Kid in a Locker (REWRITING)

1. A Series of Unfortunate Events

How do you know that there are pockets in your pants? How do you know that when you reach down to place your phone into the protective little hole, it won't find itself struggling to enter a fake pocket, or slide right against the material of your pants because there is, in fact, no pocket at all? How does one remember which pants are good for harboring goods, and which ones aren't? You don't. It just happens. Something in a certain part of your brain knows that yes, these pants you are wearing are safe to put your phone in.

Except, that part of my brain was not working on that Monday morning, which resulted in me slipping my phone into thin air and letting it go. This sets off a chain reaction that looks a little something like this:

The phone lands on the concrete in front of the garage and I panic, letting out a horrified scream that wasn't called for.

This causes my eldest brother, Romul, to let his foot off the break of his very old, very smelly station wagon, and this rolls back far enough down the driveway that his tailend is hanging out into the road.

The movement causes my youngest brother, Peter, to stop in his tracks, since he was walking towards the car before it started moving. His sudden stop in movement causes his foot to kick slightly as he steps on the concrete to prevent himself from moving forward, which in turn causes him to kick my phone underneath the car.

The car rolls backwards and my phone slides under the left passenger tire, all the while I'm screaming my head off. We hear a muted crunch and then suddenly, I no longer have a working phone.

Romul jumps out of his car in a panic. He doesn't yet know that he is an accomplice in my phone's untimely demise, only that he heard a scream and thought something was wrong.

When he realizes that none of us are dying, he lets out screams of his own filled with curse after curse. Our neighbor, who came outside because he believed his new neighbors were murdering each other, accidently lets his front door swing too far open, allowing his hyperactive labradoodle to escape and bounce down the street with the fury of a thousand suns.

And that's how I ended up late to my first day of the new school. The three of us sit in the principal's office side by side, looking around the room while phones ring and people shuffle papers.

"Skittle?" Peter asks, holding out the bright green bag to me. He has to reach over Romul, since he planted himself there to keep us from attacking each other. The whole way here we had been throwing random items from Romul's floorboard at each other, missing each other but hitting the eldest many times.

"This doesn't mean I like you." I scowl, plucking a yellow from the package. The ones that were mostly left were the yellows and greens, the two colors that neither Romul nor Peter could eat. They had claimed they tasted like battery acid. I would eat them and Peter would eat purple and red, leaving orange to Romul. It was our system, the system that seemed to work with anything we did. Never one without the others, never a train wreck without all of us there to complete it.

"I'm aware."

We continue to sit in silence, waiting on the guidance counselor to stop talking with the principal long enough to understand that the kids they were talking about were sitting five feet away from them. None of us know what we are doing here, but we all can probably guess.

Every school treats us the same way: three kids who move around a lot that have no home structure or sense of normalcy. Every guidance counselor wanted to swoop in and make us their next Big Save, every principal pities us because they don't understand that we like to move around. We like going to different countries and seeing the different schools and people. Our parents loved us, though we did live on a military base that leave zero room for teenage rebellion.