Work Text:
One slap. Two slaps. Piper slapped her desk a third time, with both hands, for luck. Two hundred out of 1200 words, excluding headings, sat in front of her in a Pages document. The cursor blinked under a heading entitled ‘Economic Impacts’, as it had for the past 24 minutes.
Despairingly, Piper opened a new tab, skimming the set work for another subject. The wheels of her desk chair scraped the linoleum floor as she spun to face the boy sitting cross-legged on her bed. The crown of his head stayed facing Piper; he was too enraptured in the process of culling pages from a library book to notice hr movement.
“Hey. Loser,” Piper swiped at the cord of Leo’s earphones, yanking both earbuds from his ears. He glanced up from the textbook he was mutilating to poke his tongue out at her, then turned his face back, shoving the right earbud back in. “Have you done the mind map for modern?”
“Do I look like I’ve done the mind map for modern?” He scoffed, launching an origami crane at Piper for her folly. It was adorned with an obscured image of an old US $10 note. “Do not ever insult me like that ever again. Weren’t you working on that report for geo?”
“I fucking hate reports so much. Having to find the sources and then trudge through all the academic wording and jargon and then analyse that? And make sure it’s all spelled right? Hell on Earth, my eyes and brain are fried. And whenever I tell the teachers I have a legitimate problem with this sort of work they just say ‘Oh, there are fonts to help dyslexia, and you can change the settings on your computer. I don’t mind if you hand in the report in a different font than it says on the task sheet.’ I mean,” Piper snarled, “honestly what difference does it make if I can hand in my report in calibri rather than helvetica? I want more time for this, not permission to make an aesthetic change, but this shit-ass school can’t do extensions without a doctor’s note every single time.” She scoffed, scraping her nails down the arms of her chair in frustration.
Leo smiled at her. “I mean the advice schools give is always shit, no matter what the problem is. If there isn’t the inherent doubt in students’ disabilities and the mindset that kids are lazy and entitled and can do everything themselves if they ‘put their mind to it’ is it even the education system?” He untucked a leg to place on her forearm, effectively stopping the scraping.
She shrugged it off and made a face at him. “Don’t put your dirty feet on me.”
Leo rested his face in his palm and stared at her laptop, scrutinising it. “Can’t you just use the speech to text function? Then get your roommate or whoever to read over it. That’s what I do.”
“My mic broke last month so I can’t do that until I get it fixed or replaced. I thought James was, quote unquote ‘a little bitch’?”
“Yeah, but he’s a little bitch that owes me for fixing his shit when it breaks. It’s symbiosis, Pipes. Speaking of which, I can fix your laptop.”
She stared at him, intensely studying his facial features. He met her gaze, swapping between looking at her left and right eye every few seconds until a curl of dark brown hair fell into his left eye. He blew it away, then swore and scrubbed his eye as a strand landed directly in his eyeball. Piper continued to watch him in silence. He glanced up at her when his blinking fit was done, but dropped his gaze back to his textbook after seeing her still staring.
Piper was smug. She had won the staring contest. But she had lost his attention. The silence remained.
Finally— a total of 32 seconds later— she thrust her arm out straight, to point directly at Leo’s face. “Wow, okay. Keep this up and I am going to fall in love with you.”
He pouted at her. “You aren’t already in love with me? And here I thought we were friends.” Hurt dripped from his tone and mischief dripped from his expression. He bent the spine of the textbook in his hands.
“Oh, whoops, my bad. Sorry, Mr Valdez, I am, in fact, in love with you, as we are friends. Don’t you have to return that book to the library when you’re done? I feel like they probably wanted it back with all the pages intact.”
Leo loudly tore off another uneven strip of paper, leaving a jagged half-page behind in the textbook. “‘Mr Valdez’, you’re making me sound thirty. And don’t you have to finish your geography report?” He snorted. “What’s the school gonna do about it? Gonna hit me with those library fees are they?”
Piper scratched the scabbing around her industrial piercing. “Thirty is generous considering that you like to call yourself ‘Uncle Leo’. I think forty-five is more realistic. The school could probably get money out of you for destruction of property.”
