T for swearing! Cause teenage boys have a vocabulary built mainly off of a variety of eight or so words.

Tuesday, September 22nd found Cam hoisting his bag over his shoulder as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. His dark hair was tousled and askew on top of his head, curls brushing against his cheeks and ears. He tore out of his room and pedaled down the steps, not bothering to greet his mother, who was calling for him.

"Harris!" He wheezed. "You asshole." He opened the passenger door and plopped in as Arcade Fire blasted through the speakers and ruined the bass in the back.

His older brother chuckled, shaking his head to sweep dark hair out of his eyes. "You're like a fucking girl, yo. What takes you so god damn long to get ready, anyway?"

Cam shrugged. Secretly, he had been texting Derrick, and had gotten side tracked. Officially, he had been downloading last-minute music from the computer. "I wanted to download some US Royalty onto my iPod."

His brother looked mildly impressed. Aside from the fact US Royalty was part-chick part-soft rock, they were fairly acceptable.

He shifted the car into first gear as the V8 engine roaring to life as he pummeled down the street with a colossal roar. Cam gripped the sides in silent prayer, eyes wide as the Dodge veered into a dangerously sharp left turn. Harris didn't seem to notice, one hand on the lining of the open window, the other five o'clock and limp on the steering wheel. Eventually, as Cam adjusted to the partially-homicidal driving, he was comfortable to itch his elbow just where the pinstripe blue long sleeve had been rolled up. His jeans were ripped at the knees already, he noticed with dismay. This would be the third pair he'd have to buy a new one for.

"How's that chick of yours?"

Harris was probably just trying to make polite conversation with the younger brother he usually didn't talk to.

Cam's face lost its pallor.

"Err—what?"

"That girl." Harris motioned with one hand to his hair, which resembled Cam's bed head closely. "Y'know, blonde? Kinda meek looking?"

"Claire?" Cam said with hesitation.

Harris nodded. "Sure. How's she doing?"

"Good I guess." Cam shifted uncomfortably It was like a double kill, not only were relationship advice-conversations incredibly awkward (especially with Harris, who had a way of making it a thousand times worse then it could be) but every question was as if Harris was stabbing closer and closer to the right direction, which would be—Cam had no intentions of dating Claire, or, for that matter, girls in general.

After another round of painstaking interrogation, Cam near leapt out of the car as it came to a screeching halt in front of OCD.

He felt a little sick as Harris pulled out of the drive with a flickering wave of his hand, carrying "Bullet with butterfly wings" down the street as Billy Cogran hollered out his windows. He rubbed his hair and made his way to the trailers, which were officially decked out in Fifa themed accommodations. He didn't really care much for showing up a whole bunch of girls—the little clique they had was pretty ridiculous—but he wasn't going to live the school year in a god damn jewelry box.

He set his bag down at his desk and wondered where Derrick was. Hotz was bouncing a football on his knee, Plovert plopped on one of the desks beside him. Kemp had turned away from the teacher at the front and was, no surprise, playing Pokemon on his laptop. Cam would have joined him, if the teacher hadn't called him over.

"Fisher?"

"Yeah?" He asked as he scanned the room for Derrick. No such luck.

The teacher hovered around her desk for a moment, scrawling on a pass. "Do you mind running into the main building and finding Mr. Hollander? Tell him I sent for him about those books we need."

"Sure." He answered absentmindedly, but also a bit worried. The main building meant Massie and her pose of she-banshees.

But the teacher shooed him off, and he made an effort not to look as sullen as he felt.

The sky was gray, swathed in watery tumults of lugubrious clouds, some tenebrous looking as they bled into the horizon. Pigeons soared above him.

He hated the Pretty Committee—worse, he hated the freakish Olivia Ryan, who seemed to have gotten a nose job at the tender age of thirteen, then proceeded to stalk him from hell and back. With a quick glace around the hallway, he surmised most of his classmates were in homeroom, leaving him to steal down the hallway mostly unnoticed.

Fate would, of course, have him bump into Dylan Marvil.

Claire used to bemoan all the useless gossip and even more useless fears the PC, err, NPC, used to have. Apparently Dylan had this never ending fear she'd never be skinny enough. She also had bright red hair, an amusing amount of makeup for a thirteen year old girl, not to mention four-inch heels in a school for God's sake, and somehow managed to meld all of this together to create an image of a… well, a little girl trying to be a hell of a lot older then she actually was.

Cam might be a little cynical in his appraisal of her, however, considering she was obviously more then a little interested in his boyfriend.

"Oh!" She squeaked, and, admittedly, it wasn't an awful sounding voice. Not like Massie, anyway. "Sorry."

"Nah, my bad." He gave a quick glance behind his shoulder as she strutted off like a peacock with ruffled feathers, wondering what sort of foreign galactic planet these girls were from. Tatooine? And would Darth Vader be lopping off his hand while he was at it? Perhaps Derrick could be stolen by an enormous slug space gangster and he'd have to free him from his carbonite prison.

He stilled.

But that would make him Leia, wouldn't it?

"Oh, Mr. Fisher!" The teacher, a port, stoutly man, rummaged around the back of his desks and protruded the largest stack of books Cam had ever seen in his short academic life. Cue giggling.

Oh great. So this was where the NPC was lurking.

"You'll bring these guys safe and sound, right?"

He didn't even spare the girls a glance, lest he get Claire in trouble for making eye-contact during their boy fast. Evidently Massie would have some sort of conniption fit if anyone dared to get any action aside from her.

"I'll try." Cam joked, precariously balancing the tottering top stack before it fell clean over his head.

Maybe he was just the only kid in school not going crazy. Girls were obsessed with looking at least two decades older then they really were, and the guys were continuing a long fascination with Megan Fox's gigantic boobs and an incessant urge to 'hit that'. Was he the only one who was outraged the Packers won the superbowl? Celebrating that the Bruins won the Stanley Cup or that Maryland made it into the NCAA lax finals? Suddenly nukes were taking a back burner to these disturbing creatures called girls, the boys were lowering their AK47's and halting their kill streaks in favor of learning more about these barbaric space aliens.

Cam may have been overreacting, but he didn't understand how suddenly everyone's interests could unanimously shift in such an undesirable direction.

"You're only saying that because you've got me." Said Derrick arrogantly, smirk on his face as he met Cam halfway back and the dark haired boy had allayed all his fears.

Cam suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Then he suppressed the urge to look around fervently for watchful eyes as Derrick leaned over to kiss him right over the books.

"Someone's going to see!" He hissed, but Derrick had tossed the books to the floor—effectively damaging them in mud for life—and pinned him against the wall with a fierce kiss, biting at his lips and making his toes curl.

"No one's going to see." Derrick smirked, voice low enough to carry only to him. "You're being paranoid—

"Realistic, I'm being realistic!" Cam retorted, flushing. That wasn't to say he didn't enjoy it, however. He was a teenage boy, with an outrageous libido that flew clean off the handle and this strange wonton urge to experiment, though he had no intentions of doing so in front of the entire school. He grabbed the books off the ground—which was the majority of them—and gave Derrick an irritated glance.

"You could at least help, before you, you, attacked me on my way over." He huffed petulantly, but Derrick surprisingly didn't protest. He simply took the books with those narrowed, smoldering eyes that unnerved Cam like no other, before sauntering off into the gloom.

Cam wondered vaguely if perhaps he'd done something to upset him.