Spencer always did okay in school. Not good, not bad...just okay. B's and C's, right smack dab in the middle of the grading spectrum, smack dab in the middle of his essays and homework and tests in thick red marks. He was okay with that - his papers weren't bloody when he got them back, nor were they covered in empty praise that only his par - guardians would take to heart.
His grandad had always thought differently though. He'd clip out the names from the honor roll in the paper, and he'd search down through the columns for Shay-comma-Spencer with more diligence than he ever paid to his crossword puzzles. (And his grandad did love crossword puzzles; he had stacks of crossword dictionaries with torn, yellowed pages in the corner of his living room, and there was almost always a pencil behind his ear in the event that an answer struck him while he was making his favorite fried bologna sandwich for lunch.) And if he found his grandson among the hundreds of names in the high honors section, there was no doubt it would be highlighted and hung on the refrigerator.
"You see this?" he'd say when his family went visiting to Yakima, and he'd point as though the neon yellow blended in with the dull gray of the paper. "This is what happens when smart young men apply themselves." Beaming, he'd catch his grandson's eye, and when the two were alone, he'd ruffle his hair, hug him with a scary amount of force for a man his age, and murmur "I knew you could do it, son."
Spencer had always understood that his grandad was just trying to complement him, and there was never anything wrong with that. He had to work for good grades, and this kind of thing meant achievement. Beyond the embarrassment of being treated like a child, there was always a bit of pride. Not that he'd say so when he got older. Of course not.
It didn't make sense. Intelligence was supposed to improve with age, yes. But this was pushing it. This wasn't right.
The circled 'A' at the top of the history quiz he'd gotten back defied all logistics of his mind, but there was nothing wrong with it. Not according to what his teacher said when he stayed after class to check. He'd said he'd never been so befuddled by a student's insistence to get a C before. His words, not Spencer's. (Spencer did add the word 'befuddled' to his mental vocabulary, though.)
He stared down at the quiz, just as he'd been doing between classes all day. Blinking at it didn't make it change, and neither did rubbing his eyes.
A.
He should have been proud. He should have been smiling on the inside and out.
He should have asked his little sister what the letter was. She knew her letters perfectly, as long as they were uppercase. She'd have been be glad to tell him.
He should have shown Grandad.
Instead, he shoved the quiz in a drawer, letting the ends wrinkle.
Numbers and letters were only more than numbers and letters when people made them that way.
For a while after his mother's passing, people would send them cards. Hallmark after Hallmark would fall out of the mailbox, and he used to count them. Sometimes they outnumbered the bills and junk mail, and when he compared the thickness of all of them combined to the thickest envelopes, they'd be equal. He would wonder if that meant there was more good in the world than evil, but then as the coffee table began to fill and sappy messages peeked out from behind nooks and crannies, he decided they were each despicable in their own little way. So when his grandad left to buy groceries, he gathered them up in a trash bag and left them to be disposed of the next day when the garbage truck came.
He was washing the dust off of the coffee table when his grandad returned, his granddaughter in tow. Neither of them said a word about it, but dinner was exceptionally quiet. His baby sister asked at one point why they were mad, and he said, "I'm not mad. Are you?" in reference to his grandad across the table. There was no answer, but he made an offer to play Candy Land with her, and all was forgotten. For a while.
"Spencer, how come there aren't any postcards for mommy anymore?" she asked out of the blue a month later. She was coloring a picture of a teddy bear for kindergarten at the kitchen table, and it was coming along quite nicely. The red bow around his neck was a nice touch if he did say so himself.
"Your teddy bear has a pretty bow," he told her.
She thanked him. "But that wasn't the answer to my question." Four-year-olds were determined little things. He almost asked her to repeat herself, but that would be like saying he didn't hear her, which was like lying. And he was a horrible liar who didn't take kindly to people who lied to his siblings, even if they were little white ones.
"Because...because people can't say 'I'm sorry' forever, and so they have to move on."
