When Bumper's really little, his mother gets him to sleep with lullabies. He likes to sing along with them too. She strokes his hair and coos pretty words at him. She tells him what a handsome young man he is, what a gift to the world he is, how proud of him she'll always be. When he hurts, she fixes it. When he's sad, she tells him all the things he can be happy about instead.

She's confident he'll grow into a great young man. She reads from the pages of really old comic books, made way before he was born, as bedtime stories. She kisses him goodnight and Bumper sleeps peacefully. They're the only two people the world needs as far as he's concerned.

Then he gets older and things get more complicated. She can't be there anymore in the nights, but Bumper remembers what she said and that helps him to sleep. She's there in the mornings and that's enough.

Soon, though, nothing ever feels like enough.

School is lame. School is for losers. School can't even begin to contain the awesomeness that is Bumper Allen. Most people just can't handle Bumper. He guesses he'll have to forgive them. The common people get jealous of things that are too far above them. Right now, it's not his day but Bumper will get there. Eventually.

The people around him just don't get Bumper. He understands. It's hard to relate to genius. Most people feel threatened by his limitless talent. (Why wouldn't they?) Who cares? Bumper's above all their petty grievances with him. So what if no one plays with him at recess? So what if people throw paper planes at the back of his head at class? So what if people steal his lunch or give him wedgies or lock him in the girls' bathroom after they've given him wedgies and stolen his pants?

Bumper is eleven and three-quarters. That's practically twelve. Soon, the girls around him will finally wake up out of their childish stupor and see the hunk of a man he really is. Chicks really dig musicians and, for all the laughing behind his back people do, no one can ever deny Bumper Allen has talent.

School is lame, but this new year is a new start. Middle school is not going to be anything like elementary. Middle school is a whole new playing field. It's filled with people who are way more mature and will recognize Bumper's brilliance and not call him a suck up just because he's the only boy in choir who can hit those notes perfectly.

He's got this in the bag.

Somehow, it falls out of the bag.

Bumper bursts into school and introduces himself in a self-choreographed, one-man show stopper no one else seems to appreciate. (He didn't realise his audience would be so painfully mainstream.)

"That was the one and only Bumper Allen," he declares as he finished, chest heaving up and down with the doughy exhaustion of his epic dance number. Instead of applause, when the confetti goes off, he gets hauled to the principal's office. Even that doesn't earn him a swaggering bad boy rep. People just keep calling him the freaky singing boy.

Fine, Bumper thinks. He can still make this work. Singing is still in there. This is going to be totally awesome. Bumper Allen can make anything work. He has the voice of an angel. He's Bumper Allen, for Christ's sake. (He makes sure not to say it aloud; his mother would have his head for using words like that.)

Home isn't that great for Bumper, but it's not like it's bad. His parents are so boring. Bumper deserves celebrities for parents. He should be a Brangelina kid, with paparazzi desperate to get a photo of him moving to and from school. Other kids should all look up to him and know in the pit of their gut that he's not to be messed with.

Instead, all he's got are frozen TV dinners and an internet connection that isn't even fast enough to cope with all the facebook accounts he's set up to prop up the Bumper Allen fanpage. (It just needs a bit of a spark then he's sure it'll take off like wildfire.) He'd bug his mom for some extra allowance to buy a himself his own webcam for the YouTube channel he knows he's going to rock some day, but she's too busy using the only computer in the house herself, all holed up in her room. Whatever. She's usually asleep on the couch when she gets home. She works a night shift or something, he figures. He doesn't much care.

When he's sixteen and the perfect age to be a teen pop singing sensation, Bumper is going to be so done with this place.

He's destined for greatness and California sun. He knows it.

It's not too bad. Bumper carves himself a niche.

Bumper may not be able to run fast, or get good grades, or tell the greatest jokes (okay, maybe he objects to that last one, he is hilarious if he does so say so himself) but he can sing. Boy, can he sing.

He's a showman, he is. He's a born performer and he dazzles on the stage where no one even has time to make fun of the faces he makes as he kills those songs. He can harmonize, he's got perfect pitch and smoking moves. He is a star. Clearly. This greatness gets recognized and, even if the other kids jeer at the way he shoves past them to get the best seat in choir or fights to put his hand up first for even the possibility of a solo, they recognize his talent too.

