Chapter Text
Karkat stood in the doorway of the staff room. Right in front of him, his History teacher whom he needed to talk to, and another teacher, a woman with pencil-thin lipped. He politely decided to wait for them to pause their chat before interrupting.
“…I found him passed out in the hallway right in front of the locker. I learned later he had told his math teacher he was going to the bathroom. He did not stay unconscious for long, but I did call the nurse and we stayed with him for a while. We eventually found out he hadn’t eaten the whole day. Scratch that. He had eaten barely anything for the whole week.”
“Incredible.”
“And it wasn’t easy to find out. The boy talked and talked but always avoided the question. Kind of like in class, actually. He gets really easily off-subject when I allow him to talk. Which I don’t anymore, because he is a distraction. Though he talks anyway. I had to give him detention at least twice. Anyway, we decide to call at home, we get an answer from his guardian, we explain to him the situation and he told us he didn’t care. Not one bit. He actually wouldn’t care if he had burned the whole school down or not shown himself to a single class.”
“What in the world…”
“In fourteen years of career, I’ve never seen that. With this as his only guardian, I’m actually surprised he isn’t even more of a problem case.”
Okay. Maybe they hadn’t noticed him. Karkat coughed to try and signal his presence.
The History teacher, Mrs. Henry, gave a quick side-glance at the boy, before returning to her discussion.
“I went through his entire file yesterday. It’s actually unremarkable. Average grades around C and B, a couple detentions, mostly for disturbing class time and forgetting to hand in homework, a pretty lonely student, actually. Not shy, however. Nothing else could have indicated such an upbringing except maybe that he lives quite a poor part of town. He came here because of administration shenanigans.”
Karkat leaned on the door frame, crumpled the small piece of paper in his hand and started tapping his foot impatiently.
“I talked to his former teachers. They say they absolutely did take notice of him. With his shades they can’t tell him to take off because he has an official authorization, he’s hard to miss. No one knows why he wears them though. He always has some comment to make in class, rarely raises his hand, sits at the back of the classroom, doodles, never seems to pay much attention most of the time, though his comments contradict that, never takes notes, and he has a hard time finding teammates for group work. Outside of class he apparently rarely hung out by himself though, or so I’ve been told. At least before this year.”
In the doorway, Karkat then decided he wasn’t going to let his teacher babble infinitely before going back to class. He didn’t have all day.
“Uh, Hello? Ma’am…”
Mrs. Henry turned back to him, slightly annoyed but compliant.
“Hello. May I help you?”
“I have this permission slip I need to give you, next week the student council holds a special activity and I will miss the History period…”
She took the slip in her hand, with a nod.
“All right, thank you.”
He turned on his heel, ready to leave, but at the last moment his teacher stopped him.
“Karkat?”
“Yes?”
“You know Dave Strider, right?”
The douche in his History class.
“Well, yeah, from your class…”
“Is he your friend? Or is he a friend of one of your friends?”
Karkat tried to recall for a second. More like half of a second. He knew a lot of people and nobody really hung out with Dave Strider on a noticeable level. Terezi did mention him a couple of time and found him tolerable, as opposed to everyone else ever, but rarely interacted with him.
“No, not really I’m afraid.”
“Do you know any friend of his?”
Dave Strider had friends? That would be news. Wait. Karkat did see him a lot with that glasses guy, the most annoying English partner he ever had. Well, it wasn’t Dave fucking Strider at least, Karkat told himself, even though Dave wasn’t even in his class at the time.
“There is always, uh, John something. John Hubert? Oh, wait, no, his name is John Egbert.”
“John Egbert moved out during the summer, he’s not going to school here anymore,” said the pencil lipped teacher.
“Wait, really?”
For some reason, Karkat felt a bolt of pity for Dave Strider in that instant. His only friend moving out. Wow, that must have been a bitch.
The teacher was reflecting before jumping out of her contemplation.
“Anyway, you can go, I held you here long enough. Have fun with your activity.”
“Thank you,” Karkat said flatly before leaving.
He knew very well that the conversation he had eavesdropped was about Dave Strider. A lot of people in school had been talking about that famous incident where Dave-Fucking-Strider, alias “coolkid” (never without the quotation marks, otherwise people might start to believe it wasn’t sarcastic) had fainted in the hallway during his math class. And that now his principal occupation was avoiding teachers left and right trying to get him into “healthy eating habits” and “legitimately talking about what is going on at home”. Karkat didn’t even know these overworked teachers had it in them to care about one painfully average-in-all-regards-except-douchery-guy. Well, they were teachers from a decently funded middle-class white suburban school, weren’t they? Maybe that’s why they had the time to worry about him.
Would they worry, though, if he dressed, talked and acted normally?
Well then maybe he wouldn’t be forever alone in the first place.
Karkat had little overall pity for Dave. He himself was a guy of color in a practically all-white school, openly bisexual, he insulted people on a daily basis and somehow still managed to have a social life. He wasn’t Mr. Universe or anything but he was involved in school activities. Dave had dug his own grave and it wasn’t his fault. Never an ounce of pertinence, out-of-style, and so arrogant he didn’t even bother to go around the pot junkies of the school who would probably have taken him. He had John. Wait, didn’t he have two other friends too? Karkat remembered seeing all four of them eat lunch under the school soccer bleachers last year. Well, he still had those, no?
He shook his head. That was already too many thoughts than the guy was worth. Next subject. About that book he was reading with his reading club…