Chapter Text
I slept soundly in my bed, dreaming dreams of the day that the Lord God would come to take me away, but alas, I had to be awakened by my alarm clock. It sang its wretched cry to tell me to wake up for the first day of school.
Oh no.
The first day of school!
I nearly jumped out of my bed when I realized.
I can’t make a bad impression on the first day of school!!
Sure, I’ve been going to school with the exact same people since forever, but I’d like to think that first impressions matter, no matter what first you define them as.
Especially the first rapture. I have to be dressed well for that.
I ran to get to the bathroom before it was too late.
If I didn’t get there in time, I was extra screwed.
Sadly, it looked like that day was one I was going to be extra screwed because of one reason and one reason only:
My twin brother, Domenico.
He is a dirty sinner.
“I keep telling you,” Domenico said all the time whenever I addressed him by his good Christian name. “My name is Wes now. It’s my Alabamasona.”
Then he’d put his headphones on over his stupid, Non-God Adoring mullet and listen to Jamiroquai, the Music Of Satan.
We don’t get along well, clearly. He’s too edgy for me.
And he always takes too much time in the bathroom fixing that dumb hair!
“You wouldn’t understand, Enrico,” he said once when I reprimanded him for taking so long. “I’m not taking hair advice from someone who has the opposite problem Jojo Siwa does.”
Some of us are the specific sinners Jesus died for.
Domenico falls into that aforementioned “some of us.”
Ugh.
That was how, on the very first day of school, I ended up having to run to the bus stop. Running has never been very good for me. One of my feet has been twisted weird my whole life, and that doesn’t help running very much. It’s more of a very fast limp.
However, I still made it to the bus stop intact to join my brother and sister there, complete with receiving a Look from Domenico like it wasn’t all his fault I was late in the first place.
Domenico and I may be twins, but I’m clearly the superior sibling. I am dedicated to The Lord God.
I wish I could use a car to get to school instead of having to stand at the dreaded bus stop year-round with him , but my parents won’t get me one because then they’d have to get Domenico one too. Gosh, being a twin is so unfair!!
On the other hand, my relationship with my sister is quite stable.
Perla is, for lack of a better word, the world’s bae. If she threw the woah, God would catch it.
“Hey, Enrico,” she said at the bus stop. “What is your first class?”
I looked at my schedule printout that was carefully stowed under the front cover of my Pocket Bible. On the paper, the first class listed was English.
“English,” I said.
Perla nodded smally. “That’s cool. My first is choir, and then PE with Mr. Tonpetty. Is he good?”
I’ve only had PE with Mr. Straizo, so I can’t really say, but if Mr. Tonpetty dared to even do anything to my little sister, I would bash his face in no hesitation.
“I’ve only had PE with Mr. Straizo, so I can’t really say.”
Perla nodded again.
Just then, the bus pulled up. The bus was number 17 (my favorite prime number!) and the driver of the bus was the same one I’ve had for years, Mr. Westwood. It’s always been clear that he has hated his job forever and will continue to until the end of his days, but he’s been on this bus ever since The Incident in third grade and no one’s gotten him fired yet.
Keyword “yet”.
I hopped on the bus and sat in the very front seat because only heathens sit in the back of the bus. I always like to think that the closer I am to the front of the bus, the closer I am to God.
Mr. Westwood, on the other hand, is very much far from God. He’s the only exception to my fun little rule.
Maybe the Lord keeps him close because it’s always best to keep your enemies closer than your friends.
Maybe that’s why I always end up sitting by Jolyne Joestar on the bus.
I absolutely hate the Joestars.
They’re loud and edgy and absolutely everything I do not want to be.
Jolyne always ended up sitting in the front of the bus because Mr. Westwood deemed her and her friends “too disruptive” and had to separate them, which left me to her whims instead. She always sat and chewed her gum and did her homework on the bus because unlike responsible students like me, she was extremely irresponsible.
“Hey, Pucci,” she said to me annoyingly, “What’s the answer to question 3 on the math packet?”
I pretended I didn’t hear her. I merely kept reading my Daily Bible Verse Tuesday August 27 Psalm 119:1, “Blessed are those whose ways are blameless, who walk according to the law of the Lord.”
Jolyne Joestar has never walked according to the law of the Lord, of that I am sure.
Following those words of Jesus, I was able to make it through the rest of the bus ride without committing an unspeakable act, and I was able to bid goodbye to a grumpy-looking Mr. Westwood like usual.
My first few classes were fairly uninteresting. Not that I wasn’t interested in school at all; I was, in getting a good education and being successful in life like a good productive citizen should; but the majority of the content was kept solely to introductions, to both the class and the people in it.