“Rude, but I see your point. But do you see, that if I just never return the book then it’s just late fees that they have no way of enforcing, because we’re students and the administration in this school is shit.”
“Oh true.” She picked residue out from under her nails and flicked it in Leo’s direction.
He flinched away, shuddering. “You disgust me. Do your modern.”
“I’m actually working on my report for geo right now,” Piper sniffed, mock-delicately. She turned her chair back to face her desk. “I’ll just tell my teacher I forgot we had homework.”
“Right. I forgot all your teachers love you and just let you get away with shit like that. I’ll just be doing nothing in maths and Miss Marsden will be like ‘Ah— Leo— move up here to the front, you’re distracting the other boys.’ Miss I am just fucking sitting here. Sorry my mad hotness is just too off the charts for the other boys to focus on compound interest around me.”
Piper restrained a grin. “Leo! I can’t believe you would intentionally derail the learning of all those fine young men!”
“Sorry my— what do I have uncovered?— My bare forearms are just too tempting,” Leo cackled, flexing the veins in his forearms at her.
“Cover up you fuckin’ slut!” She wheezed.
“Better not say that too loud or your neighbours are gonna think we’re fucking.”
“Nah. They know my standard’s are higher than that,” Piper said, tossing her hair over her left shoulder in an exaggerated movement that proved useless, as her hair was too short to stay there. She looked more like she was trying to swat an insect with her head than imitate a movie-stereotypical mean girl.
“Please. You had a rat’s tail for months and I will never forget. I get that you’re ‘quirky’ and ‘rebellious', but some hairstyles can never be redeemed. If we’re talking about being ‘out of someone’s league’, I’m basically getting professionally paid, at the top of my field, and you’re still playing in the little leagues Pipes. ”
“Gross,” she wrinkled her nose. “Why would you make a vague baseball sports analogy at me.”
Leo waggled his eyebrows. “You know me. Vague baseball sports are my favourite social experiment.”
Piper sighed, loudly and at length. “You know baseball has no rights outside of being a hot aesthetic for women. And also, fuck you. I can-and do-pull off anything I want, and I did pull off Dave.”
Leo threw his modern workbook—thankfully not the textbook— at Piper’s head. “I don’t know whether to clown you for that phrasing or for the fact that you named your rat’s tail. And you named it Dave.”
She smirked at him. “What’re you gonna do about it?”
“Uh well what I would've done was maybe talk to him at a party, maybe ask for his phone number, shoot my shot, but now I see you’ve viciously cut short an innocent life, and I don’t want to talk to you.” He scribbled something into his modern history notebook. Piper was not convinced that it was modern history notes.
“Ha ha. You insisted on handing me the scissors when I ‘cut short’ Dave’s life, and now you’re upset? About my rat’s tail? That you apparently have romantic aspirations towards, post-mortem?”
“Yeah dude, that was before I knew you named him. Now you’ve gone and humanised him and he’s gained a personality and following of his own. RIP in peace, Dave. Your life was short and presumably full of dirt. I don’t know, I’ve never seen you wash your hair. I’m pretty sure you don’t.”
Piper spun her chair so she could kick him in the leg, and said, “That’s because, as a normal person, I tend to wash my hair in the shower, creep. I fucking hope you haven’t seen me.” Then she slammed her laptop shut and grabbed pen off her desk, to leverage it two inches from Leo’s eyes. He batted it away.
“Don’t poke my eyes out, I like having them.”
“Wow, can’t believe after all this time, after everything we’ve been through, you wouldn’t trust me like this. I see how it is.” Piper stood, her back instantly cracking in three places.
“Cute. And we’ve only known each other for four months.” Leo watched as she shoved her stationery back into her red pencil case, then began rummaging through her floordrobe for something.
