It’s lunch time at El Dorado middle school. I walk outside to find my best friend, Aiko Soragami, sitting in her usual spot: the wooden bench that overlooks the tennis courts. She’s a thin girl with long black hair, and the daughter of a couple of Japanese immigrants. She has a Hello Kitty lunchbox that had contained the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’s currently eating.

“Hi, Aiko!” I say cheerily, sitting to her right. “I was hoping to find you here.”

“Hey Ashley,” Aiko says. For some reason, she sounds… dull today.

There is an awkward pause. I suppose it’s time for me to spill what’s on my mind.

“I was going to sit with Tasha and Nathan like usual, but… they didn’t… they don’t want me to sit with them anymore.”

Aiko doesn’t say anything at first. She eats the last bite of the sandwich and closes her lunchbox. Then she asks, “You don’t have any food. Aren’t you going to eat something?”

“Um… well… I had a big breakfast,” I say, blushing a little bit. (I was hoping that she might have some extra food, but it’d be rude to ask for it now.) “Aiko… do you think that I’m a braggart?” I ask her suddenly.

“Well, I have to admit, you’ve let your skills in band get to your head a bit,” she says, still looking straight forward.

I sigh at the ground. So it is true… I guess I really do need to learn to reel it in. “It feels like nobody wants to hang around me anymore,” I tell her.

Because it’s true. Everywhere I go, I can’t shake the feeling that people are avoiding me… and with Tasha’s rejection still ringing in my ears, I can’t ignore it any longer.

Aiko doesn’t say anything to that, so we just sit here for a while. I see her start packing some of her stuff up, making me realize that it’s now or never.

As I think about what I planned to do, I feel a fresh wave of anxiety… but I just have to do it. I have to find out. It’s going to tear me apart from the inside if I don’t.

I turn to her. “But… you still like me, right?”

Then, my nerves get the better of me, and I grab her hand. She furrows her eyebrows and says, “Um, Ashley…?”

“Because I like you,” I say very quickly and nervously, the words spilling from me before I can stop them. “I like you a lot. Like, as more than just friends. And if you…”

But then, she retracts her hand from me, looking shocked. She quickly gets up, and just stares at me for a few seconds, before turning around and sort of jogging away.

And… um… I’m not sure what to do from there.

Maybe I should’ve… taken it a little slower? I may have freaked her out by grabbing her hand…

Of course, I’d been preparing myself for this… she may not be interested in other girls, or in me… and of course, I can’t fault her for that. But somehow, I can’t shake the plummeting feeling in my stomach… had I just messed up our whole friendship? Aiko’s the only one left now who’s willing to be friends with me… if I lost her… or had she already been having second thoughts about me? She seemed so cold the whole time, even before I popped the question… she’s normally so sweet and polite...

All of these thoughts are going to drive me nuts with anxiety, so I get up to head back into the school.

As I go through the door, I see Emily approaching from the other way. I hold the door open and say, “Hey Emily!”

She glares at me suspiciously and uses the other door. “Don’t get too close to me,” she says.

“Huh?” I say stupidly, as I feel another stab in my stomach. What on earth is going on…? We never knew each other that well, but I’ve never seen her act like this…

Then, I gaze down the hallway, and…

I see a group of other girls partway down the hallway, all looking at me, some of them pointing.

And in the middle of them, was Aiko.

That was the moment that changed me forever.

Even though I’m only three quarters of the way through the etude, I stop there.

Why… did that memory come back just then? That was over two years ago…

At any rate, it annoyingly completely killed my desire to practice. I sigh at this. I guess I’ll put up now, even though I probably could have gone for another thirty minutes and been okay.

I set my French horn back in its case, making sure to wipe it with my cloth real quickly as I do. According to my parents, the French horn is the most difficult brass instrument to play. The unique way it’s coiled all up in a little ball gives it a harmonic series of pitches that are unusually close together, so it’s all too easy to frack a note. And yet, here I am, at fourteen years old, and not only am I the best French horn player at my high school as a freshman, but I’m also proficient in two other music instruments. Fun fact: The term “French horn” is technically a misnomer, as the instrument originated in Germany. The International Horn Society is actually currently trying to insist that it simply be called the “horn.” But well, it’s my internal narration, so I can call it whatever I want.

I shut the case, latch it, and put it up against the wall alongside my trumpet case. One look around my room should tell you all you need to know about my priorities in life. In front of me is a heavy-duty Manhasset music stand, which is piled with all-region tryout music, solo literature, and other etudes. Behind that and my two instrument cases is my cheap electric piano; we unfortunately still don’t have the money for a proper upright. Against the opposite wall is a desk. Currently, the only thing on it is a generic school supplies list, but that will change very soon. My backpack sits in between the desk and my door. On the other side of the desk is my bed, and next to that is my nightstand.