Soon, I was packing up my books and heading down to lunch.
Sadly, I wouldn’t be able to sit with Perla, as she had a different lunch than I did, but that's alright. Surely some of my other friends would be there, and if not, the Holy Spirit could always sit with me instead. I continued down the hallways in that fashion, head down, wondering what sharing my little ziploc bag of red grapes with the Holy Spirit would entail, when I found a large group of shadows towering over me.
“Move it. Loser.” came a male voice menacingly from the shadow conglomerate.
I looked up.
There he was. Someone who I’d prayed out of my head at Bible Camp over the summer. The most beautiful man at Jojo Bizarre Adventure High School.
With his bleach-blonde hair and golden eyes. With his 5-inch platform boots. With those three succulent moles on his left earlobe. Oh, how I wished to lick them.
Dio Brando.
He looked me up and down with that scathing gaze. Those blinding yellow orbs mapped every inch of my body.
I could cry. He’s so radiant.
It was almost like time stopped in that moment; me looking at him and him looking at me.
Then he took his many-buckled foot and slammed it right on my toe.
I fell to the ground in pain, quite in shock at what had just happened, as Dio and his crew simply walked by me. It was such a strange act; I felt so betrayed.
But when I stood back up, something felt… different.
It was my foot. My twisted foot.
That birth defect had been fixed when Dio stomped on it.
Oh, I thought, what a glorious day.
What a glorious man.
Elated, I headed to lunch. I quickly spotted a couple of my friends, Yoshikage and Doppio. Both of them are fairly average people. At least they're better than the Joestars. Maybe not better than the Holy Spirit, though.
Doppio has pink hair and large, crussunt-brown optic organs. (What are those things called? The bread. Criisant? Crosant? Quasant?) His usual style of crop top edged dangerously on the line of Not Appropriate, but his shoulders remained covered, so that made it all okay. He has this strange habit of deciding that everything except his actual phone is a phone, which had sent him to the nurse’s office not once, not twice, but three times with a severe case of Plastic Spork To The Ear.
Yoshikage, on the other hand, sure, looks a little old to be attending high school, but he’s a good friend. His number one goal is to go through life unnoticed, which seems a little hard when you look like a 33-year-old man whose house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are. He is not married.
But I really couldn’t have asked for better people to sit and eat school lunch with, aside from the Holy Spirit, that is.
“What do you guys think of Dio Brando?” I asked them as I sat down at the table. On the table in front of me, I twiddled with my fingers. I still couldn’t really believe what had just happened to me.
“Nice nails,” Yoshikage answered.
Doppio’s eyes widened. “You like painted nails? I can do yours.”
“No, I only like them on other people. Correction: off of other people. No people. Just the hands. Nails included. Let’s get off of this topic.”
Yoshikage says the weirdest things sometimes.
“Alright,” Doppio said sadly. He slurped his chocolate milk with a more tragic tone than before.
My friends may be a little weird, but they’re my friends, and I’d support them in any God-respecting activities they choose to perform.
“Who do you have next period?” Doppio asked Yoshikage and I. “I have Mr. Diavolo for economics.”
Yoshikage took a sip from his own milk carton. “Trussardi. FACS.”
“Oh, you’re taking FACS? How nice!” the pink-haired teen commented cheerily. “You get to make little pizzas in there, right? Last time I tried to make a pizza I burnt my whole hometown down. 5 people died.”
“I have biology. Mr. Zeppeli,” I responded to Doppio’s original question. I had Mr. Zeppeli for biology last year too, so it wasn’t going to be as bad as having a completely new teacher.
“Doesn’t he… punch frogs?” asked the blonde at the table.
“Yes.”
He does, in fact, punch frogs. A lot. I don’t know how he keeps getting all these frogs to abuse. He should be on some kind of list.
As I drank some of my sparkling water, I looked around the cafeteria to inspect the other groups of students sitting around me.
To my dismay, I located the table at which Domenico sat with his friends. This table just so happened to include my worst enemy, Jolyne Joestar.
Of course my own brother would betray me for the likes of her.
“Is that a literal child?” came Yoshikage’s voice from behind me. He’d noticed me staring and started looking at my brother’s table also.
…At which sat exactly what he said. A literal child.
“Huh,” said Doppio. “That is a literal child.”
And then we all returned to eating our lunches in silence.
When the lunch period ended, we all said our goodbyes before heading to our separate classes.
I entered Mr. Zeppeli’s biology class with my head up as high as it could possibly be, now ready to take on the day.
