teaganmitchell (teaganmitchell) wrote in horror_story, @ 2012-12-18 08:46:00 |
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Visiting the deaf kid down the street after school on certain days had become an unspoken ritual for Teagan ever since she’d had the eye-opening realization that there was a deaf kid down the street. That he was only a year younger made it justifiable. Had he been five or fifty, however, she would have been eager to make contact simply out of an innate curiosity about what deaf kids were like. Initially, she’d been a little disappointed to learn that deaf kids were much like other kids. The strangest thing about the deaf kid on Orchard St. was that he was homeschooled. After the novelty of hearing his odd way of formulating words and lack of volume control had worn off, she might have moved on. As luck would have it, Charlie Patenaude happened to be blessed with a high tolerance for the Teagan Mitchells of the world. She hadn’t been a child of many friends, but what friends she’d accumulated tended to be strays like herself. People who didn’t quite fit in with everyone else. Charlie suited her requirements, and tolerated her inclination towards nonsense. So she began dragging him over to her place for her birthday parties, and the ritual visits were established.
Because it began at such a young age, her father saw the friendship as innocuous. Granted, that probably had a lot to do with the fact that Charlie was the very personification of ‘harmless.’ At fourteen, Teagan had started to manifest certain attributes of the lady she would one day become, but Charlie was still very much a child at thirteen, and Mr. Donnelly was willing to turn a blind eye to his daughter’s development. He was much more concerned with her sudden interest in makeup than he was the boy down the street. Teagan also saw the friendship in much the same light. Being a whopping seven months older than Charlie cast her in the role of wise benefactor and confidant. She was the more experienced one of the two, who’d survived the trials of elementary school and half a year in girl scouts (before she was unceremoniously asked to leave... but that was hardly her fault). It was essentially her job to guide Charlie through life, so that he wouldn’t become a complete social outcast.
She took this job very seriously, sometimes to the point of assigning him homework, which usually took the form of watching specific television shows or reading magazines she brought him. As if he couldn’t procure them himself. But at least he wasn’t getting the exact same treatment as her baby sister, who Teagan was trying very hard to model into a smaller, redheaded version of herself. She’d successfully acknowledged at some point that Charlie was a boy, and usually brought him what she interpreted to be very manly magazines. The last one had been about deer hunting.
On this particular day, she came without gifts. The first couple of weeks of classes had been more difficult than she’d anticipated. It seemed like the books weighed significantly more than what she’d remembered from 8th grade, and teachers had a habit of conspiring so that she had homework in every single class. That meant an impossibly heavy backpack to lug home nearly every day, so by the time she got to their neighborhood, Teagan mostly wanted to dump her homework off at her house and make her way over to Charlie’s unencumbered. As she approached the driveway, Teagan wiped the lipstick she’d been wearing off on her sleeve, and put on the standard Hey, Mrs. Patenaude, can Charlie come hang out? face. Gaining entry from his parents had never been difficult, but she gauged how she treated other people’s parents by her own father. If he wouldn’t approve of something, she wouldn’t do it in front of them. After all, she’d hate to be deemed a bad influence. Teagan had lost several friends to that classification over the years.
---
Charlie was finishing up an American History paper that his mother was expecting the next day when he caught the blinking lights of his Honeywell RCWL330A1000/N P4-Premium portable wireless door chime out of the corner of his eye. He dropped his pen to the side (his mother insisted that he hand write all of his assignments) and stuck the device in his back pocket before racing down the stairs. At this time of day, it could only be Teagan ringing the doorbell and so there was no anxiety or self-consciousness when he opened the door. Instead, he greeted her with a small smile which only decreased in size when he saw she was empty-handed.
“You didn’t bring any of the books,” alright, so Charlie may not have asked Teagan directly to bring her high school textbooks over but he had aggressively suggested that he would love to see them. He was convinced that his workload was much smaller and less involved than that of the normal eighth graders. It had to be, he was learning things he’d perfected years ago and the amount of time he spent on homework had barely increased since his sixth grade “graduation”. He was curious to know what sorts of things they were covering at CLH and whether they might present too much of a challenge for him. At this point, whether Charlie would attain his GED by attending high school or continuing to learn from home was still undecided.
He gave Teagan a disappointed look but stood aside and held the door for her anyway. “Come in. My parents are grocery shopping,” he said with a slight wrinkle of the nose. Alongside the theory about his workload, Charlie had also begun to suspect that “grocery shopping” meant something else entirely for Mr. and Mrs. Patenaude. For one thing, they never came home with any food.
---
“Startin’ to think you only love me for my literature, Chuckles,” she responded with a fake pout as she stepped through the door. Even after years of friendship, Teagan had a difficult time remembering to not look around while she spoke to him. Her eyes liked to wander off, and generally the rest of her face followed suit whenever they did so. When she was focused on a person, she had a habit of not blinking enough, though Charlie had never complained about that. Probably because he was following her mouth and not her eyelids. “Those books weigh a ton. If you want to see ‘em, you’re gonna have to start walking them home for me. If you’re really sweet about it, I’ll let you do my homework for me.”
---
He despised being called “Chuckles”, or really anything other than Charlie. “Charles” was reserved for when he did something wrong and everything else just seemed inappropriate. He scowled at the older girl as she entered.and rolled his eyes when she mentioned the books weighing a ton.
“They can’t be that bad,” Charlie had overseen a couple of older kids at the mall once talking about how girls aren’t as strong as boys. His parents had never mentioned anything like that before, and Teagan certainly didn’t look any weaker than him, but the mall kids had seemed really certain about it so he couldn’t help thinking they might be right. He wondered if he would have an easier time carrying those books than Teagan just because he was a boy.
He lead the way up the stairs to his bedroom, as was their ritual, and made sure to leave the door wide open when they reached it. He was allowed to have Teagan over as much as he wanted but if they were spending time in his room, the door had to be open. They hadn’t quite worked their way up to sleepovers yet but Charlie’s parents had assured him that no such thing would be happening without express permission from the girl’s parents.
Flopping down onto his desk chair and waiting for Teagan to do the same on her usual spot, Charlie got right down to it. “How was it today?”
---
“It was awful,” Teagan said, a little too enthusiastically, given her word choice. She’d flopped down on his bed, on her stomach, propping her chin in her hands to look at him. “The hivemind blondes were particularly vicious, today. Class was dull. Mr. Kantro doesn’t enunciate. Mrs. Lagier never got the memo that we have six other classes to study for. I think I have a dozen essays to write in the next two weeks, and we have to read ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ which is so unbelievably stupid... not to mention kinda irresponsible, don’t ya think? Forcing every Freshman to read Shakespeare’s most famous play about underage sex and suicide? Seriously, everyone knows it pretty much by heart, and the kids who don’t know it already are gonna be the ones dumb enough for it to give them ideas, right? So it’s stupid. I wish we were doing Macbeth, but that’s not until 12th grade. Which is also stupid.”
---
The only things Charlie knew about high school in America were the things he’d learned on after-school television programming and what Teagan told him. Many times, what Teagan told him and what the TV showed weren’t actually too far apart but Charlie still didn’t want to believe them. When he saw the pretty blonde girls walking home from school, he couldn’t imagine them being cruel or hurtful to people like Teagan. They were always giggling and twirling their hair around their fingers or, one time, cartwheeling down the sidewalk to impress their friends. How could people so lovely be awful?
He’d given up having this argument with Teagan, though. His rebuttals mostly consisted of the words “yeah, but...” and she always ended up winning. This time he just decided to cut his losses and focus on the work.
“Your only choice is Romeo and Juliet?” he asked with a hint of worry shadowing his face. “My mom always gives me a list to choose from...”
---
Teagan nodded, shrugging as best she could from her position and kicking her legs back and forth. “Well, yeah, you have to do what the rest of the class is doing. We’re reading it out loud as a class, talking about it, and then watching one of the movies, I guess. There’s a list of other reading to do that we can pick from, like that summer reading list I showed you last year. But this is required. Every grade level does a Shakespeare play, and Freshmen have to do ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ I don’t remember what Sophomores do. It wasn’t Macbeth, though.”
Macbeth was really the only piece of Shakespeare’s that Teagan had liked, though her knowledge of the material was fairly limited. Most of her knowledge of anything, be it Shakespeare or biology or world politics, came from watching movies. That didn’t stop her from speaking as if she were an authority on a lot of subjects, but it did limit what she could pull from... which probably wasn’t altogether a bad thing. “It’s not hard, Charlie, I keep telling you. It’s just volume. I even got homework in P.E. Can you believe it?”
----
“You got homework in what?” Charlie demanded, a stream of uncontrollable giggles escaping his lips. From where he was sitting, it looked like Teagan was trying to tell him that she had to go home and write a paper on the subject of urine. Being just barely teenager who spent most of his time with adults, Charlie was incapable of keeping a straight face at the least mature of jokes. He simply wasn’t exposed to enough of them to find them tiresome or distasteful.
When he finally realized his mistake he let out a loud “Oh! P.E.,” he signed the letters as he spoke them. He didn’t let her in on the specific error he’d made; partly because it was a little embarrassing but mostly because it was Teagan’s fault for not knowing the alphabet by now. “Phys Ed is also a good term. What homework do you have for that?” Charlie found himself picturing Teagan recording herself doing pushups in her living room and bringing the file in as proof for the teacher. How else would they know for sure that someone had done their homework? The notion of phys ed scared him enough as it was, having never played a team sport in his life, but imagining the kind of homework that would be assigned was especially unnerving.
