I don't see why people make such a big deal about appearances in a district where everyone's supposed to be exactly the same.

I've been told that I at least look normal, which I guess is a blessing since apparently what's inside my head is hopelessly abnormal i never really took the time to imagine what other people thought about my looks because i never take time to notice theirs when the world moves with lightning fast drumroll heartbeats that won't slow down enough to let me care and twisted beyond hope of repair. I'm your average guy in his late teens, 5'8", maybe a little on the "full figured" side at 180 pounds. Not exactly the poster child for the dangers of obesity, but no body builder either. No overly noticeable musculature except for my arms, but having strong arms kind of comes with the territory when you spend the majority of your time beating the hell out of stuff with drumsticks. Solid bone structure, broad shoulders, legs a bit on the gangly side in proportion with the rest of me, big, clumsy hands and feet. I'm easy to overlook in a crowd, especially when everyone's wearing these damnable gray jumpsuits sometimes i do things to mine like doodle all over the fabric with permanent marker or rip pieces from the fabric because i don't want to be so lost in a sea of gray people with gray thoughts in this bleak place where no one can find an excuse to smile or similarly lackluster government-issue clothing.

Mirrors have never held my interest for too long i'd have to stand still to get a good look at myself and i just can't do that when the rhythm of life makes my veins tingle and i have to movemovemove like the world will end if i stop because for me it will but after a lifetime of fleeting glances, I have a decent knowledge of my own features. My mother says I have a baby face, a fact that I'm rather indifferent to since any childishness it might betray usually disappears under a few days' growth of scruff since shaving just takes too long and requires patience and finesse and everything I lack until one of my more fashion-forward female friends gives me the good old J, love you, but you're not rocking the mountain man look speech and all but shoves a razor into my hand. But I can see where the whole "baby face" title would come from, a juvenile air given off by a wide, undefined jawline and cheeks that never really lost their baby fat, pale skin (but everyone in this place is pale, living in nature's basement) smooth and unblemished by some fortuitous twist of genetics that never left me with acne problems. Perhaps my screwed-up mind was enough misfortune for one body. Full-ish lips, not-too-angular nose, wide baby-blue eyes with vision typically obstructed by a shock of straight but disheveled light brown hair that I usually can't be bothered to fix… There's been the poor sucker on occasion that's actually described me as angelic.

But that's obviously before they get to know me.

I can't stay still.

They noticed it early on, my mother, my teachers, anyone who came into any sort of contact with me. I've never been able to focus on one thing at a time (it's so boring, just sitting around and waiting for things to come to you), and there's something about that fact that's apparently different or bad or wrong - In this district, they all mean the same thing. There's a name for it, Attention Deficit Hypersomethingorother it's everywhere and it mixes things together until i can't think and have to move so it goes away but i can't focus and all i hear is everything at once but to me, it doesn't have a title. It's being alive, it's bouncing off the walls when they want me to sit down, it's living all caught up in a chaotic but somehow oddly organized, rapid, fever-pitched rhythm that no one else seems to hear.

I march to the beat of a different drum.

But hell, anything to do with a drum, I'll jump on it. For someone so flaky and flighty, it's odd that there's someting in the world I'm so fixated on. They were all ecstatic when they found out that banging on things with sticks was something I could actually focus on, and so my obsession has been indulged in the form of an intricately-built set that resides in my room and an hour out of my schedule every day that allows me to play to my heart's content. I don't think they really understand why when i play all of this noise in my head disappears under the beat and for once it's all i can hear see feel live breathe and i don't feel quite so much like i'm drowning under the giant mess of light and sound drumming seems to be the only thing that keeps me from pinging around like a hamster on meth, but that's all right. I don't need their understanding. Come to think of it, being misunderstood is half the fun.

"Jace, you are not your ADHD. It doesn't define you." How many times have I heard that? Sometimes it's frustrating and edging on infuriating when they don't get that it's impossible for me to not be defined by something that consumes my mind to the point that i can't make sense of things very well because i can never slow down enough to get a good look at them and life is nothing but a brightbright colored blur of movement that's wonderful and awful and exhilarating at the same time it's ingrained into every tiny piece of my inner workings. It's in everything from my gung-ho, usually bright and sunny attitude i have to go run drum leap move because if i don't the world caves in to how easily I become frustrated the longer i work on something the more i have to stay still and the harder everything gets and i hate it all so much to the rebellious streak that no one's ever been able to tame i can't live in this cage too much longer because life in here makes it hard to breathe and all i want is to be free to drum until it all goes away and i don't have to try so hard to be like everyone else anymore.

