Ctrl + Alt + Dalt (BxB)

Ctrl + Alt + Dalt + 1

CHAPTER ONE

I HAVE IT ALL. More friends than I've ever bothered to count. A shiny, new sports car. A shiny, new girlfriend. Just graduated with honors from high school—Valedictorian, no less. Popular—so popular, in fact, that I'm nearly the very top of the food chain in the popular group from school. It's the first summer after my graduation—the first summer of freedom—the first summer of my new, adult life. I'm grateful for a life that is so spectacular, but, then, why does it all feel so...wrong?

"Are you okay?" asks a seemingly distant call of a siren, while I'm blankly staring into my glass of water, swirling the crushed pebbles of ice around into a vortex with my straw. "Doll?"

"Hmm... What about a doll?" I ask, a little bit confused, realizing that I'm completely zoning out. A hand reaches underneath my chin, its fake fingernail digging into my skin, forcing my head back up and into the present, reminding me that I'm still presently on a date with Beth—my girlfriend. I shudder, mentally, at the very word, girlfriend. Although, I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I'm pretty sure that it must have something to do with the fact that I'm just not comfortable with her, yet.

"Not doll—Dalt—duh! as in your name, Dalton,"  she says, laughing after clarifying that she'd said my abbreviated name, and was not referencing an inanimate object only masquerading as an anthropomorphic figure—perhaps, the latter would still be quite accurate for either of us. "You're funny. Silly, Dalt."

"Right. Sorry, I zoned out," I say as she reaches for my face, trying to cup my cheek. I back away—instinctively and not intentionally—just far enough that she retracts her hand, rather awkwardly. Between the locks of dyed brown hair, her chocolate eyes melt into an exaggerated expression of hurt—I shudder at her cartoonish acting, unsure if she even feels the emotion at all. "Sorry—"

"I was just asking if you were feeling okay," she whines, her lips curling downwards, exaggerating that whole sad-face thing—I shudder at how plastic and fake it seems to be, or perhaps I mean that about her, in general—perhaps that's why everything feels so wrong.

"Yeah—no—I'm not all right. Everything just doesn't feel right. Nothing feels right—"

"Oh, my God—with a capital G." She fake sobs—I shudder. "You're breaking up with me?"

"That's not what I was saying at all," I start to explain, but find myself incapable of forming words that can accurately and logically explain what I'm feeling, especially when I, myself, don't really know. She stares at me with hurt eyes—genuine hurt this time, or at least, I think it might be—until they suddenly narrow, her cartoonish expression changing into an indignant, cartoonish one, forcing me to think as if I should apologize—but then I would be apologizing for her misunderstanding me, and apologizing for simply trying to honestly explain how I've been feeling—I don't think anyone would say that it was my fault. "I'm Sorry. I—"

She rises to her feet and throws her full glass of iced water into my face, cutting me off from explaining anything any further. My eyes blurry and half shut, I'm frozen in shock even as her hand smacks me across the cheek, her fake fingernails slicing into my skin. My cheeks stinging, my face and neck dripping and freezing with crushed ice resting around my collar, she turns away from me and storms off and out of the restaurant. As the other seated patrons within the restaurant stare at me, I find it a little bit odd, but—for the first time, ever—I question if I should even bother to go after her.

~ ~ ~

I don't even quite make it back to my home, before my phone starts vibrating incessantly with a deluge of new message notifications. I finish parking my car in the driveway and whip out my phone from my pocket with one hand just as I engage the parking brake with the other. All the texts are from my friends—every one of them is from the popular group. They all want to know what happened—or rather, perhaps, who was wrong, and who's to blame.