1
No one remembers who the scary kid was before Brady. There are a number of unreliable memories, of someone’s lab partner freshman year who reportedly skinned a neighborhood dog and spent Bio jotting down a hit list of people in the building, and others arguing for a musty-smelling lad who no longer goes here; a greasy-haired terror who showed up to their gym midterm wearing a bathrobe, and a third group that claim these two were the same person and his name was Patrick and he didn’t move, he went to juvie for skinning the dog; none of this is the point—now it’s Brady.
It was really screwed up because he hadn’t done anything to deserve that status, it happened to him. But this was one of those mandatory little shits about being in high school. Everyone has to pretend the new girl is hot, even if she has the bone structure of a dinosaur, because all the guys want to motorboat her massive tits and if you disagree they’ll say you’re jealous. Everyone has to nod their sympathy when the drama kid tearfully claims to have BPD when you know damn well they’ve never been diagnosed by anything but a ‘what kind of bread are you’ online personality assessment. There’s gotta be a scary kid. These things you cannot avoid.
It’s hard to tell if the title bothers Brady—with everything else going on in that kid’s life, it’s unlikely the sweaty pits of his classmates weigh heavily on his conscience. But it was impossible to ever figure out what was going on in his head: he communicated only with disinterested grunts of yes/no a couple times a year and all he ever did was glare.
The only thing we know for sure about him is that there is not a single first day of school Brady has ever attended on purpose.
He wouldn’t be attending this one if he wasn’t so hungover as to not realize what day it is. Everyone in this homeroom is hungover, though, trudging into the room with shoulders hunched in to protect themselves from the lights, their faces bloated back to elementary school roundness. Yawns spread through the room with contagion, mouths puffing open to expel a nauseating aroma of last night’s tequila and this morning’s Cheerios. Nick Casciano doesn’t even have it in him to jump up and smack the top of the doorframe when he passes under it.
In the back corner, Brady’s long legs spread out beyond the shadow of his desk, splayed over the entire area as a warning to kids toeing through the aisles for the seat they want. It is a move much like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant—but a dog who doesn’t live near other dogs or any animal that would even want it.
Brady slumps backwards in a cramped desk, eyes closing, cursing under his breath. He doesn’t want to be here ever but especially not on first days, which have no purpose. Even though they’re all trying too hard, everyone else is appropriately dressed for the weather and a school where air conditioners are often hissing out pure steam. It’s going to be ninety today, but Brady is Brady, so of course he has his black sweatshirt on. It won’t be coming off, either.
More kids shuffle into the room, making the air hotter with their breath and breathy hi’s to people they sort-of know. The nervous quiet turns deliberate when someone else enters and Brady squints an eye open to find out why. It’s just a girl standing the wrong way in the doorframe. He can’t make out her face, she’s just a headless figure in a stonewashed Nirvana tee that makes Brady want to open his eyes just so he can roll them at her. People seem to be holding their breath, her impending seat choice is that important to them. Brady’s eyelids slide back down.
Whatever. The back corner is his—he pissed on it.
It’s been an hour. The kids in 208 have learned the name of and a fun fact about Mr. Brennan, and were forced to tell everyone their name and a fun fact about themselves, and Brady slept through that. Then the class sat through a syllabus that’s really a list of rules copied and pasted from the Internet saying don’t plagiarize, and Brady slept through that too. The humid air is sucking on his skin and everyone is murmuring. Brady is awake but uninterested in opening his eyes until he hears the soft sound of inhales he should not be able to make out. Someone is sitting there. Beside him.
Splitting one eyelid open to prove himself wrong, Brady instead sees that girl, Nirvana’s number one fan, sitting and breathing in the desk adjoined to his. Her proximity alone brings on enough angst to tighten a death grip on his windpipe. His heart is chasing for a normal rhythm and Brady swallows, breathless and dry. The only available seat was on the left side of him and still she took it.
She smiles his way, awkward and lacking eye contact. “Hey.”
It’s the smile that resurfaces his drunken memories of her. Same girl from the back of the truck, from last night. Taken in through sober eyes in the light of day, she looks far less cagey than the girl Travis scared the shit out of yesterday. Brady’s fixating on her without saying anything back is starting to evaporate that smile.
Brady hears himself talking with realizing he decided to. “You wanna switch desks?”