So I'm different. It's not nearly as big of a deal as the higher-ups make it out to be, but no one ever seems to listen when I tell them that. They refuse to see the fact that there's beauty in this rushed, blurred world of mine. They only see the hell it puts me and them through, even though there's so much more than just the bad parts. Everything here is black and white, and I am wrong for seeing my world in grays and, even more scandalously, vivid technicolor. Once people notice the fact that I'm always, always drumming with or on or against something (pencils on a desk, open palms on my lap, twitching fingers on any hard surface it doesn't stop everything from swirling together and crushing down like the weight of the world but i have to move or it all gets to be too much that can be found) or see the subtle shift in the schedule of my arm marked Music Therapy: 1600h-1700h, they judge me. And I guess that's okay. When you're born into this cookie-cutter society, I suppose different things like me are bound to freak you out a little. It isn't like I'm a pariah, but they all act like I can't see that glimmer behind their eyes that oozes unspoken pity and i've never been all that good with talking to people because i'm too fast for them and everything just blurs together and it's all so damn distracting that i feel like the world is about to burst into light and color and all the things i can never explain when the doctor asks me about them something else that I can never quite place.

Revulsion? Maybe.

I hate telling my story.

It's gotten so boring, repeating it to the endless stream of doctors and teachers that try to figure out exactly where my mother or society or my genetic cocktail went wrong. Always that word. Wrong. Different. Odd.

They always like to blame my mother, the doctors do. Saying all that stress she put herself through running through the wilderness with during the stage of her pregnancy that was crucial to my mental development made me chemically unbalanced. She blames herself, too, although I try my best to tell her it's not her fault because my twin sister Devyn is disturbingly normal and that negates anything the doctors accuse her of every time i have to stand still to talk i start drumming or twitching or i'll get off topic and it really doesn't help because it only makes her cry but i can't even try to stand still because my mind won't let me function if i do and so sometimes i just drum as hard as i can so i don't hear her sobbing over what a mess her baby boy is, but I've never been able to convince her of that. She just cries and cries sometimes when she thinks I can't hear her, sobbing to the faded photograph on her bedside table of a man I suppose must be my father that he looks so much like you and what have I done and oh, I should have just stayed in Twelve.

She never would say why she left, but whenever I asked she would get this awful, deep-down sad look in her eyes. I learned eventually not to talk about it. I made her sad enough as it was.

I suppose I must have been normal when I was really little since being a hyperactive infant is nigh unto impossible, but once I got on my feet, Mom says there was no stopping me. I was into everything, toddling as fast as I could into all sorts of trouble it really wasn't my fault but i just always had to be moving be running be doing something because i didn't have it in me to ever ever stop and mayhem. And to think, for the first five years of my life, everyone just thought I was an abnormally rambunctious little boy. When I went to school, though, it became apparent that something was wrong.

I couldn't focus on anything. I was a five-year-old lightning bolt, unstoppable and so full of pent-up energy that no one knew what to do with me. I wouldn't sit still i tried so hard i really did but no matter what i always had to move because if i didn't everything would rush together and it was scary and i'd end up standing up from my chair or bouncing up and down or playing with pencils or drumming on my desk because stillness just didn't work for anything, and I discovered pretty quickly that I couldn't learn the way the other kids did. I'd get sidetracked halfway through my ABC's, I'd get frustrated learning to tie my shoes because my fingers were too jumpy and unsteady to do it effectively, hell, I never even learned to color inside the lines because it took too much focus. My teachers had no idea why I was such a little hellion, but it was generally assumed that I was a royal pain because I chose to be. I was in third grade before they finally got their heads out of their asses and realized that no one was this hyper by choice.

I was a pretty popular guy in school the teachers all hated me because i couldn't stay still and even though i ended up in detention over and over and over again i just couldn't stop for fear that the rushing in my head would get too bigbrightloud and i would disappear into it forever among my peers, although the adults running the place never quite took a liking to me. That's probably why it took them so long to actually send me to a doctor for evaluation other than writing me off as a pint-sized ne'er-do-well that sought attention because he didn't have a father. But when I finally went, took all kinds of IQ tests and Rorschach tests and sat in a chair for a torturous amount of time, twitching and drumming little fills against the taut leather of the armrest, the diagnosis gave me a whole new persona.

Don't get me wrong, my teachers still thought I was a pain in the ass. But now they looked at me with something that was almost like pity (which I hated) mixed with annoyance that they were now actually forced to put up with my antics in class since I had a legitimate mental problem other than being a rebellious little bastard. They tried to give me pills, but I'd throw them away when no one was looking, hide them under my tongue and spit them out when the nurse had her back turned. I hated those things, hated them more than I could ever hate the existence I had grown up accustomed to they took my world of color and rushing light and made it dark and dull and monochromatic until the part of me that the pills couldn't drown pounded at the walls they built around my mind and screamed to be set free and i was a zombie and out of it and dead and it was the worst thing i've ever felt in my life despite how hard the condition made school. Even though the doctors said my IQ was unusually high, I went all through my academic career with piss-poor grades, shocking the world with every grade I managed to pass by the skin of my teeth.

