some notes:
- this work is complete, and I will be updating it as I finish minor edits.
- this started as a series of smut oneshots and got so far away from me during the planning process that it's now completely unrecognizable.
- if you have any criticisms or catch any grammar oddities or spelling mistakes please let me know. I was the sole proofreader and editor and as such some mistakes may still be present
- finally: i hope you enjoy reading this half as much as I did writing it

WINTER, 2007
Chapter 1

"The world is round—my square don't fit at all."
Queens of the Stone Age, "Turnin' On the Screw" - Era Vulgaris, 2007

All considered, Jimmy figured that most everyone had, maybe a few, but at least one moment in their lives which they could consider a turning point—a juncture around which they could definitively classify any point as being before, and after. Years later, when prompted, he'd take his time considering his own options—there was the day he first arrived at Bullworth Academy; or the day he and Gary Smith plummeted from the academy's bell tower less than a year later. There was the day two years after that, when Gary left Christy Martin's house with car keys in his hands, swaying and inebriated, and Jimmy had let him go, watched him walk out the front door, saying nothing.

But he knew as well as anyone that stories are often determined long before they start, and if he had to waylay dramatics and go by ear, one night in particular tended to stick out to Jimmy as the real beginning of it all. That had been the evening the whole mess with Kirby started, and in the way messes often seem to—in the middle of the night, and completely by accident.

It was January, and the turn of the new year had brought a fresh, hard snowfall—the kind that encased all the dirt and blood into the bitumen and left nothing but a deceptive sheen behind. Anyone who knew better could almost pretend the school was innocent, when viewed after a snowfall like that one—but even beneath a spotless cover of white you could still sense the presence of dirt, and with it the implicit suspicion that there was a war going on. The country was at war, of course, in those days—that was a hard fact to escape. But some other, independent conflict, far smaller in scope to all but those who lived it, waged on at Bullworth Academy, had probably been waging since the day the foundation was laid. The country was at war. The school was at war. And Jimmy Hopkins, himself, was waging a war of his own—one tiny skirmish at a time.

With the hood of his snow-dampened sweater pulled tight over his head and the contents of his backpack rattling ominously, Jimmy was the picture of insubordination. On paper, it was an easy enough infiltration—walk right into Bullworth's main building via the maintenance door, place a small stockpile of water guns and a foul-smelling, duct-taped water bottle inside a nondescript crate in the janitor's storeroom, and then get the hell out. Jimmy had weighed the pros and cons of the plan, which had been detailed in needless depth by Earnest Jones with the aid of a whiteboard: he couldn't say that he was thrilled by the idea of Earnest and crew having such easy access to water guns, and there was no way he could talk his way out of serious consequences if his involvement was revealed following whatever...incident took place the next day, but Jimmy figured that so long as he didn't fire any water guns himself, he'd come away from the whole thing just fine. It was easy enough to rationalize, considering the compensation Earnest had promised for a job well done.

But the first roadblock of the night presented itself when Jimmy set out for the maintenance door a quarter to midnight and found it locked tight. He was momentarily peeved—but as much as he didn't like setbacks, life at Bullworth Academy (and, he supposed, life in general) had set Jimmy up to be an improviser, and he'd snuck in through the front door easily enough in the past. That night was no exception, and for the first few moments after slipping in through the front undetected, Jimmy was nearly able to convince himself that the rest of the plan would go off without a hitch.

"Hopkins? Is that you?"

Jimmy darted for the shadows in the west-wing corridor on instinct, but a strong hand closed around his wrist and yanked him back toward the entrance.

Jimmy threw an elbow back and his captor swore and staggered. He spun around and back, putting space between himself and the aggressor, before relaxing and lowering his guard. "Oh. Uh...sorry, Tom."

Tom Gurney's face, twisted in pain, was bathed in shadow, his black eye like a bruised pit beneath the band of his gray beanie. Jimmy had never seen Tom without that black eye, and it seemed to Jimmy that the boy was simply perpetually bruised (though who wasn't, in those days?) Tom bent over, gripping his midsection. "I think you got my solar plexus."

"Shit happens." Jimmy whispered. "Especially when you go around grabbing people in the dark. What are you doing here?"

