Work Text:
i. the comments
Bathroom graffiti doesn't generally have comment sections. Or, at least, not that Stoney is aware of.
A bunch of kids must’ve missed the memo, then, judging by the feedback that his throw-up on the second to last stall door has received: half a dozen “ass” in various colors and sizes, one “lame” punctuated by an exclamation mark, and, most notably, one comment in a messy orange cursive which reads “shut up, Stan”.
Stoney can’t let that slide.
He pulls out a pink marker and writes, in big letters, “fuk all of you”. It takes him too long to notice his mistake. At that point he can only squeeze a little “c” and hope it comes off as intentional and quirky instead of making the gaps in his education painfully blatant. He adds a little “especially you” with an arrow pointing towards the orange text, making sure to write the “c” smaller than the rest of the text. He played them like fiddles for sure.
::
Katherine sits next to Stoney in math class. She only talks to him because he’s willing to help her with schoolwork - math is the only subject in which he’s never been held back - and he clings to their almost-friendship more than he’d like to admit. Call it desperate, but when the scary girl who keeps getting into fights with the teacher takes a liking to you you don’t spit on that.
“Have you seen the shit they wrote under my throw-up?”
“What throw-up?”
“The one I painted in the bathroom.”
“Why did you paint a throw-up in the girls’ bathroom?”
“It’s not in the girls’ bathroom it’s in-”
“Then why are you asking me if I saw it?”
Before Stoney can say anything, the teacher calls for their attention and Katherine tells him to bite her. The teacher just sighs.
ii. the argument
Stoney generally avoids the middle school part of the school building aside from going to the classes he has repeatedly failed. He’s seventeen, damn it! Being the coolest kid in middle school loses its charm when none of your classmates are allowed to come to your house because you’re, as their parents put it, a terrible influence and a drug fiend . Not true, by the way. Stoney’s drug use is relegated to parties and very much under control. He’d call himself more of a drug connoisseur than a fiend.
Either way, on Tuesdays, half of his classes are eighth grade ones, which forces him to use the middle school bathrooms at some point in the day. The walls of these bathrooms are covered in scribbles as well, some left by Stoney himself through the years.
On the Tuesday after what he’s mentally dubbed “The Graffiti Incident”, he finds that the orange cursive guy has struck again: under a four year old writing of Stoney’s which reads, “ Breaking Bad is the best TV show ever, argue with the wall” - it’s corny but he still stands by it - he replied “ The Wire is better.” With a period.
::
“I mean, can you believe this guy? He’s arguing with shit I wrote when I was thirteen now?”
“Should’ve written it on a piece of paper.”
“That would’ve defeated the whole point- I was making a statement. It’s a truism.”
“What a radical statement, calling Breaking Bad the best show of all time. How controversial. Write it on every moldy wall you can find.”
“The walls have mold?” He made a mental note of covering his snout in the presence of any weird stains from now on. “But anyway yes, I know it’s common sense, that’s why it’s a truism . I don’t even care about the show now because I know I’m right, I care that he’s hunting down every single thing I’ve ever written and arguing with me.”
Katherine yawns. “Is this your life now? Beef with a marker?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Stoney crosses his arms. “I need to find this guy and hack his shit,” he mumbles.
iii. the trap
The bait is irresistible: a self-portrait of Stoney captioned, “don’t mess with the Stoney crew”, all in pink marker and one stall away from the throw-up that started it all. It’s going to earn him detention for sure, but he’s not thinking about that. He just wants to catch that guy.
It takes him a few minutes and, when he’s done, he hides in the stall with the throw-up and waits.
Stoney is not good at sitting still. His teachers have been telling his mom to get him a psych eval for years, but she’s been busy. So he drums his knees until they go numb and he’s sure they’ve turned bright red under his fur.
Nearly half an hour in he’s started chewing his forearm out of boredom, but finally he hears the noise of a marker being uncapped in the next stall.
“Motherfucker,” he grunts, and he scrambles trying to climb the wall. Except, his legs have fallen asleep from sitting on the toilet for half an hour, so he slips and falls on his ass.
By the time he gets out of the stall, the guy is already slipping out the door. All he catches is a glimpse of long, white ears.
iv. damien
Damien grimaces when he sees Stoney approaching in the cafeteria. Stoney tells himself he’s just intimidated.
