Chapter Text
Fugo is glaring at her across the desk. There’s a hole at the shoulder-seam of her blazer, again, and at this point Leone is starting to think she cuts them in herself.
“Stop that,” Leone tells her. Goes back to playing Spider Solitaire on the school’s beat-up computer.
Fugo continues glaring.
She sighs. “What did you want me to do? You did it right in front of me.”
Fugo rolls her eyes with an amazing amount of indignation for someone who just got caught selling commissioned English essays during phys ed.
Leone gives her a pointed glare. Cocks an eyebrow.
Fugo doesn’t waver under it. “You weren’t a snitch the last time I saw you,” she says.
Leone scowls.
“You were, actually, the opposite — “
“Yeah,” Leone cuts her off. “And I got busted for it, so.”
Fugo groans. Slumps in her chair.
“I can’t believe this,” she adds. “One kid gets caught selling their xan, in a school I don’t even go to, and now I’m no longer allowed to sell essays — “
“You were never allowed to sell essays.”
“Like, the clientele isn’t going to write their own now, you know that?”
Leone rubs at her eyes. “The clientele?”
“They’ll just keep flunking until some poor kid with a decent GPA gets forced into helping them out, and that kid will write their paper, and it’ll get turned in, and the same process you’re now stopping will have played out, just —” Fugo flings her hands out. “What? More slowly?”
Leone knows Fugo has a point. She also knows that one more wrong move on her behalf, and the teaching degree she spent the last five years of her life on won’t be worth shit. So she just sighs, shakes her head.
“Less profit for you.”
Fugo squints. “This is just to make me miserable?” She ponders on it. “Yeah, no, I’ll believe that.”
Leone holds back a snicker. “I need to keep myself entertained somehow.”
Leone Abbacchio is in her twenties, a recent university graduate, and a newly employed physical education teacher. Despite only being in the field for eight months, she’s already succeeded in getting herself fired once, and the only school willing to take her on afterwards also made her chaperone the student-run dance club (the club, thankfully, did not seem to currently have any members. Maybe her teaching method of making fifteen year olds do planks while she got existential at eight-thirty each morning dimmed the fire of their creative passions).
The first school she worked in didn’t make her chaperone anything. It was one of the fancier establishments, and her uncle had pulled a few strings to get her hired — Leone would have normally felt a little guilty over knowing her employment had less to do with how suited she was for the job (which — apparently — was not at all) and more with the fact that her uncle’s father-in-law used to kayak with the headmistress, but was assuaged by the knowledge that, if nepotism was already happening, there was no additional harm in her profiting of it. It wasn’t like she could make them fix their hiring process. And she had trusted herself to be good with kids. She’d always wanted to have some sort of a positive impact on the people around her.
Not a month in, she caught two sixteen year olds trying to snort Zoloft off the bathroom windowsill.
“What the fuck,” she could still remember herself saying.
(She wasn’t supposed to swear around students).
“Oh, shit.” The taller girl noticed her first, flipped around as if to cover the crime-scene. “A teacher.”
Leone had sure been one.
“That better not be what I think it is,” she threatened — both girls paled. The shorter one looked like she was considering crawling out through the window.
They ended up telling her most of the situation — that a senior guy had a prescription, and would exchange two pills for a boob pic, or something else of equal value.
“He’ll buy you alcohol too,” the girl had also told her. “He’s eighteen, so he can. But the store down the road doesn’t card anyone, so no one really pays him for that.”
Leone had realized, then, that society was broken in ways she could not really fix with a pedagogy degree.
She ended the talk by pulling up the list of known Zoloft side-effects and reading it out-loud, until the girls agreed that diarrhoea didn’t sound fun and assured her they’d no longer trade their mother's Valium for some guy's Sertaline.
Looking back, Leone could agree she was acting on some dumb shit impulses.
It took another six months for the whole thing to blow over — but the boob pic Zoloft guy got caught, and somewhere along the line someone told him the Goth PE Teacher knew what he was doing, and Leone could only assume he assumed she'd been the one to turn him in because he proceeded to insert her into the story in a way that, even with him unable to prove she knew of the extent of his low-scale drug empire, undoubtedly proved she knew of something, and then failed to report it.
