Huey

"Alright, class, welcome back. Hope you had a fun weekend, because I certainly didn't. Today, we're going to discuss the second reading of this semester… 'Sharing Season'."

Huey sat bolt upright at his desk, hands clasped together and keenly listening to Mr Puglesi's words. The middle-aged, paunchy dog stood up in front of the whiteboard, writing down something with black pen. He sat near the front of the class, surrounded by a bunch of young ducks, dogs and other such people. Dewey sat at the desk to Huey's immediate left, and even though he wasn't looking at him, Huey knew for a fact that he was sitting in an inattentive slump, barely listening.

"We're going to be talking about metaphors!" Puglesi said, writing down the word on the board. "Themes! Symbolism! All the stuff that I've been drilling into your heads for the past year. If you'd recall, I gave you all homework last week, which was to read chapters one through six over the weekend. The chapters are all pretty short, so I know it wasn't too difficult a read…"

He turned around to face the class, a bored expression across his canine snout. "With that being the case… how many of you actually did the reading?"

Huey's hand shot straight up.

"I know you did, Huey." Puglesi said flatly. "Anyone else?"

An awkward silence settled upon the room. Huey looked over his shoulder, counting only two other upraised hands.

Puglesi rolled his eyes with a sigh. "Come on, people. You're in eleventh grade! You're not kids anymore, you're going to be seniors soon! Where do you think you're going to be when Finals come around, and you don't even know how the book starts?"

"In fairness, sir," Called a deep, belligerent voice from a couple desks behind Huey. "You could probably make it easier for us by giving us books that are actually good."

"Yes, well, neither of us write the state syllabus, do we, Phillip?" Puglesi deadpanned amidst a chorus of giggles. Huey heard his brother chuckle along with the rest of the class, and cast him a disapproving glare as Puglesi turned back to the board. "No matter. I came prepared. Here's what we're going to do – you're all going to form groups of five, and you are going to spend thirty minutes powering through all the way to chapter six. Then, you're going to spend about ten minutes discussing those chapters in your groups, and then, I'm going to go around the room and ask each group one theme or narrative device that you noticed. Any questions?"

There was a pause. One of the kids tentatively raised his hand and asked, "Uh… what if we don't have the book?"

"Then you'll take one of my spares." Puglesi replied. "Now, come on! Go! Form your groups! Start reading!"

Everyone immediately started shuffling around, with most of the groups consisting of kids who were already friends with one another. In Huey's case, his group consisted of himself, Dewey, and Violet, who happened to be in their class. Nobody else joined their group, despite the fact that they were supposed to be forming groups of five, but Huey wasn't complaining. As far as he was concerned, this meant that his group could be more focused.

Once everyone had gotten into their group, they settled into their usual behaviour for Mr Puglesi's classes. The English teacher has a free-form style of teaching that a lot of students liked, but it often tested Huey's patience. He let the class talk among themselves, with the only restriction being that it stayed roughly on topic and didn't get too loud – even though it usually did. There wasn't a whole lot of structure to most of the classes, which Huey found irksome, and the red triplet suspected that Puglesi was making a lot of it up as he went.

Huey took out his notebook and his copy of the reading from his backpack. The cover of the book depicted a light, female hand handing over an apple to a different, outstretched hand, underneath the book's title, emblazoned in pretentious cursive font. He'd already read through the entire thing over the weekend and made a few rudimentary notes, but now he had the opportunity to make some more detailed notes.

So, he knuckled down, analysing the book in near silence. Violet went to grab something from her locker, and one of the groups was particularly loud and had to keep being shushed, but other than that, there were few distractions.

"Alright," Dewey said after ten minutes. "This sucks."

Huey looked up at his sibling, whose face bore an expression of complete disinterest. "It's not that bad." He said defensively.

"It's so boring." Dewey groaned, running his hands down his face dramatically. "Our last text was so much more interesting than this!"

Huey looked up, eyebrow raised. "What, the weird psychic detective movie?"

"Exactly! Stuff happened in that movie!" Dewey complained. "First twenty minutes – bam! The guy jumps into someone's brain, messes around to find clues, and almost gets killed by dream monsters! First few chapters in this are just the main character giving stuff away to the guy she has a crush on. Like, that's all she does until, like, chapter six!"

"Actually, it goes on to chapter twelve." Huey corrected him. "And romance stories aren't mindless action movies. They're thoughtful, character-focused, and they're slow-paced because they need to gradually build up the relationship. If you just skipped ahead to the characters getting married…"

"Do you seriously like it?" Dewey asked in disbelief.

"…Well… no." Huey admitted. "The pace is far too slow, the characters are bland and uninteresting, and the relationship between the two leads is actually really unhealthy when you think about it… But!" He said quickly, "The point of this isn't to evaluate the quality of the book, it's to recognise narrative techniques and analyse how a story is structured. It's to learn how to write metaphors, and similes, and other things like that."

