Chapter Text
Between dropping his bag and passing out, Evan had failed to set an alarm. He was woken by a sharp rapping at his door and his mother’s muffled voice telling him he had 15 minutes before they needed to leave.
Evan groaned and flipped from his stomach onto his back, staring at the ceiling for a moment before forcing himself to sit up and slide off the bed. Rummaging through his duffle, he pulled out a pair of jeans that had, as of yet, been spared holes in the knees and a short-sleeve polo. Given the options he was working with before the rest of their things arrived, it’d have to do. Evan didn’t have time for a shower (didn’t think he even had a towel, anyways), but he snagged his toiletries bag and headed to the bathroom to get as ready as he could after a fourteen hour travel day.
Brushing his teeth, Evan looked in the mirror, scrunching his forehead in a way that wrinkled his soft red birthmark. He wondered what kind of impression he was likely to make on a new group of classmates, already 90% of the way through the year. He wouldn’t say he’d had friends back in Hershey, but he’d been popular enough. He always had a spot at a full table waiting for him at lunch, at least, skating by socially on the basis of his casual affability and being on the football team. He didn’t imagine he’d have that easy of a time now.
Evan quickly ran a damp hand through his hair in an unsuccessful effort to tame his curls, practiced a wide smile in the mirror that didn’t reach his eyes, and made his way out into the living room. With nowhere to sit, Margaret was standing poised by the door waiting for him.
“Good morning, Evan,” she said mildly. “Did you sleep well?”
“Fine,” he replied quietly, shoving his phone into his backpack. “Where’s dad?”
“He took a taxi to the office a while ago. We’ll have to pick him up later if our cars haven’t been delivered by this afternoon.”
Evan shrugged. “Ok.” With nothing else to discuss, Margaret turned off the harsh overhead light and walked out the door, Evan following behind her and waiting for her to lock up.
Evan looked around, squinting against the already harsh sun. If the street hadn’t seemed like much at night, it somehow felt even worse in the daylight. There wasn’t anything wrong with the house, per say, but it was boring, the same cookie-cutter design every other one in the neighborhood had. It made him uncomfortable, like he’d been dropped into a movie set where everything was a facade, front doors held up by 2x4 framing.
—
Getting registered at La Salle High School went smoothly, given Margaret’s former life as a third grade teacher before Phillip started making enough money for her to quit. (Evan would hesitate to give her the title ‘stay at home mom,’ but she was, definitely, constantly at home.) She greeted the Vice Principal warmly as he made his way into his office, and got on Jolene’s, the office administrator, good side quickly.
His sample size was small, but, from what he’d seen so far, Evan thought it was safe to say that suburban high schools didn’t differ that much from state to state. His schedule basically looked like what it had just a couple of days ago, aside from a switch from football to general PE and French to Spanish. He wasn’t looking forward to trying to catch up on a new language seven and a half months into the school year, but he figured it would be more practical, and Jolene had gossiped that the unmarried (God forbid) French II teacher was out on maternity leave, anyways.
The rest of Evan’s day left him in a bit of a daze. He got on fine with the few classmates he had an interaction with; that was never his issue. He’s always been good at surface-level: Joining in on conversations around the lab table, chatting about the Super Bowl with the guy behind him in line for the water fountain. But, just like at his old high school, genuine friendship felt out of his reach, especially coming in in March. The cliques were established, the unassigned desks were unofficially claimed, the clubs were winding down activities for the semester. It kind of made Evan feel like a ghost haunting the halls, able to see and hear but not speak or touch.
Increasingly overwhelmed, Evan had to duck into the bathroom at the end of passing period before his final class to lock himself in a stall. Drawing his knees to his chest, he took ragged breaths, embarrassed and self-conscious even in an empty room of his inability to chill the fuck out. One day in and he already felt on the verge of falling to pieces. Didn’t bode well for the likelihood of him keeping it together through the end of the year.
And the thing is, he thought a bit hysterically, it wasn’t even that he couldn’t handle loneliness. He had watched his sister, essentially his only friend, get into a car and leave in a way that felt like running away from him rather than towards something else. He lived in a house, not a home, with two parents who were simultaneously overbearing and completely absent. Evan had learned to breathe with the weight of that on his chest. But this was worse, and he struggled to unravel why.
At least in Hershey, he had a rubric. It was easy to slip into the cocky, amiable attitude people looked at him and expected. Evan knew what people wanted from him and he was eager to meet their assumptions. His entire personality some days felt like carefully negotiated artifice. Evan thought that part of what made this new environment so disconcerting was that, this late in the year, everyone seemed to know their place. The play was cast, the lines were learned, and he’d been dropped onstage in the final act without a script.