Piper fished a backpack out of the pile. “Four long months, full of rich emotional bonding! Not my point. My point is, I’m hungry, I can’t focus, and I am not going to discuss my fashion choices with you on an empty stomach. Let’s go get food.” She shoved her keys and wallet into the bag, and, giving only a cursory glance, swiped a few miscellaneous items off her desk to make sure she didn’t miss anything; two lip balms, a hair tie, a green bobby pin, and a packet of matches she got from some fancy restaurant months ago.
Leo skimmed his hand over the quilt of her bed. On finding her phone, he chucked it at her with a “Heads up.”
“Careful!” She scolded, after catching it in mid-air. “You could break it.”
He levelled a flat gaze at her. “It’s a Nokia. They paved the streets of Pompeii with that shit, and now— one major catastrophe and hundreds of year later— you are using that artefact to make phone calls and it still works. Being a little airborne every now and then won’t break it. I’d honestly be more worried about your skull if you hadn’t caught it.”
She widened her eyes, fluttering her eyelashes at him. “Aw, you do care!”
He looked her directly in the eyes and grinned smugly. “Yes, I do genuinely care for you, as you are my best friend and I wouldn’t ever want you to get majorly hurt.” He smirked at Piper, and she scowled back. “That’s right, baby! Bet you weren’t expecting me to pull out the emotional honesty on this fine Tuesday afternoon.”
“I mean, you didn’t really. Emotion and affection shouldn’t be a smokescreen for your insecurities, which is what I feel like is happening here. You’re not always gonna be able to use fake emotional transparency as an ironic punchline to distract people from the fact that you like to keep whatever’s bugging you in a full fucking fortress all the time. But, like. I care about you too. I want to listen to you and support you if you ever want to talk to me about things for real.” She paused.
Leo said nothing, and then he said “Cool. That was good, you should definitely apply to Disney, you could do some kids show no one will ever remember, about uh, an apartment complex only occupied by kids or something.”
Piper pushed her desk chair in. “Okay, well. Get your shit together loser, we’re going shopping. For food, before I eat my own arm.”
Leo conceded, perfectly happy to gloss over an emotionally compromising topic.
They left around the back of the girl’s dorm building, lucky enough to avoid everyone except Piper’s returning roommate, who just gave them a smirk and an eyebrow wiggle. It was more to annoy Piper than anything, and it worked. At this point Pam was probably sick of hearing about Leo, and Piper’s chronic lack of success on that front. Piper should probably get her a crunchie or something, for being roommate of the year.
Because Wilderness was, as implied, in the middle of fuck nowhere, Piper organised an Uber to pick them up for the 20 minute drive to the nearest anything.
They eyed off the cars in the parking lot as they cut through, Leo not owning a vehicle, and Piper having had her licence confiscated after the BMW ‘theft’ incident. The consequences of that still followed her, and she hadn’t even done anything but ask the dealer for the keys.
They would have made it through the lot unscathed, but for the clopping of approaching shoes, and a voice with a lilting Southern accent calling out to them. Their attention was drawn to a girl running towards them.
“Piper! Leo!” Sammi waves them down, smoothing her pleated cheerleader skirt as soon as she’s caught up. She offered them a pretty smile, and a “Where’re y’all headed?”
Leo grinned at her. “We’re going for sushi, did you wanna join?”
Her eyes widened and brightened, like headlights, and Sammi’s smile sharpens. A shiver runs down Piper’s spine. Something metallic glints at the bottom of her vision, but when she looks for it she sees nothing but Sammi’s toned cheerleader legs and her white and navy socks and sneakers. Piper’s apprehension fades.
“I’d love to join you guys, I was actually going to offer you a lift if you were leaving!” She winked at Piper and linked their arms. Piper felt her face heat, she assumes from the proximity to a pretty girl. Sammi grinned at Leo. “Thanks so much for inviting me. It was getting just like, suffocating, at this school.”
Sammi lead them across the parking lot to her Prius. About 20 feet from the vehicle, Sammi’s phone buzzed, and she paused to fish it out of her tote bag.
Her eyes widened as she opened the message. “Shit,” she glanced over her shoulder.
