Seventeen Again


"So, why are you moving back in again?" Iris asked him.

Barry gave her a somewhat hurt look.

"Not that I'm complaining!" she said quickly, "I'm so happy you're moving back in! It'll be like old times, like high school all over again."

"You have no idea," Barry muttered, unpacking one of his boxes into his old bedroom.

He had the whole weekend to get all his stuff moved in before going to his first day of school.

"There was a gas leak in Barry's building," Joe said, walking into the small bedroom, carrying a large box.

"Right," Barry confirmed, catching on quickly, "I'm just staying here until it gets cleared up. They said it could take a while."

"Why you ever moved into that death trap, I'll never know," Iris said, opening one of Barry's boxes to help him unpack.

"Hey, I like my apartment," Barry said defensively.

"Barry, you said yourself that the laundry machines in your building have been broken for almost a month," she pointed out.

"Still love my apartment, though," Barry said with a grin.

She just smiled at him in amusement.

So far, up to this point, Barry had only seen the downsides of his new assignment. He hadn't realized how nice it was going to be, living back at home again with Joe and Iris. Joe had been playing it cool, acting like it was no big deal, but Barry could tell he was ecstatic to have both his kids in his house again. He hadn't ever admitted to it, but he had actually been kind of sad when Barry had moved out in the first place. He had tried to play it cool by joking about how he was going to turn Barry's old bedroom into a gym—something he still hadn't gotten around to doing—but deep down, Joe had missed Barry's presence in his household. It just wasn't the same without him.

"Hey, Joe," Barry said once Iris had left the room, "Do you think I could borrow your car to get to school on Monday? You can drive your squad car instead, right?"

Joe gave him a serious look.

"You better not crash it this time," he said flatly.

"I was sixteen!" Barry laughed, "And I wasn't the one driving. Iris was."

"I still hold you just as responsible, though," Joe said, but then he laughed, "Yeah, you can take the car. I'm not so evil that I'm going to make you ride the school bus. You'd probably be late and miss it every morning anyways."

Barry laughed.

"I was going to get my own car last year, but then, you know. The lightning and everything," he shrugged, "Now I don't see the point in it, considering I run everywhere I go now."

"Too bad you can't do that now," Joe sighed.

It would be too fishy, they had both decided. It would be hard to explain to others that he "walked" to school when the school district Barry would be going to was on the other side of the city, not just a few minutes away like Barry's high school had been. He couldn't flash his way to school in the morning, or he would be risking revealing more than one of his secret identities.

Barry didn't bring much of his stuff with him to Joe's house, seeing as this was only temporary, but even without all his possessions there, Barry felt at home right away. Iris was feeling particularly nostalgic, and she insisted they have a late movie night for Barry's first night home. As Barry sat on the couch with Iris curled up next to him as they watched the movie, he thought to himself that maybe this assignment wasn't going to be all that bad.


"Have a good day, Grant," Joe said with a grin as Barry was leaving for school.

Barry rolled his eyes at him, grabbing his red backpack and a slice of toast on his way out the door. It felt so weird for him to drive, considering he was used to going everywhere on foot and he hadn't driven very often even before the lightning. He had only been the Flash for a few months and he was already so used to his speed that to drive in a car felt painfully slow to him.

It took him some time to find the school, considering he had never been there before. He had gone to high school in a different district, and obviously, he had to go undercover at a different high school from the one he went to or all his old teachers would recognize him. He wished he had scoped out the new school before today so that he would at least know where he was going. He was going to be late on the first day. He ended up driving in a few circles because he didn't really know where he was going. All he knew was the address: 52 Jump Street.

It took him forever to find a parking spot once he found the school, another thing he hadn't missed about driving. The parking lot was full of cars but vacant of people. He was so late. This day was not off to a great start.

When Barry checked in at the front office, the secretary gave him an irritated look.

"You're late, Mr…?"

