"Cause I knew you were trouble when you walked in..."

***

Once upon a time, in a school called Diamond Crest High, there was this legendary mischievous boy who made it his life's mission to prank people.

He stole the pompoms of the cheering squad and replaced them with his own version of pompoms made from ripped out tampons sprayed with red dye.

He once replaced the football team's shampoo with Elmer's glue, and enraged the senior members of the student council when he sent a bogus letter to their parents telling them that they got a D in all of their subjects, complete with the school's dry seal and the principal's stamp.

All of that happened during freshman year.

Did I mention I almost drowned to my death when for some unknown reasons, he decided to hit me with a tennis ball while I was standing at the edge of the school pool? It threw me off balance causing me to accidentally slip and plunge straight into the pool. Without any floating device. In December. Luckily, Kenji saved me, and I survived.

The pranks only got worse when the boy discovered that he was incredibly good with computers.

On the first week of our sophomore year, he hacked our school's website and changed the school's motto from: "Diamond Crest High School, learning today... leading tomorrow" to "Diamond Crest High school, lame today... lamer tomorrow."

As if hacking the school's website wasn't horrifying enough, he tried to hack the website of the United State's Department of Defense.

And succeeded.

For one whole week, whenever someone clicked on the Top Issues tab of the site, they were redirected to a porn site.

Not just that. There were also rumors that he succeeded hacking into NSA and Pentagon's database. Amazing, right? Leave it to that evilness-personified to pull off an Edward Snowden before it was even cool.

Obviously, it didn't take long enough for the CIA to appear on our school yard, demanding for the boy.

All of us thought that the boy will be sent to juvi to pay for his crimes, but we were all surprised when we learned that the CIA had instead decided to use the boy's genius mind for the good of humanity and recruited him to join their elite force of young computer geniuses who would battle the many evils on the internet.

Soon, news about this extraordinary high school sophomore who was able to hack some of the most secured sites on the internet, and mock America's online security had made it to national television.

TV crews from CNN, BBC and other major news programs rushed to our small town, just to see the boy.

And just like that, from being the school's most notorious prankster, the boy became the town's hero.

He was gone for almost two years as he was sent to Washington DC to train with the greatest minds of CIA.

And now, they said he was back. And my life would never be the same again.

***

"I wonder how will Hunter react when he sees Heather with Rush." I heard Rachel Carter say to one of her friends as she opened her locker door, which unfortunately, was just beside mine.

She didn't pay me any attention even though we were just a few inches away from each other.

It didn't really bother me. I liked being invisible. No unwanted attention, no problem.

She was one of the popular girls in school, probably because there was a rumor that she slept with almost half the guys in the football team. Of course I didn't believe it because I knew for a fact that she only slept with the three of them. I heard her brag about it to Jessica Hewitt in a voice just slightly lower than the decibel of a megaphone.

"Oh Gosh, he's going to be real pissed. I bet Rush will get his ass kicked." answered her friend who turned out to be the school's cheerleader, Sophie Vanderbilt.

The two of them were checking their already perfect blonde hair in the mirror of Rachel's locker door, as if they were searching for a non-existent split end or something.

"I would too if my best friend fucked my girlfriend while I was away." Rachel smirked at her reflection in the mirror.

"Who told you that?" Sophie asked, looking very annoyed that she wasn't previously informed about that piece of very important news.

"No one told me, but it's obvious that Rush and Heather were fucking each other while Hunter was in DC. That's why Heather broke up with him. Maybe she missed the sex so she decided to just do it with the bestfriend. Classic." Rachel explained. She looked really proud of herself. She just probably used all of the ten remaining brain cells she had to come up with that brilliant theory.

By the time I gathered all my things, I was already feeling squeamish out of disgust for the two girls beside me. How could they talk about other people like that?

I didn't know Heather personally but I always thought that she was one of the nicest girls at school. She was friendly to everyone, always the first one to volunteer to any community service related activities, and definitely didn't look like a sex addict as the two girls beside me were trying to imply.

What happened to the good, old girl power? Why the hate?

Annoyed, I closed my locker door quite harder than I intended. This made the two girls look at my direction. I quickly turned my back on them and walked towards my first class.

"What's her problem?" I heard Sophie ask Rachel.

"Who cares? Can I borrow that lipstick?"

I rolled my eyes. That was the reason why I chose to become invisible. Socializing with those kinds of people was just a waste of time and energy.

They only saw the worst in people and often used those weaknesses to drag everyone that wasn't part of their clique down. They sucked out all the goodness and positive things in life, leaving nothing but crushed spirits and a battered self esteems along their wake. I knew it because I had seen them do it every single day. I would rather be invisible than be subjected to that kind of torture.

