Adam, Chapter One
Adam was there — on top of him, hitting him. He broke his glasses.
Everyone gathered around, asking: “What happened? What’s wrong? Adam?! Standing up for himself?”
There were laughs, shouts, and screams
Adam barely heard them. His heartbeat thudded so loud it drowned out the noise.
His hands wouldn’t stop trembling. Was it anger? Fear? Maybe both.
He hated this part.
The part right after the fight. The part where he sat in the principal’s office, facing questions he couldn’t answer.
“Why did you snap? Again?”
He knew why, deep down. Years of being “the Syrian kid.”At first, as a kid, he almost thought it was just a silly nickname.
But now... the insults kept growing.
Adam’s childhood wasn’t the greatest. He ended up in the Kuwait three years old after the Syrian Revolution and moved around a lot — going to seven different schools and suffering from racism.
He grew up as the middle child, with a tough father, a depressed older brother, a much younger sister Layla whom he adored, and his mom, Jasmine.
He finally settled atArrow High School, though he still couldn’t stop himself from getting into yet another fight — about his ethnicity, obviously.
Freshman year, Adam met his huge friend group — more like a cult or a family, call it whatever you want. They always had each other’s backs. Yet they also bullied everyone else, they saw it as part of their sense of humor. They even bullied Adam for liking a girl in his class, Bibi.
Luckily, he was blessed with friends who would go around the school shouting at whoever mockingly called him “Syrian.” Like Karim. And when he was too much of a coward to stand up to someone who called his little sister a bitch in 8th grade, Qasem would say, “I’ll fight him for you if you want.”
Sophomore year, a huge fight happened. Adam and Karim got expelled, but they still chose to spam and mock a freshman girl’s account — Jade. But Jade didn’t find it funny, so she fired back. They despised her, bullied her even more, and most of them didn’t even know why they were mocking that innocent freshman — they just went along because their friends did. Especially Adam.
Adam, after his expulsion, was at his lowest, but his friends didn’t know it, he never showed it. His family kept blaming him and couldn’t stand him anymore — he had made them proud by getting into one of the best schools in Kuwait, and now he had thrown it all away.
Someone — or let’s say some girl — had texted him before. He acted unbothered and forgot about it. But during one of his depressive episodes, he noticed a familiar notification. Something shifted inside him — he was bored, vulnerable.
