Chapter Text
The rumors are terrible and cruel, but honey, most of them are true.
-New Romantics, Taylor Swift
Dean had been working at Dick’s Yummy Treats for two months, and he still hadn’t gotten his employee card.
Sunday.
Eight a.m.
In the rain.
He waited fifteen minutes for his coworker by the shut store doors until she finally appeared around the corner, glowering at him.
To be fair, he glowered first.
“I know I’m late,” she muttered. “Shut up about it.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I won’t shut up, Meg. It’s been sixty-four days. You could at least get here on time when you know I can’t open the store without an employee card.”
“You’re counting?” She put her card into the little machine, waited for the beep and pushed the doors open.
Inside the store, Dean turned on the lights and took off his coat. “Of course I’m counting.” Meg closed the doors back up and headed to the storage room to put away her things. “How else would I cultivate my grudge?”
“What’s with you today?” She said when she resurfaced from the back room.
“I’m pissed,” he said. He was pissed.
“Yeah, well, write a strongly worded letter to management. Smear some ranch on it and tell them it’s bird crap.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna do that. My mom doesn’t like it when I get in trouble.”
“Aww, you listen to your mommy?”
“Have to,” he muttered to himself. If only his life here didn’t depend on it.
He’d write the fuck out of that strongly-worded letter.
Dean shook the rain off his hair and started taking chairs off tables while Meg handled the cash register. It was almost eight-thirty, which meant opening time, which meant getting ready to get yelled at by hangry customers who really needed a chocolate croissant right away or else.
“Where’s Charlie?” He asked and opened the doors all the way through. He usually took the weekend shifts with Charlie and Meg, and it was always a pain when Charlie was late or missed a shift so that Meg and him were left alone at the store for hours and he had to pretend he wasn’t afraid of her.
Right across from them, on the other side of the street, was a lingerie store. He’d thought it was kind of cool at first, but it got old pretty fast when he spent all day watching all the creeps who roamed it holding a Dick’s Yummy Treats paper bag.
To its left was some snooty bookstore. It wasn’t anything about that particular shop that made it snooty; all book lovers were snooty, Dean reckoned, because books were for sophisticated, snobbish, boring people, and therefore, all bookshops were snooty. Including this one.
“She’ll be here at noon,” said Meg. Dean turned away from the bookstore to help her line up heat-sealed sandwiches in the display case.
“Great. So I’m stuck with you for the next four hours.”
“Three and a half,” Meg said dryly. “Delivery truck is here.” She nodded at a truck that was turning around the corner outside. They both knew the look of it by heart; it brought them fresh pastries every morning from an actual bakery a few blocks away. “Go open the back door for them.”
Strong thuds coming from the storage room coated her every word. The delivery guys were working on breaking down the back door one day at a time. “Why don’t you do it,” he muttered at Meg, less a question, more a complaint.
“Because I’m a meek and delicate woman,” she answered, slumping down into a chair and lifting her feet onto another. “Whose strength doesn’t hold a candle to your powerful man muscles.” She laid unimpressed eyes on his arms.
Dean didn’t find it within himself to argue with that. He knew there was no amount of glowering in her direction that could make Meg show up to work on time or not exhaust him into lifting the heavy boxes. He also knew that she never once turned her back on him when he needed help in the two months of his working at Dick’s, and that she would stand up for him in the face of any customer who so much as looked at him the wrong way.
Unpacking the boxes took some of the morning, and staring into air took most of the rest. Charlie arrived at noon, along with a fresh crowd of customers.
What’s the opposite of lost? Dean’s mind shot at him when he saw her. He would never tell her this – would never double-cross his own sense of privacy so viciously as to expose his feelings, any feelings, toward her, toward anyone – but she was, a little bit, his light at the end of the tunnel. She was smiley, and forgiving, and chatty, and all around very gay, and a lot of other things that Meg really wasn’t.
“What’s up?” Charlie asked and hopped up on the counter, swinging her feet. Meg gave her the death glare until she slid back off and leaned her elbows on it, looking past the few customers and out into the street. Her eyes fixed on something to the left.
