Chapter Text
The moment Zak realized he was a loser was the moment he found himself sneaking out of the side of the cafeteria with a watered-down blueberry slushie and an over-baked raisin cookie. It was a few weeks before Christmas Break, and as he walked through the breezeway the chill in the air reflected the time of year. It was nowhere near as cold in Florida as it was up north, but it was cool enough for him to zip his jacket up.
He took a sip of his blue dye and sugar water and stopped himself. Why was he drinking a crappy slushie in this weather? And what was the poor, burnt excuse for a baked good doing in his mouth? He chewed the rest of his bite angrily and chucked both items in the nearby trashcan, stuffing his hands in his pockets instead. What a mess.
He was probably being dramatic. He could practically hear his father saying it to him as he scrolled through those annoying stocks of his on his phone. His mom would tell him to give it a bit more time for things to click in to place as she fixed her makeup. His sister would call him a stupid teenager. Their responses were always the same, and he knew they were right. He was being dramatic. He was a stupid teenager. He should give things time.
But he had been giving things time. The thought made Zak sigh under his breath as he weaved around bodies in the hallway, keeping his head down and his mouth firmly shut whenever he was bumped into and sent bouncing off of backpacks and the wall like a pinball. Nobody had a glance to spare for a random freshman that was barely 5”5’.
He’d been giving things time ever since the beginning of the year when he’d promised himself not to get discouraged by however long it would take him to get friends. Or rather, re-get them. It turned out that moving away during the summer before freshman year and leaving your childhood friends to stuff you into the corner of their brains and forget you existed for three months wasn’t the best strategy to achieving friendship in 9th grade, what a shocker. But he didn’t know it would take this long to get back to the level of familiarity they had. Geo, Harvey, Lya and he had been close ever since he could remember; they’d played together, camped together, eaten together, cried together. You name it and they’d probably done it. Why did being in high school have to change any of that? It made no sense to him how they’d went from throwing eggs at each other the morning after a sleepover to cautious nods to each other in the hallway.
Maybe it did make sense. Maybe those three and a half months meant more than he was giving them credit for. They all changed more than he was expecting to find when he came back. Geo got a jawline, Harvey got a bit taller, Lya got prettier. Zak knew he got a bit taller over Summer too since his mother wouldn’t stop mentioning it. Their drifting might have been justified, but was Zak really the only one that wanted the gang back together? Lya couldn’t truly be happy hanging out with her new friend group that only wore skirts to school, and Geo and Harvey’s conversations couldn’t be that interesting without him.
It wasn’t fair that he was the only one that had no group to fall back on. It wasn’t fair that as Lya ate her stupid vegan cruelty-free lunch with her stupid friends that giggled too loudly and as Geo and Harvey discussed which stupid games they should spend their stupid weekend playing, Zak was navigating himself to the stupid empty building of the stupid school where he’d been spending his stupid lunch periods. It wasn’t fair that he had to go to stupid Ohio for three months and focus on comforting his little sister and dealing with his parents instead of preparing himself for high school while all of his stupid friends got to befriend the stupid people they would be stuck with for four stupid years.
Somewhere deep down he knew that if he walked up to one of them and asked to eat lunch with them, they wouldn’t refuse. Maybe not Lya. He didn’t want to eat with her friends even if he could. Almond Coconut Crunch Granola wasn’t his style. But Geo and Harvey would probably let him, maybe even try to engage him in their conversation. It’s what he wanted, but not like that. They would only do it out of pity. Everybody in his life seemed to be doing things out of pity, lately.
Zak released another frustrated groan. He sounded like even more of a loser. As soon as he crossed over into the dated building’s threshold he placed his heavy backpack down and rolled his shoulder blades. Nobody told him high school would simultaneously give him relationship problems and back problems. Was he just looking for negativity? No, negativity was looking for him.
Out of everything in this school, the West Wing was his favorite, which wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t very different than the rest of the school; it wasn’t even that dated. It hadn’t been used in 15 years, but the white stone it was made of looked about the same as the rest of the school. It had three doors on each side but the back. The front led out to the breezeway of the main school buildings, and only the right door was unlocked. Somebody before Zak had busted the lock, probably the kids that liked to smoke weed in the bathrooms. He hadn’t seen any secret druggies during the current school year but he was positive they had existed once.
The ceiling was high like a gymnasium. The main room probably was a gym before, considering the basketball hoops, front stage, wooden floors, and folded-up seats lining the sides of both walls. Large skylights flooded sunlight in from above, illuminating the dust as it floated idly throughout the air. One of the skylights in the corner was busted, and mold grew along the edge of the exposed floor.