"…Why do we have to know that?" Dewey asked.

Huey took a deep breath, and explained exasperatedly, "Because it's in the syllabus, and if it's in the syllabus, then we have to learn it. That's just the way it works."

"That's dumb." Dewey said flatly, slumping down onto his desk.

Huey gave up, returning to the book with a sigh.

Violet returned after a couple of minutes, returning to her seat in front of the boys. Like Webby, her outfit hadn't changed much over the years. A blue-green jumper, black pants, and a blue headband that kept her dark headfeathers in a neat bun at the back. Her default expression hadn't changed much either. To those who didn't know her, she still came off as a bit cold or disinterested. The Ducks, of course, knew better.

"Apologies." She said formally as she sat down. "Lena needed my aid with something."

"It's alright." Huey replied as he took down a few more notes.

"Yeah, it's good." Dewey added from his slump on the desk. "Hey, can I borrow your notes?"

"What?" Huey cried, turning to his sibling. "No, you can't borrow her-!"

"Here you go." Violet said politely, pushing forward a spiral-bound notebook across the table.

"Thanks, Vi." Dewey said thankfully, taking the notebook.

Huey stared at her, beak agape in outrage.

Violet started to get something out of her backpack, stopping when she noticed Huey. She raised an eyebrow. "What? He asked for them." She said flatly. "And the study guides in the library go into much further depth than those notes do."

"It's the principle of it!" Huey hissed, grabbing the notebook and pushing it back to Violet, to Dewey's cry of annoyance. "You don't learn anything if you don't take your own notes!"

Violet suddenly pushed the notebook back and leant over the table, her beak inches from Huey's and her eyes boring into his. "And if we were reviewing real literature, instead of uninteresting, cheap, exploitational drivel, I would agree with you. But we're not, and I refuse to put in any more effort than this inexplicably popular mediocrity deserves."

The two boys leant back in their chairs, somewhat alarmed.

Mr Puglesi coughed from his desk, looking up from the laptop by his side. "Everything alright there, Ms Sabrewing?" He asked calmly.

"Yes, sir." She responded, her tone of voice as unwavering and even as ever. She sat back in her seat.

The boys looked at each other. Dewey asked hesitantly, "You, uh… you really don't like the book, huh?"

"I despise the teen romance genre in general." Violet replied, taking out a book with some Latin title. "If you want an in-depth explanation as to why, I wrote a ten-page essay a while ago that I could share with you."

"I'm good." Dewey said quickly, opening up the notebook and reading through it. Huey opened his beak to protest, closed it, then he turned back to his own notes, wincing and trying his best to ignore it.

It was about a minute later when Violet spoke up again, this time with a softer edge to her voice. "Incidentally… your brother, Llewellyn. Does he have a free period at the moment?"

Huey looked up, frowning. "…No, he's in Biology at the moment."

Violet seemed to hesitate. "…Perhaps it isn't my place, but… I feel you should know that I saw him in one of the locker hallways near the court. It's possible that he may be… truanting."

Huey slowly processed this information. He looked down at his notes for a moment, thinking. Sighing, he closed both the book and his notebook, then put up his hand.

"Come on, man." Dewey muttered, uncharacteristic anxiety on his face. "You know he doesn't…"

"What's the alternative?" Huey whispered back. "That we just pretend that everything's okay?"

Dewey didn't seem to have an answer for that.

"Uh, yes! Huey. What do you need?" Mr Puglesi said, noticing Huey's upright hand.

"Can I please go to the bathroom?" Huey asked.

"Yep! Just remember to come back."

"Thank you," Huey said, standing up and walking out of the classroom, leaving the other two to their study.

After he'd left, Dewey looked up at Violet and tentatively asked, "Do you have any notes that have, uh… larger handwriting?"

"No." Violet replied bluntly.

Huey slowly approached the locker hallway near the court. He knew which hallway Violet had referred to – it was the same hallway where Huey's, Dewey's and Louie's lockers were, the same place where the triplets hung out before homeroom.

He peeked around the corner, looking down the hall. Sure enough, he could see his emerald-clothed brother, thankfully facing away from him, speaking to some other kid in a black jacket and with swept-back head feathers that were dyed blue. His satchel leant against the metal safe, partly open and revealing a laptop within its confines.

"…got exotic tastes, I'll give her that." Louie was saying, reaching into his locker for something. "These were not easy to get."

"Yeah, they're pretty expensive." The other kid replied, looking over his shoulder anxiously. "Can we hurry this up? I kinda need to be in class right now."

"Sure thing, bud." Louie replied, taking out a small object from the metallic cube. Huey narrowed his eyes, trying to see what it was. He couldn't see it clearly from this angle, but it looked like a couple small strips of paper.

"Here you are." Louie said, handing the items out to the other guy. "Front-row seats, for you and your girl."