Leone got fired to appease upset parents, but she could not deny; she deserved to get fired.
She is working in a less fancy school now — but she is working, so she’s not about to complain. Not even with the threat of having to monitor teenagers choreographing that tik-tok song hanging over her head. She’d learned her lesson.
Back in the present, Pannacotta Fugo heaves another over-dramatic sigh.
“What,” she snaps.
Fugo just sighs again. “I’m bored.”
Leone rolls her eyes. “Should’ve thought about that before you got caught.”
“Thanks for the feedback.”
Leone had first met Pannacotta Fugo back at her old job — Fugo was one of the special cases the school had warned her about, a kid that had skipped a good number of grades and was technically in college but still needed to go satisfy certain secondary education criteria, one of which seemed to be high school PE. Leone could understand that a kid with an IQ of however much you needed to be in college at thirteen wouldn’t enjoy dodgeball, so she mostly tended to let her slack off . The fact no one else in the class liked her much probably didn’t help. Leone had initially ascribed it to high school kids hating on anyone who in some way stood out, but after a few interactions with Fugo herself, started wondering if the kid was maybe just too mean to make friends.
Whatever it was, Fugo disappeared from class after two weeks. Leone had gone and reported it, because she was still playing by the rules then — got informed Fugo got into a physical altercation with one of the staff members and transferred.
Leone will never forget the look on Fugo’s face as she walked into the PE class, a month ago, and realized Leone Abbacchio was the new teacher. Again.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Fugo had said.
Abbacchio had blown her whistle. “No swearing.”
“Fuck you,” Fugo was already getting down into a plank. The 10-seconds-per-bad-word rule she’d previously installed was, apparently, still Pavloved into her mind. “Are you following me?”
“Yes,” Leone had deadpanned. “Got myself fired because I missed you that much.” Fugo wheeze-laughed, hands shaking after not even three seconds. “Get up before you hurt yourself.”
Leone will never admit it, but Fugo is one of her favourite students.
Rewind back to present — they’re sitting in the homeroom, and Fugo is still glaring, and Leone could have gone home an hour ago, but.
“I caught you charging fifteen euro for a two page essay,” she repeats herself (Fugo just rolls her eyes, again). “Was I supposed to not react? Not only is it against the rules, your prices are ridiculous.”
“It’s college level quality,” Fugo says.
“Fifteen euros.” Where did high-schoolers even find that kind of money.
“Return customers get discounts.”
A knock at the door saves Leone from having to answer that — she jumps to her feet, remembers to close the Solitaire window.
“That your guardian?” she asks. The way Fugo’s brow furrowed whenever she used the word ‘parent’ told her there was something going on there, even if the school files refused to.
“You tell me,” Fugo yawns. “You’re getting the door.”
“Brat.”
“Verbal harassment.”
Leone swings the doors open. Turns away from scowling at Fugo to look at the newcomer.
Any and all words die on her tongue so instantly it’s almost funny.
“Hi,” the person at the door says. They’re a little shorter than Leone, a lot more tan; their hair is a short, curly bob reaching just past their jawline, pinned down with multicoloured hair-clips. Leone thinks she can see an aeroplane one. More importantly, they’re wearing a black-and-white patterned blazer; under it, not much. “I’m here for Pannacotta Fugo?”
Leone can see the edge of their bra. She steps aside, lets them in. “Uh,”
In the periphery of her eye, she can see Fugo watching with obvious distress.
“Bruno, for real,” Fugo whines. “Do you need to use the P word?”
“After I had to close early because someone was causing trouble at school?” Bruno, apparently, chirps back — they pull up a chair next to Fugo, ruffle her hair. “Yes. Plus,”
“There aren’t other Fugos.”
“There might be other Fugos!”
They look back up at Leone. Leone swallows.
“Uh,” she hates that she’s still wearing her tracksuit. Wishes she’d done something with her hair, ever. Wishes she’d remembered to re-apply her lipstick after eating that snack bar, half an hour ago. “You’re Bruno Buccellati?”
Bruno nods. “And you’re — “
Leone just stares. Fugo clears her throat pointedly.
“That’s Leone Abbacchio,” she says. “The teacher from my old school.”
“Oh!” Bruno’s eyes widen. They sit up straighter. “I’ve heard about you.”