“It’s you.”
“Damn right it’s me.”
“Swear to God, if you want to talk about my dad again-”
“My feud with him has been put on hold.” He points at Damien, making him recoil. “I need the name of the rabbit guy.”
Damien blinks at him.
“From the mathlete tournament? The one who kept leaving me voicemails.”
“You studied with him for a month and you never learned his name?”
“I don’t need to justify myself to you . Or your dumbass dad.” Stoney’s gaze falls below the table, on Damien’s leg cast. He nods towards it. “When are they taking that off, anyway?”
“In a week.”
“Shit, dude, I haven’t even signed it, I’m such a bad friend! I’m just in time!” He kneels and pulls out his marker, his eyes darting over the various names written all over it.
“We’re not friends,” Damien says, but he doesn’t pull away. He sighs, much like the math teacher did with Katherine, and shakes his head dramatically.
Stoney keeps adding details to his tag to buy time until, finally, he finds an orange signature on the back of Damien’s knee - on the popliteal fossa , as he’s had to memorize three years in a row. Trait .
“Are you done? This is starting to get weird.”
Stoney jumps up and hops back, waving cartoonishly at his ex friend. “Yeah, bye, Damien. Say fuck you to your dad for me.”
He doesn’t hear Damien’s reply, but from reading his lips he deduces it’s either “Weirdo” or “See ya, bro”. Not that he cares either way. Damien and his stupid dad can break both their legs for all he cares.
::
Stoney heads behind the school before going home. His usual smoking spot, however, is already taken.
“Shit,” the math teacher - Stoney doesn’t remember his name - mumbles, tossing a half-finished cigarette into the drain.
“Chill, you can smoke if you’re not on school property. I checked.”
The teacher is frantically waving his hands in front of his face, as if the smoke that still hasn’t dissipated is the evidence of a horrible crime. “I shouldn’t set a bad example.”
Stoney barely stifles a laugh. “By smoking? Dude, unless you have ketamine on you right now, you’re not showing me anything new.”
The teacher’s gaze changes a little. Stoney’s not sure how to interpret it. “That’s quite sad.”
“Don’t Good Will Hunt me, captain my captain my ass,” he snarls. He didn’t mean to say it like that. It’s not a good idea to snarl at teachers, even when they’ve had their spirit broken to the point that they smoke two packs a day behind the school building.
“That’s not…”
“Good day to you, sir.” He storms away. The only way to prevent disasters when your mouth moves faster than your brain, he’s found, is to have even quicker legs.
v. the rabbit
A rabbit named Trait is easy to find, even with half the school refusing to help him. Dicks.
He’s all by himself in the music room - really, just a room with foam walls and a couple of cheap instruments. His paw is flying up and down the neck of an acoustic guitar as he strums with his knuckles, so caught up in it that he doesn’t notice Stoney walking in. Oh, well.
Stoney switches on the electronic drum kit and slams his fist on the crash cymbal. It makes no noise. He tries each pad until he realizes that it’s unplugged, but by that point Trait has already stopped playing and he’s staring at him.
Stoney clears his voice. “So. I’ve found you.”
Trait doesn’t say anything, he just holds the guitar and gently rocks back and forth. Stoney ignores that.
“What’s your problem?” When Trait simply tilts his head and blinks, he continues. “Dude. The graffiti. Why are you replying to everything I wrote? You’re obsessed with me or something.”
“You said to argue with the wall and I did.” He says it matter-of-factly, in a calm, quiet voice.
Stoney narrows his eyes, trying to recall what he actually wrote. “Sure.” Then he remembers the first, more relevant incident. “But my throw-up.”
“Yeah, I was pissed off at you. We lost the mathlete tournament ‘cause you wouldn’t study.”
Stoney crosses his arms. “I told you I was stupid.”
“Evidently.” He taps his fingers on the side of the guitar and his rocking gets more intense. “Did you need anything else?”
“Oh, so it’s fine when you focus on music? Hypocrite?”
“This is a free period and I don’t have any tournaments coming up.” He begins picking at the strings then, completely ignoring Stoney.
“Okay, fuck you too, I guess. And Damien’s dad, it’s his fault I got distracted.” Not getting a reply, he decides to get up and leave. “And fuck your stupid crooked handwriting. Just write normally like the rest of us.” He keeps mumbling as he walks out the corridor, hoping to get back at Damien and his dad and Trait and maybe Trait’s dad too through some form of negative psychic energy.