Piper startled, and separated from Sammi as two hands grabbed the cheerleader by the shoulders, and forcibly spun her. With one hand on Sammi’s shoulder, and the other on the newcomer’s hip, the cheerleader was pinned down by the glare of the cheer squad’s captain.
Sammi laughed nervously. “Hey Ally, wasn’t expecting to see you, haha. Did you need me for something?” Piper kind of wanted to laugh. She really said ‘haha’ out loud. It was like watching a child blame their sibling for drawing on the walls, with the crayons still in their hand.
Raising her hand from her hip, Ally flicked her bangs out of her black eyes. Piper watched her other hand, where the pale seams of her fake tan bisect with the almost glowing tone of Sammi’s shoulder. Ally rolled her eyes.
She rose to her tip toes and whispered something to Sammi that Piper couldn’t catch. The cheer captain retrieved her arm and stepped away. She nodded an acknowledgement at Leo and— weirdly— gave Piper a discreet wink. Then she waved and left, nails furiously tapping out a text on her phone.
Piper was feeling rightfully disgruntled. First Pam, then Sammi and now Ally? She was going three for three on getting winks from girls today. Just collecting them left and right.
Sammi huffed. “I forgot we had training this afternoon, and the old woman will defs try to smite me if I skip. I’m just lucky she can’t right now.” With that weird and unexplained comment, she pouted at Piper, then turned puppy dog eyes towards Leo. “I’m so sorry guys, I can’t give you that lift after all. Maybe some other time?” Leo promised her they’d make future plans, and Piper waved her goodbye as she ran to catch up to Ally.
They continued walking to the road while Piper gathered her thoughts.
“Hey, actually that was kind of weird. That wasn’t just me right?”
Leo absentmindedly chewed the neckline of his shirt, before dropping it to answer. “As much as it would be nice to believe it was just genuine interest, yeah that was weird.”
“I mean, Sammi’s nice but I’ve barely spoken to her outside of doing the work in French class and I didn’t think you guys had any classes together. And the whole thing with Ally was annoying. If she had to talk shit she could’ve waited the two minutes until they left instead of just whispering about us.” Piper felt she was generally pretty good at reading social dynamics, but something about the whole cheerleading squad felt odd, like the information was there, but in a different language. Then she remembered something. “Wait. Pam’s friends with Ally. Anger cancelled, she can’t be irredeemable if she’s friend with Pam.” And that would explain the wink. Ugh. Piper had to find a less social butterfly to vent her romantic frustrations to. Or get some sort of client confidentiality.
“Maybe she lost her voice or something,” Leo reasons.” I’m more stuck on the fact that her typing could spell out morse code words.” They reached the strip of shrubbery hiding the fence to the road. The season had stripped off most of the leaves. Leo pushed some of the branches aside. “After you.”
Piper blinked at him. “Seriously?”
“Yeah dude, dead serious, I was raised with manners.”
“No, I meant about the morse code, but I don’t think I should trust you,” Piper replied, walking through the path Leo had made anyways.
He grinned. “You shouldn’t.” He let go of the branches, and they whipped back, whacking Piper in the face and arms.
She swiped at him, trying to put her fingers in his eyes. “But really, what did she say?”
“Dumb bitch,” he paused deliberately, before adding “Is what she said. Not that you aren’t a dumb bitch, though.”
“That’s what she said?” Piper bit back a smile, and Leo snorted at her attempted straight face. “I can’t believe you know morse code though.”
Leo glanced away. “My uh, my Mom and I use to use it. It reminds me of her so I kept it up.” He dug his index finger into a rip at the knees of his jeans, and glared back at her, defensive. Piper didn’t pry.
“That’s such a cool skill to have though.” Leo looked away again, but seemed to soak up the compliment, which Piper counted as a victory. She watched him watch a car zip past as they waited for their lift. “But why would Ally know it? Maybe it’s like a prerequisite to join the cheer squad.”
“That would be a weird requirement,” Here, Leo adopted a half-decent attempt at a valley girl voice. "’Yeah, I’m here to try out for cheerleading, I have 6 years of experience. No I don’t know morse code, why do you ask? What do you mean I’m not qualified, literally what the fuck? Do you know who my mother is, she coached this squad for years.’” Piper snorted.
