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It starts with not being able to sleep.
Every night becomes a fight and in the way your life is these days, you lose more often than not. In the evening, Channel 7 will say it's supposed to get as low as 45 degrees that night, but there you'll be at three, heaving awake to find you've kicked off the sheets and blanket.
Your body is slicked with cold sweat and it's buzzing, the sick-shaky comedown of adrenaline. But it isn't from a nightmare – not a normal one, anyway. There was no surprise test you haven't studied, no speech you have to give in front of the school and you're naked—
Actually, in the dreams you are naked. More naked than you've ever been in your entire, miserable fucking life.
–
You know this is not how life is supposed to go. You grow older, you get taller and smarter and stronger, and there isn't supposed to be any backsliding. But something reached inside of you and turned the dial. None of it is really happening but if you don't do something to snap clear, it will have happened.
Suddenly:
You are the loser. You are the poor kid who was attacked by his teacher. You are the bruised embarrassment at the country club holiday party. You are the too-quiet truant case and you are the problem student who might not graduate if he doesn't start turning in his homework.
You can survive being all these things, but please god, please don't be the fag.
This last, like the rest of it, is LaRusso's fault.
–
The two of you never speak. This problem, it's one-sided like a mugging.
You watch LaRusso sometimes, because he's easier to look at than the equations on the projector in Algebra 2, or the dense blocks of text on the page in Civics.
He is awful to look at, but he makes sense in the same inevitable way a crashing ocean wave makes sense. You think you have control and balance and strength, and then the wave hits and sweeps you away and you're left only with the stinging brined realization that you never had any of those things, actually.
And he is awful to look at, because he makes no sense at all. It doesn't make sense that someone that small could beat you. You trained for years, which at this point represents a good chunk of your formed memories. Five days a week pushing your body to become something different, something better, and you thought it meant something when it finally started to work.
You remember how his body felt at Halloween. Slow and pliable, you could do anything to it. (What a wasted opportunity, a voice says in the darkness of your room, and you punch your own thigh as hard as you can.)
At school you study the movement of his slender shoulders and arms as he talks to another classmate. He gestures a lot. If you could pretend you saw something girlish in him, that might make it easier, but you look at his hands: strong and capable. You remember them striking you. There is no refuge in those hands.
LaRusso's soft, pink mouth curves and falls, shaping an endless torrent of words that never fails to elicit laughter from whoever he's talking to, and you don't want to hear it. You want to shut him up, but you know from experience the way you'd normally try to do it won't work. Which leaves the other option.
LaRusso is looking at you over his shoulder. His eyes are dark and hooded, and he doesn't look even a little scared of you anymore. Under your stare, he draws his lower lip into his mouth with a white flicker of rabbit teeth. His eyebrows go up, and you belatedly turn away.
You put your head down, tuck the side of your face into your folded arms and stare hard out the window of the classroom until the teacher decides to try telling you off again. Aren't you here to learn, Mr. Lawrence? You never want to learn another thing so long as you live.
–
In March, you show up to school stinking drunk, just shy of reeling. The faces in the hallway all have a distant, glazed look to them, the moving bodies rendered untouchable, and you feel good about all of it. The homeroom teacher looks at you narrowly but it's barely three months until you graduate; in the end, she says nothing. It feels like a solution, until you start to sober up and sweat, and then the headache comes.
Third period, you ask to use the bathroom and go stick your head under the faucet of the boy's room.
There is not enough space in the sink, but you persist. The rush of water disguises the sound of the door opening, which is why you later assume you don't hear LaRusso enter. Or maybe you gave up on vigilance after December. Maybe you've been hoping, if you leave yourself open, the attack will come.
You raise your dripping head up and meet the wide, watchful eyes of the other boy in the mirror, and the lingering drunk is replaced with cold adrenaline.
“What are you fucking looking at?” you say, but your voice is too high. It's not a threat, but a plea.
In your nightmares, this would go differently. You'd rake your soaked fringe back from your forehead and turn to Daniel, and he'd reach for you with those surprisingly strong hands that never stop moving. He'd pull you to him until you were pressing him against the white-washed cement wall. You would cover him from head to foot, and his head would fall back, that mouth would open hot and wet. For a moment your body would feel like it used to feel, when it was strong and capable and right, and you knew what to do with it.
In reality, LaRusso's gaze goes cool and calm and he says, hands twitching out from his sides in a dismissive shrug:
“Nothing, I guess.”