I wanted to sit next to Miuccia Miuller, who I am cordial with and also happened to be in that class, but Mr. Zeppeli put down those dang assigned seats and I ended up sitting with a bunch of people I’ve never talked to instead.
One of those being… Dio Brando.
He was in the seat right next to me at the black science table in the back corner of the classroom, towering in his little plastic chair.
Once class started, we were told to introduce ourselves to the table. I learned the guy directly across from me was named something starting with a C (Connor? Cody?) and the girl across from me diagonally was one of those Write Your Notes All In The Same Aggressively Bright Red Pen girls, Yukako. She and Dio didn’t seem to want to talk to us that much.
That left Compadre and I to do the conversing.
“Basically, I want to be a police officer when I grow up. Or maybe a detective. You know, to get justice for the people. Leave no murder unsolved. Just like Sherlock Gnomes.”
Dio snorted. “The police are useless.”
Corintians blinked questioningly. “How so?”
“If the police really do their job, how come I, Dio, am allowed to be this criminally hot?”
To tell the truth, I have seen the school resource officer sweat a little in Dio Brando’s presence before.
I cleared my throat.
“Well, I’d like to become a priest. To serve only God for the rest of my life sounds like a great time.”
“Oh, I could never,” Corgi commented. “I want to get married someday, so I can’t really do that.”
For a while now, Yukako had been playing some game on her phone, but she muttered, “Wedding rings are a scam. Diamonds are worth nowhere near as much as the market makes them out to be, but if they keep most of the diamonds off of the market, the value stays up and they can stay in business making all the money while their African child slaves get nothing.” She sighed. “And yet I’d buy one of those rings for my beloved in a heartbeat.”
The teen across from me slowly nodded at her.
“Alright, class,” Mr. Zeppeli called from across the room. “Sharing time is over and I have an announcement!!”
Everyone sat in suspense as we waited for the announcement.
“Dio Brando, you are failing biology,” Mr. Zeppeli announced.
Wow, Dio is so cool. He’s already failing biology class and it’s only the first day of school!
“And?” Dio asked, perfect formation to deflect bullying, not that he’d need to ever do so. “So?”
Mr. Zeppeli frowned.
“You’re going to need to get a lot better if you want to pass this class. I might just have to ask one of the other students to tutor you or something. Haha, wouldn’t that be so funny? A student tutoring Dio Brando."
Then Mr. Zeppeli turned to me.
“You’re a good student, Enrico. Why don’t you stay after school to tutor Dio?”
He leaned down to whisper, “I will give you an 100% in this class please just do it”
So my instinct to be a very good student kicked in and I simply nodded at the teacher’s request.
“Eccellente!” the educator Italianed. “Now time for class.”
Class was… interesting.
Zeppeli was his usual animated self, punching a frog and all (really, where does he keep getting all these frogs to punch?), but near the end of the instruction I felt eyes on me.
I turned to see the One, the Only, the Dio looking me up and down.
“Weren’t you the kid I stepped on in the hallway earlier today?”
I flushed a little. “Yeah, it was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
This received a look of a little surprise, but it was quickly replaced by a snarl grr bark bark
“Wacko.”
And then the bell rang, class was over, and Dio Brando was gone.
The rest of the day went by in a blur now that I had thoughts of spending time with Dio in my head. What would happen? Would we really study biology? Would we praise the Lord? Only time would tell, really.
That afternoon, as I walked out of the school and through the crowd of children outside of it to my bus, I treasured that memory. It would be the last day for a while that I’d have the experience, with the new development of tutoring Dio Brando in biology and all. Even so, I was very excited to leave Jolyne Joestar for a while.
When my siblings and I got off of the bus, I had to tragically tell Perla I wouldn’t be riding the bus with her for a while.
“I have to tutor… someone. In my biology class,” I explained to her. “I have to stay after school.”
Perla nodded quaintly.
I then looked to Domenico, who was off sulking to the side.
“You’d better make sure nothing happens to Perla, you hear me?”
The non-response I got was great evidence that he did not, in fact, hear me. I, now quite cross, walked over and yanked one of his earbuds out by the wire. Domenico always complained that we were too poor for airpods.
“Make sure Perla is okay on the bus tomorrow, Domenico,” I repeated.
“Not gonna be there. Have to hang out with friends,” he whispered back.
Ugh. Dodging responsibility.
“It’s okay, Enrico,” Perla said. “I’ll be fine by myself. I have friends, too.”
Alright.
Fine.
And that was my very interesting, extremely wild first day of school came to a close.