Dreamers [#Wattys2020]

1.

Noah.

Life is terrifying. It's short, exceptionally good at tearing down everything I work towards and gives me only a sliver of the world I wished I lived in. I've always been out of place and it's not as if I despise it, yet I want others to understand that this is simply who I am. I blend into the crowds, I still live with my parents and I'm no more popular than the guy who sits beside me in my psychology class.

Every time this class ends part of me wishes that as soon as I walk back into the student soaked air of the very large hallway that something different might hit me in the side of the head, something that can tell me where the hell I'm supposed to go once I fly the stupid nest that is the dream I wished my life had turned out to be. I'm the loner that everyone thinks I am even if I had never planned on being it, but how am I supposed to change that? How do I prove to my family that I'm not a lost cause? When I decided to take an extra year to complete my degree I felt as if I had disappointed the whole god-damned world, but I just need a little more time to figure things out.

Today, at least, I only had one class and now I can go home to my bedroom where I will spend the rest of my time alone drawing and working on my somewhat of a side hustle. Diana, my sister, works at a small publishing house in the city and luckily she seems to be the only one looking out for me. When she sees an opportunity for me it feels as if she's placed a me-sized billboard right in front of my eyes. It's nice to make a little extra money from attempting to design book covers, but I know I can't rely on her forever.

I'm the first to get home, like almost every day. I barely unlace my shoes as I kick them off into the closet with every other pair of shoes that I own while my family's neatly stored side of the space stays organized.

My bedroom, on the second floor, has just enough space for my bed, my dresser and my desk. It's practically been the same since I was a child except for the few decorative upgrades I've done over the years. My parents had put up plenty of cute elephant portraits when I was a baby, but now I've replaced almost all of them with posters.

I finally power on my laptop and sit down on my plastic egg-shaped desk chair. On the other hand, I've had this stupid computer for so many years that I'm finally starting to see it slow down like an elderly dog with its fan blowing the hot air out from the probably overheating battery.

It's kind of a habit for me to check my email first before I do anything else. I think I kind of just expect there to be something in my inbox even if the more likely discovery is that there's absolutely nothing, but today, for once, it's a different kind of day. My inbox shows one unread email from Diana with the subject line: I've got a new project for you.

"I've got the perfect book for you!" she writes me. "It's a teen romance novel."

This is a pretty common kind of email I get from her.

"Anyways, it's about this really talented boy and he's got this crush on this one girl in his grade. Turns out she's got a crush on him too. Well, they graduate and kind of go their separate ways but end up finding each other again about a year later. Of course, by now the boy is a full-blown superstar and then all this stuff happens.

So what do you think?"

What do I think? For someone who works in the publishing industry, she should probably word her messages more formally, but besides this, I know exactly what this story is. It's a fanfiction disguised by changing the names of the characters and I already know who it's about.

"It's a Rover Baxton fanfiction isn't it?" I write back.

Minutes later I get a reply, "I'm so glad you figured that out, Noah."