Like us, he decided not to say.
The little hand that was so carefully moving inside the lines like he taught her (because he was the artist in the family and every good artist had to have an apprentice) stopped.
"Because she's not coming home." She looked surprised to hear herself admit it, even though she'd been told, even though there were always gentle reminders administered by him or their grandad to stop her from relying on false hopes.
When minutes passed and there were no more words between them, she picked up her red crayon and went back to work. But he could see what was coming in the way her knuckles went white and her bear's bow was getting to be much darker. She didn't resist when he turned her chair, outstretched up for his embrace even though her arms were so small she'd never reach on her own. Her face pressed into the nape of his neck; there were hot droplets spilling down his skin, but there were no ugly, horrifying sounds muffled into his shoulder like at the funeral. Her chest shuddered against his, but he rubbed her back in slow, rhythmic movements until there were nothing but tiny gasps now and then grazing his cheek.
He put her down when her breathing evened out, and she ran a wrist along her bloodshot eyes before pressing her hand against the paper to get the rest of her bear's bow as dark as she'd managed to make it moments before.
Like any concerned guardian, their grandad was quick to ask what happened when he saw her tearstained face.
"I colored outside the lines," she said after a while, and Spencer's chest started to hurt.
The kids in his art class were wrong - they weren't going to be stuck with an old woman as an art teacher, and their teacher hadn't into labor before the start of the school year. In fact, that wasn't even anatomically possible because their art teacher was a man named Mr. Westfield who'd just been out with a sick child. He insisted that formalities felt unnecessary in this case, and that they should all just call him Rick. It was painfully obvious that Rick didn't want to let go of the seventies, with his overlong sandy hair held back into a ponytail and his washed-out tie-dye t-shirt having seen better days, but Spencer was okay with that. He was a free-spirited kind of guy who believed in trying different mediums of art supplies in order to find one's niche, and that direct classroom instruction defeated the purpose.
"It disrupts the flow, man," he stated breezily at the end of his introduction and let his students stare blankly at him for several seconds before succumbing to laugher. "I've always wanted to say that in my classes," he explained before perching his huge, orange-tinted sunglasses atop his head. Nobody laughed.
Spencer decided he kind of liked Rick. They were on the same page as far as humor went, anyway - funny inside their heads, but not so much to other people.
"Well, this is awkward," he muttered, scratching his head. "I should have listened to my wife."
Forgotten muscles curled into an expression of slight amusement, and Rick turned his way with a slight laugh. "At least somebody appreciates my jokes."
It took Spencer fifteen minutes to realize that he had smiled, and the rest of the day for him to realize he couldn't remember the last time he'd done so without it being entirely false.
His artistic muse, however, still eluded him. He blamed the kid with no face (and still no name; he'd zoned out during attendance, only realizing that the kid's name had been called when he said "Here.") because he was going right to town with those dragon pictures again, this time coloring and shading way better than he could have ever done with a twelve-pack of Crayola colored pencils.
Meanwhile, his new papers were crisp and unmarked as ever, his pencil hovering just inches from their surface. He'd been telling himself that once he made the first mark it would get better, that his artistic chi would start flowing once he touched familiar territory...but he couldn't do it. He was so used to having a clear picture in his head when it came to art that starting with a blank slate with his mind just as spotless seemed just wrong.
The pencil was placed down in front of him with a soft clink at the same time a knock sounded at the door. Rick, who was painting on a canvas that he'd set up next to his desk, went to answer it, unaware that there was a streak of orange running from the center of his cheek down to his chin. Spencer kind of wondered how he managed that.
He reverted his eyes down at the table even though he was pretty sure if he focused any harder than he had been his brain would explode and bits and pieces of it would escape out his ears.
"...just made a transfer. I'm new here. To Ridgeway, not just this class. I couldn't find the room."
