Chapter Text
"Jack! It's ten minutes past eight! Get out of bed!"
Jack jolted awake suddenly at the sound of his mother yelling at him, and his whole body filled with dread when he realised he was about to be late for his first day at school. He had set his alarm clock for quarter to eight, but he'd been up all night worrying about starting school, and he had barely slept an hour. Then of course, when it was time for him to actually get up, he had finally fallen asleep at last.
He jumped out of his bed, still half asleep, and ran around his room grabbing clothes, hoping they would make up an okay outfit. Then he ran with them to the bathroom, and brushed his teeth and had a wash as quickly as he could. He put on underwear and socks, then he got dressed in the outfit he'd put together while bleary-eyed: a brown T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans.
He looked at himself in the mirror, and ran his fingers through his dark brown hair. It would have to do. He sped back to the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, Ryan and Adam, and found his shoes, a pair of brown loafers. They were battered, but they were his favourite.
As he was putting them on his feet, Ryan poked his head around the door frame.
"Are you ready yet?" he asked, then he lowered his voice to a whisper. "Mom is going mad right now."
"Yeah, I'm all ready to go." Jack said, not looking up at him, as he was concentrating on tying his laces.
He finished doing them, then picked up his school bag from the end of his bed, which was the bottom bunk of their triple bunk beds. He threw his backpack over his shoulder, then followed Ryan out to the living room. His mom was in there, and Adam was sitting there too. He was waiting for Ryan, as the two of them were about to take the bus to school. They went to different places: Adam went to the local high school, while Ryan had just started middle school last week. But the buildings weren't too far from each other, so it made sense for them to travel together.
Jack, however, was about to start at a completely different type of place. Most kids his age would now be at a regular elementary school, but instead, his mother had insisted he be enrolled at an institution called the Professional Children's School. She'd told him that it was a school tailored especially to the needs of young professionals working in the arts, and since Jack wanted to have a career like that, he agreed to attend there instead of a normal elementary.
Jack had recently started street performing with his brothers in the park. They called themselves Tapping Brothers to the Third Power, or TB³, because they involved their tap dancing expertise in their performances as well as singing. The tap dancing was another thing that their mother had encouraged them to do, saying that it was a good extracurricular activity for them. She had signed up each of the boys to the same programme when they were young, so Jack had only been learning for a year, while Adam was the best dancer out of all of them as he'd been doing it the longest. TB³ considered themselves a band, and though they only sang covers at the moment, they hoped that one day they would be able to write and record their own original music. Jack had also recently starred in several short films, and had cameos in a few TV shows. So he had already begun his journey to stardom, he thought.
Jack's daydreams of becoming famous were interrupted then by his mom's voice, as they often were.
"Oh look, you're finally ready. Let's go, school starts in twenty minutes!" she said to him, clapping her hands together.
The three brothers and their mom left the apartment then, and took the elevator down to the ground floor. They left the building, and when they all stepped out onto the pavement, Adam and Ryan set off walking in the opposite direction towards the bus stop.
"Good luck, Jack!" Adam called to his youngest brother.
"Yeah, good luck!" Ryan shouted too.
"Thanks!" Jack replied, and waved goodbye to them.
Now he had to take the subway with his mom to his new school. He wished it was his dad taking him, but he had to leave the house earlier than his mom for work. So instead of the laughter he would have shared with his dad, possibly turning his anxiety into a fond memory, he was stuck with his mom's coldness.
She wasn't always this cold, though. Whenever Jack performed, that was when his mom showed the most love for him. She was always so happy watching him shine. When he shone, his shine reflected on her too, in the form of comments from her friends about what a good parent she was, and how she was so selfless to give up so much, just to support her children's dreams. This shine bathed her in a golden glow, making her seem almost angelic.
But whenever Jack wasn't that star performer, or he made mistakes that showed he was human, she berated him. Or even worse, simply ignored him, and acted as though he didn't even exist. Maybe what Jack needed to do was just try harder. He could learn to pretend that his relationship with his mother was just like one of his tap dancing performances, where everything had to be perfect. Although one misstep was much more fatal with his mother than it could ever be on stage. But maybe if he put in practise and improved, she would love him more.
Recently though, there hadn't been a lot of love in the Metzger household. His parents had been arguing more than ever, so much that they couldn't even bear to be in the same room together. Whenever they were, all they would do was pick fights with one another, chipping away at each other with harsh words until someone lost it. It hadn't always been like that, though. Once upon a time, his parents had loved each other. But those days were long gone, and any warmth and romance that had previously been there was now replaced by hostility and cruelty.
If this is what relationships are like, I don't want one, Jack thought to himself.
They travelled on the subway, with Jack's mom barely saying a word. When they arrived at their stop, they got off and then walked the short distance to the school. Jack spotted the building quickly. It was a place with big windows, which allowed you to see all the young stars in the making milling around inside. There were lots of other kids going inside, some Jack's age and some more the age of his brothers. He thought about Ryan and Adam. He wished they were here. They would know what to say, how to comfort him.
"Okay, this is it. Have a nice day, and I'll pick you up later." Jack's mom told him.
She was just going to leave him to go inside on his own. His stomach suddenly started to hurt. He felt sick with anxiety, and wondered if there was any way he could fake being physically ill and go home. He turned around to complain to his mom that he didn't feel too good.
But she was already gone.
Jack could see her waiting to get her next subway ride, the one that would take her to her workplace. He sighed, then took a deep breath in, knowing he was going to have to face the first day of school eventually.
He took off his backpack and rooted through it for his school planner, which he'd received in the post when he'd been signed up to the school. He turned to the page in the planner that had his student timetable on it, and he took a look at it to find out where to go for his first class.
English, room 24, it read.