"West," Barry said breathlessly, "Grant West. I'm so sorry. I got lost on my way here. I'm a new student."

"Very well then," the secretary said, writing something on a piece of paper.

"Here's a hall pass," she said, handing him the paper, "You can give that to your first period teacher. Do you need your schedule or your locker number?"

"No," he replied, "Thanks, but I have all of that already. I should be fine. Thanks for the hall pass."

She gave him a small smile, and Barry left the office.

For a smaller school, the building was huge. He didn't know how he was going to navigate it during his time here. The building was built like a maze. Parts of the school had been added on, built off of the older foundation. It made for a really screwy layout that made absolutely no sense in Barry's opinion. He should have asked for directions when he was in the office.

By the time he found the classroom, he was already twenty minutes late. Surprisingly enough, it wasn't even a new record for him. He had always been notoriously late back when he was in high school. His old habits must not have changed much.

"You're late, young man," Mr. Agnew said when he walked quietly into the classroom.

"Sorry," Barry said quickly, aware of the entire classroom's eyes on him, "I'm a transfer student. Today's my first day."

He handed the teacher his hall pass and then made to sit down in one of the chairs behind the lab benches, hoping to get everyone's eyes off him. He didn't want to draw too much attention to himself on the first day.

"Hang on there, Mr...West," the teacher said, looking down at his seating chart, "We have assigned seating in my classroom."

Barry stopped in his tracks, holding back a groan. Was this guy for real? Assigned seats?

He was sat down at a lab bench next to a kid who was supposed to be his lab partner for the rest of the semester. The kid smiled nervously at Barry as he sat down. He was clearly very shy because he didn't even look Barry in the eye after that.

"Alright," Mr. Agnew said, continuing as if he hadn't been interrupted, "Now, I know stoichiometry seems a little daunting right now, but it's not that hard once you get the basics down. We already covered balancing chemical equations before break. Now we'll just be taking that one step further."

Barry smiled to himself. This class was supposed to be advanced chemistry, but the material they were covering was somewhat rudimentary to him, being information that he had committed to heart his first semester in college. This was going to be easy. Barry listened to the lecture leisurely, trying not to let his boredom completely prevent him from paying attention to the lesson.

"Grant," the teacher said suddenly after he had been talking for nearly twenty minutes.

Barry didn't respond right away. It took him a second or two before he snapped up and looked at the teacher. He was going to have to get used to responding to his new name.

"Yes, sir?" Barry asked.

A couple kids snickered at his formality. They thought he was being sarcastic. Barry had gotten so used to calling his boss 'sir' that he hadn't realized most high school students didn't address their teachers with such formality. Judging by the irritated look on Mr. Agnew's face, he must have thought he was mocking him.

"Mr. West, tell me. Do you have a photographic memory?" he asked him.

Barry was taken back by the question.

"No," he said, confused.

"Then, may I ask, why have you not taken a single note since you entered my classroom?"

Barry looked around. Most of the other students had their notebooks out and were taking notes on the lecture. Barry blushed as he looked back to the teacher.

"Sorry," he said quickly, "At my other school, we covered this information already. It's a bit of a repeat for me."

"Oh really?" Mr. Agnew said, though his tone suggested that he didn't quite accept this excuse, "Then you won't mind balancing this equation here for me, would you?"

He gestured to the equation on the white board. Barry looked at it, then back at the teacher again. He nodded, and he tried to stop a smile from forming on his face as he stood up and walked over to the board. This man was trying to embarrass him. This forty-some-year-old man was seriously trying to humiliate a high school kid just to prove a point. Power trip.

Barry wasn't used to having a fellow adult talk to him in such a condescending way –besides Singh maybe—but to this man, he wasn't an adult. This man thought he was some seventeen-year-old punk, so Barry would just have to put up with it.

