted violet by colored contacts. They climbed into Kylle's beat-up car and she grabbed a bottle of something from the back seat and started spraying her clothes with it, making Ives sneeze.

"Is that Febreze?" he demanded, looking at her skeptically.

She nodded and handed the bottle over. "Use it, if you want. I'm sick of smelling like Mom's smoke all the time."

Ives couldn't agree more, and took the bottle without another word. He sprayed his clothes as they drove toward Raynor High School, rolling down the window before he felt like suffocating. "I really hope she stops this chain smoking crap."

"So do I," Kylle agreed. "You'd think she'd stop after what happened to Dad. Does she want to go the same way he did?"

"And leave us to fend for ourselves?" Ives added, watching the houses pass by through the window. Thinking of his dad's death made him want to go crawl into bed again. At least he wasn't planning on picking up a cigarette after seeing all the pain his dad had gone through. He really didn't understand his mother.

"I hope you pass your road test next month."

Ives snorted. "Why? I can't drive to school. It's too late to get a parking pass."

His sister sighed longingly. "You're lucky you get Dad's car. It's so much nicer than mine."

"Only because it's newer, not fancier," Ives pointed out.

Ives made it to his first period History class with seconds to spare, and sitting in the seat next to the last open desk was the last person he had been hoping to see.

"Hey there," Sam said to him, smiling flirtatiously. "Haven't heard from you in a while."

Sam's voice was somewhere in the range of too masculine for a woman, and too feminine for a man. And Sam's body was just as androgynous, with no definitive secondary sex characteristics, nor did the haircut or clothing style suggest one sex over the other. For reasons Ives couldn't explain, this had always attracted him to his classmate.