Leone’s mouth is dry. “H-huh.”
Bruno nods. “You — but, well.” They grimace, look away. “Not relevant right now, hm?” Leone can appreciate them dodging an awkward subject. Even if it’s done this clumsily. “What is this all about?”
Fugo groans, as if on cue. Leone shoots her a warning look.
“Pannacotta here —”
“Oh, come on — “
Leone sails past her complaint. “—has been writing other students’ papers in exchange for money.” She raises an eyebrow at Fugo. “Large amounts of money.”
“Ah.” Bruno nods. Glances at Fugo. “Again?”
Again?
Fugo keeps rolling her eyes. Leone wishes it were possible to pull something. “Look. If there’s a demand...”
“Fugo,” Bruno sighs. Leone, who’d initially been thrown off by how young they look, feels relieved they at least seem to be taking this seriously. “You can’t keep doing this. What did I tell you about doing your classmates schoolwork for money?”
Fugo sighs too. “That I should do it for free.”
Abbacchio is taking everything back. “Excuse me?”
Bruno doesn’t, or pretends to not, have heard her. “And how do you keep getting caught? Are you still doing it in person? What’s the point of social media if you — “
“I’m not making an instagram account to sell papers about Paul Verlaine,” Fugo says. “And I’m still suspended on twitter.”
Bruno grimaces. “Unfortunate. Facebook?”
“No one uses facebook anymore, Bruno.”
“I use facebook.”
“No one under twenty uses facebook.”
Leone watches the interaction unfold. Wonders if they forgot she’s there.
“Right,” Bruno jumps up again — looks to Leone. “Is — how much trouble is she in?”
“Well,” Leone almost gets lost in the colour of their eyes. “Uh. I had to report her.”
Bruno nods. “Understandable.”
“And she had to pay the student back.”
“And they took the essay,” Fugo pipes in.
Bruno shushes her.
“But other than that — “ Leone shrugs. “I didn’t see her do anything else — as far as I’m concerned, this was a one time thing.”
Bruno nods.
“Even though it obviously wasn’t.”
Bruno winks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Leone short-circuits.
“God,” Fugo groans from her chair. Climbs up to her feet. “Are we done now? Can we go?”
Bruno is still looking at Leone. “We’re just making conversation.”
“We’re going.”
“Alright!” Bruno chuckles. Leone might be imagining things, but they sound almost flustered. “It was — a pleasure. Meeting you.”
Leone forces herself to respond in some way. It’s mostly an incoherent creak, but it gets the message across.
“You can make friendship bracelets later,” Fugo is already out of the door. “Let’s go.”
Bruno doesn’t move. Fugo slams the doors on her way out.
“If you’re not there in a minute,” they can hear her shout from the corridor. “I’m taking the car!”
Bruno laughs.
Leone tries to not get melodramatic about the dimples in their cheeks.
“I should go after her,” Bruno adds. “She might be serious.”
Leone frowns. “Did you leave your keys in the car?”
“No,” Bruno says, nonchalant. “But she knows how to hot-wire.”
“What?“
“Have a good day!”
They get out of the office so fast Leone is sure they must have, like, opened a portal in the wall or something. She loses track of time, staring after the shut doors.
__
Giorno Giovanna considers herself somewhat of a first-day-expert. It’s not a path in life she’d chosen, necessarily, but it was one that her life situation picked out for her, and she was never one to half-ass anything.
This one might be different, she reminds herself. The string of schools she’d previously been to — a minimum of one transfer per year — were first a result of her mother needing to skip towns after unpleasant breakups, and then her stepfather needing to skip towns after getting in trouble with local law-enforcement. Giorno had never been good at making friends but got good at not minding that she had none — she also got good at blending into the background, not attracting too much attention, and not getting called in to testify when her stepfather got arrested for public violence. She was easily adaptable. She was good at this life-style.
Her legal emancipation went through a month ago. She could have stayed home, ended the school year there, and then planned ahead — but she got excited. The chance to no longer depend on the whimsical nature of her mother’s marriage choices was too good to pass up (she was also smart enough to know that, while she was handling everything perfectly and had no long-term problems, a constant threat of violence and general neglect were not the best conditions for a teenager to grow up in).
