AkuRoku - The Pajama Virgin - Prologue

No one ever tells you what you want to hear. That's the first rule I should tell you. I'm thinking about writing a book of these things. I could call it "Roxas Tatem's Guide to a Successful Life". The only probably is, I don't have many tenants, and the ones I do don't exactly transform my life into what is commonly referred to as- successful.

I'm a junior in high school, with nothing to show for it. My life has been completely ineffective. Seriously, if I were to die today, nothing would change except the obituary in the newspaper.

I have this sort of crazy idea that the meaning of life is to change things. To give people different perspectives, challenge ideas, and invent new products to improve the value of living.

I've done none of the above… granted I'm only sixteen. But who am I to talk? By my age Gandhi was married with children, Mozart was on tour, and Leonardo Di Vinci had been apprenticed and already painting masterpieces.

To be honest, I'm not even around anyone my age that makes me feel envious for my lack of accomplishment. I went to East Dale High School in Burbank California. Everyone I went to school with might as well be a zombie robot programmed to eat, sleep, and complain.

East Dale was a place like that. It was almost humorous how stereotypical it could be. Not the kind of stereotypical where the glasses wearing chess team captain gets his money stolen from the buff and handsome blond running back on the football team. It was more of a 'typical high school ignorance' sort of stereotypical.

The kids were okay; no one really showed any hint of personality… although now that I mention it, all the kids are usually high. There were different types of people, and although organized cliques hadn't been officially established, I could place every single person I knew into a category.

There were the art junkies; kids who were super rebellious and would go camping or some freaky hipster shit like that. They all wore eccentric clothes and had piercings that deemed them 'unique' and all have weird sexual fantasies and fetishes. They're a real good model of the modern teenage age.

There were dumb bitches and sluts, which are technically different, but similar enough to be lumped into the same category. They were the girls who asked for designer jeans for their birthdays, and thought drinking booze with the guys was 'hardcore'. Honestly, no matter how pretty those girls were, they didn't appeal to me at all. They may have had perfectly straightened hair, flawless makeup, goddess-like bodies, and revealing clothing, but they all cursed to much and didn't have minds of their own. They listened to pop music and had no class. I don't care if you're the most sophisticated, nicest, and most wonderful person on the planet. If you listen to pop music, I will never have respect for you.

There were the male counterparts of the dumb and slutty girls, who were basically no different, except they had penises and didn't have to be good looking. I'll be completely honest here; most of the so-called 'popular' male students were pretty ugly. It didn't matter though… if they had badass clothes, a rotten personality, and failed school for no reason other than 'trying isn't cool'; you were guaranteed to be liked.

Then there were the stoners and rapid facebooking statusers. The kids who wore gothic styled clothing, bitched about everything, and uploaded irrelevant song lyrics to the Internet in order to seem 'artistic'. I've come to find that most of these sorts of people were compulsive liars and usually self-harmers.

I could go on forever on other classes; the croquet-playing-lemoade-drinking preps with daddy's money, the douchebag kids who appeared friendly, but were really narcissistic assholes, the partygoers, the stoners, the super religious, the emos, the cheerleaders, the nerdy virgin boys, the nerdy virgin girls, and so on and so forth. East Dale had too much of a complicated web of different personalities and groups that almost everyone came across as annoying and superficial.

If I had to group myself, I'd say I was across between the nerdy virgin boys, the loners, and the artistic junkies. I didn't have tattoos or piercings, but I've been taking art my last three years of high school, and painted when I was in a 'funk'. I was also a virgin who cared more about the next Final Fantasy game than the Kardashians and hoarded my old worn out Pokémon cards religiously. As for the loner part, well, it's not that I didn't have any friends. I'm not that pathetic and sappy, believe me. I just found myself enjoying books and video games more than the company of others. My parents deemed me as 'antisocial'.

I don't particularly think I am. I have a few friends here there. My best friend, however, had to be Xion. She's basically a girl version of me, if you could imagine, only she's attractive and has short black hair. We'd known each other since kindergarten and were raised like siblings.
She was a cool person, spunky, nice, and didn't worry about the stupid things that didn't matter. She was the kind of girl who'd wear mismatched clothes, chipped nail polish, and could make the best damn lemon tort you've ever eaten in your entire life. And I vowed to that.  

But I always felt there was something unnatural about our friendship. I kept feeling like sexual tension should have brought its way in somehow. I mean, we were both post-pubescent, she had boobs, and she's probably the only person with a vagina I know that would tolerate me. But, that never came. Once, I almost tried to make myself life her. I'd try picturing here in swimwear, or kissing me on the cheek. Innocent little cute romantic things like that.
But I couldn't bring myself to it. It was weird, unappealing, and almost gross. That's when I realized I had never even had a crush in my entire life.

So here I was: a shorter-than-average sixteen-year-old virgin who'd never had a crush on anyone in his unaccomplished and degrading life.