Hello Carlo

Prologue

Scarlett

The ruffled pea sized paper rolled over to my table, courtesy of the biology teacher who had taken it upon himself to put us in pairs for an assignment probably half of one person could do. In his words, it's a way of socialization which I didn't really find a problem. Socialization is fun, it's good, it's everything one can think but in my case, it's difficult to actually get along with people when the submission is due in two weeks.

With my hopes up, my overgrown fingernails dug into the frail sheet, almost ruining it in the process and after all I'd planned for it, who did I see? Carlo Martinez. The one guy that just didn't get along with anybody at all, it made me wonder what it's like for him to go through till senior year still intact.

He's not a bad person neither did he do bad things, at least not any that I know of even with all our years together since elementary school. He wasn't the brightest kid from the start, didn't grow up well or so I heard. He wasn't with his parents, even when they were both very much alive and his foster parents had taken care of pretty much everything that needed to be taken care of. Everything except Carlo's social life.

Word went out when we were younger that his father, someone with the name of Tom if my memories are correct, was involved in some sort of murder of a kind, and his mom had her way with substances and basically, they weren't the best for him. They were already separated, one in jail and the other somewhere else. That was the only thing that made him even more antisocial cause society didn't take that very well, especially on a boy as young as he was.

I would say he wasn't treated unfairly but I knew too little to judge. And now all of this is on me because Carlo is now my partner, someone I'll work with for the next one week. I glanced over at the pale looking boy only to see he already had his eyes on me, and a look like he was going to squeeze me to pulp. Nevertheless, my bubly nature warranted me to smile which is what I did and in response, he gave a cold look back and looked away. Nice start.