Also, she’d just gotten her name legally changed. Moving towns ensured no one even knew she went by anything beforehand. Really, it all just played out perfectly.
Until today.
“I know you’re in there!” One of the cleaning guys — Giorno thinks he might be called Luca — bangs on the doors of her bathroom stall, again. Giorno who is currently squatting on the toilet seat, curls into herself and continues pretending she’s not there. “Kid!”
The toilet seat is very filthy. Giorno thinks it’s no wonder. Thinks that maybe-Luca probably preoccupied himself with other things, while he was supposed to be cleaning.
Giorno is pretty sure she just saw him sell drugs to a student.
Now, Giorno knows living on a manual worker’s salary must be difficult, but she still feels justified in condemning his act. If the act was what she thinks it was. Judging by how determined Luca is to get into her stall, it probably was.
God damn it. First school she’s allowed to stay in, and she already needs to leave.
(Except that she can’t. She knows that. Giorno can’t leave, not now that she knows what’s going on. She spent too long biting down on her tongue and tolerating all sort of reprehensible behaviour — she’s done with that.)
Another loud bang on the door. Giorno clenches her jaw, stares straight ahead.
“Kid — “
“Jesus, Luca.” Another voice, drawling, cuts into the scene. Giorno startles, holds her breath. “What are you doing?”
“None of your business,” Luca snaps. “Get out.”
“I need to take a piss.”
“Go to another bathroom.”
“This is the only unisex bathroom,” the voice responds. “Want me to go into the other ones? Cause I will, but I’ll need you to speak to the principal once the concerned complaints come in — “
Luca sighs. “Fine. Go piss.”
She can hear the other person wheeze laugh. “Wow, thanks.”
Don’t push it.”
“Push what? My — “
“Go use the bathroom!”
Giorno continues holding her breath as footsteps echo down the bathroom. Tries to count how far the person could have gotten. Finds her spatial awareness really underwhelming.
“What are you hesitating for,” Luca snaps.
The person shrugs. “I’m worried for that door, man.”
“Don’t man me — mind your own business.”
“What do you think is behind that door?”
“Keep pushing and you’ll find out.”
“That didn’t even make sense.” A laugh. “Like, you just look really stupid, talking to an empty stall, is all.”
“It’s not empty,” Luca snaps.
Noo, Giorno tries to manifest a thought in his head. Never too late to casually develop superpowers. It’s empty. Completely empty. Leave.
“You sure?”
“It’s locked.”
“Yeah, kids lock them from outside all the time — the coin trick?”
Luca grumbles. “I saw someone get in.”
“You sure?” The person keeps going. “Cause, like, I don’t think anyone is in there.”
“She’s in there.”
“Did you check?”
Luca bangs on the door again.
A beat of silence. “So, yeah, I think there’s no one —”
“Of course she wouldn’t answer!” Luca hisses. “She knows I'll — “
It fades out. Giorno has to bite back anger.
“I appreciate you not making me a witness of your premeditated crime,” the stranger says.
“There’s no crime — .”
“I’m way too young for witness protection.”
“Fuck you.”
“But I think your, uh, whoever you’re chasing slipped out on you.”
Giorno wonders if Luca the cleaning guy will try hunting her down. Wonders if he’d do it across cities. Thinks about becoming a woman on the run. Finds she doesn’t really hate the idea.
But — no. He’s selling drugs. She can’t run.
She might have to kill him, she realizes. Nearly gasps. Starts working on warming up to that idea instead.
Luca is rattling the doors again.
“Let me check,” the person too-young-for-witness-protection says. “Consider it a friendly favour.”
“I’m not giving you no favours.”
“Your loss.”
A beat. “What do you want?”
“For you to stop writing my boys down.”
Luca grumbles. “Fine.”
“Cool!”
“Don’t tell me you have them on you again.”
“Sure do,” there’s a light knock on the door. “Hey, uh, whoever is maybe in there, I’m coming in.”
Giorno briefly panics. Braces herself to — something. She’d do something.
There’s some rustling, light grunts — then, there’s a guy peering over the edge of the stall, and Giorno finds herself freezing.
He looks to be older than her, and has a slouchy hat on. His face remains impassive as he takes in the scene, and then looks around the room.
