Chapter Text
Dr Ryland Grace dragged his hands down his face for the umpteenth time. He was going to kill the man living in the apartment above him– as of 8 days ago– and then prepare a nice warm batch of sodium hydroxide to dispose of the evidence.
Ryland Grace did not like to think of himself as a violent man. But even the world’s most patient, mild, ugly-sweater adorned middle school science teacher had their breaking point.
The lime fluorescent numbers blinking on his microwave (a beautiful invention that rendered his oven, stove, and clock useless) informed him that the time was 2:36am, officially marking the third hour in a row that the man above him had been abusing his drum kit.
Encore! Encore! Shouted nobody.
Grace pressed his newly minted noise cancelling headphones firmer to his ears, and returned to the unending stack of papers splayed across his desk.
He smiled, Marcus was really making progress. He reached for a suitably cheerful “Good Job!” sticker from his desk drawer.
It was whilst he was leant over that the everpresent vibrations pulsing through his apartment caused his blameless, innocent pen to roll off his desk.
It was a small act, really.
Retrospectively, Grace may have overacted.
The pen thudded lamely on to his carpeted floor.
With the impulsive, angered frenzy of a man once described as, “pleasant to have in class, and full of knowledge, but he just can’t keep still!” Ryland Grace stood upon the laminate top of his IKEA desk.
And through a helpful combination of America’s love affair with cheap buildings, and his status as a 6 foot something man, he banged his fists upon the ceiling.
With eloquence, he shouted:
“Shut up! You stick banging neanderthal!”
For three precious seconds silence fell across his apartment. A thick, uncomfortable silence.
It was distinctly similar to the three seconds of peace that preceded the storm of angry emails following the one time he called a parent a “drooling, brain-numbed flat Earther”.
Or the three second interlude that fell across the bright minded attendees at the 2018 UNESCO conference.
And as a man who had evidently traversed this tenacious space between immediate satisfaction, and deep, soul shattering humiliation routinely, Grace spent these precious three seconds releasing a regretful, yet knowing, sigh.
He fell back into his chair.
The drumming started again, louder, and significantly more aggressive.
The sheer amount of noise this man was capable of creating with (presumably) only a standard set of limbs would be impressive if it were not actively preventing him from completing his overdue marking, or escaping to the sanctity of sleep.
To add salt to this raw wound, as he sat morosely, he noticed the spiderwebbed cracks coming out of an imprint of his foot he had left on his desk. Fudge.
Ryland Grace resigned himself to a long, sleepless night filled with head-pounding banging– and no, it was nowhere near the sort of banging he wished his night would be filled with.
Grace spent the next day running on a sort of manic cheerfulness. One that directly juxtaposed the heavy eyebags decorating his face.
“Good morning! Who can name one type of light? A beanbag is on the line here.” He introduced, with the drawing, enthusiastic cadence of an overpaid gameshow host.
A hand in the third row shot to the air.
“Emily! What have you got for us?”
“Mr Grace, last lesson you said today would be about sound?”
Grace’s eye twitched.
“You got me, thought I’d give everyone a little break today.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but, graciously, relented.
Unfortunately, the rest of his class didn’t.
After all, he had promised them a drumming exercise, of all things.
They began banging on their desks:
“We want sound. We want sound.”
Grace felt the caffeine-induced cheer drain out of his body as he accepted what was surely the universe’s karmic punishment for his outburst the night prior.
“Alright, alright” he relented.
Following his morning class, an aweary Grace trudged into the staff room, sheltering himself beside the ancient coffee machine. It was there that his greatest friend, and second greatest tormentor: Rocky, approached him.
Rocky taught mathematics, and was regarded by everyone– except for Grace– as a social recluse. Rocky was no hermit. However, he did find himself bored by the entire faculty of Grover Cleveland Middle. That is except for one Dr Ryland Grace.
“You look exhausted.” He observed.
“No sheep Sherlock.”
Rocky sighed fondly,
“It wouldn’t hurt you to swear, you know.”
Grace smirked
“Oh, it would, and you know that. My potty mouth got me into a lot of trouble when I started out here.”
Rocky laughed, reminiscing on the event that had sparked his interest in the science teacher. Approximately three years ago the staff of Grover Cleveland had unearthed the irresistible gossip that the new science teacher, Dr Ryland Grace, had cussed out a parent for insinuating that a belt was the only discipline a child needed.
Of course, the staff agreed unanimously that Grace was in the right, but most would not directly call the parent a “fucking asshole who’s microscopic dick must, impossibly, be bigger than his brain”
Grace had kept his job, however lost his dignity. He never managed to grasp that backflipping the other direction into “holy moly!” and “fiddlesticks” arguably made the initial outburst significantly more hilarious.
Grace yawned widely, showcasing to poor Rocky the little testicle– sorry, correction there: uvula– hanging in the back of his throat.
“What’s got you so tired?” He questioned.