"Setting up a prank. What are you—" Tom began, but he spotted Jimmy's backpack. "Oh. Nice," he said approvingly. "What have we got?"

Jimmy looked around; there seemed to be a dearth of prefects in the area, an anomaly both welcome and foreboding. A break in routine on part of authority at Bullworth was never a good sign, as their schedules seemed to afford them all the flexibility of a strait jacket, but Jimmy couldn't complain about the opportunity to operate away from prefect supervision.

Tom seemed to pick up on his confusion. "All upstairs. We staged a, uh...diversion that should keep them busy for a minute."

"Who's 'we'?"

"Me and Davis. Well...mostly Davis. I don't really care about the prank, I just don't have anything better to do. Oh, and Trent was supposed to be here too, but he never showed. Come on, show me!" Tom said suddenly, taking one of the backpack straps in his hands.

"Fine! No tugging, come on..." Jimmy led him further into the corridor, away from view of the front office and stairwell, and opened up the bag.

"Careful with this, I dunno what it is..." Jimmy said, withdrawing the firmly sealed bottle. He could smell it even before he removed it.

"Holy shit," Tom said, choking.

"Yup," Jimmy said, wrinkling his nose.

"What is it?"

"Dunno," Jimmy repeated. "Smells like piss, though."

"It just might be." Tom said, regarding the bottle. "Yeah, I think this is animal urine."

"What?"

"Like, for pests and stuff."

Jimmy considered the prospect of potentially having to attend classes in a building that smelled like an enormous litterbox for the next several days, or however long it would take for the building to air out, and suddenly doubted very much that the fifty dollars Earnest had promised him would be worth it. He was a man of his word though, and he'd already come this far.

"Here, take it back..." Tom whispered, sticking the bottle back in the bag, the collar of his polo held over his nose. Jimmy shouldered the bag.

"Good luck with whatever you're doing, I guess." Jimmy said. "You know if the janitor's closet is open?"

"Should be. Oh, and," Tom added in a clandestine whisper, as Jimmy set off for the closet, "You didn't see me."

"Likewise," Jimmy replied.

Jimmy started back across the foyer toward the east wing, and almost immediately the second roadblock of the night manifested at the top of the staircase. Edward turned the corner looking as big and mean as ever, his deep navy blue jacket blending into the shadows so well that Jimmy may have missed him all together had the moonlight not glinted off his glasses and given him away. Jimmy knew right away he'd been spotted; he retreated carefully back into the shadows, but not carefully enough.

"Is someone there?" Edward's voice was deafening in the relative silence. Jimmy froze, watching Edward—the prefect didn't seem to spot him, but he remained at the top of the stairs by force of some authoritative sixth sense. Jimmy scanned the foyer, but he already knew he lacked sufficient cover to get across the foyer and into the janitor's closet without a distraction, and he had nothing of the sort. Running through his options in his head, they quickly narrowed to two: bail, or wait Edward out.

He couldn't say he was in the mood to stand upright in a locker or sit in a trash can for the next however many minutes it would take for Edward to continue his patrol, so Jimmy withdrew into the corridor behind him, testing the classroom doors; the second knob he tried twisted, and, gently as possible so as to avoid making any noise at all, he eased the door open.

Jimmy had always had a pretty keen sense of situational awareness. It had saved his ass more than a few times, and all in all was a pretty invaluable trait for a habitual troublemaker to have. But as Jimmy also knew, it doesn't really take much situational awareness at all to know when you've walked in on something you weren't supposed to see.

Trent, who it appeared had come to the main building that night after all, stood at the other end of the classroom just a few yards away. He stood with his back toward Jimmy. At first, due to the low light and distance, Jimmy couldn't make sense of Trent's posture, nearly formless and moving slightly. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw that the movement he'd detected in the dark was another set of arms. Someone else was there, and they had their arms wrapped around his neck and shoulders from the front. Then the rest of the movement he'd seen suddenly fell into place, was easy to distinguish—a tipping head, a groping hand—and then Trent leaned forward slightly, and a face peered out over Trent's shoulder...

"Oh, shit!" The smaller form ducked out of sight.