They see it. They see him. They have to put up with him for that, at least.

He's in the middle of a solo for the choir, at the big championship to boot, when the unfathomable happens.

Bumper's voice cracks.

It's this terrible, shrieking noise that makes him sound like a rank amateur, a cat dying on a hot tin roof, a car backfiring in the middle of a ghetto. It's awful. Everyone won't stop looking at him and it's not the way he wants to be seen at all. He tries to pull it back, he really does, he tries, and he keeps going but it's just worse. It gets worse and worse, like the broken car is backing over the dying cat and falling off a roof until the wreckage smack every member of the audience in the face. He keeps going and going because he thinks it has to get better, eventually, it has to, he can key it in!

Only he can't, actually, because everyone keeps staring at him like he's wrong. The whole choir in the background has fallen apart to silence and muffled snickers, but he keeps singing alone waiting for it to miraculously get better and for his talent to come back.

They have to drag him off the stage. He's need to- He needs to! He can sing!

He can sing.

Honest.

The rest of the kids leap on the excuse to hate him (and boy are they glad they found something to eclipse the power of his voice) and leave Bumper behind in the bathroom, faking the headcount to the music teacher who supervised everyone there so, by the time Bumper gets out of the stupid locked stall, the bus is long gone.

The teacher doesn't notice he's not really on the bus till their halfway back home. The school charges his family for the extra gas (can they even do that?) or maybe that's just what his mother tells him happened but either way, she's unhappy and he goes to bed hungry that night.

His bones ache as growing pains set in, growing him not quite fast enough to make him anything other than the awkward runt of school a literal head below anyone else.

Bumper hates everything about puberty.

They tape all sort of stuff to his locker after that.

LOSER.

CONGRATS TO BUMPER ALLEN FOR SCREWING OVER THE SCHOOL'S CHANCES OF WINNING.

THE BIGGEST MESS UP AROUND.

WAY TO GO, LAME-O.

THE ONLY IDIOT CAPABLE OF MAKING CHOIR EVEN MORE SUCKY THAN IT ALREADY IS.

FAILURE.

FREAK.

And it's not like the kids in school don't know even worse words that start with F either. Bumper's mom's been a little moodier lately, so he tries not the think about those words since they make her upset whenever he says them. ("Too young," she mumbles over and over.)

They're stupid insults. They're childish. Bumper is above them. Half of them aren't even spelt right and they're wholly unoriginal. He should be able to shrug them off, easy as that, right? There's no reason to be bothered by the stupid kids in this stupid school and their inability to recognize the gift that is him when they have it.

He's fine.

He's totally fine.

Bumper rips the stupid notes off, every one of them and tears them up in his hands until he's red in the face and his teeth grind heavy in his jaw and his stupid, stupid voice listens to him again.

Aubrey Posen transfers in to his middle school right in the middle of the semester. It's maybe a week after Bumper's spectacular fall for show choir grace.

Aubrey Posen's dad is in the military so she changes schools all the time and that's why she transfers in at such a weird time. It's also why she's gotten to tread all over the world like it was a trip through the Mall of America. She's a pretty doll of a girl, with bright blonde hair and green eyes and, goshdarnit, isn't she just the cutest little thing? Blech. It all makes Bumper feel ill, and not even the kind of ill he gets on long car rides. (He wonders if it's anything like the kind of ill you get on an aeroplane.) She's pretty so the boys don't mind her and she's pretty so the girls want to talk to her. (That is, when everyone's not too busy commenting on how weird all her transfers are or making up rumors she was actually expelled a lot or that she's repeating a grade or that her father is actually James Bond.)

Aubrey Posen is new, fresh of the boat from some jungle in South America, and has the gall to come to his choir and take his lead spot with her stupid voice that she has perfect control over. She looks happy all the time, for the while at least when people are looking, and Bumper finds it sickening, just sickening, to watch her butcher his precious songs.

Bumper kind of hates Aubrey Posen.

By some cosmic force of evil, Aubrey Posen's locker ends up being basically next to his. Okay, so it's two spaces away, but the principle remains, really. Too close is too close.

