Since we were now in High School many things had changed, and in my opinion, it’d been for the worse. For starters, our building changed and so now we were in a new school campus. The campus itself was not so much the problem, but instead, the problem laid on where the campus was. Our group of kids had been moved over to another city in Sector G. Before, we lived on the outer part of the sector which lied right next to the border of Sector C. Sector C is the Sector where all Good couples went after both people had turned a certain age. It was basically a retirement sector. Seeing that it was filled with Good old couples and we were neighboring them, everything was quite peaceful.

The place they moved us to was right in the middle of the Sector. In this section, there were several other high schools apart from ours. The streets were almost always filled with all kinds of people.

This was a drastic change from the place where we lived before. Every night there would be sirens, every morning we’d see police, every afternoon there’d be someone being dragged off campus and into some kind of custody. This wasn’t a place where one could fool around.

I began being careful 24/7. I was careful of where I looked, how I walked, who I spoke to. Basically, anything that could trigger an attack.

If I was scared of almost anything and everything back in elementary and middle school, in high school I was terrified.

About a week into high school though, I decided that no, I wasn’t gonna be the quiet, weird, weak kid anymore. I was gonna do something I never thought I would do. I would stand out.

I told Kyungsoo about my plans and he gave me his honest opinion.

‘You’re gonna get beat up bad’

He had so much faith in me.

For about three days I observed what the cool kids did. I took notes on how to act, how to look at people, and how to talk to others.

The next week I put my plans into action. I started out slow, not wanting to draw attention to myself all at once.

That didn’t go as expected though.

A day into me trying to act tougher than usual and I had already been singled out. A kid from an upper grade named Daehyun had noticed me. He was one of the cool kids I mentioned earlier. I really don’t know why I interested him. I was just minding my own business eating my carrots but no, this kid wasn’t gonna let me eat my carrots cause he wanted to pick a fight.

“What’s your name freshman?” he sat on the table in front of me.

“Jongin, why?” I raised an eyebrow. In reality, I felt like peeing my pants but no. I needed to act though.

“You seem like a feisty one” he ruffled my hair. I slapped his hand away and heard people gasp.

I turned to see that there were a lot of eyes on us and began to wonder if just lowering my head would have been a better choice.

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