Alex, Xander (Chapter 1)

Alex considered packing a dozen eggs with him to chuck at the front of the shiny school on his way to work, but submitted to his own better judgment. Instead, he focused on fidgeting with the unruly bow tie knot in the mirror, humming to himself to maintain the distraction. The bow tie pulled neatly against his crisp orange polo—finally, ugh—and he finished the outfit off with the embroidered black cap. The restaurant, a deep-fried chain, would have his new name tag. He kept his old one, which proudly displayed “ALXE” in a solid slab font, next to his bed. It gave him a reason to smile, and he so very desperately needed one.

He lifted the cap back up, tugged a comb through his hair once again, and set off on his walk to work, which he had been dreading ever since he first mapped it out.

It would be a forty-five minute walk at the shortest, Alex calculated over the summer. At the shortest. But also at the most heart-wrenching. There were two choices: forty-five minutes, or, the alternative, two and a half hours. Alfred clicked his tongue at this estimate, and, acquiescing the facts declared by the numbers, decided to shove his own emotions to the side, like he had shoved his old backpack into the corner of his closet, and just take the fall of the forty-five minute walk. He locked the door on the way out, and crunched a few orange-dead leaves on the sidewalk.

Twenty minutes after embarking, he closed his left eye just to avoid looking at the school across the street. Richard V. H. Caxwell High School. The site of his damnation. The first bell of the day had rung nearly a half hour ago. The first bell overall, Alex thought. The last Monday of August. The first day of school. I should be in those classrooms, thought Alex. I should be a senior there.

He wasn’t. He had to choke the truth down.

Two kids strided down the opposite sidewalk, bulky backpacks bouncing on their shoulders. Freshmen, thought Alex. Maybe sophomores, if I’m being generous. They won’t know what happened last year. The two, a boy and a girl, caught sight of uniformed Alex, then began chuckling to each other. The girl whispered to her companion, and Alex could only imagine what she was saying: stay in school, don’t end up like him! How dare they laugh; Alex wasn’t the one late to the first day of school.

He walked parallel to the school, which haunted him on the other side of the road. To his left. Alex instead tried to focus on the sights to his right. Oh, gorgeous trees, kissed by autumn. Brilliant scarlet leaves.

Oh, wait; when he remembered the connection, it triggered the utmost annoyance in him. Autumn leaves were now tainted forever.

Alex, like all (well, most) high school juniors, had been desperate for money. So along came Xander, some savvy popular jock with the intent to solve everyone’s problems. Xander, who never worried about anything: grades, money, nothing. Who felt an impulsive connection to Alex, simply on the coincidence that they shared the same first name.

“Why don’t you get a job? If you need the money that badly,” said Xander, taking the seat next to Alex at lunch.

Alex clicked his tongue. “Can’t. School’s too busy. Homework. Other stuff. My mom doesn’t want me to get one. She doesn’t want me worrying about it. Thinks it’ll be a distraction from school.”

Xander fell quiet for a moment. His eyes darted from side to side. He leaned in, though inconspicuously. “Hm. That’s a problem.”

“Eh. If I do well enough, I could get enough scholarships to pay for a bachelor’s at a community college.”

“Yeah.” Gears grinded in Xander’s head. “How bad do you need the money?”

“Oh, bad.” Alex’s young mother, sole source of the household income, was an underpaid waitress, and underpaid librarian’s assistant, and an underpaid lawn care worker. Their apartment had no beds. Alex slept on a forty-year-old couch, his mother on three adjacent bean bags. Who didn’t want her son to worry about a job.

“I think I can help out with that.” Xander’s voice hushed itself to a whisper.

And so Alex and Xander entered in some sort of pseudo pact. Entrepreneurship on Xander’s part. Desperation on Alex’s.

Xander would purchase the drugs; Alex would distribute them to the school’s customers.

For the many months this partnership persisted. The gas that fueled Alex’s participation was Xander’s abundant promise that the pair would not get caught. Their specialty was Autumn Dust.

Xander, unlike Alex, did not panic when administration bounced a surprise drug possession test on the student body a month before summer. Everyone into the hallway. Stand in front of your locker; unlock it and leave it open. Drop your backpacks to your feet.

Alex flinched at the police dog’s bark. He clenched his fist around the hem of his shirt to calm himself down, to try to contain his beads of sweat. The dogs prodded their noses into his backpack. The officer unzipped it and pulled out the Ziploc sandwich bag, halfway full with some sort of powder. A brilliant scarlet powder. The same hue, saturation, intensity of the hellfire red waving through the leaves of the autumn trees.

Xander had deflected all of Alex’s accusations of involvement. This must have been a common occurence to him; he had buried all of his tracks, burned all of his evidence. Alexander was to blame: not the angelic, charitable athlete, but the Alexander who was an average student, the expendable Alexander. So Xander got to live out his year as a popular high school senior and Alex got to be haunted by a season’s foliage. Expelled from his school. Lucky, he’d been called, to only pay a fine. Now breathing off of minimum wage. He felt a lump swell in his throat.

Alex turned the corner. It’s alright, he thought. Quite alright. Xander will get what he deserves. The corners of his lips lifted subtly, so subtly. While it wasn’t the ideal situation, nor did he have the ideal resources, Wild Guy’s Deep Fry would be the site of Step One.