Chapter Text
Eva Stratt and Ryland Grace were not friends. Nor were they enemies. Nor lovers. Nor any other label that the students of Grover Cleveland High dubbed them when they thought no one was listening.
Eva Stratt had been a transfer student who, to everyone’s surprise, including her own, stuck around longer than anticipated. She had spent much of her time in the care of herself.
With a mother long gone and a father in title and financial support alone, if one could call checks from the government financial support, Eva Stratt learned very early on that it would be up to her to make her way in the world.
No one needed her, and she needed no one. Not the mother who abandoned her or the care of an apathetic father who couldn’t hold a job for more than a few months, who was more than happy to pick up and relocate on nothing more than a whim and wonder if the next town they stopped in would have a better breakfast place. There didn’t seem to be any other logical reason for his decisions to abandon whatever home they had only just started to build months or sometimes even weeks prior.
It wasn’t until she was starting high school that Eva’s father was arrested on two counts of assault and battery, as well as theft of a motor vehicle. Though Eva hadn’t known about any of her father’s misgivings, she was not as shocked as she probably should have been at her father’s guilty plea.
Eva was sent to live with her father’s mother, whom she had not known existed until the court dug up the file. Her Oma seemed just as surprised to have a grandchild, having lost touch with her only son long before Eva’s birth and the rest is history.
Her Oma, much like herself, was a very reserved sort of woman who, though she loved Eva the moment she found out about her, expressed herself in subtle lifting of a corner of her mouth when she was amused.
The pair spent their first two years coexisting in the same house. Though Eva was fond of her Oma, she found she could not allow herself to feel settled. There was always a general feeling of uneasiness, a foundation laid brick by agonizing brick in her youth that was hard to overcome.
Ryland Grace’s past was quite the opposite. Where Eva felt only the love she herself could provide, Ryland, or Grace, as most referred to him as, at times, found himself smothered in love. Growing up in a household with two loving parents and no siblings meant Grace was the center of every universe. The focal point in which his parents’ lives orbited. His father ran a repair shop on the corner of State and Washington, inherited from at least three generations of Grace’s before him, and his mother made mother her full-time job.
It was their very different upbringings that mostly kept the two unaware of each other for their first two years at Grover Cleveland. While both were academically gifted with schedules overflowing with AP and Honors courses, Grace seemed to ease his way through life, getting by with an easy smile whenever caught in the halls instead of in a classroom. There was no question of his intelligence, his ability to solve complex problems, paired with an almost photographic memory, meant he was a nearly unstoppable force of nature. Something Stratt found unfair and, though she understood on a technical level that Grace could not help his intelligence, nor his natural likability, she still held a grudge against him for it. The two just simply ran in different circles: him with friends he had known since diapers, and her in a circle of one.
Eva was probably the only one in the school, hell, district, that could rival Grace’s intelligence. Though one could argue that, unlike Grace, Eva was not simply handed the grades or the brain. She poured blood, sweat, and tears into her school work, knowing one day she would find the place she belonged. Until then, she kept her face down and her head buried in hopes for the future.
Their official introduction happened the way most high school meetings occur: the unfortunate luck of being seated next to each other.
When Miss Shapiro instructed them to turn to the person beside them and share about their summer, Ryland Grace, with unearned confidence and a heavy dose of needing to be liked, turned to her and opened with “Knock, knock?” She rolled her eyes.
“Not good at jokes,” she replied simply.
“‘Not good at jokes’ who?”
Eva sighed and thought to herself this was going to be a long semester.
“Okay…” Grace said to fill the awkward silence. “What’d you say your name was again? Eve?”
“Eva Stratt.”
“Oh yes. Eva Stratt. I’ve heard of you.” Grace said in a mysterious tone that refused to give away whether what he had heard was good or bad.
“And you are…” Eva trailed off, waiting for him to supply his name. At this, he was taken aback. He wasn’t used to people now knowing him, or at least of him. He didn’t seem offended, though, which Stratt had to give him.
“Ryland Grace, but my friends call me Grace.”