I space out in my desk chair for a while. It was never really clear to me what exactly I did to deserve that. She said that I had let my skills “Get to my head.” Except I really was happy with how quickly I was able to progress in band. What’s wrong with being proud of your accomplishments?

I did have a bad habit of bragging about it too much. I admit to that. But I thought that Aiko and I’s friendship was special. I never dreamed that she’d totally abandon me over something like that. I was so naïve back then; I honestly would have changed for her if she’d asked me too.

Though some of the others turning on me was less surprising. I already knew that Tasha had been souring on me for a while. I’d known that since that one time at church camp the spring break before that. And now that particular memory is playing through my mind…

I feel something warm in my arms. It’s really nice to hold… I’d like to just sit here for a while and enjoy this. Why does it have to be so bright in here?

“Um… Ashley?” A girl’s voice says.

I open my eyes. It turns out that the something I’m holding is Kimmie…

“Oops, sorry about that,” I say quickly, retracting my arms and blushing.

She smiles. “It’s okay... we can’t control what we do when we’re sleeping, now can we?” She winks at me.

I’m not sure how to follow up this enigmatic response. I look around the room. Tasha and Maria are already awake and dressed.

“What time is it?” I ask them.

“Breakfast in ten minutes,” Tasha explains. She doesn’t seem to want to look me in the eyes for some reason. Well, what I did was very suspect… I need to be more careful for the rest of camp.

“Darn, I overslept,” I say. “Better get moving!”

These three were my roommates for Spring Break church camp. Tasha and Maria I knew from school. Tasha is a bespectacled black girl with wavy hair that she usually keeps tied up. Maria is a plump hispanic girl with a whole lot of hair that trails behind her back and always gets blown around in the wind. Kimmie is the only one in our room who’s not from El Dorado. She’s also black, and small in stature, with hair that seems to naturally keep itself tidy around her shoulders. Being the only white girl in the room is a bit unusual, given that my city is over 60% white. Didn’t bother me, though. After all, there was a totally different reason I was the oddball of the group…

Anyway, Kimmie and I are able to get ourselves dressed and ready, and we make our way to lunch. The cafeteria is a short walk away from the cabin we’re staying in. We’re served fruit and crappy scrambled eggs. On the back wall is a “list of sins” provided by our camp, which for some stupid reason contains “Dungeons & Dragons.”

“Hey Maria, do you want to trade your peach for my banana?” I ask her as we sit down. No response.

I look over at her, and she has her eyes closed and she’s mouthing something… oh, duh, she’s saying grace. Forgot about that...

“Oops, sorry about that…” I whisper.

“Am I the only one who’s starting to get a bit homesick?” Kimmie says as she sits down herself.

“No, you’re not,” Tasha says, having just finished saying grace herself.

“I am looking forward to getting back to practicing,” I say as I start shoveling scrambled eggs into my mouth. They taste just as bad now as they have all week.

“Practicing what?” Kimmie asks, curious.

“Oh, my french horn!” I explain. “I need to get back to that ASAP, because I’m the best player in my grade. I’m already able to hit a high G. Of course, I’m already really good at reading music because of my training on piano. I had to learn to transpose, but that’s not really that hard. So I was able to learn how to play a lot quicker than the rest of the class. Most of the other kids have difficulty hitting the right harmonics, but like…”

“Um, Ashley?” Tasha interrupts me. “You do realize that none of us are in band, right?”

“So?”

“So, we… don’t really care that much.”

I look at the other two to back me up, but they’re concentrated on eating their food.

“Alright, fine,” I say. To recover from the awkward moment, I start peeling my banana. It’s already all bruised…

The memory still makes me a little angry. Why did she have to interrupt me like that? Sure I was being a little annoying, but I don’t think it was worth that cold of a response. Not like it matters.

Aiko wasn’t at that camp, as unlike the rest of us, she wasn’t from a religious family. But I liked to imagine that if she had been there, she would’ve come to my defense. Well, looking back on it now, she probably wouldn’t have after all. I guess I was stupid for getting so attached to Aiko. She ended up being just like the rest of them. Sometimes, I wonder if all of them somehow already knew about me being gay, and they were just looking for a reason to get rid of me.

So, I learned from my experiences that nobody wants to listen to me brag. That’s fine. I decided that I didn’t need anyone else to hear it. I stopped trusting in other people to get my self-worth. I redoubled my efforts in academics and music, and let my achievements do the talking. And I’m still hated by people who are jealous of my skills. The difference is, now I don’t care.

