Me

New York City. A kingdom for the wealthy, a hovel for the poor. A place where only the rich and famous are admired, whereas the poor and weak are ignored. A perfect place for a person who doesn't want any attention to start over.

I've been told I have a timeless face. Some people say I look thirty, others say I look a day over seventeen. My name is Zeke White, and I am twenty years old. I've just rented a small apartment on the Upper East Side, just around the corner of a high school prized for the many great artists it has produced.

Am I a troubled person? Yeah. Yeah, you could say that. I was abandoned by my parents as an infant, and jumped around from group home to group home, until the age of twelve, when I ran away and started living on the streets. I grew up in the dark alleys of Los Angeles, where I learned a valuable lesson from the strange people who moved into the city believing that they could become the next big thing. They taught me that 'fate' and 'destiny' and 'the realization of one's dreams' were all fake. There's no such this as 'tempting fate', or 'achieving one's destiny in life'. People either strike it rich, or they don't. And the people who fail end up like me- living in the streets, sometimes stealing, other times begging for money. The only way to ensure that one's hopes and dreams come true is not by letting fate take its course, but by bending fate, crushing it, melting it, then reforming it into something of your own. Something that you want. The only way to get what you want in life is by planning every single step out. Thinking of all the consequences and effects it could cause, one by one, changing every little detail until you have a perfect plan.

I didn't know that as a kid. I didn't know that I had to make a plan. So I screwed up. What would you expect of a kid living off of scraps in the streets of the craziest city on Earth? I won't tell you exactly what happened. But let's just say I did some pretty messed up stuff.

But all that's in the past now. I'm in a new city, all the way on the other side of the country. My childhood horrors left me when I left LA. And now, a new chapter of my life begins.

Or so I thought.