“He’s back.”
“Who’s back?”
“Cas from Page Turner.”
Dean glanced outside at the snooty bookstore. He knew who she was talking about when he saw him; some guy from school, blue eyes, dark hair, tall. Almost as tall as Dean. He’d been mentioned between the three of them before, way before the schoolyear started and Dean came to know who he was. There wasn’t much to do at Dick’s during summer break beside gossip about the other employees they saw every day through the display window. Cas had stopped working around the beginning of summer break, which was right when Dean’s family showed up around here, and he’d gotten his job at Dick’s. He’d never said more than a hello to the other employees around the block, and still he knew all about them. This was the small, middle-of-nowhere kind of town, and no piece of information was left untalked about in it.
It made Dean nervous.
“Man, if I were straight.” Charlie leaned her head on her hands.
“You can’t say that,” said Dean and leaned against the counter beside her.
“I so can.”
“You can’t just know you’d be into someone if you’re not into them. You can’t…” he trailed off, turning around and taking a second look at the bookstore, really looking this time. “Man, if he was a chick.”
Meg glanced outside, her eyes resting on Cas wordlessly.
Cas looked in their direction, then.
Dean looked away and shook his head. Charlie kept gazing outside.
“Do you think Richard didn’t realize how bad the name for this store was when he came up with it,” she asked after a minute, “Or was he the trickster type who pretended he had no idea what people were talking about when they said maybe he should change the name?”
“Which Richard?” Dean asked. He looked at the clock. One fifteen. Lunchtime. He could take a break soon.
“Dick. From Dick’s…” She motioned vaguely at the sign on the front of the shop. “Ugh. I can’t even say it.”
“I think he knew exactly what he was doing,” said Dean. He’d long stopped telling people where he worked when they asked.
When he looked back outside, he saw Cas leaning against his own counter with his head on his fist, and the look in his eyes as he stared at the pastries behind Dick’s display window was almost wistful.
“What’s he doing?” Dean asked.
“Dreaming about lunch.” Charlie let out a sigh. “I wish someone looked at me the way Cas looks at a chocolate soufflé.”
“Lunch,” Dean echoed. “Charlie, can I borrow your employee card?”
“You still haven’t gotten yours?”
“No! It’s been–”
“Don’t get him started,” Meg cut him off. Charlie dug a hand into her pocket and handed him her magnetic card.
“Don’t lose it,” she said. “It should be good for any food place on the street. Just show it to them and they’ll give you a fifteen percent discount.”
“Thank you kindly,” said Dean. “And thank your parents for the gender-ambiguous name.”
“You know you can get seventy percent off of lunch here,” said Meg.
Dean grabbed the card and whatever cash he could find in his wallet. “I’d rather eat at a restaurant run by rats controlling people by their hair as long as it isn’t named after a genital.”
Dean’s first week of senior year had been rough, no doubt, but no one had crashed right into him and made his phone fly out of his hand and onto the floor. That came at eight a.m. on the Monday of week number two.
To Charlie’s credit, she picked up his phone and made sure it was alright before placing it back in his hand. To her discredit, the crashing wasn’t exactly accidental.
“Come on,” was all she said, and grabbed his hand, dragging him down the hall.
“I don’t need babysitting, you know,” Dean said, letting her pull him away, if only because he had no idea how to get to his next class.
“I’m not your babysitter,” she said. “I’m your friend.”
“I don’t need friends.”
Charlie wasn’t in his homeroom class. She went out of her way to find him and drag him places in a school that she’d known for years and he was only starting to understand where the bathrooms of were stationed. And as much as she was… whatever he’d called it yesterday – his light at the end of the tunnel – at work, here she was probably just trying to make him feel better about being new, despite his having spent the past two months in town, and despite his blunt and extremely straightforward – as straightforward as he could express it – lack of desire in friends.
He didn’t like the idea of anyone butting into his life, on the off-chance that they found something they weren’t supposed to find, and his life would become torture.
Charlie didn’t care.
“And I don’t need guys to hit on me over a strawberry cupcake, but they still do,” she was saying as she dragged him up the stairs.