After losing all my friends, I got a sort of second chance when my parents decided to move away from Concord, California, and came to live here in Enchantment City, Texas. Enchantment City is a thoroughly unremarkable town that may as well not even exist, planted right in the suburbs north of Austin. They came here for the same reason why Californians are flocking to Texas in general: Lower taxes and lower cost of living. In addition the live music scene in Austin is famous, hence why we’re here specifically. Less time travelling to gigs is ideal when they’re one of your only sources of income. The move to Texas also presented an additional opportunity for my dad; he’s been using his compositional skills to provide music for churches, which has given us a nice cushion in our income for the first time.

After we moved here, I made sure that nobody ever learned about what kind of person I am. To this end, I have very few friends, and I avoid interacting with most people. Even with my one friend who I genuinely like and trust, Zoe, I haven’t gone into detail about anything that happened before I came here. Even though I’ve unfortunately become attached to her in the same way I was to Aiko, I keep a bit of distance between us. There’s no timeline involving me trying to escalate our relationship that has a positive outcome. Either she doesn’t like me back, and it’s Aiko all over again, or she does, and I end up dragging her into the type of bullying and torment I received in my final days at El Dorado.

Anyways, now that my practice session has been ruined, I’m not sure what to do. Maybe go to bed early, as it is getting dark. But… I feel restless for some reason. I walk out of my room.

In the kitchen, Mom is washing dishes. My mom and I look very similar to one another. We both have long red hair and bright green eyes. We’re both on the tall side by female standards; I’m about 5’10’’, and I think Mom is either the same or an inch shorter. (Note for international readers: 5’10’’ is about 1.78 meters.) That said, you can see some of Dad on me in some subtle details. For one, he’s probably where the extra inch came from, as he’s about six feet tall; and compared to Mom, my face is a bit thinner, and I lack her dimples. (Thankfully, I didn’t inherit my dad’s poor eyesight.)

When she sees me walking by, she gives me a small smile. “Tomorrow’s a big day for you, how are you feeling?” She asks.

“Fine,” I say.

“It’s okay if you’re nervous, you know,” she says. “It’s your first day of high school. You’re going from being the top of the pack, to the bottom. Now you’re going to have to compete with those upperclassmen.”

This isn’t true. Well, it is true that I have to compete with the upperclassmen, but they’re of no concern to me. Even though I’m just a freshman, I was let into the Symphonic Band, the higher of the two in the high school’s band program. Only two other freshmen also made it in, one of them being Zoe. In her case, it probably helps that she’s the only bassoon player at the school.

Honestly, I’m sure it’s not going to be that different from junior high. Just a bigger school with more assholes to deal with. Harder schoolwork, though it’s nothing I can’t deal with. Marching band is a thing now, but to be fair that’s already been a thing for the past few weeks thanks to boot camp.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Mom says, a hint of teasing in her voice. “You’re being awfully quiet.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. To prevent her from asking me any more unnecessary questions, I walk into the living room, where Dad is watching TV.

Unlike either of us, my dad has brown hair that is short, but reasonably thick, and he wears a round pair of glasses with a thin, metallic rim. He’s watching some news channel. Apparently there are riots happening in Ferguson, Missouri. That’s great. He’s so engrossed in it that he doesn’t notice me sitting down.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I came out here. This isn’t making me feel any better. All it does is remind me the fact that my newfound mistrust in other people also extended to my parents somewhat. It’s technically not their fault. But I have no idea how they would’ve reacted to that particular revelation, and I have decided not to take the risk.

That’s another decision I made the same day that I fell out with Aiko. Once again, a memory flashes through my head of what happened when I got home from school that day…

I feel numb. I feel nothing but numb. I don’t want to think about anything. I can’t.

I hear the sound of the door opening and closing.

“Hey Ashley! I’m home!” My father’s voice says.

I can’t find it in me to respond. I just sit there. Blank. My eyes are glued to the television screen. I’m watching a rerun of some old Nick show.

After about a minute, I hear my father’s voice again.

“Hey, didn’t we still have half a tub of ice cream left? Don’t tell me you ate all of it! That’s not good for your teeth.”

I don’t say anything. An empty tub of ice cream sits to my left, the spoon still sitting on the inside.

I hear footsteps behind me, indicating that my dad has entered the room. I’m expecting him to yell, but instead, there’s a few seconds of silence. And then...

“Well… on the other hand, I’m not a big fan of caramel in ice cream, so I’m glad you finished it off for me.” I hear him shifting around behind me, and then I feel him scratching my back. “Rough day at school?”