Bumper's too old to believe in girl cooties infecting his precious locker space but Aubrey must be in some league of her own because he can practically feel all the gross in the air when she unloads her pink notes books into the thing and traipses around with her flowery messenger bag. Sometimes, people hang around her and talk to her. Sometimes she's on her own.

Sometimes, she makes tiny glances at him, maybe to see the pictures of John Mayer he's stuck to the inside of the locker or maybe they way he pins up sheet music or lyrics to whatever they're learning in choir that week so her can stay ahead of her in the game.

She's checking out her competition. Alright, Bumper will give some credit for that, at least. Crushing insects gets old. Maybe Aubrey can try to be a little bit more interesting.

"Hi," Aubrey says to him one day at lunch or maybe just break. She looks around skittishly for anyone else she knows. He guesses she can't find them. "Bumper, right? We have choir together but I've never gotten to talk to you much. Do you want to have lunch with me? I hear you're a really great singer too. My dad says people with the same skills should always trade information for the betterment of their craft."

'Too'? What's that supposed to mean? Is she seriously trying to lump in her half-hacked approach to 'Amazing Grace' in with his genius? And what is up with the way she talks?

...He'll tolerate it, maybe. Just for a lunch. Just so he can get to know her to tear her apart, he swears.

"Fine," he grunts and they sit down somewhere together, opposite one another.

Their lunch is quiet and doesn't last long because Bumper can't bear to ask her anything (her voice is annoying) and because she doesn't say much either. That's how it goes, anyway, before some other girl with a flouncy denim skirt comes and drags Aubrey up by the arm, not-whispering to her, "Ew. Stay away from Bumper. He's gross. Such a weirdo."

Aubrey gets shepherded off to another table filled with boisterous laughter and other kids from choir. Bumper sits alone.

She doesn't talk to him much after that.

As far as he's concerned, Aubrey is a two-faced liar and a coward. For all her posturing on being friends and having lunch together with him, she won't say a word to him except for stuff like 'pass this' or 'bring that'.

Now and then, she sees him as some of the other guys play monkey in the middle with his backpack. She just looks at them for a while, biting her lip. He wants to yell at her to go away. He wants to tell her say something if she wants to say something. Pick a side. Do anything. Just stop watching. Stop staring at him like that.

They threw it away once ("Go long! Go long!") and she caught it, maybe by mistake. She threw it back at him, but they didn't grumble that long, just walk off, disappointed and looking for something else to do. She gave him this feeble smile. He didn't say thank you. He didn't say anything.

Bumper really hates Aubrey Posen.

In the middle of a performance to the whole school, Aubrey chokes (quite literally) and blows chunks all over the second row and maybe a little into the third. The splash zone is killer, though most of the stuff flies straight over the VIPs (small miracles) and over the wiring for the electronics.

It makes Bumper's day.

Things go up hill from there. All of a sudden, Aubrey's the one with a giant target painted on her back and Bumper loves it. How does a person even have that much vomit in them? Aubrey's such a tiny thing, but it's like her stomach is one of those vacuum sealed packs that just expand the moment you open them just a tiny bit. It's morbidly fascinating, or at least Bumper thinks so.

Picking on Aubrey is in vogue. People stick things to her desk, her bag, write notes with hastily drawn bits of vomit on them and hide them places she'll find, mix up the most disgusting recipes for fake vomit and leave that somewhere she'll find, make gagging noises when she walks past, say things about her in the hall, in class, in bathrooms, graffiti all over her locker and desk. Basically anything.

Whatever they're saying, it's not about him.

And making fun of Aubrey? Bumper thinks it's easy. It's almost fun, too, the way everyone joins in to cheer whenever someone nails a particularly good one on her. He can make this work.

Aubrey has asthma. That just makes things too easy, really. One of their favorite games is to hide her inhaler or even just to toss it out of windows, into ponds, into the heavy traffic, give it to a dog, stomp on it, anything, really, that renders the thing useless to Aubrey. Hiding it is the best, actually, second only to throwing it away so Aubrey doesn't have any. Watching her clamor to find it is hilarious. Aubrey keeps two number two pencils pristinely sharpened and perpendicular her desk at all times to even the thought of misplacing her inhaler makes her break out in hives that, well, make her need her inhaler.