Jimmy could hear Trent's hushed reply. "Whoa, whoa, what?"

"Stop, stop," the other voice replied. And then, directly to Jimmy, a threat—"I'm gonna kick your ass, Hopkins!"—and Jimmy was woefully familiar with the voice that delivered it.

Jimmy whipped around and reached for the door, which he'd left just slightly ajar—through the gap he could see to his displeasure that Edward had unwittingly followed him, and was only a few classrooms away. Weighing his chances against the prefect, he nudged the door shut and turned to face Kirby Olsen.

Kirby had crossed the room in the seconds it took for Jimmy to lock the door. He snatched Jimmy by the collar and in one swift move brought him to the ground. Some of the air went out of Jimmy's lungs. Kirby was small for a junior, and Jimmy, stupidly, made the constant and ironic mistake of underestimating his strength.

"You're in for a beating, Hopkins. And you can't outrun me here," he hissed. His hair was disheveled.

Jimmy gasped. "Aahh...sorry..."

Trent came into view around Kirby, looking flustered. "The hell are you sneaking around the building at night for?" Trent asked, still catching his breath. He smoothed some of his blonde hair out of his eyes.

"I dunno, why does anyone sneak around at night?" Jimmy evaded.

Kirby's hands curled into Jimmy's collar, and he shook him. "Don't tell anyone what you saw," Kirby said. "Or I swear to God, I'll…I'll…"

Trent rolled his eyes behind Kirby; he disappeared from Jimmy's line of sight and let out possibly the most pointedly theatrical sigh Jimmy thought he'd ever heard.

Kirby's head snapped back toward him. "What?"

"Let the dude up."

"What?"

"I said, let him up. This really isn't necessary," Trent said.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Who would he tell?"

Kirby looked aghast. Jimmy was a bit taken aback himself, amazed by the idea that Trent would talk anyone out of a proper beating—never mind that he and Trent were supposed to be on good terms. "You want me to list everyone in the school?"

Trent didn't answer, just looked at Kirby with a look of what Jimmy assumed was pity. "Incredible. You are that ashamed to be seen with me."

He might've imagined it, but Jimmy thought he saw Kirby deflate a little. For a moment, he seemed to forget Jimmy was even there. "We're not doing this now."

Trent shrugged. "Yeah, you're right actually. We're not doing this now. See you around." As casually as though the past few minutes had never occurred, he pulled a beanie out of his pocket, tugged it over his head, yanked the classroom door open, and just like that was gone.

If Jimmy thought Kirby might've deflated earlier, he definitely did now. His shoulders slumped, still twisted away from Jimmy and angled at the door. Jimmy took the opening, and quickly rotated his hip outward, jutted his shoe into Kirby's hip, and rolled matter Kirby's strength, Jimmy was stronger, and he knew it, and within seconds he regained the upper hand.

Straddling him, Jimmy hauled Kirby's upper body off the ground a few inches by his collar, until their noses were almost touching. "I should kick your ass for throwing me around like that." Jimmy hissed. Already he could tell that his tailbone would be bruised tomorrow.

"I'd love to see you try," Kirby replied, but once Jimmy had the upper hand in a fight, it was difficult for anyone, even Kirby, to deny it.

Jimmy dismounted Kirby, got to his feet, and held out a hand to help him up. Kirby looked at him and pointedly got to his feet on his own, dusting himself off.

Jimmy dropped his hand. "You really didn't have to threaten me."

"Sure!" Kirby laughed.

"I mean it. Because I get it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I do." Not even Jimmy was sure what he meant by that, at least not right away, but he convinced even himself that he did indeed get it, whatever it was. Kirby scowled, but he pushed passed Jimmy and into the hallway. The door clicked shut behind him, then Jimmy was alone.

The clock on the wall read 12:04. It was just after midnight, and three things were true: First of all, he was standing in the dark in an empty classroom with a backpack full of piss; second, he'd just watched Trent Northwick and Kirby Olsen kiss, and it had settled into him some confusing emotion he wasn't sure he was capable of understanding. And third: for some inexplicable reason, the kind of reason that required hindsight to properly understand, his face had grown very warm, and his little heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest.