Over the next two weeks, Max laid awake at night contemplating life as intensely as an eight-year-old could possibly think about life. Max thought about the troublesome, unlikeable kid that he become. Max thought about who he would much rather be: The cool, funny kid that existed in Lexi's eyes. Yet, that kid hadn't been real. He wanted that kid to be real, though. He was sick of being treated like a freak. This led Max to make a choice.

If he couldn't be more like his peers, then he wanted to become better than them. Better at sports. Better in school. Max wanted his classmates to look him in the eye for once instead of glancing past him like he didn't matter.

On the following Monday, Max paid attention in class more than he ever had before. If Ms. Woodard, his third grade teacher, assigned one page of multiplication facts for homework, then he chose to complete two pages. If she told them to write their spelling words five times each, then he practiced them ten times each.

He asked his mom to sign him up for afterschool basketball on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Soccer on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Max arrived early to run drills on his own and then stayed late to train more. It wasn't like anyone was waiting for him at home, anyway.

A few months later, Max stopped showing up to the principal's office. And the counselor's office. And the nurse's office. The other kids sensed something different about him, their parents noticed it, and, for better or worse, Max knew it, too.

Third grade led to fourth grade, and Max's mom enrolled him in the same youth football league that his dad had participated in as a kid. From the first day of practice, it was clear Max had inherited his dad's speed and stamina on the field. His skills quickly developed as he learned how to execute plays and read the other team's coverage. Game after game, whenever Max had the ball in his hands, his team became unstoppable. He carried his team through the season in a streak of glory.

Although, there was, unfortunately, a downside to winning so much. After the last game of the season, a dad from the opposing team went so far as to approach Max for scoring too many points. His mom had been at work. Absent and unable to defend him. Without a parent to hide behind, Max had no choice but to simmer in silence as the angry man rambled on and on about how "he hurt Junior's feelings" and why "good sportsmanship was more important than winning."

Max listened to every word the guy spat at him, but he didn't understand why he needed to hold back when his team obviously had the stronger offense. The stranger's nastiness only fueled the fire inside him. From that day on, Max only went for W's. The bigger, the better.

In fifth grade, a rumor started on the playground about how Max's mom enrolled him in kindergarten a year late. Supposedly, this was the reason why he was bigger and better at everything than everyone else. Owen Watanabe and Tanner Howell stood by him the whole time, claiming they knew all the talk was total BS, until Max did a little digging and discovered Tanner had been the one who made up the story in the first place.

Two days later, he gave Tanner a bloody nose and a fat lip. Max was suspended for a week. When the school notified his mom about the suspension, all hell broke loose.

She smacked him upside the head over and over again and managed to make him feel two inches tall in two different languages. "¡Debes tener caca en tu cerebro! If you ever get suspended again, mijo, then I'll personally ship you off to some country where child labor is legal because we have no fucking money for a babysitter, and there's no fucking way you're staying home completely unsupervised for a week!"

Max sat there feeling 80% petrified and 20% indignant. He let her rip into him for an hour nonstop. He had no regrets.

When Max returned to school after his "week off," a strange phenomenon occurred. He thought everyone was going to judge him as harshly as his mom did, but, instead, the popular kids welcomed him with open arms, girls started talking to him more, and Tanner was labeled as a sniveling little bitch whom no one wanted to befriend anymore.

This shift was all very weird and very new to Max. Less noticeable than the condescending snarkiness that his classmates had reserved for him when they deemed him lesser than, there was a much more subtle, slow-moving toxicity that tiptoed behind Max's sudden rise to excellence. Admiration fueled by envy attracted many friendly faces—but few friends.

Surrounded by these "friendly faces," Max's childhood in Temecula was no longer a lonely one, but Lexi remained his only true friend. Secretly, everyone else thought he was kind of an asshole. A pretentious one, too. But Max didn't give a damn.

It felt good to be on top for once.