The best part about it is that, without it, she's too scared to sing.

Every day is great. Every day is a new game of pestering Aubrey. Bumper leads the charge.

Everyone finally loves him.

Aubrey's in the orchestra too because apparently Aubrey just loves doing everything and 'making friends'.

Yeah, right.

The day Aubrey shows up with that giant case strapped to her back is like the day a pride of lions sees a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti; the bag strapped to her bag to hold it is almost taller than she is and makes her walk funny. He doesn't know what that that instrument is called (a cello, he's later told) but the knows he wants to break it. Everyone one must want him to break it, really, how dorky does she look touting that thing around all the time?

So he breaks it.

This turns out not be the greatest idea.

Aubrey must have told because Aubrey always tells. What a snitch. Ugh. The stupid giant violin of her costs a bomb too and he's never going to hear the end of that from his mom (if she hears about it.)

The teacher's march him and a few others who were around when the cello (what a weird name) got smashed to bits.

There's stern lecturing and sterner stares and Bumper, to be quite honest, tuned them out a while back. He picks up a few words, here and there, though.

"...School-rented instrument..."

Ah. There's the problem.

The cello (he will never get over that word) does cost a pretty penny but the school board says if they fess up to who did it, no one's parents will be footing the bill. That's not much heat to put on them or at least that's what Bumper thinks at first when he's sure his friends will stick right beside him in silence.

"It was Bumper's idea!"

"Yeah, yeah, totally Bumper's idea."

"I told him to stop, but he wouldn't listen! He's always taking stuff out on Aubrey."

"To be honest, I tried to get him to stop a few times but he really wouldn't lay off. I felt bad for her... I'm sorry I didn't say anything before."

They both nod, faux-solemnly.

Bumper remembers watching TV shows late at night when his mother was too tired to stop him or maybe too pleased a free babysitter existed.

He wonders if this is what it feels like to get sold out.

"Not your day, Bump," someone says.

"What a loser," someone else says.

"Yeah, Bumper, you're such a douche," someone different says. "I can't believe you just pushed Aubrey around like that all the time, you make me sick."

"We don't need bullies like you in this school."

"Yeah, remember the time you screwed over the choir?"

People join in.

The earth under him turns.

No one talks to him after that. Fine. Whatever.

Things go back to their status quo.

It's like when Aubrey was never around, back in the days before his voice broke and he blew the school's chances of winning the any competitions; Bumper is a nuisance but mostly invisible.

He closes his facebook fan page down. He closes his regular facebook down. He makes sure his YouTube channel doesn't accept comments.

They post stuff on his locker again. Stupid notes. Sometimes paper messages tucked inside. How many times are people going to break into his locker? Setting the code to his birthday may not have been the brightest idea... He changes it to his birthday in, wait for it, reverse order and knows that that's a bit of brilliance that will definitely escape the minds of the proles at his school.

Aubrey Posen who still has that stupid locker two spaces across from him looks at him with this gross sympathy on her face and so, instead of throwing the papers away, when she's not looking, he shoves him into her locker. It's her fault, this whole mess. If she'd just never come here at all, he'd have clawed his way back up the choir hierarchy by now and he'd be ruling the school.

Anyway, the most important thing is the code change. Real Mission Impossible-style encryption. Even Aubrey who always looks at him when he's looking at his locker can't break through that stuff. Aubrey can't even keep eye contact with him for long.

It works, he thinks.

"I can understand why you did it," Aubrey says, out of the blue.

It's like the first time they ever spoke again, only now the rambling is a little more authoritative. Bumper hates her voice even more. She sounds so snide, like a teacher who's telling him he's been behaving badly or 'acting out'. He wants to puke, but probably not as much as she does. Whatever. Is she still going?

She says, "I've been to a lot of schools before. It's not always easy meeting people in them. The new girl is always the freakish outsider. I bet it felt good, right, being part of something? So I get why you did it. No one should have to feel as bad as we do-"

"'We'," Bumper scoffs. His blood boils again. "Don't kid yourself. No one compares to me. And anyway! Anyway-!

"I'm nothing like you."