“Developing a whole personality for your hypothetical cheer squad reject are you?”
“But of course! I have a standard to uphold.”
Piper noticed their Uber, and flagged down the driver.
Leo continued the thought. “Maybe they just send each other whatever they want to say on snapchat instead of talking. Besides, I’m pretty sure Coach June’s running a dictatorship. Sammi mentioned something about smiting?” Piper smiled fondly, partially at her best friend and partially at the idea of strict, 39 year old, hot mom Coach June, smiting teenagers while holding her ever-present, eye-searing, violet ‘Queen of F@#cking Everything’ coffee mug.
“She gives me the vibes of a high school bully who became a nurse.” The Uber driver pulled up.
“And then quit nursing to go back to bullying high school kids?” Leo opened the car door not facing the road. He got in, and scooted to the other side so that Piper could get in too.
Piper pulled the door shut. “Yeah, exactly.”
Leo pulled out his earphones for the ride. Piper demanded they take turns picking songs, so he instantly chose one that was thirteen minutes long. In retaliation, Piper queued the only song ever; Kids of the Future, a cover/lyric rip of Kim Wilde’s Kids in America, performed by the Jonas Brothers for the Meet the Robinsons movie.
It was a seventeen minute walk to the sushi train, which Leo and Piper spent trying to step on the others heels, and pull their shoes off. It probably would have been a lot shorter if they weren’t both avoiding walking in front of the other.
It came to an end when Piper managed to tell Leo to stop without laughing. He immediately took several stops away, accidentally knocking into a nearby fence. A dog that had been guarding the yard was up immediately, a hulking black mass barrelling itself at the fence bars. Leo yelped and stumbled back towards Piper. He grabbed her shoulders and used her to shield himself from the dog’s sight.
“Jesus! I didn’t know it was legal to keep bears as pets,” he grumbled in her ear. Piper laughed at him. The dog barked.
“Aww, she just wuvs you! She wants to say hewwo to you,” she teased. The bars of the fence shook as the dog rammed it again. It’s owner called to it from somewhere in the yard, drawing its attention. The dog stared them down, almost considering, before it padded off.
“Hm, on second thought, let’s maybe move on while she's distracted.” Piper dragged Leo away by the hand. He stuck his tongue out at her.
“Aw, Pipes, if you wanted to hold my hand that badly you could’ve just said so,” he teased.
She grinned back. “Oh yeah?” And laced their fingers together.
He smirked back at her, but left their hands connected. Like he was explaining something to a child, he told her “Uh, Pipes, gay chicken only really works when it’s. You know. Gay.” Piper had to stifle a sigh of considerable proportion. It had been a long four months.
She only let go of his hand when it was time to push the door to the sushi train open. The door screeched on its frame, the warm air inside escaping past Piper’s skin with a hiss, as she held the door open for Leo, who bowed at her on his way in.
The tall lady behind the counter greeted them, and Piper barely had time to admire the embroidered crane on her eyepatch before Leo grabbed her hand again, and made a beeline for a booth in the corner, tugging her into the seat next to him.
“Okay, as much a fan as I am of awkward seating at restaurants, and being rude to servers, what’s going on?” Piper poked Leo’s cheek, and he made as if to bite her hand.
“Coach Hedge at 3 o’clock, opposite the sushi train island.” Leo grabbed a pair of wooden chopsticks out of the holder, and snapped them apart.
Piper slid out of the booth to sit opposite Leo, covertly glancing over the conveyor belt island, and seeing the telltale baseball cap, curly hair, and baseball bat that accompanied Coach Hedge everywhere.
“Damn. They let him bring a baseball bat into a restaurant?” She whispered, grabbing a platter of salmon nigiri off the train, and sighing at the pitiful selection available. “I miss getting sushi in a state that isn’t landlocked.”