I don’t say anything. How can I explain what happened?

I already lost all of my friends. I can’t risk losing my parents, too.

“Hey, I think I remember this,” my dad says. “What’s this show called again?”

“Hey Arnold,” I say weakly. “It’s an old Nickelodeon show.”

“Hey, it’s not that old!” my father says. “I think this was coming out around the time your mom and I got married, when we had first moved here… okay, I guess that’s old for you.”

There was a minute of awkward silence, and then he puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, um… If you need to talk, you can always come to your mom and I. You can tell us anything, I promise.”

I don’t say anything to this.

Still just numb.

If only he knew...

After a while, he sighs, and then exits the room.

Meanwhile, in Hey Arnold, Arnold and an old man wearing a sort of pilot’s hat walk through a door onto a roof. Everything up there had been trashed, and was lying in ruins.

“What?” Arnold asks. “This is awful! Who did this?”

The other man sadly begins walking away. “People, Arnold,” he says.

“We can rebuild your cages… and sweep up,” Arnold says hopefully, putting a piece of furniture back upright. “Your birds will come back!”

“Of course they’ll come back,” the man says, standing near the edge of the roof. “They’re birds. I trust them. I understand them. It’s people I don’t understand. You see Arnold… it’s time for me to leave here. Some people are meant to be with people. And some people, like me, are just… different.”

You know… I changed the channel after that part, so I never found out how that episode ends.

Damn it… I hate this. I thought it was all behind me. Why do these thoughts about my past have to torment me now? I pull myself out of my memories, and get up from the couch to head back into my room.

Truth is, I’ll never forget how I felt that day. I felt like everyone hated me. I even wondered if God Himself hated me. I thought I was sick. I prayed to be healed… and it never happened. Well, in hindsight, that should’ve been obvious. He wasn’t letting me out of that particular bind so easily.

I just feel more and more frustrated the longer that I sit here. I grab my phone from my night stand and open up Skype. I feel like I need to get this off my chest…

I’m about to click on Zoe’s name, but then… I stop myself. Zoe’s just about the only person I have left that I trust. If I lost her friendship… well, I don’t want to think about it. So no, I still can’t tell her about this.

Well, I guess there is someone else I could message: A sophomore trombone player in marching band named Anja. We didn’t know each other before marching band boot camp. For our lunch breaks, most of the other kids would go home to eat, allowing them to come back for the afternoon session showered and with a change of clothes. However, there was always a pocket of ten or so kids who sat and ate sack lunches in a hallway near the band hall. At some point, Anja randomly started sitting by me and making conversation. I’m pretty sure she only did it because she doesn’t really have any other friends. But regardless, she eventually harassed me into giving her my Skype info.

But who am I kidding? Telling her about any of this is out of the question. I barely know who this person even is, and she could be a gossiper. She doesn’t really seem like it given that she’s not exactly popular, but Aiko didn’t seem like a gossiper either, so there you go.

Well… I’ve never really been into journaling, but maybe now’s the time to take a stab at it. The trouble is, I don’t know if I have any spares. I have several new ones that I got for school, but I’d prefer to keep more personal things separate from that. I decide to check and see if I have any extras in my closet.

After digging through it a bit, I do find an empty journal. It’s a thin, brown one. It looks old and tattered, but nobody’s ever written anything in it. Where did this thing come from? I don’t remember ever seeing it before. Well, it’ll do, anyway. I open it up on my desk and start writing.

“Entry date: August 24, 2014.

My name is Ashley Davis. As an experiment, I would like to begin keeping a private written journal. The key word there is ‘private.’ That means that if anyone else is reading this, you must close it and walk away right now. If I ever discover that you read past this point, you will be subjected to unimaginable pain. This is your last warning.”

I figured it was only fair to give the hypothetical snooper a chance to back away now, so I make a page break and continue on the other side.

And… I write for quite a while actually. I write about how angry I still am at my friends. And about how that anger got turned around towards society as a whole. I wrote about how I feel about Zoe, and how afraid I am of her finding the truth about me.

I stop for a minute to admire my work, to check it for any grammatical inaccuracies, and to appreciate how cleanly I managed to articulate myself.

And then, I watch every word I just wrote fade from the page, and it reverts to looking as if it had never been written on.

Nothing could have prepared me for something this utterly absurd. Immediately, I am on high alert, mulling over every possibility of what this could be. Am I dreaming? Is there something wrong with the paper, or the pencil? Is there some serious supernatural bullshit happening? Am I hallucinating?

And then, something appears in its place right before my eyes, something written in a loopy handwriting that is not my own.

~Beginning of Movement I: Shattered Dreams St.~