He says it, he's pretty sure he's the one saying it, only when he goes home at night, he can hear Aubrey whispering it too, the same way he said it.

So Bumper's heard sometime you need to solve things like a man. If there's anything he's learned about men from syndicated TV, it's that they solve problem with their fists and their guts. Bumper's hands are hugely awesome and he's got enough guts to light up a stage, so wouldn't they be enough for this too?

The violence and fighting approach, as it turns out, is very ill suited to him.

Of course, the moment everyone else finds out Bumper is a 'throw it down' kind of guy, 'throw it down' becomes the new way he gets to face everyone else every day.

He's not exactly known for thinking things through.

He's stuck in the stupid dumpster again. Mostly because it's empty and that means there's not much to climb over to get out of it. The walls of the dumpster area little tall for Bumper's tastes.

It's not Bumper fault he hasn't his growth spurt yet unlike those unsightly testosterone hopped gorillas that threw him in here. The walls of the thing are too high and he can't climb out. It's just super gross. Man. He'll have to keep banging on the side of the thing and wait till the janitor pulls him out. (Bumper loathes talking to the help, but maybe it'll make a good 'everyman' kind of story when he's rich and famous and Mister Jamison can tell the magazine what a down to earth boy he way. Mister Jamison smells weird and chases Bumper out of places more often than not, convinced Bumper is loitering in the pond outside of school because he thinks it's cool to sit in the middle of it instead of thinking he just got pushed in by Travis Cavanaugh.

Whatever. Bumper is so over stupid jocks like him. Bumper need classier friends, never mind the fact that Travis's super-rich parents have hooked him up with every gaming console known to man and that if Bumper was Travis's friend he could go over every afternoon after school and play the day away instead of going home to his crummy room.

Bumper's stuck in a dumpster. He keeps banging on the side of it with his Captain America water bottle (a sturdy thing that looks like it could survive World War 2 just like Cap) until he hears footsteps and then yells, "Hey! Help! Get me out of here!"

There's weird shuffling for a bit and someone yells, "Hang on!"

It's quiet for a few minutes and Bumper's convinced himself that whoever was out there has left him there to rot when all of a sudden the dumpster starts shaking again and a hand pops out.

Bumper's so thankful; he just takes it and tries to jump as he's pulled over the edge of this thing.

He regrets it when he's out, stumbling onto the playground tarmac, tangled up with Aubrey Posen. There's something next to the dumpster, like a crate or a chair or something she pushed there to climb up and help him over. Bumper can't tell what anything is, exactly, because his head's too foggy with rage (and definitely no embarrassment).

Bumper's stuck in some sort of stupor, but Aubrey's already getting up and brushing the dirt of her sickeningly pastel pink dress. She sticks a hand out to try and help him up. He feels sick and swats it away.

"Go away!" he yells and scrambles up, fumbling with the straps of his backpack. "I don't need your help with anything, loser! Don't touch me! I'm so sick of you going around like you think you're better than me because of your stupid help! I don't want any of it!"

He doesn't know what Aubrey does after that because he runs away. He runs home. He's already late. His mom's going to kill him.

"I forgive you," Aubrey announces at him one day. Bumper prays for holy vengeance against whatever force of administration arranged to have their lockers this close to each other, he really does. His is even beginning to smell funny, like bleach or something else that's abrasive and used for cleaning. Does she puke everywhere when people aren't looking and make the janitor clean up the mess?

"Yeah, okay, whatever," he says. There must be an insult he can toss in there somewhere, so he settles for, "Loser."

"I really do forgive you," Aubrey says. "My dad says you have to consider what things feel like in someone else's shoes. I know hurting other people makes you feel a lot better about people hurting you. But I think, now there's two of us, maybe we should just try not hurting anyone-"

Someone else slams her locker shut and spills her papers everywhere while she's distracted. Bumper lets off a whooping cheer and applauds Aubrey's clumsiness and the way all her stuff has scattered around the hallway and her lunch bag has tipped over, juice box split open and soaking all of it. Other people cheer.

People cheer with him. People cheer him on.

Bumper laughs with them.