“Can’t say I’m following.”
“We don’t get what we need,” said Charlie. “We get what life thinks will make for a good joke.” She stopped walking and turned around to look at him. “Speaking of which. Please tell me you applied for the senior courses.”
“The what?” Dean asked.
“Senior courses. The list is up. You had to write your preferences so that they don’t put you in something really boring.”
His face went blank. “Charlie, at this point, you have to assume I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Alright, last year they asked us to fill this form and choose a class we wanted to take this year. It’s just extra credit, not an official subject, because it’s supposed to teach us about things we wouldn’t otherwise know and raise morale. So there’s, like, advanced origami, and…”
“Yeah,” Dean cut her off. The people pushing past them were getting kind of rough, and he kept walking. “Advanced origami. It’s coming back to me.”
“I figured they gave you the form when you signed up for school,” said Charlie. They were at the seniors floor now, and she led him toward a bulletin board.
“They did.” Dean felt his eyebrows furrow. It had been really confusing, trying to figure out what the hell these forms wanted from his life with no one to explain it to him. And he couldn’t say he cared much about school after what had happened in the months prior to his family moving here. “I think I wrote down comic art and architecture.” He didn’t remember putting anything in third place. Was that bad? He hoped they wouldn’t put him in advanced origami. “What did you write down?” he asked.
“Arrow dodgeball, cosplaying, and…” She stuck her finger against a page on the board, eyes bright. “Creative writing.” Her finger moved across the page to underline Dean’s name. “Look! You got into creative writing too,” she beamed at him. “We’re gonna be together.”
Dean’s eyes roamed the list, and his heart sank when he saw she was right. He didn’t ask for creative writing. He didn’t want it. In fact, the last thing he wanted was a class designed to fish his private thoughts out of his head.
He wanted to kick the wall. He wanted to rip that list right off the board. He wanted to go up to whoever made the stupid choice to put him in a stupid class he had nothing to do with and yell at them.
Instead, he pressed his lips together and made way for another student who pushed past him to see the list.
He recognized the back of the student’s head. It was Cas. Dean glimpsed at the list – he got into a class called Ancient Languages: Latin and Enochian.
He walked away looking pretty happy with himself.
Dean couldn’t help but feel bitter, bitter, bitter, that everyone else seemed to get what they wanted, and he had to go about life being beaten down by it again and again, and hating every moment of it.
He figured he was allowed to have a bad day. He was allowed – he figured – to walk in the front door being in a shitty mood without his brother sending him a death glare, and his mother eyeing him like a hawk ready to dive for prey, and himself being left feeling like he didn’t deserve to have his own feelings anymore.
He was wrong.
He made a beeline for his room without bothering with hellos. All this crap his mother lectured him on, about being good and staying off the radar and not raising anyone’s suspicion – the act was over when he was home. No one pretended to be happy within these walls anymore.
Inside his room, finally, was a space where he didn’t have to care about anyone else. He was alone.
He dropped his backpack on the floor and kicked his shoes off. His room had somehow managed to take the shape of a seventeen year old boy’s bedroom over the summer: posters of horror movies and of pretty actresses on the walls; clothes thrown on the floor; headphone and charger cords everywhere. No books.
He scratched angrily at the back of his neck. Something had been bothering him there all day. He grabbed the back of his shirt and craned his neck to see the tag sewn into it. He dropped it and started opening his drawers looking for scissors.
Something glinted dimly in one of the drawers, and he paused to look at it. His amulet. He’d worn it for half a decade before he did what he did and Sam told him to take it off.
He shut the drawer and left his room.
In the kitchen, Sam successfully ignored him, and Dean successfully retrieved scissors. He went back into his room and cut the tag off his shirt.
You don’t care he’s mad at you, he told himself. You don’t care. You don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care.
There was a knock on the door, and his mother entered.
“How was school?” She asked and leaned against the doorframe.
“Fine.”
“In more than one word.”
Dean sat on his bed and rubbed his face with his hands. “Are you going to keep doing this every day until I graduate?”