Barry had to stop himself from rolling his eyes when he looked at the problem on the board. Of course, the asshole would try to give him a college level stoic equation for Copper (II) Nitrate solution—way too advanced for high school students. Little did he know, Barry had a double major in chemistry and physics. It might as well have been 2+2 for him.

Barry stared at the chemical equation for only maybe half a minute before he solved it, quickly inserting the numbers in front of each chemical in the equation to balance it. He handed the marker back to the instructor, who stared at him in surprise.

"You didn't show your work," Mr. Agnew said flatly, "You have to explain the process."

Barry sighed. For real? This guy seemed set out to put him on the spot. It's not like you ever had to show your work in real life. The idea of Singh asking him to explain every forensic test he ran was laughable. What point was this guy trying to make? Barry took the marker back from him and turned back to the board again. He sighed before starting to explain his process aloud.

"First I assigned variables to each substance to represent the coefficients," he said, writing it on the board next to each chemical.

"Keeping the Law of Conservation of Matter in mind, I used those variables of the coefficients and subscripts to write an equation for each element so that the number of reactant atoms is equal to the number of product atoms."

The class, along with the teacher goggled at him as he wrote on the board:

Cu a=c
H b=2e
N b=2c+d
O 3b=6c+d+e

"From there," continued Barry, "I took the longest equation and by substitution I got the equation to be a proportion containing two different variables."

And on Barry went, explaining his advanced method for solving the chemistry equation while the class tried to follow what he was talking about. When Barry finally finished, ending with the solution of the chemical equation, he set the marker down and turned back around to face the instructor.

The entire class was staring at him.

"And you did all of this in your head?" Mr. Agnew asked skeptically.

"What are you suggesting?" Barry asked, somewhat irritably, "That I somehow cheated?"

"No," Mr. Agnew said, becoming flustered for the first time now, "No, of course not. I…You can take a seat now, Mr. West."

Barry nodded stiffly and walked back to his desk. Mr. Agnew stared at the board for a minute or two before he was able to give himself a mental shake and get back to his train of thought, returning to the lecture. Barry made a point of not taking out his notebook after that. He had no respect for this man, this man who abused the little bit of authority he had been given to bully around high school students just to make himself feel more powerful. It was pathetic.

He had seen some cops on the force do it, too. You could always tell a lot about a person just by how they used their power and authority. It was always the people who hadn't really had a lot of popularity or power in their adolescence that usually let everything go to their heads as soon as they found themselves in a career field that permitted them even a single ounce of authority. It said a lot about their character, and Barry was somewhat smug that he hadn't allowed this teacher to get the best of him just to prove a point.

Barry still regretted his actions, though. He should have just played dumb, should have apologized and admitted defeat, saying he didn't know how to solve the problem. His temper had gotten the best of him. This was the opposite of laying low. He was drawing attention to himself. People in the classroom were still glancing at him every now and then after that. Great. It wasn't even second period, and Barry was already going to be branded a nerd. This was going to be like his first time in high school all over again.

When the bell rang, Barry stood quickly from his seat, wanting to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. Once he was halfway down the hallway after leaving the classroom, he suddenly heard a voice shout out behind him.

"Hey!" some guy called out, catching up to him.

Barry hadn't known he was calling out to him at first. He thought it strange, considering how he doesn't know anyone yet.

"Hey," Barry answered back curiously, once the guy had caught up to him.

The kid was tall, just like him, with broad shoulders and curly light brown hair and preppy Hollister clothes. Barry had made an effort to dress down for school, wearing just jeans and a plain t-shirt, thinking the sweaters and button downs he usually wore were maybe a little too dressy, but this kid clearly took a lot of pride in how he dressed.

"It's Grant, right?" the guy asked.

"Yeah," Barry answered, and he was surprised when the kid actually shook his hand.

"I'm Justin," he said, smiling at him, "I just needed to tell you that that was seriously sick what you did back there."

Barry just stared at him in surprise.

"Mr. Agnew seriously needs an ego check," Justin continued, "It was awesome to see somebody finally show him up for once."

