Chapter Text
During his suspension Akk was in a strange mood. Or, well, moods. With his parents accepting his sexuality and his boyfriend, and Kan and Wat and Thua not hating him for what he had done, he was happier than he had been in years. And even when his friends and Aye had left to go back to the city – Kan, Wat and Aye still had to go to their classes, after all – he mostly felt calm, knowing that he wasn’t alone in facing whatever the future held.
And it was great; finally, Akk could see a future for himself. The fear of losing his scholarship had been looming over his head for years and had dictated so much of his life, that he hadn’t dared to think about a life after Suppalo. It all seemed to matter so little, now.
He didn’t know what the school would throw at him when he came back after his suspension, but Akk knew that somehow, despite everything, he would be okay.
But other times, particularly in the evenings, when his parents were sound asleep and unable to keep him company, he felt the old desperation creep in. He was afraid of what would happen once he got back to school. How would his classmates think of him now? What if the principal decided to take away his scholarship after all? Would the World Remembers gang forgive him?
Akk spent his days with his feelings swinging back and forth like a pendulum, switching from his newfound optimism to the old guilt and fear.
He felt like he was going mad, but when he complained about it to Aye on the phone, his boyfriend was confident that he would get better with time and a good therapist. Akk trusted him enough on this to believe him.
On the fourth day at his parents’ house, he got a call from Teacher Chadok. The principal had decided to extend his and Thua’s suspension for another week. It sent Akk’s anxiety into overdrive.
Another week of depending on Aye to send him his notes. Another week that would make its way onto his report card. And no way of knowing if that second week was really the last one.
After he took his pills with shaky hands, he ran to the beach, hopped onto one of his family’s boats and took off towards his secret island. He desperately needed the comfort of his favorite hiding place.
Once there, he sat in the sand for hours, leaning back on his hands and watching the seagulls circle over his head. One in particular caught his eye. Something about it reminded him of Aye, with its beauty, the energetic flaps of its wings and the flashy way it cut through the air, as if it was showing off its skills. He took a picture of it and sent it to Aye, saying as much.
He put the phone down again and turned his head back to the seagull as it glid across the sky. The onsetting sunset painted a beautiful glowing orange hue on its feathers, as if the sun was using the seagull’s body as its canvas. The wind ruffled the bird’s fathers above and Akk’s hair below. It felt like the soothing caress of a hand. Akk felt himself slowly relax deeper into the sand under his palms, tipping his head slightly back and closing his eyes.
He stayed like this for a little while longer before he got up and slowly made his way back to the boat, much calmer and ready to tell his parents that he’d be staying a week longer after all.
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Akk had never been an artsy person, heck, the last time he had drawn much of anything was back in elementary school, but something about his photo of the bird set off something inside him. Before he knew it, he had already reached for a spare paper on his desk, and a pencil.
His first few sketches of the seagull looked no different from the attempts at drawing he had made back when he was a toddler, but after a couple of tries, zooming in and out on the photo, he started to make sense of the anatomy of the bird, of how the different parts of its body worked together to keep it suspended in the air.
When he was done with one, he started over again on another paper, repeating the process until his hand cramped and his desk was littered with sketches of the seagull.
Once he felt like he had the seagull down, he tried to challenge himself and drew new things. Thus started a new obsession: Akk sketched everything around his parents’ house during his suspension, from the bushes by the door to the flags on the boats.
One time, when Aye called in the evening, as he did every day, Akk put him on speaker while he doodled mindlessly in a sketchbook his mother had bought him the day before. After they ended the call Akk looked down and inspected his drawing. He had drawn a campfire.
He suddenly felt reminded of the one they had sat by after Aye had caught Akk with the lighter at school. A thought came to him.
When he had first become a prefect, he had thought of the rule breakers and rebels at his school as a destructive force, trampling on Suppalo’s rules for fun and obliterating the delicate order his P’Mes worked so hard to uphold.
But now, looking at his drawing made him realize that it had never been that way. Jumnong, Jumnun and Jumnian’s rebellion had never been destructive, on the contrary. Akk smiled to himself at the memory of their paintings and the carefully sewn doll that he had almost burned down.
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Following his suspension, he made a habit out of drawing in every spare moment where he wasn’t preoccupied with his studies, or his clingy boyfriend. He often stood on his little balcony with a notebook in his hand and studied the flight of the city birds.
Aye noticed his new hobby – as he seemed to notice everything else about Akk – and often took him to a park near his house, where they would bring bread to feed the doves. Then, Akk would take out his sketchbook and draw them while his boyfriend either looked over his shoulder, or stared at his face with a sparkle in his eyes that turned into a sly grin as Akk grew more and more flustered by the attention.
Akk found that his new hobby calmed his usual anxiety a lot. Never before had he stepped into a classroom on exam days without feeling his chest painfully constrict with nerves. Now, he reveled in how calm he felt while he waited for the teacher to hand out the papers.
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The night before their official graduation ceremony, Akk, Kan and Wat went out to drink. Aye was visiting his grandparents with his mother, and Namo had asked Thua to help him write some application letters for university. That had left the three former prefects to celebrate alone.
They had brought a cooler full of beer bottles and found a quiet secluded spot not far from Akk’s apartment to settle down on the grass.
They were all in a good mood, buoyed by the thought of leaving Suppalo behind them for good, ready to begin a new, exciting chapter in their life soon. The final exams had left them worn out and desperate to catch up on some sleep, but all that was soon forgotten as their beer bottles got emptier and emptier as the night went on. Soon their cheeks were stained red and their speech became slurred from the beer. That didn’t deter them from talking. For hours, the three boys sat there and reminisced about the years they had spent together in Suppalo.
Kan started singing the opening of some show Thua and him had started watching together. The alcohol made him a tad too loud and out of key, but Akk was too drunk to care. His own laughter was echoing off the buildings around them in a way he would have cringed at had he been sober.
At some point their energy reached a level at which they could not sit still on the grass anymore. They abandoned their cooler – Akk couldn’t be persuaded to leave his backpack behind, though – and got up to explore the neighborhood, Akk and Wat shushing Kan repeatedly to keep him from waking up the people sleeping in their homes.
They kept walking – or rather: staggering around – until they reached a dilapidated, apparently empty building. The boys decided they were tired from running around and needed a place to sit down again, and Wat suggested going into the abandoned building to take a rest there; so they did.
While Akk and Kan strained to remove one of the wooden planks that were nailed over the windows, Wat had taken a flashlight out of Akk’s backpack, and was pointing it shakily at his two friends. Akk squinted in the bright light.
They tried to be quiet, but between their drunken giggling and the wood breaking off at the edges as it gave in to the teens’ strength, Akk doubted that the neighbors didn’t hear them. He prayed that no one would call the police on them.
Once the planks were removed the boys climbed inside the building and took a look around the rooms on the first floor. Kan wanted to climb up to the second floor, but promptly got scolded by Wat, who was afraid of the stairs collapsing under his friend.
“Just because you’d be a shitty engineer doesn’t mean the guys who worked on these stairs were…”, Kan grumbled, but let Wat drag him away from the steps.
While his companions sat down on the ground to rest their legs, Akk kept walking around the room.
The walls were adorned by multiple graffiti. Some were clearly done by seasoned artists, others were more amateurish. Akk smiled at the Tul + Ploy 4eva in wonky green letters and found himself wondering what it would look like with his and Aye’s names instead. If he wrote something similar, what would his boyfriend say? He would probably laugh, but would ultimately find it cute, like he did with most things Akk did, for some reason.
He suddenly wished he could add to the paintings on the wall. The thought of leaving an artwork for others to so see, a physical reminder of this night, made his heart race with want.
Want. Doing graffiti wasn’t a reasonable, or useful thing to want. It wasn’t something he could put on his resume, or his university applications; it was the sort of thing he would have denied himself for those reasons a few months ago.
He had wanted Aye in the same way: beyond any reason, but badly enough that he couldn’t ignore it.
He still remembered how ashamed he had been of that longing, in those first weeks of confusion after Aye had transferred. He had told himself that he wanted nothing to do with Aye, but really, Akk had wanted nothing more than for Aye to keep looking at him. Now, the want – because it hadn’t diminished in the slightest – was a part of himself he had learned to embrace.
He had started making art because it had helped him keep his anxiety in check. Then, somewhere along the lines art had become not only a source of comfort, but energy as well;
Akk loved the excitement buzzing through his body whenever he started working on a particularly challenging drawing, and the sense of fulfilment after he finished it.
Nothing made him feel more free than art did.
So, he had started art because it had been useful to him, yes; but what if it he didn’t do it just for that purpose; what if he did it purely for the feeling of freedom, or out of that strange desire that he couldn’t explain? Maybe it didn’t matter if it was useful, or why he was doing it. Maybe he should still embrace it, like he had done with his feelings for Aye.
Akk then remembered that he carried a tube of black acrylic paint in his backpack. He took the flashlight from Wat and stepped up to one of the walls.
The acrylics and his small brush were entirely unfit for the concrete of the wall. The paint looked clumpy on its grey, uneven ground and took ages to apply. Akk found himself wishing for a couple of graffiti spray paint cans as he worked, flashlight between his teeth.
But when he finally stepped away from the wall, he couldn’t help the proud giddy laugh that escaped him. He interrupted his friends’ drunken conversation and pointed at his finished painting:
Shaky strokes assembled to form the black outline of their high school’s crest. But the rays of the Suppalo sun extended beyond far the circle, turning into a flock of flying birds at its tips. At the bottom, he had written the words: Finally free
It was an amateurish graffiti, to put it nicely. He wasn’t used to the medium he was painting on (yet. Supplied a small voice in his head. He wasn’t used to graffitiing yet.) and it showed, but to Akk, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever created.
The euphoria he was feeling apparently affected his friends as well, because Wat shot up off the ground and let out a whooping sound at the sight of the painting on the wall. He stumbled forward and into Akk’s arms, and looked between the graffiti and his friend, like he couldn’t believe that he had made it.
Akk couldn’t blame him, with how rule abiding he had been in the past. He still was, to an extent. And in a moment of clarity in his tipsy haze, it hit Akk that they were
1. Trespassing on private property and
2. He had just graffitied on said property.
Just a few months ago, Akk would have probably popped a vein at the thought of doing something illegal, but in his current state, it just made him dissolve into drunk laughter at the irony of it.
Wat and Kan looked at each other, confused by their friend’s behaviour, but quickly joined in on the laughter.
Akk took out his phone and snapped a picture of the painting, so he could look at it again, and also so he could show Aye tomorrow.
His eyes met Kan’s, and the latter smiled at him. Akk thought he could detect a hint of pride in his friend’s gaze. He felt like he was about to cry.
Since all their secrets had been revealed, their entire friend group had grown so much closer than they had been before. Especially with Kan, Akk had developed a deep understanding of each other’s struggles during their last months in the prefect club.
Kan knew how much damage Suppalo’s rules had done to Akk. He understood how much of a step forward it was for Akk, to break another set of rules on this particular night.
When they eventually left the abandoned building to go back to Akk’s apartment and catch at least a little bit of sleep before the graduation ceremony, Akk cast a last glance back at his drawing, a resolve hardening in his chest.
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A week later, the cashier in an art supply shop looked up from the counter as a tall teenager approached him with a bright smile and five cans of spray paint in his arms.