Zak didn’t even know why he called it the “West Wing”; it was just an old gym with some classrooms connected to it. Maybe it made him feel cooler about eating lunch in an abandoned building that nobody would dare step foot in. The mold smell at the front was stronger than it was once you actually entered the Wing, but it served as a worthy deterrent for most students that dared to stray from the breezeway pathway. Except for Zak, obviously.
Usually, Zak sat down smack-dab in the middle of the stage overlooking the room and munched on whatever he had. Sometimes the cafeteria food wasn’t half bad if it was Pizza day or when they had fries that weren’t soggy (A 20/80 chance that was never in his favor.) Other times he just brought something from home. But today he had nothing to munch on, the service in the building was terrible enough that he couldn’t aimlessly scroll through TikTok, and he was not about to hold a search-and-rescue mission for the crumpled up homework in the bottom of his backpack until at least 8 pm that night, so he had nothing to do. Which was terrible, because thinking about Lya and Geo and Harvey had made him restless.
Maybe he should do some exploring. He’d already seen the whole gym since he’d been sneaking into it since August. It was almost December, and it wasn’t like he had any new plans yet. If he was going to be stuck sneaking out to a building he was not even supposed to be in for the rest of the year, he should get to know it. He’d peeked through the glass windows of some of the classroom doors leading out from the main room before, but he’d never stepped foot inside of them. He didn’t normally have time. Lunch was only 30 minutes long, and if he wasn’t eating he was napping or listening to downloaded music.
Zak could probably will himself to sleep if he tried hard enough, and he wouldn’t have to go through the current trouble of wiggling the classroom handle in hopes that it opened. It was frustrating. It was like the metallic jingle was teasing him, chanting You can’t even get a rickety doorknob to turn! In a burst of anger, he drew his leg back and kicked square in the middle of the wooden separator. The frame separated from the door, sending it flying open and leaving Zak panting a bit. He felt foolish as the adrenaline wore off, but a giddy smile made its way to his face. That was badass of him!
The nerves put the teen in a better mood as he stepped forward, surveying the new area with a critical eye. It wasn’t much. He found the line of old desks and chairs in the room, still fairly in order, kind of cool, along with the plastic skeleton model handing up in the corner. The whole right wall was full of anatomy diagrams and the whole left wall was full of windows. Straight ahead was a chalkboard, with nothing but an old “H.A.G.S CLASS OF 2004” written on it in faded yellow chalk. Even though a little crack in the glass of one of the windows let in a small breeze, the air smelled stale. Christ, the place was old.
Zak guessed it was the former Health classroom if the surroundings were anything to go by. He walked around aimlessly tracing his hands over the laminated wooden desks and barren board before leaving for the next room. Kicking open a door the second time around was easy now that he knew it would work. Years of Floridian humidity had made the wood rot and that made the job much more simple.
This classroom wasn’t as interesting as the last; it was identical in build but fully empty, and nothing more than a heavy layer of dust covered the floor. Zak frowned as he peeked into the closet on the far side of the room, perking up a bit when he spotted a rack of clothes. He walked over and began leafing through them, realizing after stumbling across a ruffled dress shirt and overly-sequined dress that they were stage costumes. His face lit up. This was cool, cooler than sitting around humming to himself. He wanted to look more closely at all the outfits, but he decided he had all of the semester to do so and he was more curious about the other two rooms.
He walked past the only entrance without a door; he’d been in there before, it was just the old bathrooms. All the toilets still worked perfectly. Not that he had ever... used them… for a shit after taco Tuesday at school or anything... Never. Nope.
The next door wasn’t even locked. Zak peeked his head in. It looked like another Health room, with the same plastic skeleton hanging in the corner and the same desk set-up. The only thing it lacked was writing on the chalkboard. He guessed it was probably just a product of the fact that Health classes were split by gender, and one had belonged to the guys while the other belonged to the girls.
A sudden ring pulled him out of his thoughts, and he bumped his head against the side of the door frame. His stomach dropped as he checked his phone- how was D lunch already over?! It hadn’t even been that long. As he rushed to close the door and dash across the gym to the entrance to snatch up his backpack, he glanced over his shoulder at the one room he hadn't gotten the chance to explore. He hadn’t noticed before, but it was slightly cracked open like it was inviting him in. Maybe…
He shook his head forcefully. No way. He’d already had 4 tardies in the same class within 3 months. One more and he got detention. The room would still be there tomorrow. Slinging his book bag over his shoulder and nearly escaping a tragic face plant into the concrete path, Zak made his way to his fourth period. If he got there fast enough he was sure his ability to talk himself out of sticky situations would come in handy.
