Chapter Text
There was a new kid in Andrew's English class, and Kevin already had his metaphorical, track-obsessed tongue down his throat.
"I'm serious," Kevin said, leaning into the kid's space with far too much enthusiasm for such a dreary morning. The kid pulled away, with a hesitant twist to his mouth, tugging a threadbare, too-big hoodie tight around his shoulders. "You have to tell me—what are your events?"
Andrew stalked over and slammed his stack of textbooks down on Kevin’s desk, hard enough to scatter the taller man’s neatly organized pens. Kevin jumped, but the new kid's whole body flinched, curling into itself for a moment so short Andrew would have missed it if he hadn't been watching so closely—not that he was watching. When he straightened, he met Andrew's impassive gaze with a glare hotter than the red of his mess of hair.
There was an icy fire in that look, the heat of it curled behind the carefully neutral set to his brows, his expression a slate wiped clean in the face of the rude interruption.
It was uncommon, someone more keen to shy away from Kevin’s irritating fanaticism than the weight of Andrew’s apathy.
Interesting—annoyingly so.
It was harder than Andrew anticipated to break away from the bright blue of his eyes, to pretend that he had more interest in whatever Kevin was about to complain about than the constellation of freckles sprawled over the bridge of his nose and creeping under his eyes. Andrew felt a muscle in his jaw twitch, clucking his tongue against the back of his throat just for the sharp sting of almost-pain.
"What’s this, someone new to irritate with your stupid obsession," he said, a question without the inflection of one.
Kevin ignored the jab, buzzing with excitement. He had that look in his eyes, the same one he’d fixed on Andrew the first time he’d seen him at the pole vaults, nearly feral in his focus. "He clocks a sub-six minute mile without any training, Andrew. He needs to join the team. Imagine what I could do with him."
"Hold on a second," Freckles said, an unexpected rasp softening his voice and a strange mix of concern and annoyance in the narrowing of his eyes. "I said that was an estimate. Nobody's ever timed me, and I don’t want anyone doing anything with or to me."
Andrew pretended not to notice they way his nose crinkled and the strange way he rounded out his syllables, a clear remnant of a sticky accent Andrew couldn't place. His eyes pulled into a squint with the scrunch of his nose, long lashes casting shadows over pale skin. Andrew wanted to reach and wipe the look of his face himself—maybe even scrub off a few of those freckles while he was at it.
Irritation at the weakly flickering flame of his concentration bloomed in his chest and trickled down to the palms of his hands.
"Name?" Andrew asked, twisting his voice into his usual apathetic tone. He allowed himself another—closer—look, if only because it would have been more suspicious if he avoided his gaze.
"You can call me Neil," he responded, the edges of his mouth pulling down in a complicated, unreadable expression. "I’m a mid-year transfer."
"Congratulations," Andrew said, mind already racing. Transfers were rare—mid-year ones even more so. "I don't care."
Neil's eyebrow quirked up, the faintest of smirks tugging at a corner of his chapped lips.
"Yeah, sure," he scoffed, slumping back into his seat. Neil shifted his weight back until the chair was balanced precariously on the two back legs of the rickety school-assigned excuse for a chair, something steely in his pale eyes. "That's why you asked. You do a lot of asking after things you don’t care about, asshole?"
The muscle in Andrew's jaw twitched. Again.
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Andrew’s pre-lunch class was irritatingly far from the cafeteria. By the time Andrew wandered into the chaos of teenage voices clamoring to be heard and the press of too-many bodies per table, Kevin had already tucked Neil between himself and Matt, talking all their ears off about the importance of impressing colleges their junior year. Dan sat on Matt’s other side, one leg tucked under and her weight cradled into Matt’s side, looking like she was pretending to pretend to listen to Kevin’s scout rant.
It wasn’t like Andrew could even blame her for her lack of rapt attention. She was the idiot’s captain, and finding amusement in denying him was stunningly easy.
Kevin was flailing his arms around as he spoke, paying his irritatingly healthy lunch no attention and nearly backhanding Andrew as he made his way around the table. He had to bat the errant hand away, jabbing a finger in Kevin’s face in silent warning before walking past.