Evan, staring at the flaking silver lock of the stall, wished he were an angry person. He had every right to be. He wished he wanted to kick the lid off the seat and rip the toilet paper holder off the wall and punch the mirror over the sink until either it broke or his hand did. Get suspended his first day and force his parents to focus their attention on him, even if it was negative. If he had their attention, then he was real, something solid. He wished that he could push this feeling outside of his body. But instead, it burrowed inward, claws puncturing his gut.
And then the minute warning bell rang. Evan blinked away the watery haze in his eyes, and took a final ragged breath, and put his feet back on the ground.
—
At the release bell, Evan joined the stream of students exiting through the south doors towards the roundabout where a line of buses sat idling, waiting for their riders. Margaret had offered to pick him up from school before retrieving his dad from work, but Evan figured he’d rather the person driving him home had nothing to say to him because they were strangers and not because they just didn’t like him.
Evan double-checked the number Jolene had written on the top of his printed schedule, then headed towards the bus marked #118. He didn’t rush like the other students were, lunch bags tethered to backpacks bouncing from the impact of feet hitting pavement. Evan wanted to give the others on his route a chance to board and take their usual spots; he’d accidentally sat in the wrong seat in Biology and, despite having technically done nothing wrong, had flushed with shame for fifteen minutes after.
Just as the buses almost simultaneously cranked their engines, preparing to head out, Evan hopped up the steps of bus #118. He absentmindedly nodded at the bus driver, scanning front to back for an open spot. Unlike at his Pennsylvania high school, it appeared the cool kids didn’t sit in the back. Evan hiked his backpack up higher to avoid knocking into people and walked all the way to the rear to take an empty seat next to the emergency exit, three empty rows in front of him serving as a buffer between him and the next person.
He pulled out his iPod and hit shuffle, shoving his earbuds in and leaning his head on the window despite the uneven road causing his temple to hit the metal handle every so often. He didn’t move for the thirty minutes it took for them to roll to a stop down the road from his house.
—
The next month passed better than his first day had, if only by the measure that Evan hadn’t had to lock himself in a bathroom stall for an abbreviated mental breakdown again. Evan struggled to stay afloat in some classes, like Spanish, but found that in several of his others he was way ahead of the curriculum and was subsequently bored out of his mind most of the day. He’d taken to spending as much time as he could get away with in the library; the librarian was probably the coolest person on campus (she had a nose ring ), and he had to frequently replenish the supply of books he was doing his best to read inconspicuously in class.
When he got home each afternoon, he’d make stilted conversation with his mom and then go for long runs around the neighborhood; football tryouts were at the end of the year, and Evan figured he’d better start conditioning himself to the blazing sun if he had any hope of making the team. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually get used to how oppressive the heat was, even in the spring. He’d taken to leaving blue Gatorades in the freezer and eating them like frozen ice when he got back, laying at an odd angle on the couch to ensure that the air vent hit his face directly.
Evan had read a headline once, some article he couldn’t remember the context of now, that described a pace as “punishing.” Something something set a punishing pace. The wording of that had stuck with him. The idea that you could want to move forward so badly that you would hurt yourself in the process. Evan thinks he’d describe spending most of the six hour window between school and sleep running in temperatures hot enough to make the rubber of his shoes sticky on the asphalt as a ‘punishing’ pace. At least this was discomfort with clear cause and effect, like poking at a fading bruise until it turns purple again. You had agency, you knew where the pain was coming from because you were the one to inflict it. Too bad Evan didn’t feel like he was moving forward at all.
—
Towards the end of April, La Salle had a random half day to accommodate a teacher professional development session. The bell rang for early release at 1:30 and Evan made the now-routine walk out to his bus. What was not routine was the unfamiliar boy sitting in the seat Evan had come to consider his, perhaps the one thing that felt consistent the entire school day. The boy had dark brown hair, just long enough to fall down his forehead as he hunched over some schoolwork. Evan hadn’t seen him before, but he thought it screamed ‘freshman’ to have your homework out before the bus even pulled away from the curb.
Stopping short, all Evan could do was gape for a moment before snapping, “What the hell are you doing?”
The boy looked up from his notebook with downturned eyebrows broadcasting his confusion. “What?”
Suddenly, Evan was looking into wide brown eyes framed by long lashes and a small beauty mark. He felt hot. With annoyance.
