Chapter Text
Lunch. In the cafeteria. Filled with unstable teenagers, food fights, weirdos, and who knows what else. Ew.
"Yo, Egg!" I call to my best friend, Eggchan, who's sitting at our usual table away from the rest of the chaos that is Unstable High School. His short, bright white hair covers the top half of his face, most noticeably his large single eye. He's wearing his usual clothes, a black suit with a bright magenta tie.
"Dude. Wemmbu, why are you so late? You know I managed to finish all of our math's homework before you managed to get here right?" Eggchan scolds me. I push him with my hip and slide into the cold metal seat next to him.
"Bro, whatever, I got held back by the Principal because apparently staying in the bathroom for an entire lesson is 'putting my education at risk'" I scoff, making air quotes with both my pointer fingers. Rolling my eyes, I start eating my pre-packed lunch made by my parent's chef and try to keep up a conversation with Egg about our studies, but eventually ending up failing and succumbing to by skittish tendencies and fidgeting with my hands. The cafeteria slowly fizzles out to only a few friend groups, as people have finished their lunches and go out to do god knows what. Eggchan and I noticed this when we first arrived at Unstable High, so we usually stay in the cafeteria to avoid the rest of the people in our school.
"What's up, losers?" Unfortunately, that didn't mean everyone. FlameFrags slides into the seat opposite us, and folds his arms onto the table. Most days, I notice Flame alone by himself or bullying other people, but whenever I ask him about it, he always says something about how he 'doesn't need other people' and is a 'solo player', whatever that means. Despite this, Flame always manages to sit with me and Egg at least once a week, despite repeated attempts at denying that he liked being around us. It was nice.
"Bro, I can't believe we got fucking detention on the first day of school. It's not like we even did anything! People watching us fight is their own problem, like why does it even matter." I complain. This always somehow happens. Flame and I fight, and once it's finished some random teacher thinks it's their job to get in our business and give both of us detention. Like, at least pick a side at this point.
"Literally, bro, and this other dumbass new teacher gave me another detention. I'm not even going bro, like bro, why would I even waste my time doing that." Flame agrees, rolling his eyes.
He and I look at each other, or more accurately I look at his blindfold and he magically looks at my eyes, and at the same time we turn our heads toward Eggchan, who's peacefully reading an old book, already tuning out our conversation as usual.
"You know, it would be nice to have a teacher's pet at detention with us, right Flame?" I say a bit louder. Thankfully, Flame gets the hint.
"..yeah, someone who knows us as well." he says as well.
Smiling, we both stare at Eggchan until he finally looks up and noticing what we've been suggesting.
"Are you serious? You can't expect me to get detention every single time you guys do as well. Do you know how much other stuff I could be doing instead?" He squints his one eye, sighing dramatically. After another 5 minutes straight of convincing Eggchan, he finally gives in and joins us in detention. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to ask him if he actually has it, right?
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Detention, as expected, is uneventful. Flame and I throw paper planes at each other. The teacher yells at us. Eggchan tries to tune everyone out and read. Not surprisingly, the class troublemaker (that's a lot coming from me), Spoke, is also there - for something stupid I'm assuming. But surprisingly the new kid, the green avian or whatever, from homeroom is there. I look at him, and he seems to be busy with some kind of work. Why would someone that does work be in detention?
The bird is sitting next to Spoke, which is also surprising because Spoke usually doesn't have any friends. I mean, he has Jumper, Derapchu, and Minute, but they never seemed to actually want to hang out with him. I noticed, of course, because Spoke always seemed to be the person that everyone hung out with, but he was also always the person who was stuck sitting alone in the cafeteria after everyone left. Looking back to earlier today, I realised that he was also sitting with the bird during lunch, instead of being by himself as usual. A part of me felt bad seeing him everyday like this, but what can you do? It's high school. It reminds me of a time before Eggchan moved into my house, way back before I met him as a kid. I shake my head out of the memory before I can go deeper into it.
"Egg, when can we go home???" I whine, hitting my head against the desk and groaning.
"We have 5 more minutes. Just hold on for a bit then we can go home, Your parents are still away on that business trip out of the country so we can do whatever we want at home."
I roll my head to the side until my cheek is flat against the desk, and I look at the wall. The normally annoyingly bright and optimistic posters are looking darker than usual, and weirdly ghostlike shape materialises in front of it. What the fuck.
I get out of my chair and walk towards the shape, ignoring the teacher's protests, and look at the abnormal thing. I reach my hand out to the dark fog shape, but when I touch it, it instantly disappears, as if it was never there.
"HEY! Wemmbu, get back to your seat, unless you want to stay here another hour?" The teacher scolds me, and I reluctantly trudge back to my seat and flop down into my chair next to Eggchan and Flame.
"Bro, what are you even doing? You're going to get us another detention, bro, stop." Flame says, clearly concerned with getting 3 detentions on just the first day.
Eggchan, who's a bit more observant, notices my weird expression.
"What happened? You looked like you saw a ghost?"
I laugh, "Yeah, I guess I did."