She leans back, studying the chair and the body next to her, but again cutting herself off before her eyes go any higher than Brady’s shoulders. “Why? What’s wrong with yours?”
“Nothing.” His voice sounds as though it has not been used in about three years. “But… you wanna switch? So…”
“So what?”
He’s irritated that she’s playing dumb or messing with him, that it’s so hot in here and that he’s here at all, and Brady’s got one of those voices that can’t resist giving away any and every emotion going through him. “So then you’re sitting on the other side of me. So you don’t have to be next to it,” he snaps at her.
“No. I don’t care.”
Her face is visibly on fire. Shrinking down, she wraps one arm around her ribs and picks up the pen to go back to forging a parent’s signature on some school forms. Brady throws his back into the hard plastic of his chair, feeling his own skin wrapped around him and hating it.
After a minute, she slides a stapled packet of paper over the surface of her desk to Brady’s. “This is the syllabus, he passed them out while you were asleep,” she says without removing her eyes from her lap.
His voice is flat while he grunts out a thanks. Around the room all the nameless faces are forcing small talk with one another or turning away from small talk that has gone on too long. This is why you don’t come on the first day.
Their teacher is weaving through the aisles, checking to make sure everyone is following his instructions to become best friends with their neighbor so he will never be asked to give out notes to some little bastard who got sick and missed the week. He hmmm’s? at one of two students until they give him an answer.
Mr. Brennan reaches the back row. “Did you introduce yourselves?”
Brady and her play dead, waiting for the awkwardness hovering in the space between their two desks to answer him first.
Mr. Brennan scans the remaining students he needs to check on. He hits them with the “Hmmm?”, alternating expectant looks at them both. But Brady could and would let his eyes shrivel up, dry out and fall from his skull before ever being the one who blinks first. He continues to say nothing, eyes canted harshly at Mr. Brennan.
“Not yet.” She swallows and orients herself towards him. “…I’m Charlie.”
He yanks on the drawstring of his hoodie. With far more irritation than anyone should ever have at something like this, Brady grinds his jaw around his response. “Brady.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Nodding, Brady yanks on the other drawstring to make them even. The teacher waves his hand flippantly. “Trade numbers,” he calls, walking on to the next row.
Charlie chews on her bottom lip, waiting to see if Brady is going to say more. He’s not.
He rolls his head back on his neck, counting ceiling tiles with his eyes. He knows he’s being a dick right now, but he just can’t help himself. He resents having to introduce himself to anyone; it’s such a waste of his breath. Everyone already knows who he is.
It is only because school superlatives are all politically correct now that Brady does not have a piece of paper predicting that he would most likely end up in prison. Otherwise, everything he’s done in this district since the day they let him into it tried to prove the possibility.
Every grade he passed in elementary school, whatever old lady with neck-chain glasses and makeup settling into her wrinkles that was unfortunate enough to have Brady and his friends that year retired at the end of it. In sixth grade homeroom, He taught everyone what a ‘flamer’ was, hoping to land a long enough punishment that he wouldn’t have to sit state testing the next week. That same homeroom maintains that he stumbled in from the hallway three mornings that year with his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, absolutely wasted. Brady would go on to spend more months of eighth grade in suspension than out of it, and at the time boasted about it: more proof that he was growing into the little derelict everyone always expected him to be. He met like, all his friends there too, so Brady would tell you it was a productive era of his youth. Don’t ever let anyone tell you those ‘bad kids’ in the back of your science lab who spend the whole period moaning the name of whatever girl was brave enough to wear her new pushup bra can’t be quite friendly when they feel up to it.
Sometimes Brady even behaved. Faking his way through a class he liked and the teacher would never know his student file was thick enough to be used as a blunt force object. This Brady knew from experience. Freshman year he was too infatuated with tits and tight jeans to divert much of his energy to maintain his reputation as a menace, although rumors kept it alive for him. Those mostly got overshadowed by the last rumor that went around, the one with the most truth to it, which was that he died.
When he came back to school after that summer before sophomore year, everyone had already heard what happened to him. But Brady knew, again from firsthand experience, that that was nothing to prepare you for laying eyes on it.
Half his upper body had become a quilt of skin. The gnarled, nasty looking masterpiece of some intern plastic surgeon at the only underfunded city hospital that can be reached by an ambulance in ten minutes. The kind of disfigurement that made people sweat and stare at the ground when they talked to him.