“Yeah, dude,” he calls out. “No one’s in here.”
Giorno feels her eyes widen.
“What?” Luca starts grabbing at the door — Mista rolls his eyes, kicks him away.
“Don’t even try, you’ll break your ancient back.” He laughs. “Better go run after the girl.”
“I — wait,” Luca pauses. “How’d you know it was a girl?”
Giorno feels a wave of cold wash over here.
The guy’s face barely shifts. “You told me it’s a girl.”
“I didn’t tell you — “ Luca falters under the stall-climbing guy’s endless impassivity. “Did I?”
The guy rolls his eyes. “Why'd I lie?”
Luca grumbles something to himself. Giorno listens, disbelieving, as Luca shuffles out of the bathroom.
The guy snorts. Jumps back down.
Slowly, with limbs stiff from what she’s sure was a minor heart-attack, Giorno also exists the stall.
“Uh,” she says, awkward. The guy just nods. “Thank you?”
“Don’t mention it." He's taller than her. Definitely at least a junior. She studies him, hesitates.
“Who are the boys?” is what she asks. Figures it's a safe first question.
The guy pulls the front of his jacket open, and Giorno gasps. There are three mice hanging out in the inside pocket.
“There are three more,” the guy picks one up, hands it over to her. She accepts it with baited breath — the mouse nestles into her cupped palms, sniffs. “I call them boys, but I’m not sure they’re all boys. Luca keeps writing them up.”
The amount of crimes Luca has committed keeps growing.
“Anyways,” the guy says. “I really do need to take a piss, so…”
“Right!” Giorno carefully gives him his mouse back. “Uh — thank you, again.”
“Don’t mention it.” The guy pulls his hat off, then - his hair is messily buzzed off, and there’s a mouse sleeping on top of it. Giorno watches him put the other mouse down next to it, carefully position the cap over them. “See you around.”
He goes into the stall. Giorno stares, for a moment longer, and then turns around and walks out (pauses to wash her hands, though. She’s not gross). Her brain is still reeling. She feels like she is just a step outside of her body.
By the time she reaches the next classroom, she has a plan forming.
—
“How was today?” Bruno asks, bent over a torn-up fishnet. They are on the beach, together with a couple of kids from the shelter they volunteer in - Narancia, their unofficial favourite, is knee-deep in the water and trying to fish with his hands. They remind themselves to make him get out in a few minutes. It’s an unusually warm spring, but still only spring.
Fugo, their other unofficial favourite, just shrugs. “A little weird.” She’s helping them patch up some equipment — the plan was for the kids to do their homework, in a nicer setting, but they're letting her slack off. It's not like Fugo is in any danger of falling behind. “This girl tried to buy stuff from me.”
Bruno frowns. “Fugo, you just got caught selling essays yesterday.”
Fugo rolls her eyes. “I didn’t say I sold her anything.” She frowns. “Also, I don’t think she knew what she was trying to buy.”
Bruno mirrors her frown. “Huh?”
“I think she like - okay.” Fugo puts the net down. Nests her chin in her hand. “She was — 'I hear I can buy things from you' — but she said things with this, really weird intonation — “
Bruno gets a bad feeling. “Uh-huh.”
“And then just kept being really vague until I openly asked her what she wants and she — “ Fugo shakes her head. “She like, just kept smiling, and excused herself.”
Bruno is still having that feeling. “Hm.”
Fugo stares off into the distance. “So, I think people think I sell drugs now.”
Bruno chokes on their spit.
“I’m not, by the way.” Fugo picks the net back up (Bruno is still coughing). “Though I could sell her some tic-tacs in Narancia’s Adderall packaging.”
“Fugo!”
“What? She won’t get addicted to tic-tac.” Fugo rolls her eyes. “But, yeah, last year’s rumour was that I’m an undercover cop, so I guess this is an improvement.”
Bruno rubs at their temples. “Your school is a mess.”
“Tell me about it.”
There’s a theatrical gasp behind them. “So you’re not an undercover cop?”
Fugo just rolls her eyes again — Bruno turns around, smiles at the newcomer.
Guido Mista, who will forever be a kid in Bruno’s eyes even if he’s now technically a legal adult, nods at them. Two of his mice are on his right shoulder.
