Chapter Text
Reggie yawned as the classroom lights flickered on and he scanned the empty room, mentally preparing himself for the hordes of middle schoolers that would fill the seats throughout the day. He’d like to think he had the cool teacher’s classroom, full of posters of music icons like Dolly and Jagger along with what he hoped to be inspiring quotes (“mistakes are proof that you are trying” was his favorite). He had a classroom fish, Darth the III (don’t ask what happened to the first two…). His desk was an organized chaos, full of pictures of his dog, Star Wars figurines, the fake apple that his brother Stevie had given him when he landed his first teaching gig, and piles of folders with homework to grade.
Maybe teaching eighth grade math wasn’t exactly the dream job, but what could he say? Almost dying with your best friends at seventeen years old, going through a heartbreaking band breakup, fleeing your abusive parents and gaining custody of your younger brother at eighteen years old changes your priorities in life a bit.
Everything started when Bobby’s family moved from L.A. to Vegas after the Hotdog Incident. After Ms. Shaw finally realized that their band wasn’t some kiddie garage band and her son was playing at bars and clubs that Bobby was way too young to be in while she was out of town supporting her more favorite kids at their games, she frantically tried to make up for years of no parenting by becoming a helicopter mom desperate to rescue her youngest from the “dark underbelly of Hollywood” before someone “actually dies”.
Then, after almost dying, Alex’s anxiety went completely out of control and he was wrecked with flashbacks from the night they almost died whenever they played. He became so obsessive about his food that it became hard for him to trust eating anything. This was all besides the fact that his parents still were so unaccepting of his sexuality that he was completely unwelcomed at home, even after almost dying. The realization that even his near-death wasn’t enough for his parents to love him again nearly broke him. For days the guys could hardly get Alex to talk to them. When he wasn’t curled up in the loft he snuck out on his own, disappearing for hours at a time until the guys finally caught up to what he had been doing in secret…
Dancing.
Alex used to love dancing when he was younger but it had taken a backseat when he joined Sunset Curve. After drumming started to bring on more anxiety instead of curing it, he joined some dance classes at the community center as a new way to relieve stress. When he turned eighteen and they happened to have a teaching job open, Alex landed his first professional dance gig, throwing Reggie and Luke for a loop. That soon job paved the way for another job opportunity at a local studio, where he met another teacher slash semipro skateboarder and fell head over heels in love. Luke was gutted to lose him as a drummer, saying a few choice words that Reggie lectured him over- the maddest he had ever gotten at Luke. All it took was going to Alex’s recital and seeing how relaxed and happy he looked on stage in his own performances, how loved he was by the kids in the classes he taught, and how much he loved working with Willie for them to see maybe drumming wasn’t his destiny after all.
Alex had promised, of course, to jam with the guys when he could and take the occasional gig, but then…
Then…everything back at the Peters house took a turn for the worse. To put it lightly. The truth was, Reggie had never been completely honest about just how bad his parents’ fighting was. Reggie hadn’t admitted the reason he wore so many layers was to cover bruises on his arms or that he was so obsessed with food because he wasn’t hardly fed at home. One might hope that nearly losing their oldest son would be the wake-up call his parents would need to get their shit together and treat their kids right but instead…
Instead, his dad had gotten the hospital bill for his three day stay and when his parents saw how many thousands of dollars that one dollar-fifty sketchy back alley hotdog had cost them, they were not happy.
They were really, really not happy…with him.
It didn’t matter that Reggie immediately started working at a local pizza place, it didn’t matter that he picked up even more responsibility around the house along with slowly paying off the bill. All he was to them, from that stupid decision to eat such a sketchy hotdog on, was a reckless kid who didn’t take life seriously, who had no appreciation for how hard his parents worked, who needed to get his shit together before he “actually died”. Suddenly the fighting stopped being just between his parents and started being between him and his parents. When one of those fights landed him in the hospital, after Stevie rushed next door to call 911 and he took his second-ever ambulance ride to the ER to have his life saved, Reggie knew he had to get out. He had to get both of them out. For the first time ever, he admitted to the social workers at the hospital and the police about what had been happening at home. His dad arrested and in the end it was barely even a fight with his mom over getting custody of Stevie.
You want him? You can have him.
All he had to do for the state was prove he could hold down his jobs, get them a place to live, and soon he and Stevie were living in a dump of an old one-bedroom apartment. He stayed on a mattress in the dining room while letting Stevie have the bedroom. It wasn’t much space, and it was definitely sketch, but he gained the respect of the drug dealer next door after helping his kid brother pass his algebra final and never again did he or Stevie hear a peep from anyone in the neighborhood. He started working full-time at the pizza place, part-time at the library, and when his 4.0 GPA helped him get a full-ride scholarship to the local community college, they were able to move somewhere a little nicer. Most importantly, neither of them legally had to see their parents ever again. Most importantly, neither of them had been hurt by anyone in years.
