Wee Johnnie Valjean sat in the back of the class. His hair swept over his left eye, obscuring half his vision, but he didn't care. He hated the world so much he didn't care if he never saw half of the wretched thing again.
Simply put, Wee Johnnie was angry.
Detention. They had put him in detention! Of all the places to be! He was in S6. He wasn't supposed to get in this kind of shit anymore. But no. It happened. It might have been a tiny bit his fault, but it was most certainly not his fault that it had to be his fault and, yes, it was exactly as convoluted as it sounded.
Mr Javert, whom he knew to be a young man only through word of mouth for the fellow looked like a decrepit bulldog, was a real dick. He was the reason Wee Johnnie was in a fucking classroom when he could be doing something way more fun. But that was the point. His idea of fun was not something Toulon Academy approved of.
Okay, sue him. All he had done was steal some bread- some cash, some dough, some cha-ching. And who the fuck hadn't?! He had needed it. He had no money left. He was hardly living on his meagre earnings from his job at Pets At Home (filthy, disgusting animals were just not worth it anyway) and he hardly had the money to fund his Rockstar habits. He was down to one can a day, for Christ's sake! So he had done it. He had snuck into some rich kid's backpack and stole maybe only a couple…or a hundred pound. He had not, as some 'witnesses had insisted', slapped the kid in question in the face when he was noticed. He had simply gone for a high five and his bad aim tripped him up. Obviously.
He didn't deserve the agony of a whole week of detention with the ugliest teacher in school! Or at least, it had been five at first, but he'd skipped so many times his detention sentence had reached a grand total of nineteen days. Okay, maybe that was sort of his fault, but it was mostly down to the fucking authorities probably somehow. And by God, did Wee Johnnie HATE the authorities. They were unfair. Just because his parents were dead, and the sister whom he lived with didn't make all that much money, they were always so much harder on him. If, say, Fearchar Levant had done it, he'd have gotten way less detention time! Wee Johnnie was sure of it.
Mr Javert was this actual bam of a Modern Studies teacher who had recently been, like, weirdly obsessed with busting him for everything he did. He wore grey shoes instead of black? Detention! Tie two centimetres below his collar? Detention! Stole money from some stupid first year called Wee Jerry? Detention! How the hell was that fair? Wee Johnnie had done NOTHING WRONG.
Detention, Mr Javert style, was really quite something. Wee Johnnie was usually made to build perfect replicas of boats out of the teacher's lolly sticks. Sometimes he wondered to himself whether Mr Javert had a fetish for ships or something, or maybe he just really liked Mini Milks. Whatever the case, it was, suffice to say, totally fucking ridiculous.
Begrudgingly, he slid the last lolly stick on his fifth model boat into place. His hands were shaking, not from nerves, but from sheer frustration. He glanced around the other three or four kids in this hellish punishment group. His heart was set ablaze with passionate fire. Oh, how he detested the system. These kids all deserved freedom. He swore there and then to always strive for a world where anyone could do whatever they wanted without some boat-loving freak breathing down their neck about 'school policy'.
It was the last of his detention sessions, as previously mentioned, so he was filled with a weird sort of feeling- a mix, if you will, between impatience and relief, although the relief is not allowed to settle in fully, because the last few minutes of the last session always drag on indefinitely, as if you'll never reach the end. It seemed longer than all other eighteen times put together, and that was saying something, because they had been really fucking long. School really was such bullshit. Even the classes he liked, like Advanced Higher Psychology, that was bullshit because teachers were bastards.
He squinted at the clock and realised in horror that the hand hadn't moved since he entered the wretched room. He was sacrificing his precious lunchtimes in a room where the clock was broken. Just his luck. Without a way to measure how much of this torture was left, how was he expected to manage? How?!
As if his prayers had landed on heavenly ears, the bell signifying the end of lunch and the start of sixth period blared. Usually that noise made his balls jump up into his oesophagus but today it pretty much gave him a boner.
