Love at First Text

Prologue

Beep, beep. The alarm clock rang in Luke's head, startling him out of his sleep. He sat up slowly and rubbed his eyes, trying to shake the feeling of weariness that shrouded him like a veil. 

"Luke, are you awake?" his mom yelled from the kitchen.

"Yeah, mom!" Luke answered, getting out of bed.

No need to get dressed, though, since he slept in his school uniform. Oh, yeah. Luke and his twenty-ish other classmates, along with the other grades in the school all went to a private Christian school where they were required to wear school uniforms. Luke, however, found it easier to just wear his school uniform to bed so he wouldn't have to waste as much time in the morning getting ready. Walking out into the hallway, he greeted his sister.

"Lookin' sharp, Luke," his older sister said enthusiastically, "Though you might want to consider brushing your hair for once." 

"Nah," he said. For going to a Christian school, Luke seemed to have only one main religion: Never brushing his hair. Well, that and pigs. Luke loved pigs. Like, loved loved them. If he could have a pet, it would be a pig. All of his shirts had to be pigs. If he got a birthday gift from someone, it had to pigs. He even had piles of stuffed pigs laying on his bedspread. Luke was basically known as the pig kid in class, and whenever a pig was mentioned or even a picture of a pig was shown, all heads would turn his way.

Luke gobbled down his breakfast in his typical quickly-paced fashion and got on the bus. Confused, he looked around. His friend should be on the bus this morning if he was correct. That's when he realized. His friend, Ivan, had done this before and would probably continue doing it because he thought it was hilarious when, in fact, it never succeeded in tricking Luke. As Luke walked by to his usual seat, Ivan popped out from behind the rubber seats of the school bus.

While Luke had his pig thing, Ivan had his own thing with pugs. Though nobody seemed to know this, Luke knew that he had probably just done that so he could fit in with his friend. At this point though, that was years ago, and Ivan was known as the pug kid, regardless of whether or not the idea was his.

"Wow, I had no idea you were there," Luke said sarcastically. He said this, of course, because Ivan had been doing this for months on end now. It tricked him maybe, like, two times.

Ivan's sister, Alise, had also been dragged into this simple failure of a prank. The three of them, Luke, Ivan, and Alise were the only kids from their school on the bus, so they talked in the back of the bus for the length of the entire ride there.

That was back then. The simpler times. Little did they know, less than three years later, the three of them, along with a classmate of Luke and Ivan's and one of Alise's close friends, would be involved in one of the most tragic modern romance stories of our generation.

And it's all true.