A locker slams next to him and he peeks around to see where the noise comes from. That must have been the intention, really, because it's Aubrey's locker that's slammed shut and Aubrey who's shooting him a poignant, disparaging look, glancing up and down at the state of his clothes and the dirt on the bottom of his pants from where he ran through mud to get away from some jerks in the ninth grade.

"Look," Aubrey says, frowning. Not a pout. Frown. Good. She's annoyed. (Bumper was wondering when she'd learn to take a hint. Really. Girls. Such pains.) "I just thought since we're the only people in this school who think singing is really cool, we could try and have each others' backs."

That sounds like an awful idea. Being stuck with Aubrey Posen for the rest of middle school? Like, totally gag him with a spoon instead. (Okay, Aubrey doesn't talk like that but she's blonde and that's fair game. Even if it wasn't fair game he'd probably shoot at it anyway.)

Bumper sneers back at her. He's not interested in the slightest. "Have my back? I'd rather stab yours."

Aubrey is a joke. Her musical talent is a pale shadow imitating whoever she's doing a cover of, her energy isn't earnest and her performances wooden. (Bumper doesn't care that she can keep time better than him or play an instrument.)

Bumper is better than Aubrey will ever be and he doesn't need her constantly hanging off him to remind him that.

Bumper runs away from home one night. It's for no reason exactly, he just remembers feeling under-appreciated and overlooked. So he hides at school for the night, just so his mom knows what she's missing. He could hobo it up and sleep in the dumpster, but that seems unsanitary. Instead, he settles into one of the empty classrooms, the one with the ridiculously comfortable teacher's chair that has forty-one reclining positions and brakes on the wheels, and kicks off for the night.

This is the life.

He's so hardcore.

There's movement somewhere along the corridor. Bumper twitches awake. He's not supposed to be here, technically, and it would put a major cramp on his plans if someone returned him home before his mother had time to wake up and notice his absence. Light flitters through the window. Probably the janitor on morning rounds. That's okay. Bumper is the stealth. He can always pretend he got here super early because he loves learning. Adults eat that up.

Cautiously, he climbs out of the chair and peers through the window.

Of course it is. She just can't leave him alone, can she?

Aubrey Posen.

He pops out from his hiding place with supreme ninja agility and barks, "What are you doing here?"

She jumps at the noise and that's almost enough to improve his mood.

"Bumper? Why are you here now?"

"I asked you first," he says, chest puffing out like those guys on cop shows.

Aubrey can't find anyway to back out of a stunning debate move like that, so she answers, "My dad says if you're early you're on time, if you're on time you're late and if you're late you're dead." She scratches her neck nervously. "So I'm early. I come in early every day."

"Whatever," he says. He doesn't want to hear about her dad.

"Are you...going somewhere?" she says, pointing at the bag he has with him, stuffed full of clothes and chocolate bars.

"None of your business." Just because he can (and because it's fair) he looks at what she's carrying with her too. A cloth covered in red splotches that spell like paint and a spray bottles, a bunch of bunched up newspaper, a small trash bag. He peers through the dimly lit hallway to the row of lockers.

Is she still getting bullied? Poor her.

(Not.)

Bumper goes home after that next day of school because he works his way through his chocolate stash a little more quickly than he anticipated. It's good enough, he thinks, because his mom should be all up in arms about where's been.

Instead, she's asleep on the couch as usual. He pops in a TV dinner to the microwave and frowns.

She didn't even notice.

He's slumped over against a wall, hands wrapped around his aching nose after he just took a punch to the face. This is supposed to make him feel tough, right? Like a man's man. But he couldn't even take the punch that well. Eyes closed, he sighs and leans into the cold brick. It makes his headache a little better.

Something's tickling his face, pricking at the wet bits of red that are splashed over it. It's kind of nice, so he opens his eyes and sees Aubrey Posen gentling patting at his face with a wet tissue.

"Quit it!" he says, scrambling up, but really only knocking his head against the wall once on the way up. He swears he looks dignified. "Stop being fake nice to me."

"I'm not faking it," Aubrey says. "I just think that we could be friends."

Bumper makes a weird noise. It's planned as a scoff but his messed up nose won't let it come through like that. (What about his voice? What about his singing? What's going to happen to that.