The next day Zak hightailed it to the West Wing. The promise of exploration was exhilarating- not that he was doing much. He’d always been curious as a kid. He got his kicks from pushing limits and poking his nose into places it didn’t belong. An abandoned moldy building was one of those places. But he’d been so… ‘blegh’ lately. There were more articulate words for it, he was sure. God knows what his counselor would have to say about him if he ever tried to explain it. Whatever he was, being able to look forward to discovering something was a good feeling, even if as soon as he opened the door it would be banished. No matter how fleeting the tingle at his fingers was, it made him feel like a warm body again. He hadn’t felt like one in months.
After throwing his backpack down and pushing open the door, his excitement left with an abrupt woosh. There was nothing.
Of course, there was something. The room in front of him wasn’t half as large as the other three had been, but it wasn’t empty. Instead, it was full of ancient cleaning supplies and crusted paint buckets resting on rusted silver shelves. There was a curled-up dead roach in one of the corners. Zak coughed at the acrid smell of ammonia in the air and opened the door wider, waving his hand in front of his nose to dilute it. The feeling of his nostrils burning replaced his jitters of excitement.
His hands waved around in the air until they hit a cord, and he yanked on it. The old lightbulb above him clicked on. Judging by how neglected the room looked, it had rarely been used even when the gym was populated. It resembled an old Janitor’s closet.
It wasn’t what Zak had been expecting. Obviously, he hadn’t expected anything monumental, but the drab sight in front of him was a far fall. It reminded him with a painful stab: You’re still a loser. You shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up. You’re not in a coming-of-age movie. Those don’t even start with a character in Freshman year.
It didn’t feel good.
He took in the sight in front of him a little longer, letting the numbing disappointment wash through him. It was so severe that the thought of drowning his sorrow in a mouthful of soggy cafeteria fries didn’t sound terrible. Maybe even a nice chat with Geo and Harvey about Sonic the Hedgehog. An Impossible Burger with Lya wasn’t even out of bounds. Joking, that was still where he drew the line.
Just as he was about to click the lightbulb back off and sulk in the middle of the gymnasium stage for an hour-maybe-two, his eye caught onto something bright red in the far corner of the room, peeking out under the bottom of one of the shelves. He wasn’t sure how he had seen the roach yet missed this, but in the disappointing room of grimy grey and washed out whites the splash of color was a welcome relief. He had almost left it; it’s like it had called out to him before he had the chance to go. His hand let go of the cord and he crouched down, reaching for the item and pulling it towards him.
Out slid a journal, donning a black leather cover and a red ribbon attached at the spine. It was probably used as a bookmark, which Zak found kinda pointless. Dog-earing a page worked just as well. His hands brushed over the cover, taking in the feeling of the material under his fingertips. It wasn’t a very thick book, consisting of 300 thin sheets at best, but it made up for it with its length and width. Instead of the average 8.5 x 11, the pages looked to be 12 x 14, like one from one of those sketchbooks. Zak had an art phase, so he would know. The bigger a page, the more edgy wolf art he could fit onto it. He didn’t want to think how middle school him would be acting at the moment.
It took a delayed moment for the excitement to kick back in. Holy shit, he’d found a journal! In an old building! One that looked cool, at that! He flipped the cover open, taking in the small, neat words written with red ink in the center of the page with wide eyes.
If found, please return to Darryl N.
xxx-xxx-xxxx
07/31/98
Zak shut it instantly.
He hadn’t even read past the cover and his heart was thumping against his chest. He wasn’t really expecting it to have words in it. The excitement of finding a journal in an empty building was more than enough, but finding out it was already filled up? Who knows what juicy information Zak could find in here? Would it read like an exciting autobiography? Perhaps it was full of mesmerizing-top-secret-mindblowing-never before seen art? The possibilities were endless.
There was something to be said about looking through somebody’s personal belonging. There was an “if found” page for a reason, and it would be disrespectful to whoever this ‘Darryl’ was if Zak did turn past it to the first page without any further consideration.
In all honesty, Zak wasn’t a very considerate person. His Summer had sapped him of any sympathy he was able to cling onto as a teenage boy in 2018 and left him some churning mass of bitterness and spite. He didn’t know this guy. Based on the date signed on the first page, he was old now and doing whatever old people did. Zak snooping in his journal from 20 years ago affected him in no way whatsoever.