::
His math teacher is smoking behind the school building again. This time he just sighs. He sighs a lot. “Just don’t tell anyone, alright?”
“Bribe me.” Stoney lends him an open palm.
“Not until you’re twenty-one. But hopefully you’ll be out of here by then.”
“Shit.” Stoney leans against the wall and slumps down. “Doesn’t it piss you off that you teach math? You can’t do a carpe diem shtick through theorems and shit.”
“Helping you finish high school is more than enough.”
Stoney fakes a retch. “Get out of here with that.”
“You’re good at math. Why did you fail the tournament?”
“Damien’s dad,” he says through gritted teeth. “He’s always fucking with me and making me feel stupid.”
“Uh-huh.” The teacher takes one last drag and tosses the cigarette butt into the drain. “If I leave now, will Cossett bother you?”
“I think he’s already gone.”
“Okay.” He dusts off his jacket and turns to go, then he turns back to face Stoney. “You can talk to me after class if you need anything, whenever you want.”
“Dude. I’m not skipping lunch to hang out with a prof.”
vi. i just wanna go and run away
“You look just like your dad, did you know that?” Stoney’s mom says, grabbing at his cheeks.
“You’ve told me, like, a thousand times.” He swats her hand away and she swats him back.
“If it wasn’t for that chub on your arms. You need to exercise more and burn that away.”
“Fu- I mean, come on, give me a break. I got that from you so, really, who’s at fault here?”
It starts to rain outside.
“Whatever, I’ll be in my room. Make dinner or don’t, I don’t give a shit.”
::
There’s an orange hi-vis jacket in his wardrobe. He took it from his dad’s closet after he died, and took to smelling it every day until it completely faded away.
The positive side of that is that it feels slightly less weird when he puts it on and sneaks out, miraculously climbing down the wet side of his house up until the last step, at which point he slips and falls ass first into a bush. It doesn’t matter, though, because his mom hasn’t heard him and that’s enough.
::
Trait is sitting under an umbrella by the public pool. Stoney saw him from the distance, he recognized his ears, but he couldn’t believe it until he was up close.
“What’s up, man?”
Trait twitches, like he was startled but he doesn’t have the energy to jump. “‘Sup.”
“How did you even get in there?”
He points at a hole in the chain link fence that separates them, just a few meters away.
“Damn. You cut that open yourself?”
“Uh huh.”
“Wow.” Stoney joins him under the umbrella and finally notices the nearly finished blunt in his paw. He also notices more twitches, and finally takes in that he’s only wearing a T-shirt. “Aren’t you cold?”
Trait shakes again. He keeps looking straight ahead. “A bit.”
Stoney rubs his eyes. “Don’t make me regret this, man.” He takes off his jacket and drapes it over Trait’s shoulders, rubbing him vigorously to warm him up. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“I’m acting out ‘cause my dad died.” He shrugs. He always talks about it like he’s joking.
Trait nods. “Something similar.”
“Right.” He pulls him into a stilted hug. It’s just ‘cause of the cold, he tells himself. What else is he supposed to do? Let him catch a cold? He’s read old books, that’s how the quiet kid dies. “I’m thinking of running away.”
Trait nods against his shoulder. “Cool.”
“You coming?”
“Wait.” Trait taps his knees with his thumbs for a few moments. “Why are you asking me?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you wanna run away too?”
“I guess.” He grabs Stoney’s paw and presses it against his forehead. “Hold on- hold on a second.” He crawls on his knees for a few steps before making a horrifying noise and throwing up in the pool.
“What the fuck, man, gross!” Despite that, Stoney joins Trait by the side of the pool and grabs his chest. It’s better than pulling him out if he falls in. “Someone’s gonna have to clean that.”
“It was that or your lap.”
“Oh. Thank you, then.”
Trait gives him a thumbs up, then he hacks and throws up some more.
“That must’ve been some real shitty weed,” Stoney jokes, patting his back. “You know, I got pushed inside this pool a few times.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah. You see why I wanna run away?”
Trait nods and crawls back under the umbrella, panting and coughing. “As soon as the rain stops.”
“Yeah.” He pats his shoulder and pulls him close. “As soon as the rain stops.”