"Yeah, well it was kind of dumb of me," Barry said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, "It's only my first day here, and I've already made a teacher hate me."

"Nah, don't worry about it," Justin said, waving his hand dismissively, "Mr. Agnew hates all his students. Why he ever became a teacher, I'll never know."

Barry laughed lightly at that.

"So, do you need any help with anything?" Justin asked him, "I can show you around if you want."

"That would be awesome," Barry said, pleasantly surprised by the kid's friendliness.

He hadn't expected anyone to be so welcoming and helpful right off the bat like this. Maybe kids were just nicer now than they were when he was in school. Or maybe it was just because it was a smaller school than the one he had gone to. Or maybe it was the fact that he wasn't going through it this time as the weird kid with a "murderer" for a father. That always helps.

"Why are you carrying your backpack around with you?" Justin asked him, laughing as he saw the bag strung over Barry's shoulder.

"I was running late," Barry explained, "I didn't really have time to find my locker to drop off my stuff."

"What's your locker number?" he asked, "I'll help you find it."

Barry looked at the paper he had been given by Singh with all his class information and locker number on it.

"227" he answered.

"Dude! That's right by mine," Justin said happily, "Looks like we're neighbors."

It was true. Barry's locker was only four lockers away from Justin's. After Barry had dropped off his stuff, Justin very helpfully told him how to find his next class, and the two of them parted ways. As Barry walked to his next class, he was feeling pretty good. He had been worried that he would have a hard time making friends here, which would have been a problem considering that making friends was kind of the bulk of his assignment.

At least he wasn't late for his next class, and there wasn't any silly assigned seating either. Barry strategically chose a desk near the middle of the room. He wanted to be near the most people possible, so he could not only make friends, but also maybe even increase his chances of overhearing something about vertigo. Kids could be really stupid sometimes, and he wouldn't put it past them to be dumb enough to talk about their drug-related activities at school. He wanted to put himself in the best possible position to maybe overhear some of it.

When Barry pulled out his textbook, he groaned quietly to himself when he looked at the cover. This wasn't just health class. It was Sex Ed. Barry was going to kill Joe. He knew he was responsible for this. Singh had told him that Joe had helped put together Barry's schedule. He could just picture it now, Joe and Singh laughing as they picked his classes for him. This was going to be torture. He was twenty-five years old! He really didn't need to learn all this information again.

Barry took out his notebook this time, even though he really didn't need—or want—to take notes on this. He politely jotted a few things down as the teacher went over basic human anatomy with them. He was amused by how mortified all the students seemed to be. He remembered when he had been young, and the idea of talking about this stuff seemed so embarrassing. It was still awkward for him, sure, but he wasn't as completely mortified as he would have been when he was a teenager. He felt the worst for the instructor, who was really just a gym teacher who got roped into doing this. Barry really would not want his job.

"And remember, everyone," Mr. Ronan said near the end of class, "The best form of birth control is abstinence."

When the bell rang, it was somewhat amusing how quickly everyone rose from their seats, wanting to get the hell out of there.

"Okay, everyone," Mr. Ronan said as they were all filtering out of the room, "Keep in mind there's an anonymous question box in the back of the room. There are no stupid questions when it comes to sex ed, so don't be shy."

Barry really was going to kill Joe. He knew Joe had only put him in this class for a laugh, which was really not cool of him. This assignment was bad enough as it was without him having to learn about the birds and the bees every day.

After leaving the classroom, Barry nervously looked down at his class schedule, apprehensive to find out what class he was supposed to go to next. It couldn't be any worse than sex ed, right?

Wrong. His next class was glee. How was that even an actual class? He thought it was just an extracurricular. At his old high school, glee club was just an afterschool group, and it hardly had enough students in it to warrant a club, let alone a whole class. Maybe glee was more popular now than it was when he was in school. He really didn't know.

All he knew was that he was really not looking forward to his next class.