---
“It’s boring. Labeling the muscles and stuff, on a diagram, and answering these multiple choices questions. It’s basically health class stuff, but more basic. ‘What is a calorie?’ ‘What’s the difference between aerobic and anaerobic?’ And so forth. You probably already know it. You already knew most of the stuff I showed you last year, from 8th grade.” At least the academic stuff. Charlie had always been more studious than Teagan, something she suspected had to do with the fact that he literally didn’t have much else to do with his time. Cooped up in a house with her dad all day, she’d probably really enjoy studying, too. It was still one of the many things that set him apart, however, and it further cemented how much he needed someone like her. Someone to tell him not to mention that kind of thing when they were out in public.
“It’s like I’ve been saying,” she went on, clearly warming up into a full lecture, happy to impart some true wisdom onto her younger friend. “They have to dumb everything down so that everyone gets it. So you have to hear everything over and over and over again. It doesn’t matter if you already know it. They force you to keep proving it. It’s not really education so much as social brainwashing, you know? They’re programming us to repeat what we’re told and behave. That’s why the hiveminds all do so great. They split all their brain cells so they don’t have enough spare ones to question anything. Public schools hate kids who question things. They’re just figuring out who’s better at memorizing stuff. Answers. Instructions. Orders.”
---
Charlie sometimes found Teagan’s attitude toward school a little annoying. She was always going on about “hiveminds” and popular kids and how awful they were but Charlie watched Degrassi, he knew that very few people in high school were truly evil. The mean kids always had hidden depths that he was fascinated by and listening to Teagan’s descriptions of them made him question his TV education. He decided to turn the subject away from academics and focus on the social part. That was, after all, going to be his biggest difficulty if he did decide to attend next year.
“Have you made any friends?” he asked hopefully. Teagan was his only real connection to kids his age and he always wanted her to introduce him to other people so he could get a second opinion on things. Maybe if she wasn’t so ‘alternative’ (as his mother would say) she could get him a conversation with one of the pretty blonde girls he always saw walking home. And if lady luck decided to smile on him really hard he might actually refrain from making a fool of himself during said conversation.
---
“Sure,” she said, vaguely, rolling over to sit up on the bed properly, this time avoiding eye contact on purpose rather than out of thoughtlessness. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She didn’t eat lunch all alone. She wasn’t the lowest rung of the social ladder at Crows Landing High School, but she was still a Freshman. The older kids hadn’t noticed her yet, and she’d done her part to alienate the ones in her own year during grade school. It was hard to get a clean slate when people already knew how odd you were. So she was trying a different tactic; being odd in all new, exciting ways. “Just none that want to, like, hang out with a cop’s kid after school. They’ll come around, though. Don’t worry about it. I’m a charmer.”
Flashing a grin at her friend, Teagan plucked a drawstring pouch out of her pocket. “Hey, I made ten bucks telling fortunes today. Wanna go get ice cream or something? My treat.”
---
While the notion of free ice cream did make him perk up a bit, and forgive Teagan for her lack of enthusiasm toward school, the idea of leaving the house without one of his parents gave him the urge to grimace. It could be nasty, out there. People didn’t know he was deaf so he had to tell every single person if he was planning on talking to them and, while it wasn’t a common occurrence, he’d once been bodily shoved out of the way by a kid who’d been yelling at him to move. The boy had been standing behind him, so Charlie had no way of knowing.
“Ummm...” hesitation was evident in his voice and he found his eyes drifting to the floor as he tried to come up with an excuse to stay in. My parents need me to watch the house while they’re out. Yeah, like anyone would believe that. What could possibly happen to the house that Charlie would be able to prevent?
---
Having danced this particular dance before, Teagan just stood up. Charlie would take forever to agree to something, so it was better to just start doing it before he had a chance to think too long. She stretched, feigning nonchalance, and made an overly elaborate shrugging gesture. “Or if you’d rather be a scaredy-cat, I’ll go alone. Maybe I’ll pick something up to bring back for you, but I’ll probably forget...”
It might have been a decent bluff, had she actually started out of the door instead of lingering to follow it up with, “Come on, Charlie, I’ll see what the fortune stones have to say about you for free. Let’s go.”
---
Charlie rolled his eyes, standing from his chair almost immediately to follow her. It wasn’t like she was forcing him to do anything but her methods of persuasion were powerful and annoying. He followed her down the stairs and grabbed his ring of keys from the decorative set of hooks in the front hall. They were shiny and barely used and, honestly, he’d almost walked out the door without them. He really didn’t get out much.