As for Luke, Luke never wanted to give up on the band, of course. He stayed living in the studio long after the rest of the guys moved out, even after Mr. Reynolds who owned the house moved and some new family moved in. The new family was mourning their mom, who had died the year before, and Luke quickly fell head over heels for the daughter who of course also wrote songs and played piano. Luke helped to pull her out of a deep depression and she saved Luke too, Reggie thought, and the Molinas didn’t mind him staying there. Together they began writing songs, doing open mic nights. Julie had the voice of an angel and suddenly Luke had a new sound and together they were…pretty damn perfect. She even helped him reconnect with his mom, and now they were working on their first demo together.
Reggie really, really didn’t mean to reminisce about his former band at 6:30am on a random Wednesday morning, but after having a hotdog-related nightmare out of the blue last night, he couldn’t help that it was on his mind as he unpacked his bag and booted up his school-supplied computer. And took a long sip of his black coffee.
“Mr. Peters?”
Reggie jumped at the small voice in the doorway but threw on his cool, casual teacher smile at the sight of René Alvarez. He had students who were actually assholes, students who tried to be teacher’s pet, students who (very uncomfortably) had a crush on him…and there were certain students who reminded him of a young Luke, Alex, or Bobby. Or a younger version of himself. René reminded him of all of them.
“My mom had to drop me off early,” he explained, stammering nervously. “Um…if it’s okay, I mean I don’t want to bother you, you’re probably pretty busy. But the janitor looked super annoyed that I tried to wait in the cafeteria while he was still mopping, and the library was locked and-"
“It’s okay!” Reggie promised, his heart melting when he saw how relieved the kid looked. “You hungry? Would you believe the snack machine gave me two packages of Pop-Tarts? Best luck ever, right?”
René’s eyes lit up in that way that his own used to when Luke’s mom would ask him to stay over for dinner, and Reggie didn’t hesitate to toss over one of the Pop-Tarts as he opened his own and joined his student for breakfast.
“You’re coming to music after school, right?” Reggie asked.
Then there was the music program: his pride and joy. The school hadn’t had a music program in years when he joined, it had been disbanded after the old music teacher retired and the school board decided it was a convenient time to reallocate what little funds the program had to “classes that mattered”. The new program became his baby after a few students petitioned to at least be able to have an after-school music club, and he was the lucky teacher who won the job of leading the program for no extra pay and a budget of a whole $500 for the entire year.
Okay, so maybe he was the only teacher who had volunteered.
The kid nodded excitedly, stuffing half of a blueberry Pop-Tart into his mouth before reaching into the side pocket of his backpack for a pair of drumsticks. A smile crossed Reggie’s face as he remembered Alex carrying his drumsticks around exactly like that.
“Can I show you what I practiced last night?”
“Go for it, dude.”
Face contorting into intense concentration, René flexed his wrists for a moment before he carefully began to find the simple beginner’s rhythm, banging away right on his desk. It was a rhythm he had seen Alex practice thousands of times- mostly played when the drummer was trying to relieve anxiety, not even playing for real. He had easily been able to recreate it to teach René.
“That was tight!” Reggie grinned, earning an unimpressed eyebrow raise from René at his lingo. “That was, um…a real banger?”
René snorted, rolling his eyes, and Reggie felt decades older than twenty-three.
“Any idea when I might be able to play on some real drums?” René asked.
“I’m working on it,” Reggie promised.
He bit into his Pop-Tart, ignoring the queasiness in his stomach. His $500 budget barely covered getting stands and sheet music for the kids, let alone any instruments. Some of the kids were playing on instruments inherited from older siblings or dead relatives; almost none of them were playing what they wanted to play. René had been so determined to learn drums, he claimed he didn’t care if he was learning rhythms on buckets, he was going to drum. Alex would be proud, Reggie hoped. He had considered reaching out to him, but Alex was so busy with work and Willie and Willie’s skateboarding and their own teaching jobs. He probably had his own lack of funding and resources to worry about. This was his club he had taken on; Reggie was the one who for some reason thought he could teach almost a dozen kids music from scratch on instruments that almost none of them had ever played before.
And Reggie just wasn’t ready for Alex to laugh him out of L.A. for trying to teach some kid drums via a bucket and his memories of Alex practicing, okay?
“Relax your shoulders,” Reggie reminded René, remembering the amount of times Alex had to stop and remind himself to do just that. The kid did, looking hyper-focused as he tried the rhythm again, nailing it that time. “That’s fantastic, man! Here let me show you this one-“
He borrowed the drumsticks and René watched carefully as he played another rhythm he remembered Alex playing.
Reggie had agreed to take on the music program not only to keep music in his life but to bring music into these kids lives, knowing how much music helped to save him. He had to prove to himself that he could do this on his own; he had to find a way to make the music program work out. It wasn't that Reggie was ashamed he gave up what could have been a legendary music career, it really wasn’t! He was proud of the life he had built for himself and for his brother.
If only he never had that stupid hotdog nightmare.
Or ran into a certain guitarist the next night at the laundromat.