Well, he’d given the matter “further consideration”, and he could conclude with certainty that he did not further care. His snooping would have to wait for later, though. His grumbling stomach reminded him of the canister of soup waiting for him in the outer pocket of his trusty Jansport. As he moved to get up his eyes caught on the wall in front of him.
He hadn’t spotted it before, similar to how he’d almost overlooked the gem of a journal, but being crouched on the floor like a toddler poking at a dying bug had given him a better view of the wall in front of him. In the plaster behind the metallic racks was an unnatural jut, looking similar to a piece of paper a child had folded and then colored over with a crayon to achieve a white imprint. Zak stared at it with slitted eyes. His imagination was running wild and he was letting it. Was it a door? A secret left by the old Janitor?
Come to think of it, wasn’t it a bit strange that every other room but the one he was in had concrete walls while this one had plaster? And where were the windows? Zak didn’t even know which direction this closet pointed relative to the school’s main building, since it couldn’t be spotted from the front and the back of the West Wing was guarded with a wire fence that separated it and the forest that was not a part of school property. If Zak really cared, he could try hopping it. But that would risk getting caught, and he didn’t feel like risking his freedom just to be met with English Ivy and impenetrable foliage behind a building.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t do much about it yet. He didn’t want to get half started on the job and then have to leave in another rush to prevent getting a tardy (a quest he barely achieved yesterday.) He’d wait until Friday. Their teacher always gave them an unofficial free period on Fridays. It was probably illegal by some stretch of the word, but it meant 2 hours of unsupervised time to do whatever he wanted around the school so he wasn’t complaining.
Zak had already formulated a plan by the time he stood up and brushed the dust off his knees. Clutching the journal to his chest like a trophy, the boy clicked the light off and left the closet.
Zak was woken up from his nap by yelling. He had a tendency to blackout lately after school days or dinner for 2 or 3 hours. The moment his head hit his pillow, he was out. His mother said it was because he was growing. Secretly, he thought it was because of something else, something connected to the unyielding fog near the back of his head that had persisted for months.
He rubbed his eyes with a groan and checked his phone. 10:30, No notifications. He felt pressure on his toes and looked down, a lazy smile spreading across his face at the dark eyes that met his own. “Hey, Rocco,” he mumbled, placing his phone down on the pillow beside him and releasing a sigh as he watched the dog’s fluffy tail tap against the bedsheets at the hearing of his name.
The yelling downstairs was just getting louder. You’d think that your parents living 5 states away from each other throughout a divorce would be enough for them to stop their explosive fights, but you'd be wrong. It felt like the move had only made things worse and they’d spent 3 months wasting time on a solution that didn’t fix the problem at all. If anything it had made things worse. It felt like his mom and dad spent more time fighting over the phone than they did in person.
It was sickening. It made him feel anxious and angry at the same time, and the same bitterness that had been given perfect conditions to fester within his body all summer grew alongside his emotions. He wanted to scream at the both of them, rip the phone out of his mom’s hand and throw it on the ground and stomp on it until it was nothing but pieces of metal and glass.
A quiet knock sounded from his door and he sat up, leaning on his elbows. “It’s unlocked,” Zak called. His door cracked open and there his little sister was, peeking her head in. Her teeth gnawed at her lower lip, and he could see where her fingers twisted the long sleeves of her shirt. Zak hid his cringe at the realization that it was one of their dad’s old ones. Her eyes met his before fleeing down to stare at the ground. The anger left him like a spirit leaving a house. One look from those brown eyes and he was gone into big brother mode, or whatever you wanted to call it. Whatever it was, he was lost in the urge to protect.
Opening his arms and accepting his sister’s sobs and tight bear hugs shouldn’t have been second nature to him, he realized as he sang her a song to help her fall asleep. It was something that hit him upside the head on the random occasions where he was stuck comforting her, something that had been happening more and more often as of late. He couldn’t count the number of times she’d ended up sleeping in his bed instead of her own for the past two months. The emotional dependence forming couldn’t be healthy, but neither could watching your parents go through a divorce in fifth grade. He couldn’t let her deal with it alone. She was a child. He was her older brother.
Once he finally heard the soft snores drifting up from her Zak laid her down next to him, pulling the cover up beneath her chin and pressing a soft kiss to her forehead. Rocco scooted his head up and laid it on her leg, resting his chin on his paws. Zak scratched behind his fluffy ears in appreciation. “Good boy, Rocco. Watch after her for a bit, okay? I’ll be right back.”
