At Midnight

Chapter 1

Hands down, my life was pretty darn boring. I did the same routine everyday – going to school alone, eating lunch in the cafeteria alone, coming home from school in my car alone and spending the rest of my uneventful day alone.

I didn't have any friends. Period. I was known as the town's resident loner and truth be told, I wasn't bothered by that nickname. I wasn't really bothered by the whole thing. I guessed I've grown accustomed to it.

People in school neglected me and treated me as if I was invisible, much like how they treated gravity. They were aware of gravity but they didn't see the need to treat it as something important or relevant. No that was a terrible analogy. Gravity is significant, I wasn't. Back to my point, I wouldn't really think of it as bullying since none of them made the effort to put me down. They used to, well, some of them but they gave it up eventually.

My mother was a single parent and she was hardly around so you could imagine how awkward it was for both the teacher and I during parent-teacher meetings. Teachers pitied me because of my family background so they hardly gave me punishments when I forgot to hand up my assignments or when I got in trouble with the school. Since I was 'problematic' kid, they expected very little of my results and conduct.

The kids in the neighborhood thought that I was plain weird. The only time I was ever seen hanging around other human beings was when I was at the back of the school, smoking cigarettes with the Stoners. I didn't smoke pot though.

The only reason I hung out with them, very seldom I might add, was because they were always carrying an extra pack of lights and being the kind souls that they were, they would offer them to me. They were great companions but being the anti-social and freeloading prick that I was, I didn't take it upon myself to remember their names. They were too high to even form a coherent sentence so I figured that it didn't matter.

I did the same thing everyday, going unnoticed by my peers and spending most of my allowance on products that would result in inevitable harmful effects.

As I pulled up the driveway, turning the key and cutting the purrs of the engine, my eyes trailed towards the freshly painted house beside mine. Large men were huffing and puffing as they ran to and fro from the vans to the inside of the house, heaving huge boxes over their shoulders.

I creased my eyebrows together. It wasn't common to see such a sight around here. Only the rich families could afford moving into the houses in this part of San Francisco. The houses were huge and luxurious. People around this area spent way too much money on interior designing and buying useless furniture that were too fragile to be of good use. As compared to the other houses, my house was the smallest and the least glamorous.

My mother worked her butt off so that she could afford staying in one of the many prime lands in San Francisco and pay for my education in one of the top colleges around here. I usually had the whole house to myself because she was constantly travelling for business trips and what not.

In the midst of locking my car and heading to the house where I could enjoy the company of sad soap operas on TV and the comfort of my bed, I came to a halt when I heard a voice spoke.

" Hey there! I'm Ashton Parker, I just moved into the neighborhood. What's your name?" I turned around to meet the owner of the voice. A boy looking to be my age was standing at the gates that separated my house from the small roads for exorbitant cars to drive on.

" Mia Roden."

It was the first time someone had noticed me.