Author's Notes:
I do not own Glee or the characters; nor do I own any music, television shows, websites, or films referenced.
Rating is for language and eventual sexual content.
Approximate words this chapter: 3,250
Dave at Thurston, Part 2
Monday morning found Dave in good spirits. He walked into his AP Calc class and took his seat next to Sean as always. "Hey Sean. Have a good weekend?"
"Hey Dave," Sean smiled back. "Yeah, it was okay. Nothing special. Got together with some friends Saturday afternoon. Family stuff on Sunday. Hey, I heard you guys won Friday night. That's pretty cool."
"Yeah, thanks. That was about the high point of my weekend, but the rest of it was okay." Dave flashed Sean a small smile which had a hint of pride behind it. "Quiet weekend other than that. Did some school work, worked out, pretty typical for this time of year."
Lunch period found Dave hungrier than usual. He filled his tray with two cheeseburgers and a serving of rigatoni. He craned his neck and located the place where Sean and his friends were sitting. As he approached the table, he saw Sean and the other guys leaning toward each other, rapt in conversation while Gretchen, sitting to one side, stabbed and scraped at her sketchbook with a drawing pencil. Dave set down his tray across from Gretchen and Sean. His presence seemed to cause the other guys' conversation to disperse.
"Oh, hey, Dave." Sean said somewhat nervous-sounding. Gretchen looked up from her drawing and gave Dave a flirty grin, raising one eyebrow as if waving with it.
"Hey, Gretchen. Hey, guys," Dave replied. "Don't let me interrupt your conversation."
"Ah, we weren't really talking about anything," Sean replied. The rest of the guys just hung their heads as if they'd just been busted by their parents looking at a dirty magazine.
"Oh, c'mon. You guys looked like you were hatching top-secret plans to take over the world."
Gretchen giggled and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, they tend to clam up if they fear disparaging comments from people outside their circle."
"Ah, whatever." Dave shook his head, appeared maybe slightly hurt actually, having been excluded from the conversation.
The guy sitting next to Sean changed the subject. "Hungry today, Dave?" he said, eyeing Dave's tray.
"Yes, actually, I am. Oh, I never did get your name."
"I'm Scott."
"Yeah, I never formally introduced all of my pals here," Sean said with traces of guilt and annoyance. Starting with the guy to his immediate left, Sean pointed as he gave names: "Scott, Justin, Howard, we usually call him 'Howie', and Spencer, we sometimes call him 'Spence'."
Dave smiled and stood to reach across the table to shake their hands and repeat their names individually as he did: "Scott...Justin...Howard...Spencer...nice to finally be introduced to all of you."
The guys shook Dave's hand while nodding and smiling, each verbalizing some form of greeting. Dave sat back down and grabbed one of the cheeseburgers from his tray. It seemed to disappear in seconds.
"Dude, you just, like, inhaled that burger," Sean observed.
Dave swallowed a gulp of water, shrugged, "like I said, I am hungry today."
"Karofsky! Good game the other night!" Dave startled to the sound of one of his teammates patting his shoulder as he walked by.
"Yeah, Johnno, it was fun!" Dave turned and replied with a wide grin before returning his gaze to his tray and hoisting his second cheeseburger.
Dave addressed the somewhat surprised expressions from the rest of the group. "The other team guys, they always call me 'Karofsky'. Sometimes I think that most of the people at my old school didn't know I even had a first name, I was just 'Karofsky' to everyone." Dave consumed the second burger much in the same way he dispensed with the first.
Gretchen observed and offered the conclusion, "You are such a man."
"Well, I hope so!" Dave smiled and tilted his head, looking at her wide-eyed. The rest of the group fell into quiet, unsure laughter at Dave's response. "Don't hate me because I'm direct, folks."
"Seriously, you probably keep a roll of duct tape in your locker," Gretchen opined. Dave laughed as he looked away and blushed a little. "Rrraaawwwwrrr!" Gretchen punctuated her cat noise with a clawing gesture and a sexy grimace. Dave looked back down at his tray, still blushing and chuckling. Looking up, he met Gretchen's eyes with a shy grin on his face, hunching low to the table. Gretchen returned the blush and tilted her head.
"And when's the last time your fingers weren't permanently discolored with artwork fallout?" Dave composed himself and quietly addressed Gretchen. "It's kinda like what you said last week about not doing things halfway if you're into them."
"So, like, eating is your hobby."
Dave chuckled, "Well, I happen to be very into my lunch right now."
Most of the other guys dispersed from the table to get to their next class early. Only Sean, David, and Gretchen remained. "So, no hints to the top-secret conversation I walked in on earlier?"
"That's bugging you, isn't it, Dave?" Gretchen responded. She flipped her sketchbook around so Dave could see her drawing right-side up. It was a highly-worked drawing, somewhat a caricature, of Howie dressed in a robe with arms raised, holding a scepter drawing flames and clouds of smoke all around him. In graffiti-style lettering was the word "wizard" down one side of the drawing. It was nice-looking fantasy artwork, and the likeness of Howard's face was striking and unmistakable. "There's a hint."
