By the time I get out of school, everyone's almost gone or hugging in the parking lot and saying their goodbyes for the Summer. It felt surreal that another year had gone by, and I had barely felt it.

I hadn't shown up for the end of the year tests or done any of the dumb activities and pep rallies that came with being a junior. I hadn't had the patience to sit through a lecture, and the teachers had given up on me a long time ago. All they saw was a leather-clad nightmare every time I stepped into the room.

Which, I was totally okay with. I wasn't out to impress anyone, except Janet Jameson.

I light up a cigarette as I'm standing outside of my car. It was a cherry-red, 1980 Pontiac, and she was a beast. The lights flipped up when I turned it on, making it look pissed off whenever I drove it around town, feeling untouchable.

The thing is, it wasn't really my car.

I was watching it for my older brother, John, while he was on his honeymoon with his new wife in Hawaii. He'd made me promise not to drive it while he was gone or he was going to run me over with it and use my skull as a hood ornament.

Jackass.

"Bye, Cooper!" A couple of girls shout at Cooper Anderson, an all-around nice guy and number one basketball player in school who probably would rival Michael Jordan one day.

"Bye, girls!" Cooper shouts back, and then he jogs over to his truck and opens the door.

I watch him lean inside to grab something, and his red basketball shorts ride up super high, revealing cinnamon thighs and a white tan line. My mouth opens slightly, my cigarette drops somewhere between my boots, but I barely notice it.

Cooper turns around, and he catches me staring. "Kev, my man! Like what you see?" He grins so wide that I could have probably counted every tooth in his dumb mouth.

I sputter for response and then I just book it and get into my car and drive off as fast as I can.

"Asshole!" I shout at Cooper as I zoom by, and I flip him the finger as he laughs.

For as long as I could remember, Cooper had been the only openly gay guy in school, and he got a lot of shit for it. They made him bathe in separate bathrooms, the team barely wanted to play with him and benched him for most of the year. The girls all loved to hang around him, though, which I couldn't understand. Sure, he was good-looking, but he wasn't as good-looking as me and I had what I liked to call a threatening charisma.

I drive to the only restaurant in town, a rundown Jack in the Box, and I order twenty tacos to numb the pain of my embarrassment.

Backwater was practically a ghost town at this point, it sat on the outskirts of large, dirt farmland flecked with cactus plants and dead trees. There was a Budget Inn, a Walmart, and a video store that only got tapes in a whole year after the movie showed in theaters.

"Hey, Kevin, what's up?" An old guy in the Jack in the Box window hands me my tacos. Everyone called him Martinez, even if that wasn't his real name. He'd told me once that the Cartel was after him and he had to change his identity and all of that, so Martinez it was. "Your old man up for playing cards this week?" He asks me.

"Nah," I reply, and I take the tacos and hand him a ten. "He's busy working this week. Another guy walked out on him so he has to pick up his hours."

"Huh," Martinez shakes his head, "This town's really going to shit, isn't it? I remember when tourists used to flood through here because of Roswell a few miles away. What a damn shame."

"Hey, man, can I have some extra salsa?" I ask Martinez, and I hold out my bag expectantly. "Make it extra hot."

Martinez throws in a handful of salsa and I drive off, heading for the only place I knew.

Between Backwater and Roswell, a long strip of nothing separated the two towns. There was just two hours of open road where tourists often flew down in their cars, going at least a hundred. We didn't even have a sign or anything announcing our presence.

I listen to TLC Waterfalls as I'm driving and I'm eating my tacos and I'm at peace with the world for the next hour. The wind tousels my hair, the sun is in my eyes.

"Don't go chasing waterfalls!" I belt out, "Stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to!"

I reach for another crunchy taco, and that's when everything goes to hell. The Pontiac starts to sputter and shake like a tin can, and smoke stutters out before it completely stalls.

I curse under my breath and panic a little before I pull over onto the side of the road and get out.

I'm fucked at this point and I know it.

"Shit, shit, shit..." I hiss and go around to open the hood of the car, and a blast of hot air and smoke hit me in an instant. The engine was toast, it didn't matter if I needed fluids or a new part, I was too far from the nearest gas station to try to drive back.

I step back and I look left, down the barren road. And then right, towards an even more barren road. It was starting to get dark, but if I started pushing the car right now, I would make it home in time for dinner.

"Alright, Quinn," I whisper to myself, "You can do this."

I run back to the driver's seat, throw my leather jacket into the back, and release the brake. Then I start pushing the car down the road, sweat already collecting on my forehead since it's like, eight million degrees with no cloud in sight.

I trudge down the road for almost half an hour, and in that time period, only one truck stops.

"Hey, Kevin!"

It's Cooper Anderson again, golden child, blonde hair carelessly pushed back. What the hell was he doing here? Was he following me or something?

"Are you following me?" I demand, instantly annoyed when he shoots me an award-winning smile. "You know I don't roll that way."

"Don't worry about it. He's taken," Another guy in the seat beside Cooper suddenly leans forward. They're holding hands and everything, which makes me blush for some weird reason. "We're going to his parent's cabin for the Summer," The Burnett tells me, "You want us to give you a ride back into town?"

"Seriously?" I laugh as loud as I can and Cooper's smile fades. "Why the hell would I ride with you guys? Cooper, you're practically a nobody in school. Everyone knows you're gay as hell. They talk about you like you're infected with the plague and shit."

"I don't care," Cooper replies, "At some point, none of what they said is going to matter." He looks over at the brunette beside him and they smile at each other. "Max and I are going to the same college."

"We're happy together," Max replies, and then Cooper starts to close the window.

"Good luck pushing your car back into town," He tells me, and then he drives off like nothing.

I watch their truck grow smaller behind a cloud of dust and I feel sick to my stomach. Not because they were gay or anything, but because it left me feeling empty inside.

And I knew that what Cooper had, I would never have.

"Fuck!" I shriek angrily, and then I kick one of the Pontiac's front tires. "Fucking shit!"

I kick the tires a few more times until my foot hurts and I've exhausted myself, and slump down to the dirt floor where I sit for a while.

The sky starts to get dark and the stars start to come out early. There were millions of them out here, peppering the sky like the top of an everything bagel, glittering and shining. I wondered how far they really were from Earth, and how big they had to be for me to see them from so far away.

I didn't know much about space or astronomy, but my dad had bought me a telescope one year for Christmas which he broke later during a drunken rage.

In the time I'd had it though, I knew that you could see Mars and Saturn, and even Jupiter.

So why the hell was there an extra-large star moving across the sky?

I stand up when I realize that the pinprick in the sky's actually moving towards me, growing larger by the second until it resembles a large basketball, and then a large yacht minutes later.

I'm fascinated, my feet are frozen and I can't move. Then the ball of light gets so big and I see fire reflecting off of it and there's this shrill screech, like metal grinding or a plane breaking the sound barrier. Maybe it was a plane. Maybe a jumbo jet had broken apart and was coming down right on top of me.

"Jesus fucking Christ!"

I take off yelling down the road, the open fields illuminated by this thing coming down. My arms pump, my feet pound against the concrete and tar, but I can't avoid it.

I turn my head at the exact moment the ball of lights slams into The Pontiac, an explosion of fire, dirt, and wind rushing towards me when the car's launched several feet into the air. The blast is so strong that I'm immediately thrown over a barbed wire fence and into a cow pasture like a ragdoll.

Hitting the ground is the last thing I remember, then nothing.