"I mean, what colleges are you looking at? A lot of scouts are coming for our spring season, and that starts in a couple of weeks. We don’t have enough competent people to take us to States this year, nevermind Regionals or Nationals. I'll start training you early for it so you're prepared."
Neil looked uncomfortable boxed in by the two, much taller boys, and was rolling an apple between his hands with a faraway look in his eyes. His head was ducked down, shoulders drawn in as he let his gaze flicker between Kevin and the windows behind him.
Andrew blinked slowly, surprised and begrudgingly impressed. The apple had been in Kevin's lunchbox when Andrew had slapped away his stupid, too-long limb, and he hadn’t even seen Neil move towards it.
"I, uh, haven't really thought about college." Neil said, not meeting anyone’s eyes. "I'm technically supposed to be a sophomore, actually, and I never really thought I’d be able to go."
Matt looked up at that, interest obvious in his raised brows. "Oh, seriously?" he asked. "How old are you?"
Andrew wanted to scoff. Matt, predictably, was finding interest in the wrong part of that admission.
"Fifteen," Neil said, taking a bite of his stolen apple, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He frowned, like it was an effort just to remember the number. "Sixteen in March."
Andrew saw the precise moment Matt decided to adopt Neil, the look of gentle awe he passed over the tiny redhead and his hand clutching at his girlfriend’s shirt.
"He's so small," he whispered—loudly—into the crook of her neck.
Dan snorted, but it was steeped in fondness. "We're not that much older."
"But look at him!"
She shook her head at him and propped her elbows on the table, dropping her head on her hands.
"So, Neil," Dan started. "Are you taking all junior classes or what? I know we have different schedules, but I don’t think I crossed paths with you at all this morning."
Neil shrugged, red crawling up his throat and making its home on his cheeks. "Kind of?"
Andrew threw a barbecue potato chip at him. Neil caught it and promptly ate it.
"Kind of," Andrew mocked, and threw another. Neil caught that one effortlessly, too, and turned to Andrew with a look of confused amusement.
Andrew stared back, not breaking eye contact as he jammed a handful into his mouth.
A sideways smile snaked onto Neil’s face, a faint dimple making itself known, and just shrugged again. He held the chip two hands, cracking it in half.
"Split one in half and you have halves," Neil said, voice low. “I'm in the senior's calculus class. Advanced placement, I think.”
"Shit," Matt breathed. "Damn."
"How'd you do that?" Kevin asked, finally turning to his lunch, seemingly bored by a topic that wasn’t track-adjacent. He didn’t even notice the missing apple.
"They gave me a bunch of placement exams and tests when I enrolled," Neil said, his pale skin betraying the darkening flush crawling from ear to ear. "I guess they decided I already knew too much to put me in the sophomore classes."
Dan drummed her nails on the table top, humming. "What kind of fancy private school did you transfer in from? And what the fuck are you doing here now ?"
"I didn't," Neil said, voice brooking no argument. "I didn’t go to high school before today, I mean—or any traditional school, I guess. We moved around a lot, so it was always online classes and workbooks. Problem sets were entertaining enough on long rides with nothing else to do."
There was some slippery, hidden truth buried beneath those handpicked words, Andrew decided. Neil shoulders had drawn closer to his ears, his eyes falling as he picked at the flesh of his half-finished apple. Something about it felt like a years-old bitterness spilling out against his will, like Neil had torn the stitches and was trying to staunch the bleeding with his bare hands.
When Neil did look up, Andrew's eyes were already there to meet him, to pin him and his secrets in place with what he knew was an iron grip. An ounce of curiosity settled deep in his bones, and Andrew cursed the pounding rush of his blood.
Matt paused, looking between the two with the jittery air of a man made nervous. Andrew knew it well—he was usually the reason why, after all.
"Where's everybody else, anyways?" Matt asked, voice tight in its fake cheer.
“Everybody else?” Frowning, Neil was the first to break away from their impromptu staring contest, craning his neck to look up at Matt. "Who's everybody else?"
Andrew sighed, a quick glance over Neil’s shoulder forecasting an unfortunate turn to the conversion.
"Them," he said, pointing with his plastic spork, voice dryer than the cafeteria’s Tuesday lemon chicken.
"Oh my god!" Nicky shouted, shrill and overly dramatic as ever. "You caught the new kid!"