Dave looked up, puzzled: "Awesome drawing, but I don't get it."
Sean looked at Gretchen with somewhat pleading eyes hoping she wouldn't explain further. "Aw, geeze, Sean. You really think it's that big a deal?" She turned to Dave. "Sean and his friends spent Saturday afternoon playing D & D, and they were doing a post-game recap earlier. He's afraid you'd rip on his geekiness if you knew."
Dave smiled slightly and shook his head, giving a puzzled look. "Everybody's a geek for something, Sean. A year ago, I could recite specific stats for at least thirty NFL players from memory, really specific stuff. That information is useful to no one. There's no difference between memorizing that kinda useless crap and knowing the specific times Spock smiled on the original Star Trek series: neither one is ever gonna make any difference in the grand scheme of things. At least you're interacting with your friends; and there are far worse things you could be doing with your time."
Sean looked up and nodded, smiling, looking relieved.
"Dude, the way you guys were acting, I'd have thought you were planning to build a bomb or something." Dave was intense, but he was also disarming in a really direct way.
All the while, Gretchen was stabbing and scraping at her sketchbook. She had started on another drawing. Dave dove into his plate of rigatoni while Sean finished his lunch as well. Sean paused as he finished eating, wiping his mouth on a napkin and dropping the crumpled napkin on his emptied tray, turning to address Dave directly. "Dave, you're alright," Sean said.
Dave looked up, slightly smug, and replied while nodding, "I'm glad you think so," delivered with a sarcastic edge and an exaggerated, wise-guy grin.
"You're better than alright. I just can't find the word for it so it won't sound so..."
The sentence ended incomplete, perhaps mercifully. Gretchen got up and came around to the other side of the table as Dave got up to return his empty tray. He grabbed Sean's spent lunch tray as well. When he returned to the table to grab his books for his next class, Gretchen was already leaving the cafeteria. She looked back and smiled in his direction, he returned a nod, a smile, and a wave. Sean and Dave both had their AP history class next, but Sean had to stop at his locker on the way. Dave stopped at the bathroom, mainly to wash the cheeseburger residue from his hands, not wanting to smell of ketchup for the rest of the day.
Dave arrived to his AP History class to find Sean already in his seat. He gave a greeting-nod in Sean's direction as other students were filling the desks. He reached into his bag and found the appropriate notebook for this class. As he placed it on the desk in front of him, he noticed that there had appeared a dark smear across the back of his hand. Puzzled, he looked back into the bag. There, slid between the notebooks, was a page torn from Gretchen's sketchbook. He carefully pulled it out and considered it. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait of himself, rendered in a loose-but-realistic style with no hint of parody or caricature. In the drawing, he was wearing a three-cornered hat, a medieval-looking jacket, and a white ruffle at his neck. She'd bestowed him with a flattering, noble expression. Under the portrait was the word "pirate" in stylized gothic lettering. He took a minute to let his surprise subside into appreciation. He was warmed by the gesture. He slipped the drawing between two clean notebook pages, not wanting the heavily-applied lead to smear further. He looked over his shoulder to see Sean, smiling at him from his desk, having witnessed the last few minute's discovery and possibly having been in on the gesture. Dave turned back to his notebook, smiling.
This was working. Upon embarking on his senior year in a new school, David had made up his mind to approach the situation as positively as possible. He wanted to be a consciously friendly person. The expressions of fear and hostility which greeted him so often at McKinley haunted him perhaps, but he'd earned all of it. This he wanted to be different. He would greet the new day and the people with a positive outlook every day.
In his last days at McKinley, he realized that he'd missed out on too many possible friendships with people who could have genuinely expanded his life experience. He'd finished his last days as a junior at McKinley laying as low as possible after the Junior Prom debacle; he'd have preferred that people forget he existed for those last few days. The thought that the prom itself was a missed opportunity haunted him too often, though he fought to get it out of his mind like mad because dwelling upon it was torture. The people at McKinley probably remembered him as the big troublemaker of his class. It had occurred to David, and he couldn't shake the idea, that if Kurt's election as Prom Queen was a cruel joke on Kurt then perhaps David was elected Prom King as the other side of that same cruel joke: let's elect the big asshole homophobe and make him dance with the raging flamer to an Abba song, no less. And they applauded when Kurt was crowned; they liked him; no, they loved Kurt. They had the audacity to applaud the standard-bearer for something which shamed David mortally. And David ran. He was a fucking coward. He ran from the one person who had any genuine insight into what he was going through.
Maybe if David was a genuinely good person at his new school, maybe if people liked him, it wouldn't matter what secrets he was hiding. This was stuff he couldn't change. If people liked David, what difference would it make if he was gay? Holding that against him would make as much sense as hating someone for their eye color.
As he left his last class that day, Dave stopped by Gretchen's locker as she was gathering the things she'd be taking from school for the evening. "Thank you for the incredible portrait." Dave was half-smiling, but appeared kind-of awed more than anything. "I could never be a pirate, though. Pirates are thieves. I'm definitely not a thief."