“It’s all cops are bastards,” Fugo says, dryly (there’s a hint of affection there). “Not the other way around.”
Bruno looks between them. Notices Narancia get out of the shallow water and tun towards them, making grabby hands in Mista’s direction.
“Damn,” Without skipping a beat, Mista pulls a mouse out of his pocket and holds it out. Narancia happily boops its head. “I always get those mixed up:”
Fugo rolls her eyes.
Bruno Buccellati is in their twenties, a long-time high-school drop-out, and on a mission to keep their late father’s business going through sheer determination and letting teenagers run their social media. The rest of their time is spent hanging out with a bunch of kids from the local homeless shelter — they started volunteering there soon after their father passed, in an almost selfish drive to — well.
They felt lost. They couldn’t help that. They could, however help others feel less lost. So that was what they did.
They didn’t have many marketable skills but they did know how to cook, and fish, and owned a boat. Children, it turned out, had very low standards for what a cool person looked like — boat trips with Buccellati quickly became one of the more popular activities, and Bruno tried to get as many outings in as possible, because, it was nice to see kids enjoy themselves. Even if they were constantly terrified someone would fall off and drown. Even if Narancia almost did, a few times. Fugo had only been involved twice.
Fugo, Narancia and Mista somehow ended up the staple of every group that they got put in charge of. Fugo was a child prodigy that got disowned by their parents after an incident she preferred not to talk about — Narancia ran away from home with no money and an eye infection — Mista was not technically homeless but Bruno saw him take on four guys once and then helped shield them from the police as well as the four guys, because, christ, no one in their vicinity knew what ‘picking your battles’ meant, and he ended up hanging around after that. Bruno watches them, presently: Narancia got bored of Mista’s mice and was exploring again, and Mista and Fugo were quietly bickering over the way a fishnet was supposed to look.
They tip their head back, and squint at the waning sun. Allow themselves a moment of peace.
“Look at my crab,” Narancia’s voice brings them back. Bruno cracks an eye open and takes in what, indeed, is a crab.
“Huh,” they say, trying to appear calmer than they feel. “Where’d you find it?” It’s almost the size of both Narancia’s hands put together. It’s pincers keeping scratching at air.
Narancia, unpertrubed, holds it up to his face. “The sea.”
“You’d be surprised,” Fugo says. “That’s where you usually find sea animals.”
Bruno shoots her a warning look.
“I think you should put it back,” they say. “It probably needs, uh, water to live.”
Fugo snickers. Bruno shoots them another look — they refuse to believe Fugo is also a sea life expert. They really need to find out what she’s in college for.
“Probably,” Narancia agrees. “And it’d miss its family.”
Bruno can go with that line of thought. “It would.”
“Alright,” Narancia sighs. Gives the crab a little kiss. “Goodbye, mister Smith.”
They watch him go back to the sea, squat down by the shallow end and wave the crab goodbye. Fight back the urge to coo.
“Like, I know he’s seventeen,” Mista voices their exact thought. “But does anyone else’s brain look at him and just go, oh, right, preschool?”
“Preschool is generous,” Fugo says. She’s looking at Narancia fondly too.
Bruno doesn’t bother hiding their smile.
An hour later finds them strolling down a convenience store aisle, scrolling through Leone Abbacchio’s facebook profile. It’s difficult, because they went all the way down to 2012 and need to be really careful not to accidentally like anything, and also because Narancia and Fugo went to Bruno’s house with Mista and a part of them is really scared they’ll come home to someone needing stitches again.
They feel a bit like a stalker. Keep reminding themselves they’re just checking up on the new adult in their — friends? Protegees? They’re not sure where exactly they fall, in relation to the Three — in Narancia’s, Mista’s and Fugo’s lives. They’re just being thorough. They are not being weird.
They start thinking about the kids, to distract themselves. Mista unofficially moved in a few months ago, after he turned eighteen and no longer qualified for the children’s homeless shelter, and the arrangement was that he’d stay until he graduated, but Bruno knows they’ll let him stay for as long as he needs to. He seems to have interests in life, passions. They don’t want him to have to sacrifice that. They don’t want anyone to have to sacrifice anything.