“Oh, sweet cheesus, my neighbour kept me up all night. So much banging”
Rocky’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, toward where his oversized fringe swept across his face.
“Did he now?”
“It was just. So. Loud.”
“Do you have noise cancelling earphones?”
“Yes. That’s the worst part. He was so loud that it was vibrating the walls.”
Rocky’s jaw dropped open.
“Fucking Christ, that man must go hard.”
“Well certainly, from what I hear.
And, instead of just asking him to stop like a normal person, I went all Rageland on him”
Rageland was of course the nickname Rocky had given to Grace’s tendency to occasionally break his demeanour of the mild mannered, sweetly spoken, awkward science teacher and turn into a right bitch.
“Well I’m sure that killed the mood for him,” Rocky laughed.
“Not at all, if anything he started drumming louder.”
“Oh. You were talking about drumming.” Rocky realised, drawing out the end of his words.
Grace’s eyes widened as red climbed his cheeks.
“Well I wouldn’t have said anything if it was that!”
“Ok, so just ask him to stop drumming, nicely. Easy peasy citrus-fruit squeezy.” Rocky provided, before returning to the coffee machine that croaked out a brownish liquid which Grace assured himself was at least 80% coffee.
Grace spent the rest of the day, between providing what he believed to be invigorating classes to the young minds of tomorrow, exhaustedly ruminating on how he was meant to ask the man to stop.
Perhaps it was his insomnia induced delirium, or perhaps it was the fact that he saw his kids at school doing the very same thing, but he ultimately decided that providing the man with a note was the best course of action. It had nothing to do with avoiding physical interaction with the man who could feverishly drum for three hours straight nightly. No, just imagine the biceps on a dude like that?
Grace paused in his haphazard stuffing of his work bag.
“Huh, just imagine the biceps on a guy like that” thought a little masochistic voice hidden in the back of his mind, trojan horsing its way to the frontline of his thinking through pure sexual frustration.
God. He needed to get laid.
Grace ignored these thoughts, mounting his bicycle and rushing back to his apartment before the rain could catch him.
Grace wrote on a simple, torn sheet of his notepad.
“Please stop drumming so late at night :)”
And placed it simply on his upstairs neighbor's door mat.
Satisfied, he returned to his room, and began his work for the afternoon.
One might wonder why exactly Dr Grace seemed to have such an unending pile of work dropped upon his shoulders. Partly, it was because he was a perfectionist who felt the need to tailor a “good job” sticker to each of his students– according to the colours they liked, and sometimes, their favorite Pokemon. However the more significant factor was the intervention program he ran at his school: “Helping Hands.”
Grace was a sensitive person, he was a man who experienced all emotions to their absolute height, including empathy. His bleeding heart could hardly stand to watch kids with “hard” behaviors be categorised as delinquent and written off as a nuisance.
And so he poured himself into running clubs for the kids on the edges of his school community.
Breakfast club, for kids who showed up hungry.
Science club, for the nerds who wanted a safe space to share their interests.
And his magnum opus: direct behaviour intervention when a child’s teacher had thrown up their hands and decided that they “just couldn’t handle” their behaviour. This was where Helping Hands came in.
It was hard work. Kids don’t magically fold when someone looks in their direction with kindness, and many of the activities that he spent his afternoons planning simply never came to fruition.
But it was rewarding. It solidified his decision to switch to teaching rather than sticking it out in scientific research.
He was engrossed in designing said plans when he heard his neighbour’s door slam shut.
He held his breath, here goes nothing.
For 20 blessed minutes the silence remained.
Then he started up again, drumming a heavy rock beat that sounded identical to the last 50 he had played.
Grace groaned, and stood slowly off the lounge, feeling his back pop with the movement. It was as he stood that he caught sight of a piece of paper jammed beneath his door.
He unfolded it.
It read, simply:
“No :)”
Grace gritted his teeth hard enough to ache.
“You smart Alec!” he yelled toward the ceiling.
He wanted to be juvenile? Game on. Grace had to put up with his colleagues all day, he knew immaturity. Oh, and he supposed that the middle schoolers gave him a good idea of it too.
He strolled over to a rarely used speaker and linked it to his phone.
He smirked, hitting play on his Spotify, filling the room with loud classical music.
Don’t mistake him, he wasn’t the type to actively listen to classical music, but he needed to throw off the timing of his neighbour.
To make matters worse, after 15 minutes of this debacle, his neighbour would discover that Grace had never bothered to buy premium, when “Want a break from the ads?” blared loudly through the room.
Following this, a loud frustrated scream echoed down from above.
Grace smirked, satisfied.
“You asshole!” filtered beneath the sound of Bach.
Grace inevitably felt the vicious retaliation toward his actions when his neighbour brought out the double kick bass drum, and spitefully played until the sun creeped over the horizon, and the morning birds whistled a frightened accompaniment.
Oh cheeseballs, what had he gotten himself into?