“To make sure you don’t get in trouble? Absolutely.”
He lifted his head sharply and looked at her. “What trouble? What trouble could I possibly get into?” That I haven’t already? He wanted to add, but he didn’t dare.
Mary gave him a stern look.
Dean waved his hand in dismissal. “Do you really care, or are you just making sure you’ve still got me on a leash?”
“I care,” said Mary, and the look in her eyes softened.
“I got into some stupid class I shouldn’t be in,” Dean said.
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Yeah, well, it’s annoying.”
“You’re a big boy.” Mary crossed her arms over her chest. “You can handle being in a class you don’t want to be in.”
“I can.” Dean’s voice rose slightly. “But I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to.” He clenched his teeth. He was closer to snapping than he cared for.
“Well, tough luck. You have to.” His mother closed the door behind them and walked into the room, standing over him. Her voice wasn’t calm, now. It wasn’t patient. It was seething. “We moved towns. We did so many things for you to be able to erase your past and have a future.”
“I don't want to erase my past,” Dean spat out, glaring up at her.
“I don't care what you want, Dean. This isn't kindergarten playground anymore. This is the real world, and in the real world you have to fight to survive. So fight. Shut your mouth, put on a smile, nod your head, and do as you're told. This is what it's like to be an adult. You've made your adult choices, now it's time to face your adult consequences.”
Dean looked at her silently for a long moment. Then he forced on a smile, nodded his head, stood up, and walked away.
The next day was his first creative writing class, and Dean couldn’t give less shits. He spent the forty-five minutes glaring at his blank notebook and replaying his conversation with his mother. Then he recited this week’s shifts at Dick’s.
When the bell rang the classroom deflated, and the teacher walked over to Dean's table. She said something to Charlie that made her walk away – he didn’t know what; he still wasn’t listening. Then she turned to him.
“Why don’t you want to be in this class, Dean?” She asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Calmly.
“You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said in the past forty minutes.”
“What is it,” Dean leaned back in his chair. “My leather jacket? My haircut? Maybe I just don’t look like the type who would listen.”
“I’ll leave you alone if you tell me my name.”
Dean’s mouth fell open, waiting for his brain to catch up, and when it realized his brain was stumped, it jammed shut.
“Naomi,” the teacher provided. Dean huffed.
“I could know that.”
“But you didn’t.”
Naomi seemed to be waiting for a response. He shrugged.
“Why are you so angry, Dean?” She asked. It was quiet enough that there was no sting to it.
Why? He thought. About a million reasons.
Because I miss my dad?
Because all my mother does these days is disapprove of me?
Because my brother won’t even talk to me – won’t even look my way, that’s how much he hates me for what I did to him?
None of those seemed like acceptable answers.
Dean shrugged again. It felt like a good tactic: adults were helpless in the face of shrugging teenagers. They just didn’t know what to do with them. “I’ve got zero interest in writing about my feelings,” he said. “And I’ve got minus three billion interest in anyone seeing it. So, do the math.”
“It's not mandatory to share your materials in class,” Naomi said, “Only to hand them in so that I can grade them and give the yearly honorary mention to the student who gets to the top of the class.”
Dean grimaced at his desk. “Why couldn't I be picked for architecture or something,” he muttered.
Naomi sighed. “You can switch classes if you insist.” She went back to her desk and grabbed a few papers stapled together, flipping through them. “The classes still available are balloon animal twisting, flower arranging and tambourine.”
Dean thought this over. He thought it over real hard. And of course, he came to the conclusion that creative writing was the most logical choice.
He stood up, looked at his teacher, and clenched his teeth.
“I’ll take flower arranging,” he said, and before he could regret it, he grabbed his bag and left the classroom.
He slung his bag on one shoulder and hurried down the empty hall. The next period must have started already without him noticing.
Someone walked past him – snooty bookstore Cas, he realized when he looked up, his blue eyes boring into Dean’s. He nodded as they passed each other.
Dean kept walking, and didn’t nod back.
If this guy was any kind of popular around here then he just somersaulted right into a social suicide.
He didn’t care.