They think about how Narancia is a few months away from turning eighteen too. They already told him he’s free to stay as long as he likes, but aren’t sure if he understood it as an invite to move in. They need to make themselves clearer. He can room with Mista — they have a blow-up mattress, somewhere on the attic. And they don’t have to worry about Fugo for another eighteen months. They do worry about that other girl, who just turned seventeen a week ago, but —
Bruno realizes they zoned out. They lock their screen, pocket the phone away. Sigh.
They can’t fit this many children into their house. They don’t have room. Or beds. They’re already sleeping on the couch.
They’re so lost in trying to mentally fit ten teenagers into a single-story house, they almost miss the unfamiliar girl unashamedly staring at them from across the dairy section.
They pause, a bag of off-brand Parmesan in one hand. Arch an eyebrow.
The kid smiles.
Bruno puts the cheese down.
“Hello,” the girl walks over. She looks like she can’t be older than Fugo, with blonde hair pinned back in an elaborate braid. Her smile looks practiced. “Are you Bruno Buccellati?”
Bruno pauses. Studies her. “I am.”
The girl keeps smiling.
Bruno frowns. “Have we met?”
“No,” the girl says. Holds out a hand. “My name is Giorno Giovanna.”
“Ah.” Bruno shakes it. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“All mine.” She steps back. “You do volunteer work with homeless children, correct?”
Bruno tilts their head. Wonders if she’s here for a school newspaper, or something (wonders if she's aware she is children. She didn't say it like she was). Other volunteers sometimes gave interviews for student publications — Bruno never liked that. Didn’t like the attention. Didn’t know what to say. “Sometimes, yes”
Giorno frowns. "Your record says you're there every day."
Bruno feels their eyebrows go up. "You — read my — ?"
Giorno sails right past their question. “You know Fugo?”
Fugo getting brought up only makes Bruno more unsettled. A lot of people tend to ask about Fugo — whatever happened in her home town was apparently quite a scandal. “Listen, I am not exactly comfortable with this conversation — “
“I will be honest here,” Giorno cuts them off (Bruno blinks). “I followed you because I thought you sold drugs.”
For the second time today, Bruno blanches.
“But then I saw you shop,” Giorno sails on. “And — I apologize in advance — you do not seem to have a lot of money.”
Bruno doesn’t.
“And someone who sold drugs would probably have at least enough money for real Parmesan — so I thought you might be a middle-man, too.” Giorno tilts her head. “But then I thought back on my conversation with Fugo.“
Bruno remembers what Fugo told her, earlier today. It all finally clicks.
“I realized I really do have very little grounds on which to accuse you of anything illegal.” Giorno takes a deep breath. “But I still did research you.”
Bruno really can’t tell where this conversation is going.
“A lot of children trust you,” Giorno says. “That was why I suspected you, at first — it would be very easy for you to take advantage of that.”
Bruno feels their face twitch.
“Also, Fugo’s behaviour was downright bizarre.” Fugo frowns. "I still think she might be selling drugs.”
“Not drugs,” Bruno croaks. “Papers.”
Giorno’s mouth forms a little ‘o’.
“I’m trying to get her to do it for free,” Bruno adds. “She’s really good at most things, but can’t write pro-con essays.”
Giorno nods.
“Doesn’t believe in middle ground.”
“Oh, that’s excellent.” Giorno beams. “I don’t either.”
Bruno needs to sit down. “That’s….nice.”
“My point was,” Giorno shakes her head. Stares up at Bruno again. “I think you are a good person, Bruno Buccellati.”
Bruno wants to ask if the full name was really necessary. Knows none of this was, actually, necessary. “You don’t know me.”
“I am good at reading people,” Giorno insists. “And I know you care about children.”
Bruno curls into themselves, scowls. “Is there a point to this?“
“I am new here,” Giorno says, like it’s an answer. “No one really trusts me. “
“I’m sure if you just gave them some time —“
“But a lot of people trust you,” Giorno brushes them off. “I think you can help me achieve my dream.”
Bruno sighs. Think Giorno might be slightly over-dramatic. “And what is your dream?”
“Oh,” Giorno says. “Someone is selling drugs in my school.”
Bruno waits.
Giorno beams. “You’ll help me stop them.”