This is my first story submission, so please leave lots of feedback but please play nice.
There's kind of a innocent sex scene, but no hardcore stuff. I'm working on that for later chapters. So if you don't want to wait, skip this, or at least don't flame me for it.
These characters and stories are mine. Any resemblance to actual people or events is incidental.
Names are hard when you are four, especially on the first day of kindergarden.
"I don't remember your name," he declared.
Scuffing his He-Man tennis shoes on the gravel that covered the ground beneath the metal poles of the monkey bars, he said, "I don't remember your name either."
"I'm Michael Patrick Carlin," Michael said.
"I'm Kieran William Lee," Kieran said.
And that cemented their friendship. See? Kindergarden is easy.
* * * *
"Wild women do and they don't forget it!"
It was Thanksgiving again and the kids had been relegated to the "kids' table" in the kitchen. Thankfully for the adults there was a door partitioning the kitchen from the dining room. They didn't have to listen to Kieran, his older sister, and Michael and his sisters –one younger and one older than the boys– as they belted out tracks from the "Pretty Woman" soundtrack, using carrot sticks with black olives stuck on top of them for microphones.
Kieran's and Michael's mothers had become fast friends, which had extended to the rest of their families. Thanksgiving was at Kieran's house, and Kieran's dad made them all "special" hot chocolate after the annual school Christmas play. The adults' hot chocolate was a little more "special" than the kids.' Christmas eve and Easter were spent together at Michael's house. And over the course of years there were hundreds of little family events (and some big ones) that the each other family were invited to as extended family.
But still grade school was a little harder than kindergarden, as the normal course of things tend to be. Kieran and Michael attended the same Catholic grade school they had started in kindergarden. It was small school, each grade having only one class that stayed together K through 8th grade. Michael was a focused and determined kid even then. He knew he wasn't the smartest kid in the class but his consistency carried him through with B's and the occasional A thrown in.
Kieran on the other hand was all over the board. He was one of the smartest kids in the class. He always tested in the 99th percentile in standardized testing. He always got A's on the tests for regular subjects too, which allowed him to scrape by. But everything else was up and down. He was that kid that teacher's were always saying "if he would only apply himself" about. But he never remembered his homework, and everything was so distracting. If he wasn't in trouble for talking then the teacher was trying to call his attention back to class from his daydreams gazing out the window. Classes bored him. He passed the time by reading ahead in all his school books or anything else he could get his hands on while the teacher droned on about something else.
It wasn't just in school either. His coaches in baseball and soccer were equally frustrated by his lighting fast changes between hyper-focus and distraction. He was like that nursery rhyme: "There once was a girl with a curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. And we she was bad she was ...." Well, Kieran wasn't horrid, but certainly frustrating to all the adults around him, and a good portion of his classmates too. He also had some talent as an artist and took painting lessons from a local artist. Again it was up and down. On some days he spent the entire afternoon just laying out paint in what he felt was the correct way on his palette. Again, he was "such a talented kid, if only he would apply himself."
* * * *
Kieran rushed into physics just before Mr. Payne closed the door and the final bell rang. He made it to his desk without dropping any of the many things he was juggling. There were the expected: physics book, notebook, pens, and then there were the other various things that made up his morning. The bottle of Coke that was his breakfast; he carefully put that on the floor out of kicking range since they weren't supposed to have food or drink in the classroom. The collared shirt that pretty much the only rule of their dress code –top two buttons must be buttoned.
Though when guys did only that, they pretty much just looked like morons with capes on,
he thought. He began to slip his shirt on and button it as soon as he sat down. At least today he had gotten his shoes on before class. They were always really awkward to carry and people looked at him weird when he ran in in just his socks. Today he'd been able to get his shoelaces tied at the red lights on the way to school.
In trying to organize the whirlwind he had brought in with him, Kieran had missed what Mr. Payne had been saying to the class. He winced as everyone else began to turn in their homework. He had forgotten. Again.
Finally physics came to an end. Kieran ducked his head down, avoided eye contact, and filed out the door with the rest of the class, though at 6'1" and with the exotic looks that came from him being Chinese and
happa haole
(half-white), as the Hawaiians called it, his attempts to be inconspicuous failed.
He headed for the computer lab. There he could just do mindless surfing on the internet, or maybe try to finish that paper that was due sixth block. Either way no one was going to bother him there.
The five minute bell rang for the next class. Kieran didn't notice, shutting the world out as he surfed through the drivel on the screen in front of him. Krista showed up at the door to the lab. "Hi Mr. Hurst," she said to the teacher sitting at the desk at the front of the lab.
"Kieran." Krista said as she walked down the two rows of computers. "Come on; we got to go to class."
Kieran looked up, closed out of the window he was looking at and obediently followed her to his classroom. Having dropped him off, she said "I'll see you later at break, okay?" and kept walking down the hallway to her own classroom.