“What did you do over the summer, Ryland?” Eva asked pointedly, in a way that made it clear she thought this whole start of the school year ice-breakers thing that had been happening in every classroom was a waste of her time and that she didn’t care one way or the other what Ryland liked to be called, nor what his summer consisted of.
“Did I do something to offend you? Was it the knock-knock? joke? I swear it would have been funny.”
“I’m sure,” Eva replied, rolling her eyes again.
Ryland lowered his voice and mumbled something unintelligible to himself.
“What?” Eva asked, looking expectantly at Grace,
“I said, maybe if you didn’t have a stick up your ass you would’ve laughed.” At that, Eva turned her attention back to a spot over his shoulder, trying her best not to show how amused she was by him.
The teacher clapped her hands and returned the class's focus to the syllabus. Grace spun around in his seat, hoping he wouldn’t be seated next to someone so boring in his next class.
Despite their rocky beginning, it only got worse from there. It seemed like once Ryland Grace was on her radar, he was at the center of everything. She found her eyes wandering and unceremoniously landing on him in four of her five classes that semester. Even in the hallways, though he was of average height, she still seemed to spot him everywhere. Leaning against a row of lockers, gliding his way through the crowds of their peers with a nonchalant look that said he had all the time in the world and not two minutes before the next bell rang.
It wasn’t until a few weeks into the semester that the pair discovered their… intellectual compatibility.
“Actually, the life expectancy in the Middle Ages was heavily skewed due to the fact that there were high infant mortality rates,” Eva corrected Grace’s assumption one afternoon in their shared European history class. Mrs. Jameson agreed, acknowledging Eva’s well-made observation, and asked Grace to continue, but he was flustered and annoyed. Life expectancy wasn’t even the main point he was trying to answer, but now he felt everyone’s eyes on him and stumbled over his words until the teacher mercifully moved to the next student.
While the class began to move on, he leaned over and whispered to Eva, “It wasn’t that big a deal; you didn’t need to call me out like that.”
Eva, without turning her head away from the screen, was diligently taking notes and sighed and replied in an even tone, “Actually, I did. You were talking about the barbarity of the Middle Ages, but that’s simply not the case. They were fairly advanced, and the myth and perpetuation of stereotypes would’ve continued on, had I not corrected you.”
“It’s just not that serious,” Grace spat back, rolling his eyes.
“It’s history, yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Grace, Eva,” Mrs. Jameson called out, "please settle down.”
That was only the beginning of what would become weeks of one-upping each other. While both were well-rounded individuals, it became clear that Eva’s strengths were in History and English, while Grace’s were in Science and Math. Their bio class in particular was where Grace seemed to earn the most points in their game of back and forth. They remained pretty close in score, for every historical inaccuracy Eva found in Grace’s knowledge, he found a number uncarried or a DNA sequence out of order.
Over the few short weeks, he unintentionally got to know her facial expressions enough to tell when she was confused and frustrated at her own confusion. By the next class, she was always able to come in with a mastery of the lesson, another quiet observation he made, but it took her much longer to grasp cell division than historical time periods. On the flip side, he also got to know the minute expressions in her lips and eyes that indicated smug victory. Especially now, she made it a point to go out of her way to correct him.
Sometimes the pair did so in front of the class, giving their peers a show, and other times, Eva would find a scrap of notebook paper tossed at her, listing all the reasons she was wrong about their discussion of water-based life forms and whether or not water was necessary for life to exist. Eva would never dignify being the first to send him a note, but she found herself responding to a few with scathing remarks.
“You’re not as smart as you think you are.” She scribbled in response to him writing that she clearly didn’t belong in honors bio if she couldn’t grasp the basic concepts of cross-breeding variations.
Their constant back and forth was seen as a lively debate, infused with thinly-veiled insults, the teachers seemed to overlook in favor of witnessing the two brightest students actually take interest in their lessons.
In one of his more colorful replies to her, he called her “a staggering waste of carbon”. He was sent to the office for that one by Dr. DuBois. Eva Stratt rarely took offense to anything, and she did not find herself offended by this insult either. Actually, she found it quite amusing how passionate he was about his theory of water’s role in evolution (or lack thereof).