Aljoša Rodinger, pen name AL Rodinger, is a 21-year-old writer and amateur boxer currently studying history and English literature at the University of Maribor. He was born on 1.7.1999 in Maribor, Slovenia and attended the Rada Robič Elementary School in Limbuš. He began to take interest in the English language from a very early age and by the beginning of his 6th grade was already a fluent speaker of the language. After finishing his elementary school education, he attended the First Grammar School in Maribor as a student of the classics, where he was exposed to a lot of in-depth history, as well as both Latin and ancient Greek. It is there where he began and later on finished writing his book, Killjoys. It is also around this time where he began practicing boxing. After graduating, he enrolled in the University of Maribor as a student of both history and English literature. Currently, he is also employed at the Marbior Slovene National Theatre as an usher. 

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, and - which is more - you'll be a man, my son.”

These are the words that start our tale of four friends, their deep and personal friendship and their own coming of ages, where they finally come to terms with their own flaws and manage to find perfection in being imperfect and broken. It is a story about accepting yourself with all of your strengths and weakness, living life with all of its ups and downs, experiencing pain and joy, confronting both your inner demons as well as the people closest to you. 

Our character’s lives are entwined with discrimination, hatred, addiction and death, yet it always seems that there is some resemblance of light, of contempt at the end of the dark and long tunnel before us. We just simply have to find a way to get to it and make our own path.

Killjoys

They finally reached the cosmetics store when Arnaldo finally let go of Laura who arched her eyebrows and glared at him. Arnaldo paid no attention to her and just reached into the pocket of his vest and pulled out his pack of Silk Cut cigarettes and his silver lighter. 


He placed a cigarette into his mouth, flipped the lighter and lit the cigarette.


"You go on in. I'll wait for you out here," said Arnaldo out of the corner of his mouth. Laura's eyes softened and her lips curved into a sad frown before she nodded and stepped inside.


The place wasn't particularly big, but there were still rows upon rows of beauty products, shampoos, deodorants, aftershave, soap-etc. Laura walked over to the aisle with hair dye and began searching.


"Red, no. Blue, not gonna happen. Black, nope. Green, defiantly no! Where is- Ah! There it is!" she thought to herself as she pulled out a small packet of purple hair dye. She was just about ready to pay up and leave when something out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Over the aisles, she noticed a dark brown mohawk. 


"No, it couldn't be-Could it?" she thought to herself as she made her way over to the next aisle. 


The embodiment of rage, strength, manhood and testosterone-was standing in a cosmetic ship scanning through the hair dye aisle with a small red shopping basket already filled with hair dye. 


"Ok, so I'm not imagining this. I gotta say, of all the places I'd expect him to be, this is pretty low on the list. I swear to God if I start seeing him by my gynaecologist I'm going to start going to church more often." 


Lost in her thought, she didn't notice the hair dye slipping out of her hand. The box fell to the ground and Sven slowly turned his head to Laura.


"You dropped something," he said nonchalantly, snapping Laura out of her daze and she quickly bent down to pick up her box. 


"Same thing as you apparently. My natural hair colour is starting to rear its ugly head, so I needed to go and pick up a box of hair dye," he returned to scanning the shelves before placing another box of dark brown hair dye into his basket. 


"But once here, I figured why not just buy a whole bunch of em, to save future me some trouble. How come you don't keep your natural red hair colour?" 


At the mention of that, Laura froze. Her eyes widened and a single bead of sweat rolling down the side of her head.


"How does he know that? Literally only Arnaldo and Maria know that. How? Did Arnaldo snitch behind my back?"


"You're probably wondering how I managed to figure that out?" said Sven with a deep chuckle and Laura nodded. 


"I'll give you this, you do a pretty good job of hiding it. But..." he pointed at her eyebrows. 


"Red eyebrows and purple hair don't mix well together," Laura kicked herself mentally. 


"If you want, I can dye those eyebrows of yours. Make them the same colour as your hair," Laura looked at him questioningly. 


"And if you want, I can even dye your hair for you."


"And what would you know about hair dying?"


"Would you believe me if I told you I was blonde?" replied the Berserker with a smirk and Laura froze once again. 


"Hell, I can do it now. I got time," he said as he walked past Laura who was still petrified from shock. 


"You coming or what?" called out Sven from behind her.


Chapter 18