“Okay, no need to brag so hard. We get it. You normally eat your fish fresh, just directly out of the ocean. Scales, eyes, and all. Old man Hedge probably just says he needs the bat to walk, what with his old man limp,” he whispered back. He then lay his chopsticks over his soy sauce dish to just grab a small bit of fallen rice with his fingers.
Piper scrunched up a napkin and threw it at him. “You called him an old man twice in one sentence.” She grabbed another plate off the train.
Leo tried valiantly to catch the napkin with his mouth, but it ended up just hitting him in the face and falling into his lap. He huffed. “He’s what, 50? And still teaches high school PE? Pathetic.” Even in saying this, he glanced over to where the coach was sitting, relieved to find he hadn’t noticed them yet. “But, I mean hones-,” he looked back at Coach Hedge. “Is he— Is he eating his chopsticks?” Leo hissed.
Piper tracked Leo's line of sight across the room, just in time to make eye contact with the coach as he cast a cursory glance around the room, before shoving the paper chopstick sleeve into his mouth. She cursed, and sank into her seat, clicking her nails against the granite tabletop.
“Fuck,” at this, Leo raised an eyebrow, mouth full of sushi. “He absolutely is eating his chopsticks, by the way, but-”
“Wouldn’t he get splinters?” Leo interrupted. “Ew.”
“But more importantly,” Piper shot him a glare. “Don’t look over, because I just made direct eye contact with him and I don’t know if he noticed, but we probably need to dip.”
Leo stiffened, continuing to chew as he tried to glance over to where Coach Hedge was without moving his head to look. He swallowed. Slowly, he reached out to grab a mochi from the train, which he wrapped in a napkin and placed gently into the pocket of his jacket. He pulled his phone out of the other pocket, and wiped the dusting off his fingers so he could sort out their ride back.
They flagged down a waitress, who rang up their total. Piper debated trying to put her hair up to change her appearance so the coach might be thrown off if he looked for her. Ultimately she left it down so she could hide behind it while she crossed the room and paid at the counter, as innocuously as she could.
She and Leo slunk out the door, trying to casually speed walk away before they could be noticed.
“OI!” No luck. “WHAT ARE YOU BRATS DOING OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL.” Coach Hedge was a man with the remarkable qualities of being incapable of speaking any lower than a shout, or enunciating any punctuation outside of an exclamation mark. Megaphones aspired to be him.
Leo buried his face in his phone, using the sleeves of his jacket to partially obscure him from sight. Piper dug around in her bag, letting her hair fall over her face. The coach ran to cut them off on the path, though at his height it was more of a scurry really. How a middle aged man with a limp managed his level of speed was beyond Piper, and likely beyond science too.
Leo grimaced at Piper. “No chance we can convince him we’ve got permission to be out? Or distract him for two minutes until the Uber gets here,” He whispered to her.
Piper opened her mouth to answer and then reconsidered; late slips, where to go, every other assignment. The BMW. She’s a pretty convincing person. Her hand closes around something in her bag. She glances at the dry leaves Hedge has crushed under his shoe. She’s pretty good at distractions too. “Some chance,” she whispered back.
She straightened, and enforced her voice with confidence. “Coach Hedge! We have permission to be out, and-oh my god, don’t look behind you, what is that,” she cut herself off with a horrified gasp.
As the coach whipped around, hefting his baseball bat, Piper took three quick steps towards him. She wrenched the matches out of her bag, snapped one off, struck it on the strip provided, and flicked it at the leaves by the coach’s feet. Leo choked back a laugh.
Chances were, the leaves would light up and then get blown out by the wind or stomped out by Hedge. But it would startle him for a couple of minutes.
She turned, ready to sprint away, grabbing Leo by the hand when she noticed he was busy staring at the small flames. She dragged him down the block, and they laughed the whole way down. He stopped her when they reached the corner, to point back. She looked back.
The fire had spread from the leaves, now flickering at the hems of Coach Hedge’s trousers, and he was stomping around desperately. Leo smirked at her. “Nice one Pipes. We’re fucked when he catches us.”
Piper was finding it hard to care.