My plan was simple: remain invisible to the evils of high school, get accepted at NYU, and get the hell out of here as soon as my graduation cap hits the ground.

It wasn't that hard, all I had to do was follow my three self-made golden rules which were as follows:

1. Never look anyone straight in the eyes.

2. Act like I was always in a hurry so I wouldn't have to talk to people, and

3. Never ever get involve with the popular kids. Like, ever.

Easy, peasy.

As soon as I sat down on my usual seat in our Physics class, Shawn was already bombarding me with Hunter related questions. Like, did I think Hunter would tell him all the cheat codes in Assassin's Creed if he asked him? Or, what would be the best approach if he wanted to ask Hunter to gift him with some kind of super rare skins in League of Legends?

I told him I didn't know because I wasn't really acquainted with the guy. The only time I had an encounter with him was when he tried to get me killed, which didn't really give me a chance to get to know him on a personal level. In fact, after that near death experience, I went to great lengths to avoid Hunter Cole, the harbinger of death as I liked to call him.

It was the opposite case for Shawn, though. Hunter was his hero. If there was a Hunter fan club at school, I was sure Shawn would be the President. If there wasn't even one already.

When I realized that everyone in class was also talking about Hunter, I started to drift off. I wasn't in the mood to talk about a guy I didn't even like in the first place.

Besides, Hunter and Heather's break up was old news. They broke up only a couple of months after Hunter went to DC, which was like, a year and a half ago. People were just talking about it now because Hunter was back, and Heather just got in a relationship with Rush, who was supposedly Hunter's best friend.

The amount of teen-age angst and drama in their love story were too damn high. I wasn't planning to have anything to do with it.

So I thought about Kenji, instead. I watched his football game last night and saw him get injured when one of the players in the opposing team accidentally elbowed him in the eye. I wondered if he was okay now or was he still nursing his black eye? I wished we shared the same classes but unfortunately, the only class I had with him was freaking Physical Education where he could witness my awesome skills at embarrassing myself. Great. Really great.

Sometimes, I felt like life was playing a big joke on me and I was the punch line.

My thoughts were interrupted when Professor Charleston walked inside the room looking as if he just got up from bed. His white, messy hair was reminiscent of Einstein's, but the muscles on his biceps and arms made him look like a gym teacher who drinks gallons of steroids for breakfast.

He may have noticed the unusual excitement in the air caused by Hunter's comeback and mistook it as our eagerness to learn Physics so he immediately drawled on and on about Newton's Law of Motion.

I glanced around and saw that almost half of the class were already dozing off, the jocks were busy drawing male genitalias on their tables, while the popular girls were obviously texting each other evident by their constant giggling.

I looked beside me and saw Shawn playing with his Nintendo DS.

I sighed.

Aside from Xi Jin Ping- who had his high school valedictory speech memorized since we were in fifth grade- it looked like I was the only one paying attention to the lesson.

It was such a shame because I loved Physics and Mr. Charleston was a decent professor. I wanted to tell the whole class that we were all in this room to learn, not just bum around. But of course, I didn't.

I concentrated on the lesson and blocked everyone else. What they were doing to their lives wasn't my business anyway.

I got so focused listening to the lecture that I didn't notice the collective sigh from the class when the door opened once again.

I was even irritated when I felt Shawn tapping my shoulder repeatedly.

"What?" I said, not bothering to hide my annoyance. I was too engrossed with Newton's second law and I didn't appreciate Shawn distracting me. What could be more important than the formula for Velocity?

He was staring open-mouthed at the direction of the door so I couldn't help but follow his gaze.

And that was when I first saw him again after two years.

He was leaning on the frame of the door in his six foot tall glory, with a cocky grin on his face and eyes reflecting a mischievous gleam. He was wearing a navy blue shirt with a picture of a computer switch button and the words: "Turn me on" printed on it.

He had his hands tucked inside the pocket of his washed-out jeans... jeans that hung on his hips in a way that only male-models with hot bodies could pull off, and he was definitely rocking it.

His slightly dishelved ash-blonde hair was shorter than before, making him look tougher, and somewhat, more mature.

"What? No one's even wearing their 'I heart Hunter' T-shirt? Where's the love?" He said in a voice that promised nothing but a lifetime of trouble.

That was when the whole class erupted with cheers. Even Mr. Charleston had this huge smile on his face, looking really pleased to see that prankster back. And I was just sitting there, trying not to make eye-contact with Lucifer reincarnated.

I couldn't believe it but Hunter Cole was really back, and since when did he look that hot?