Brady started wearing a hoodie everyday—(zipped to the top, never push the sleeves up)—to cover the worst of it, the parts no one will ever see, the parts he didn’t even look at—(showers with no lights on and a sheet draped over the mirror in his room). But the neck and lower jaw never healed well, even though the damage hadn’t been as severe there. The skin was still discolored and rippled. And his left hand was nightmarishly fucked. The one glove, Michael Jackson thing Brady tried had lasted about thirty minutes before the third-degree burns over his knuckles and fingers, shrieking from being enclosed like that, had gotten to him. So between the neck, the jaw, the hand, and the miserable grimace hardened onto his lips, Brady became the scary kid, too.
The one teachers don’t reprimand, the one guys don’t mess with, and girls never flirt with. The kid whose sweatshirt accidentally slips on his shoulder and you get a peek of what’s underneath for about a second, and can’t get it out of your head for a week. When he actually shows up, he is the sullen silent presence unnerving everyone from his back corner. So everyone in this school district already knew who he was, knew it was him the second he walked into a room.
Last night his blood alcohol level was too high for him to dabble around in pre-judgments but now he’s starting to wonder if she’s like…slow…or whatever you’re supposed to say instead of retarded. He feels like he remembers seeing her face-plant trying to jump off the truck last night. The fact that she keeps darting glances Brady’s way, as if she expects him to start talking to her is pretty damning evidence one way but physically, there’s no telling.
There are deep gashes telling of sleeplessness under her eyes, likely originating back farther than last night. But everything else about her is soft in a somnolent way—the bluish and lavender hollows under her eyes, the pink flush that tinges the rest of her skin, the roundness of her features, the slight wave of the hair only in the back of her head. A forget-you-have-to-look-away way. He sees goosebumps raising on her arms, probably because Brady is making no effort to hide that he’s appraising her.
The rest of the class catches the tepid silence him and her have been sitting in. Phones find laps and eyes find the screens. The period ends in three minutes and they’re starting to count the seconds.
Brady drags his worn-in backpack over the floor with his foot. He’s got gym next but there’s really no use walking all the way across campus to not do what he’s told there, either. He can sit back and hit Matt’s vape anywhere there’s a floor, after all.
“Do you wanna trade numbers?” Charlie turns only her shoulders his way. “Like he said?” she adds quickly.
Brady’s shrug is interrupted by a yawn. “I’m probably not gonna come more than once a week, so you’re better off hitting up one of these other idiots,” he tells her honestly.
“Oh…that’s— Okay.”
Brady is continuing to be oblivious and insolent, but at least he’s good at it. He’s slouched all the way back in the desk, feeling overly conscious of his own body, how the slightest intake of his breath rubs him against the damp fabric clinging to his back.
With a set to her shoulders, Charlie carefully imprints ten digits onto a sheet of loose leaf paper. Her murmur is almost unintelligible as she tells him that if he does miss school or something, he can text her for the notes. “I’ll be here every day, so.”
Brady snatches her paper with his burned, disfigured left hand because he still can’t get his right to react that fast. Stowing both his fist and her number away in his sweatshirt pocket, Brady waits for the fallout of that, to see her gag reflex activate. But it doesn’t come. She looks down at her desk, clearly processing it, but holding herself with a stillness Brady has never seen before.
The bell sounds. Having been anticipating it for an hour, a flurry of bodies swarm up to flee the room. Charlie gets up too, curved delicately over her desk and arranging folders on top of binders to slip back into her shoulder bag. Before she goes, she hesitates.
Like she has been building to it this whole time, she finally looks Brady directly in the face and holds eye contact with him. “See you next week,” she tells him. And he had every intention to at least say something back this time, but gets distracted for a moment by the look of her eyes, now that she was no longer hiding them. It isn’t even the color really, but the contrast, the way honeyed irises are rimmed thickly in black, the way the pupils are the same, huge and a black hole to fall into and not know where you were, eyes from outer space, eyes like an eclipse.
All he manages to give her in return is a nod, but it makes half of her mouth twitch into a smile anyway. Then she’s going and he’s watching the back of her limp away with a torrent of thoughts swirling around in his head for the second time in twenty-four hours.