"You're bleeding," Aubrey says, pointing out the very obvious gush of blood rolling down his nose.

Hating her makes it the bleeding less painful, actually, so maybe he's not entirely upset she's around. Still, he grips his face a little harder trying to get it to stop. Maybe then she'll finally go away.

"Here, I've got an icepack in my lunch box," she explains, ignoring the glare he sends her. She reaches for the thing, a steel box with Wonder Woman printed on the front and sides in primary colors and 1970s style bold lines. He tries not to think about his Captain America water bottle.

"You have a lunch box," he says.

"My dad says it's cheaper and more nutritious than the school stuff," she replies. She tries to put the cold pack on his face first, but his hands are still in the way so she offers it out to him again and waits for him to do something: swat it away, pick it up, push it down to the floor.

He stares at it.

"Go ahead and take it," she says. "It'll help."

"Are you still going on about this? What's your deal?" More specifically, what the hell could she be planning? If this is some sort of a ploy to lull Bumper into a false sense of security before she hoists him up a flagpole, he knows better. He's not in fifth grade anymore. He's on to her.

"I'm taking the high road," Aubrey says. "It's like my dad says, it's not a loss if you still have your dignity." She puts out her hand in what looks like a truce. Does she expect him to shake it of something? Damn weirdo.

Bumper swats it away. "Whatever, freak," he mutters, snatching the ice pack from her. "I'm not giving this back!"

"You're a jerk, Bumper Allen," she calls as he walks. He turns his head to watch her spin on her heel, full one-eighty degrees, and marches away, indignant.

He scowls. The smell of her weird may actually be affecting is vocal chords. (He's getting a little worried about his nose.)

Bumper gets better at avoiding people. His nose ended up okay so he doesn't care about anything other than that. Avoiding people isn't a total fix, though. Like, for instance, when he ends up cornered by Travis and two of his meat bag friends. They've turning hunting him into some sick sort of hobby.

"In my house," Travis starts, cracking his knuckles. "Wednesday is the day we take out the trash."

Bumper dumps his bag and runs.

He sees Aubrey again around the dumpsters. She's looking around carefully, like she's hunting a wild animal and any sudden moves could make it bolt. She's so weird; it's sickening.

"Bumper?" she calls, tentative. "Bumper? Are you in there?"

Is she talking to the dumpster? How much of a loser does she think he is if she's looking for him in the dumpsters? He's not trash! His stuff, maybe that's trash (and that's why he's at the dumpster because Travis and his cronies definitely did something to it) but Bumper Allen is not trash. Bumper Allen is a superstar in the making.

Bumper coughs, scowling as she turns to look at her.

"Oh, Bumper," she says. She can't even say something interesting when she talks to him. What a joke. "Here, I kept your bag for you. After they chased you out, I thought they'd do something so I thought, better safe than sorry-"

"What did you do to it?"

"I didn't do anything," she explains, carefully. "I just kept it out of the way since Travis's friend was looking for it and I thought you wouldn't want him-"

He swipes the bag out of her hands and rifles through its contents, making sure everything is still there and nothing suspicious has been added.

"I said I didn't do anything to it," Aubrey repeats while his head's still stuck looking through the bag.

"Hmph," he says, slinging the bag over his shoulders. "I thought I told you to quit it with your dumb act."

"Just because you're a jerk doesn't mean I have to stop being nice to you!" Aubrey says.

"You do!" Bumper shouts back. "You do! That's the whole point of the way people work! If someone's a jerk, you bite them back! You're a bigger jerk back! That's how they leave you alone!"

"My dad says that the noble thing to do is-"

"I don't care about your stupid dad!"

Aubrey's quiet. He's so glad, so, so glad he's finally found something that shut her up that he keep going.

"I don't need a dad! Any dad! I'm better than he ever will be! She said so! She said so! So you are your sorry excuse for a dad can go to-"

"Shut up!" Aubrey yells.

"Make me!"

"Shut up!"

"Make me!" he challenges again. She doesn't do anything; it's pathetic. She just stands there, hands clenched, trembling. "You're such a joke!"

"I was trying to be nice to you! It takes more than one time! You don't just get to instantly be friends with someone! It takes time," she says. "I was trying to prove I was really being nice, so I was giving you time. I just wanted us to be friends."