"It happens. I just started teaching here this morning, so I'm learning the ropes just as much as you. Come in and take a seat." Rick smiled in his lopsided way and backed up to let in the visitor in. Spencer's back was to the door, and he couldn't see it in his peripheral vision, but the eyes of his classmates showed slight interest. New kid, they seemed to say.
New kid was obviously uncomfortable, but he wasn't one of the skittish types that cowered under their gazes. He looked a little lost, sure, but not really scared, and Spencer admired that. High school students had a way of eating people alive if they let them. He pretended that there was something engrossing on his paper as to prevent more discomfort for the new kid when he sat down across from him even though he was just as curious as everyone else in the room at the moment.
"Staring at the paper won't make lines appear," he said after an excruciating silence. Spencer took that as an indicator for him to glance up.
"Your eyes are really intense," he noted out loud because his mouth didn't always have a filter and that happened to be the first thing he noticed. They probably stuck out because he was kind of pale and his hair was black as could be, but they were. His mind screamed, emerald, which, last time he checked was only a color reserved for jewelry.
And the kid's face screamed creep, which happened a lot when the filter on his mouth disappeared. Damn.
"Indeed," he replied in a drawn-out baritone, the kind of voice people used when they didn't know what to make of a situation other than the fact that it made them uneasy. He rummaged through his backpack - probably so he could avoid eye contact, Spencer assumed, a bit angry with himself.
"I didn't know you could talk," remarked the faceless boy without tearing his concentration away from his meticulous coloring. At least he was unfazed about it. (Spencer almost asked him to look up and push his hair off to the side, but he'd save that for another day.) He mumbled some gibberish just so he could say he responded somehow and then prepared himself mentally for exile because he was sure that it would happen now that the whole class probably thought he was a freak.
His exile lasted approximately fifteen seconds, after which point the new kid decided to ask, "Hey, uh, can I borrow a pencil?" Spencer waited a few seconds just to be sure it was him he was asking, then nodded. "Yeah, hang on."
When handed a newly-sharpened pencil, the new kid thanked him, and Spencer figured they were both trying to pretend that what had just happened hadn't happened at all. That was more than okay.
"So are we assigned stuff in here, or do we just kinda roll with it?" he wanted to know, eying Rick as he painted intently.
"We just go with the flow and with whatever inspires us." Spencer shrugged. "Rick wants us to explore different artistic mediums but go with whatever we like and just have fun with it."
"He lets you call him 'Rick'?" The new kid seemed mildly intrigued. "That's cool."
"Yeah, he's kind of a cool guy."
Rick gave him a small smile and a thumbs-up from across the room, and Spencer returned them to the best of his ability even though the happy expression still felt awkward on his face.
"So I'm assuming you have a name," he said once he returned his attention to the new kid.
"Actually, I don't," he informed. "My parents couldn't agree on a name for me, so I came home from the hospital without one and they never did give one to me. Most people just say 'hey kid', and I respond automatically."
"...Well that has to suck," Spencer concluded because there was no other way to describe it. Gees.
He laughed. "I'm just kidding. You're the first kid to believe me on that one. My name is actually Thom. Thom Reed. I just hate the name Thom."
Spencer's face began to heat faintly. "Oh. Well, Thom Reed, my name is actually Spencer Shay. I'm just gullible like that, I guess...and sometimes I can be socially awkward."
"I'll remember not to use sarcasm around you, then," Thom told him with a nod. Then, lowering his voice, he added, "And believe me, the eye thing was one of the most interesting compliments I've ever received. If it was a compliment."
"It was," Spencer confirmed, even though it felt weird to put it that way. But it made Thom smile in a way that said he didn't find him to be a creep at all, and something like relief washed over his insides for the first time in a while.
AN: I'd just like to reassure you all that this story isn't going to be riddled with OCs. I had to give names to some of Spencer's peers because they'd be recurring throughout, and some of them might help the plot along, but really one of the OCs will turn out to not be an OC at all...sort of.
It'll make sense later. Really.