“You’re in my seat,” Evan spat.
“Uh. We don’t have assigned seats on the bus,” the boy said, the end of his sentence lilting up in a question.
Evan crossed his arms. “Um, in case you haven’t noticed? I’ve sat in this same seat every day for a month. Get up.”
This finally provoked a response other than confusion. “Dude, what’s your problem? In case you haven’t noticed, the bus is full today. I promise you’ll get your seat back tomorrow,” he said, flicking both hands in front of him in a sarcastically placating gesture.
Cheeks warm (Evan was going to be so humiliated if he started blushing every time he was pissed off now), he surveyed the surrounding seats. Unfortunately, he was right-- pretty much all of the seats were full, either with two kids or a band kid with an unwieldy instrument case. In fact, he realized with growing horror, it seemed like maybe the only open spot was the one currently occupied by the guy’s backpack. Being so obviously in the wrong made Evan’s heart clench with a combination of guilt and embarrassment.
Naturally, Evan decided to double down. “My problem ? My problem is that you could’ve sat with anybody else but for some reason you decided to be my problem.”
Flipping his open book down on top of his notebook to save his spot, the boy said nothing, mirrored Evan’s crossed arms, and cocked his head to the side. They stared at each other in a tense silence before their stand-off was broken by a hard look in the rearview mirror and a shout from the bus driver that brokered no argument.
“I need y’all to sit. Down. ”
Impossibly, Evan’s cheeks got redder, which only fueled his annoyance. “Move. I take window seat,” he said hotly. Looking for a moment like he might argue, the other boy opened his mouth and closed it again before waving his hands again (Evan had the urge to smack them out of the air) and standing up with his study materials in hand.
This move put both of them nearly chest to chest, separated only by a Five Star spiral notebook. Evan sucked in a breath, suddenly winded. They held eye contact. Evan swallowed. The boy sighed in exasperation and motioned his stack of work towards the seat. Brought back to the moment, bristling, Evan brushed past quickly and sat down with more force than necessary. As his seatmate dropped down next to him with an eye roll and the bus began to move, Evan pulled out his iPod and began unwrapping his headphones from around it.
“Dick,” Evan hissed, desperately trying to gain the upper hand in the interaction. It didn’t work, if the snort the boy made into his already re-opened book was any indication. His composure only added more fuel to Evan’s fire.
They didn’t say another word in the subsequent half hour. Evan blasted his music, hoping that what annoyed Margaret Buckley would also annoy the stranger and distract him from his work. Evan thought it’d serve him right (For what? Maybe get back to him later). Irritatingly, if it phased the boy, he didn’t show it, working the entire ride with one hand holding open his book with a pinky and thumb on his left thigh and the other deftly scratching out notes. Evan realized he had zoned out, probably looked like he was staring, so he turned his head to look out the window instead.
They pulled up to Evan’s stop. Before Evan could demand to be let out of the seat, the kid preemptively stood up. Not sparing Evan a glance, he hefted his things up and got off the bus. Oh, of course they would have the same stop. What other stop could he possibly have.
Walking off a few steps behind, Evan mentally crossed his fingers that he lived at the complete opposite end of the street from him. Apparently, though, Evan was the unluckiest asshole this side of the Mississippi because he trailed the guy a respectable distance all the way to his immediate next door neighbor’s house. Of course . As was the case when getting off of the bus, the boy didn’t turn back. Evan’s eyes followed him as he walked through the door and closed it behind him, before he realized with a start that he’d once again caught himself staring. Frowning and glaring down at his Converse, Evan started walking again, making his way the last few yards to the house. His foul mood brightened slightly when he saw his mom’s car gone from the driveway.
With no one home, Evan was able to slam the front door and then his bedroom’s behind him, relishing the opportunity to take out his frustration in a move that usually would lead to either a dressing down.
Flopping back onto his bed, Evan pulled out his headphones, ears filling with the momentary static that comes from an abrupt transition from loud volume to dead quiet. Staring at the ceiling, Evan’s eyes were drawn to a couple of long-since faded glow-in-the-dark stars the previous tenants had forgotten to take down. He wondered if the kid who lived in this room before him liked being able to walk just as far as their backyard to get the real deal. Liked El Paso. If they’d maybe sat with a friend in this room, knobby elbows and knees poking together, and looked up at the stand-in stars together, talking about nothing in the uncomplicated way kids did. Evan hoped so. He wouldn’t wish the feeling of disquiet clawing under the surface of his skin on anyone.