"Why? Did daddy tell you that too? I bet he hates you and just says stuff like that so you'll leave him alone! Just like everyone else in school."

"Stop it."

"Make me! Make me!" he chants. Sneering, he adds, "I bet you can't. I bet you can't do anything. You're a failure. And I bet you're dad just as much of a screw-up as you!"

"Take it back," Aubrey says. Then, a little more solidly, feet dug into the ground, she repeats, no, orders him, "Take it back."

Bumper's not going to get pushed around by her of all people.

"No!" he shouts. "No, I'm not going to take it back."

"Take it back or- or else-"

"Or else what? What are you going to make me do? Are you going to go running to daddy and have him fix everything for you? Boo hoo, boo hoo. Girls like you who get everything they want at the drop of a hat-! You make me sick!"

Bumper punches her. He doesn't know where it comes from. Just that he's been beat up half a dozen times and Aubrey doesn't hit back. Aubrey's not hitting back.

"Are you for real?" Aubrey yells, rubbing the part that he hit. She's such a wuss. (His hand doesn't hurt, not at all, nope.)

He swings again. She raises her hands up to try and block it, so he swings again, low, where her stomach's unguarded. It makes a dull thud when it hits.

Something clicks inside of him; some image of a thing that's wrong and wrong and that he'd never do in his life, but it also feels like this is what his blood bred him for. He feels sick and giddy and his chest hurts; his heart throbs deep until it reaches his brain.

"Bumper!" she hisses. "You're going to regret this-"

"Bring it on!" Bumper taunts back. His hands won't ball into fists. He's just shaking. Shaking. No, he's not supposed to be shaking. This is meant to prove something, he's sure of it. He needs to stop shaking.

He shoves her once. Twice. He's chanting something at her, maybe clucking noises, maybe mock-crying noises. He shoves her one more time and she collides with the wall with a sick crunch.

She glares.

He regrets it when (he swears to God!) Aubrey punches him right back and breaks his nose.

Two teachers end up breaking up the fight, prying a livid Aubrey off Bumper who's kind of too busy shielding his face and throat and balls (somehow) from her. (At one point, he tries biting but Aubrey just socks him in the throat and he knows better. Aubrey is terrifying; no wonder no one likes her.)

The word suspension and even expulsion gets tossed around, but Bumper can also hear the words 'bullying' and 'rough time' and 'consideration of difficult family circumstances' being exchanged by the adults in the other room and that just figures doesn't it? Stupid, perfect Aubrey Posen who can get away with anything in the world because she's so pretty with her blonde hair and girlish voice and boohoo isn't it tough to be her, always traveling around the world instead of stuck in some dead-end town. Damn girls, Bumper thinks. They get away with murder and guys like him are stuck with all the damn mess. Bumper hates everyone.

Bumper's mother picks him up from school, somehow. She's not as late as she usually is, but the sky's still pretty dark when she shows up. Bumper gets suspended but he doesn't care. It's only a week. Maybe the school will finally see he's got balls.

Aubrey transfers out three weeks after he comes back. They don't talk to each other, ever, even if they can't avoid passing each other in the halls. She leaves without a word. Bumper doesn't see her go. She doesn't make any goodbyes and maybe she doesn't need to. She's not like him, Bumper thinks. She didn't have any friends. The whole school didn't want her at all, so is it really any wonder than when she left it was just like, one day, she just disappeared?

Bumper doesn't notice.

Only he kind of does, because the day after Aubrey leaves, he walks into school and goes to dump his bags away before class. It's the routine he's set up for himself for months and months now, weaving through the thick crowds of people with friends with his head down. It's all autopilot. He makes the usual open his bag, but his fingers twitch. What he sees makes him drop the bag onto the floor. It make his head swim.

That's when he realizes something. For instance, there are worse things than being invisible. Being told to kill yourself, being told you're a waste of a human being, being told you are the rock bottom everyone uses as an example to make themselves feel better because, hey, at least they're not you.

And Aubrey? When she came into school early every morning? The ratty cloths, the reams of paper thrown away, the smell of bleach?

It was his locker.

Every morning, Aubrey had been cleaning his locker.