"…And they're definitely for the Saturday showing?"

"Nine-pm to eleven-pm, Westbill Stadium."

A look of relief passed over the guy's face as he took out his wallet. "Thanks, dude. You're a lifesaver."

"Hey, don't thank me." Louie replied with a chuckle. "After all, you're the one who bought the tickets, aren't you?"

"Heh. Right."

Huey watched as the two exchanged hands, a couple of tickets going into the other duck's hands and a handful of bank notes going into Louie's. He stepped out into the hallway as the other student left and silently moved up behind Louie, arms crossed.

"Pleasure doing business with you!" Louie called after the guy, turning to close his locker with a smirk on his beak. His eyes flicked in Huey's direction, and he jumped backwards in fright. "Gah!"

"You have Biology in room D-two-four-three." Huey said slowly, each word laced in disapproval.

Louie glared at his sibling, alarm swiftly turning to annoyance. "Okay, again, I know my own timetable."

"Then why are you blatantly ignoring it?" Huey demanded as Louie turned back towards his locker. "It's bad enough that you're skipping Language Arts, you can't-"

"Yeah, because I'm dropping it at the end of the year, you know that!"

"And are you going to drop Biology as well? Throw away a third of eleventh grade?" Huey asked, a slight edge of hysteria in his voice. "Do you even care about the damage you're doing to-"

"Huey!" Louie snapped, interrupting Huey's panic. Then, visibly forcing himself to calm down, he continued. "First of all, you're worrying over nothing, as usual."

"I don't-"

"Secondly – and this is more relevant – what I do with my own time is none of your business." Louie closed his locker and started fiddling with the lock. "Or anyone else's, for that matter."

Huey forced himself to look stern. "Louie. I don't want to sound like Uncle Donald, but your mental wellbeing is always our business."

Louie looked up at Huey for a moment, flashing him an irritated glare. "How the hell does this have anything to do with my mental health?"

"Skipping class is a sure-fire sign of a student who's struggling," Huey told him, reciting a line from a mental health book he'd found on Donald's boat. "And as much as you don't want to admit it, you are struggling. And…"

Huey hesitated, before continuing. "…And I know that you haven't been taking the sleeping aids. You haven't complained about the nausea at all in the past week."

Louie slowly stopped adjusting his dial lock. He closed his eyes, and leant his forehead against the cold metal safe with a deep exhale.

"…Just… tell me what's going on." Huey said softly. "Please."

Louie was silent for a moment.

Then, he turned around to lean sideways against the locker, looking at Huey directly. "Alright, look. I haven't been taking the sleep pills this week, but not because I'm depressed or struggling, or anything like that. I just wanted to run an…" He waved his hand around, seemingly looking for words. "…experiment."

Huey wrung his hands anxiously. "…To prove what?"

"Well… to see if I still needed them." Louie explained. "You know, because I hate what they do to me? I decided to stop taking them, just for this week, and if I still had the nightmare… then, that's that. Still need the pills. But if I didn't… then I could stop taking them, and I could stop feeling like shit every morning."

"Language."

Louie narrowed his eyes at him. "…Seriously, you know that no other kid does that, right?"

"Look, I-" Huey sighed. "…What were the results of your experiment?"

Louie turned to lean his back against his locker, looking away with an unhappy expression on his face. He was silent and sullen. No words were necessary.

Huey looked at his younger brother pitifully. "…What can we do?" He asked supportively.

"Nothing." Louie replied bluntly. "This is something I have to deal with on my own."

"That's not true. There's plenty we can do to help. We can help you with homework, to take the pressure off, we can go back into the therapy, we can-"

"What is the point?" Louie demanded, picking up his satchel and slinging it over his shoulder. "You guys did all you could. The doctors did all they could. And hey, none of it went to waste. I'm not having panic attacks whenever I'm alone, or freezing up when I see a knife…"

He leant up against his locker, looking at Huey dead in the eyes. "But you couldn't change what happened." He said, almost in a whisper. "You can't change the fact that I killed somebody. And not even three years of doctors poking around in my head could get rid of the nightmares." He let his words sink in for a moment before continuing. "You really want to help me? You can start by leaving me to deal with my own problems."

"Louie…" Huey started to say as Louie started to walk away.

"Oh, and while you're at it," Louie added quickly. "Can you stop reading out my timetable every morning? I'm not a baby."

Huey looked up at him, relenting. "…Alright. I'll… give you some space."

"…Thanks, man." Louie replied, turning around.

"But Louie…" Huey said quickly, stopping his twin before he walked off. "I… I want you to tell us when you need help, okay? Don't just keep it to yourself."

Louie looked over his shoulder. "Yeah, of course. See you later."

There was something in his words that didn't convince him. "…See you."

Huey watched as Louie walked away, a feeling of helplessness settling into his gut.