Jack put his backpack on again, and set about finding room 24. He walked towards the school, becoming increasingly aware of everyone around him. He was surrounded by more other kids than he had ever been with before in his life, and he felt a little self conscious. He wondered if any of them would like him, or if he would even make any friends at this place.
Jack pushed open one of the big doors at the front of the school, and the first thing he spotted was the receptionist's desk. He decided to go over and ask where room 24 was, as she was likely to know. When he did so, she told him that it was upstairs, and so he ascended the stairs in pursuit of the classroom. He made his way along a long corridor, and eventually found it.
At first glance, Jack thought that he was the first to arrive. But then after peering through the glass window on the door, he saw that he was actually one of the last, and everyone else was already inside. Upon seeing this, he immediately entered the classroom, terrified that he was extremely late and had missed everything.
When he walked in, the teacher looked up at him
"It's okay, you're not too late." she told him, guessing his worries by his panic stricken face. "Take a seat."
Jack nodded, and looked for somewhere to sit down. He didn't know where to go.
He then spotted a free seat next to a boy with wild, curly hair, a similar dark shade to his own. When the boy looked over at him, Jack saw that he had deep brown eyes, and a distinctive mole above his upper lip. They made eye contact, and the curly haired boy grinned. Jack couldn't help grinning back.
Jack went over, and quietly took the seat next to the boy. He took off his backpack, and put it on the floor beside him. The teacher came over to him and gave him an exercise book to write in, then he searched through his bag for his pencil case. When he found it, he took out a pen and wrote his name on the front of the book: Jack Metzger.
The teacher went back up to the front of the class, and continued to talk.
"For those of you who have just come in, we were just talking about how English class is about developing a better understanding of the world we live in, through reading and then discussing what we read with our peers." she said. "In this first class, what I want to start off with is having you all get to know each other. If we want to understand the world, we should start by talking to other members of the class. I want you all to turn to the person next to you, and share one interesting fact about yourself. You have ten minutes."
The teacher sat down at her desk, and that was when the curly haired boy turned to Jack and spoke.
"Hi, I'm Alex!" he introduced himself.
"I'm Jack."
"It's nice to meet you, Jack. So. Tell me an interesting fact about you."
Jack thought for a moment before he spoke.
"I'm in a band with my brothers. I guess that's pretty cool." he told him.
Alex gasped.
"No way! I'm in a band with my brother too!" he said.
"Wow, really?" Jack asked.
"Yep! What are you guys called?"
"Tapping Brothers to the Third Power. Or TB³ for short." Jack told him.
Suddenly, he began to worry that the band name was silly. It sounded funny now that he had to say it to a stranger in his everyday life, and he wondered if maybe he should talk to Ryan and Adam about changing the name.
But his worries about the name soon dissipated when Alex told him the name of his own band.
"My brother and I are called the Naked Brothers Band." Jack started laughing, and Alex continued. "I know, I know. The name is crazy. It came from a family inside joke, it was a whole thing.
"We're actually going to be famous with that name soon though. My brother Nat and I just finished filming a TV show all about the band and our lives. There, that can be my interesting fact about myself."
"You're actually going to be on TV?" Jack asked in amazement.
"Yeah! Our show is going to be on Nickelodeon, it starts in February next year." Alex beamed with pride.
"Oh, wow. That's so cool. I'll make sure to watch your TV show, and then when it's a huge hit I can tell everybody that I know you!" Jack smiled back at him.
They stared at each other for a moment, and a sudden wave of happiness and relief washed over Jack. He seemed to have actually made a friend in this school already, and befriending other students had been the thing he'd been most worried about.
As he relaxed, he felt the right side of his face twitch. The second he realised what had happened, shame flooded his veins. He'd let his guard down for one second, and he'd ended up ticcing in front of his potential new friend. He felt himself blush, and prayed that Alex hadn't noticed anything.
But then Alex's expression changed suddenly to one that was unreadable, and Jack began to panic. He was going to think he was so weird, he wouldn't want to be his friend anymore...
"Wait. You're like me?" Alex asked, staring at him
"What?" Jack said as he was broken out of his internal shame spiral.
"That twitch you have on the side of your face." Alex observed.
Oh God, Jack thought. He had noticed.
Jack felt himself go even redder. He'd had his tics for as long as he could remember, since he was little, though he never knew the cause of them. He had his facial twitches, and also another where he would shrug his shoulders. And he'd always tried so hard to disguise them, so that he could pass as normal, and nobody would know he had them. A lot of the time, he was able to hide them in ways that meant most people wouldn't notice.
But Alex had noticed.
Jack felt a sharp pang of self hatred. He'd let himself enjoy the conversation with his new friend too much, without staying vigilant about hiding his tics, and now he was about to pay the price for his mistake. Alex would probably think of him differently now, and he would go back to having no friends at this school.
"Hey, it's nothing to be ashamed of." Alex said gently, sensing Jack's embarrassment. "I have tics too, because I have Tourette's. My brother and my dad have it too. Sometimes I'll blink my eyes really fast, or shrug my shoulders, or make random noises. It's whatever. It's just part of who I am."
Jack looked at him, processing what he had just said. Alex didn't think he was weird. He actually... understood?
"Do you maybe have Tourette's too?" Alex asked curiously.
"No, I don't really feel like that's me." Jack shook his head. "I think it might be something else, but I'm not really sure what. I've had these tics for as long as I can remember, and I've never known why."
Alex nodded, then he spoke again.
"Still. We're both different. And that makes us the same."
"I agree." Jack smiled.
He was beyond relieved that Alex hadn't judged him or made fun of him after he'd noticed his tics. And even better, he could actually relate. Jack had never met another person with tics similar to his before, and he could feel an unspoken bond being formed between them in the air.
"Hold on a second. Did we just become best friends?" Alex gasped.
"I think we did." Jack grinned.