Everyone turned to leave, but on his way out, Wee Johnnie heard a voice behind him.
"Not so fast, Valjean."
Suppressing a sigh, he turned around to face Mr Javert. "Yes, sir?" he said compliantly through gritted teeth.
"Your time is up and your punishment is over. You know that means that you have a lot of responsibilities you should be ready and prepared to take back on now that you have sufficiently learned your lesson, and-"
"I'm ready to go hang out with my pals." Johnnie glanced at the door, anxious of the time. He was in PE next with said pals and it was such a skive he really didn't want to miss a second.
"No, it means you'll be working hard to better the school community and set an example for the younger pupils." Mr Javert sighed. "And if you commit one more such dangerous atrocity as what brought you here in the first place, I was see to it personally that you are expelled without a second thought. You are entering zero-tolerance waters, young man."
Wee Johnnie felt his fists clench and his whole body vibrate with incendiary emotion. "I only stole a couple hundred quid!" he squealed, eager to jump to the defensive. "My family hasnae even got a wee bobby to buy some Coulter's candy, let alone fund my habits!"
"Habits?"
"I'm not on drugs, ye daft ned."
Mr Javert snarled. "This will be your only warning. Do not disrespect authority. I would have thought you'd have learnt that from your time in my room." He scrutinised the model boat Wee Johnnie had worked so hard on. "But then again, perhaps not."
"You don't know how hard it was on me!"
"What do you mean, Valjean?"
"Nineteen lunchtimes pure dead so I could build your weird fetish boats!"
"It would only have been five if you had taken responsibility," Mr Javert chastised. "The rest was for the way you tried to run away from what you did. Lie a common coward." He spat the last word, his eyes narrowing as if speaking an incantation to summon the devil himself. Knowing Mr Javert, he probably thought Wee Johnnie was the devil incarnate in this realm of reality. "You're just a silly little boy-"
"My NAME is WEE JOHNNIE VALJEAN!"
"And I am Mr Javert," his teacher counted. "And if you forget for even one second that I outrank you—that the system owns you, I will be down your shirt so fast you won't even be able to say 'Russell Howard's Good News'."
Wee Johnnie scoffed and made a beeline for the door.
"Do not forget it!"
Jeezo, that teacher was weird as fuck. Ah, well. He had things to do, like go skive through dodgeball.
The flu was going around, so only Champ Matthews was in for PE. That was fine, Wee Johnnie guessed. He'd always felt a sort of protective instinct for Champ. They were the closest of friends, bound together by strings wrapped around both their hearts and tied together with a heart-shaped paper clip in the middle. Sometimes the teachers tried to blame Champ for Johnnie's mischief just to get someone who knew the truth to grass. Champ never gave him up, bless, but he'd always swoop in and take the blame instead. He couldn't stand to see Champ get in trouble. Poor baby'd never done anything wrong; didn't know how to handle it.
They changed into their PE kits and went off to play dodgeball with their class. Their PE teacher put them on different teams, but was so neglectful that he didn't even notice when Johnnie swapped over to Champ's side. They started to chat.
"How was your last experience of lunchtime imprisonment?" Champ asked lightly.
Wee Johnnie smiled, pressing his lips together in a thin line. "Ah, hard labour with Mr Javert."
"Did it change you? Has it got to you yet?"
"Dude, seriously. I'm not going to stop doing what I want just 'cause some dogfaced adult told me so."
Champ swooned a bit. "You're such a rebel sometimes."
If Johnnie was honest, which he rarely was, he was completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with Champ. He was adorable. He was this adorable bundle of clueless sweetness. He wasn't particularly 'smart' or 'attractive' in the conventional sense, but Johnnie didn't care. His soul was beautiful. Whenever he looked into the boy's eyes, he saw stars and moons and galaxies. He was beautiful. And they would be beautiful together, if Wee Johnnie only knew how to ask him out.
Oh, love was a bitter game. Almost as bad as the system.