I was ten when Ms. Pickering saved my sanity.

Honestly, the woman is a saint, and even after I stopped having her for class I would drop by the school when I had time to go say hi to her but sometimes i'd get distracted and forget where i was going and end up wandering around the halls until mom came and tracked me down and yelled about how worried she'd been but i could never pay attention because the world is too slow and it can't hold my interest no matter how hard it tries on the odd day when there was a gap in my schedule. There had always been something about music class that allowed me to retain slightly more focus than I could with math or science or reading, made the mad rushing in my head calm down until I was almost able to function like a normal human being. Ms. Pickering thought being different made me something besides a disappointment, and I loved her for that. She was pretty and young back then, probably twenty years old and freshly escaped from the confines of District One, coming to Thirteen with nothing but her sunny smiles and a head full of more musical knowledge than Bach himself could shake a stick at. I can still remember the elation I felt when I heard energy isn't a bad thing, Jace, some of the world's greatest performing artists have ADHD for the first time. She noticed me drumming on my desk when we were learning about the lines and spaces of the treble clef, thought it would be a good idea to let me borrow a beat-up old set of bongos from the music closet for my own use.

Total turnaround. That's the only way to describe it. With those little drums in my lap, I found my focus. I could tap out complicated rhythms to my heart's content, and lo and behold, I could actually focus during history, I could sit still long enough to do the reading assignments. I could make it through math without bouncing in my chair. Those bongos were the only thing that allowed me to have the slimmest hope of getting anywhere in school. Finally realizing that Ms. Pickering had been onto something with the drums, the higher-ups began integrating special time for music into my schedule every day. Sometime between the end of school and dinner, I could manufacture intricate rhythms for one glorious hour, finally feeling the world slow down and things start to mesh into something I could work with. I was given music books, I was given sticks, I was given my drum set.

My mother and sister were given earplugs and fervent good luck's.

Finally able to wield a weapon other than the awful zombie pills against the convoluted mess that was my warped paradigm, I made it through middle school and high school. Admittedly, my grades weren't the best and I made more than one teacher rip their hair out in frustration, but I made it through, which was more than anyone, even my own mother she bawled at my graduation because she was so sure that i'd never do it and i really wanted to just be calm and happy and stand there and hug her but even when she was in my arms my fingers were drumming out little rhythms against her back and she got that sad look that she gets when she realizes that i'll always be off in this faraway place of mine would have thought me capable of. My schooling complete, the really scary part loomed ahead: being a constructive, good, boring little District Thirteen citizen.

Just like my teachers, the career assignment board just couldn't figure out what to do with me. There was no hope for me in a desk job, I lost focus too easily for mindless manual labor or mundane, repetitive tasks, and unfortunately, there wasn't a job that involved being able to sit around and drum all day. That is, until Ms. Pickering saved my ass yet again.

Normally, they would have laughed in her face for requesting a teacher's aide for a music class. But it wasn't like they could find anywhere else to put me, and at least she had proven that under her watchful eye I was a little less volatile. It's a pretty sweet gig, too. I get to play any kind of percussion instrument I can lay my hands on, the little kids think I'm a riot, and I've had a couple of really sweet jam sessions with the older ones. It gets hard sometimes i had to file music one time and it took me almost two hours even though there were only about fifteen sheets of paper because i started going through all the cabinets and even though ms. pickering just smiled and laughed a little bit i felt awful because i really can't do anything right but overall, I have no complaints. I could have it way worse.

No amount of music therapy or even medication will ever stop the labels, the stares, the subtle narrowing of eyes that no one thinks I notice. The doctors don't seem to realize that they're a bunch of filthy liars, because for all of that pretty nonsense they spout about this strange way I see the world not being what defines me as a person, there's about 95 percent of this district's population that will tell them otherwise. People judge the book by its twitchy, not quite there cover on a constant basis, and I'm past the point of trying to prove them wrong. Being a disappointment is something I'm all too accustomed to, and letting them all believe what they want about me is just too easy, especially when making them see that I'm not just the twitchy kid with the drums would require me to slow down.

It's okay if they want to hate me. It just means they can't handle this.

Codeword:

[main;82ABA7]
[speech;297D95]
[emphasis;A0D4A4]
[adhd;278064]
[other;EEE7D5]

Faceclaim is Spencer Smith.

Just watch this animal. Dear lord, I want to play drums just as a result of standing with my jaw on the floor in awe of his crazy skill. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is some serious talent.

March Hare in the D13 Alice In Wonderland plot.
Mr. Schuester in the D13 Glee plot.

cutiee!