"You're welcome, and thanks for the compliment. Pirates also have no allegiances. I didn't know what else to call you. You're a football player who hangs out with nerds. And you're brain, in a covert kinda way. And you're probably a bunch of other things I haven't seen yet."
"Maybe I'm just diplomatic."
"That sounds so unsexy, and I wouldn't know how to depict that." She slammed her locker shut. "I'm going to meet Sean. Walk with me?"
"Sure, gotta get to football practice, but I'll swing by Sean's direction with you."
"Yeah, and that's another thing. None of us had any clue you were on the football team until last Friday. What's up with that?"
"C'mon. Sean totally came to incorrect conclusions about me when he found out. Tell me you wouldn't have done the same."
"Well, I can't say because we can't go back in time and try it the other way. You're probably right, and yeah, that would be very wrong of me."
"So, my stealth approach is justified, right?"
Gretchen nodded agreement.
"And no one thing about me defines who I am or what I'm all about, right? I mean, I play football, but that one thing doesn't lock me into a stereotype, right?"
Agreement again.
The pair approached Sean's locker to see Sean struggling with a mess of books. "Dude, your locker looks like a landfill, and we're only five days into the school year," Dave observed.
"Yeah, well, I know where everything is, at least." Sean stuffed a couple of books and pulled a particular notebook free from the mess. "Hey Dave, could you keep it under your hat? What my friends do over the weekend?"
"Sean, I can't see anyone really caring, but, then I can't foresee a situation where I'd even be inclined to bring it up. I won't even mention it in front of you and your friends if that makes you feel better. Anyone else?" Dave shrugged, "It's none of their business."
"Thanks," Sean smiled, relieved.
"D & D, though. Man, that's some heavy geekism." Dave opined.
"Hey, Karofsky!" One of the other football team guys was running past on this way to the locker room. He slowed a bit at the three of them and patted Dave on the shoulder; then he reached into Sean's locker, grabbing and dumping a handful of its contents onto the floor, leaving it to scatter in all directions and chuckling in the wake of the paper explosion.
"Aw, what the fuck, Randy?" Dave yelled in the player's direction. Sean just looked at the mess on the floor, stunned. Dave reached down and grabbed some of Sean's stuff, helping him pick it up from the floor.
"Thanks, Dave," Sean said quietly, shaking his head. Gretchen reached down and helped gather the mess.
"Hey, I really do hafta run. I'm really sorry about that," Dave pointed to the mess on the floor which had largely been gathered up at this point. "I will be having a word with that guy today."
"Thanks, and good luck with that," answered Sean.
"See you at lunch tomorrow?" Gretchen called out.
Dave spun and answered: "Ah, no. I'll be hanging elsewhere over lunch tomorrow, but I'm sure I'll see you sometime. Later."
"Randy!" Dave entered the locker room and ran right up to Randy who was facing his gym locker, stopping inches from the side of Randy's face. "What the fuck was that?" Dave spat in a quiet tone somewhere between a growl and a hiss.
Randy laughed. "Calm down. What's the big deal?"
"I don't like it when people are assholes to my friends. Even if they weren't my friends, there's nothing cool about acting like that."
"They're just a couple of losers." Randy turned to face Dave and was struck by the intensity in Dave's face. He felt nearly burned by Dave's eyes. The grin left Randy's face. "Shit, Karofsky, I didn't mean anything by it. Just having fun."
"That's a pretty fucked-up idea of fun. Do not call my friends fucking 'losers'; and do not let me hear about you pulling any lame stunts like that one again, or you and I will be doing more than just talking about it next time." Dave's gaze did not break. "If you understand what I've just said, maybe you and I can be friends."
Dave backed off but didn't take his eyes off of Randy until Randy broke away from Dave's stare and looked down into his locker. No one else was in the locker room to witness the exchange, and it might have played out differently had there been; but Randy just quietly said, "okay, cool with that." He exhaled loudly, and Dave dropped his gaze. "Sorry. It won't happen again."
"I'm not the one you should be apologizing to, but we'll leave it at that." Dave patted Randy's shoulder and turned to walk to the far wall and his own gym locker.
David went home late that afternoon after football practice. He ate dinner with his parents as usual. When darkness was falling, he went up to his bedroom and retrieved his AP History notebook from his backpack. He found the drawing Gretchen had made earlier that day and carefully pulled it out from between the pages of the notebook. Sitting at his desk, he turned on his desk-lamp. Though the room was fairly dark as night fell, the lamp pooled light onto the drawing in his hands. He thought that the face in the drawing was handsome, even beautiful; and it stunned him a bit to think that it was a drawing of himself. So many times, David had felt angry about himself or what he was feeling; so many times he hated how he acted and the regrettable things he did which he couldn't undo. He grew to hate the face that looked back at him when he looked into the mirror; but this face was not one he could hate. The person who drew it obviously liked it enough to depict it with such care. As that thought crossed his mind, he became somehow awed by the image. Something about the way David saw himself changed a little that day.