He snuck out of the bed and padded from his room to downstairs as quietly as he could, checking the kitchen to make sure it was empty before he stepped foot inside it. An almost empty wine bottle rested on the counter and he grabbed it, pouring the rest out into the sink and watching the scarlet trickle down the drain. He could hear his mom crying from the living room if he listened hard enough. If he was a good person, he would have gone to comfort her.
But he wasn’t a good person. He had never branded himself as a good person. He was just a regular person, and he got a bottle of water from the fridge like he’d come down to do and made his way back upstairs to his room without saying a word to her.
Zak should’ve started his Geometry homework. His grades in that class were starting to lag behind, and he didn’t feel like going into overdrive mode before the end of the semester to bring them back up. But ruffling through his backpack, his hands hit something tougher than the flimsy plastic of his math notebook, and his excitement was back with a shock. The journal! He’d almost forgotten about it, in the daze of finishing the school day and coming back home, but now that he’d remembered it he was eager to initiate his first real instance of snooping.
Taking it back to bed and crawling in carefully as to not wake his sister, he flicked his bedside lamp off and turned the small light clipped to his headboard on instead, illuminating the cover of the smooth leather book resting on his lap. His fingertips were buzzing again, similar to earlier, as he traced the outline of it.
With a deep breath, Zak opened up to the first page. The words were written in the same tiny red ink on the cover, and the first passage barely took up half the page even though it looked long.
August 10th, 1998
Hello. Darryl here!
I’m not saying hi to anybody but myself, since I’m the only one that will be seeing this. Maybe you, Journal? But according to Pastor John, it’s important to start everything you do with positivity and love, and saying hi to yourself feels positive. So hi again, me!
My older sister took me shopping for school today. Mom was going to, but she wasn’t feeling very well. I got tons of stuff, but my favorite are the new Converse, earbuds, and, well… Don’t tell anybody, Journal, but I also got the new Harry Potter book. I know I’m not supposed to be reading them. There was a sermon last Sunday about consuming things about witchcraft, and of course I was paying attention. But none of it is real! I know it’s wrong of me, but I also know at the end of the day that magic does not exist, and I would never ever insinuate that it did. I hope that God can forgive me just this once.
School starts next week! I’m excited! I can’t believe I’m going to be a real highschooler!! I can’t wait to see how different everything is. Arran says I’m overreacting, but he’s just a Muffinhead. Just because he’s a year ahead of me doesn’t mean I’ll believe everything he says! When I bought this journal, he told me I should make it into an art sketchbook. I’m not even very good at art!!
I just got back from taking Lucy on a walk, and I wish it wasn’t so hot. Going back to school this early just seems counter-productive. My cousins aren’t even going back till next month, and they’re in North Carolina. Speaking of walks, I finally fixed my old Walkman. If worst comes to worst, I can listen to music during the bus rides.
Journal, I’m going to go now and try to read some of my book without my parents finding out. I’ll have to sneak it- Does that count as deceit?- so cross your fingers for me so that I don’t get caught. O_O I’ll update you next week about school. Bye-bye for now!
Drawn in the margins of the main passage was a small figure. Zak had to bring the book closer to make out more than the sketch’s general shape. It was a tiny character with pointy wings, a pointy tail, and some type of hood over its’ face, which was nothing more than a colored-in oval with two white circles signifying eyes. An arrow labeled “ Bad says hi too !!” in tiny scrawl was pointing towards it.
Zak leaned back from being hunched over the page. He blinked a few times to process the information, then promptly shut the book closed with a dramatic groan that was mere decibels away from waking his sister.
Great, he’d found a journal- No, a diary- that used to belong to a weird and boring Christian nerd that drew tiny people with arrows pointing towards them on the sides of pages and used the word ‘Muffinhead’ unironically. Nobody named Darryl could be that interesting. Maybe this kid should’ve listened to his friend’s suggestion and made it an art book instead. Suddenly, the fact that it was written 20 years ago didn’t feel all that extraordinary, especially if all the future passages would be as uneventful.
The feeling of disappointment wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier in the Janitor’s closet, but it was still present in the little huff that left his nostrils. Whatever. Zak was done for the night. He could feel sleep pulling him back under little by little, and he was not one to fight a good snooze. He shoved the journal back into his backpack, for now. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to read forward, but that same inkling of curiosity from before hadn’t gotten satiated yet. It was inevitable.
Turning the tiny light off, he rolled onto his side and closed his eyes. As he drifted off, he thought about the journal and the feeling of the paper under his hands.