September. The lazy beginning p.2

On Monday, Gar came up to Dick's locker like he usually did. Today he was waving a flyer around, calling out,

"Dude! I thought about it! I have the solution to your problem!"

"What problem? I don't have problems," said Dick.

"I was bursting to tell you all weekend! But, well, I don't have your phone." Gar paused, looked at Dick sheepishly as if trying to decide whether to make the hint obvious, then seemed to realize Dick wasn't going to bite and cut himself short. "But—here! Remember when I told you to make your own club? Let's do it! Let's make a club, specifically to laze about!"

"A whole club just to laze about? Somehow I don't think they'll let us do that."

"Dude, look at some of these clubs!" Gar argued, waving the flyer in Dick's face until Dick grabbed it. "Like this one. Swing club. Why do we have a swing club?"

"It's sewing club," Dick corrected.

"Oh."

"But there's a disco club, though, so your point stands."

"See, all you need is a name, a few members, and a teacher to sign!"

"What teacher would approve of this?"

"There's a cheese club, dude. We'll get whoever agreed to that."

"So you're saying," said Dick, leaning back to take some distance from the whirlwind that was Gar, "that we could start up a club, give it an obscure name, write a really complicated description, make it really unappealing and boring and weird to make sure no one wants to join it, and just use the space to hang out?"

Gar froze. "Well, uh… You do need at least five people to start one," he posed, and in that moment Dick saw through to the boy's motives clearly.

For Gar, this was just another attempt at getting -and fastening- friends. Being in a club together would ensure he and Dick were stuck together, in addition to the future third, fourth and fifth members they'd have to get.

Dick found himself wondering, for the umpteenth time, why Gar clung to him so stubbornly, and also why he didn't just join any other existing club. A guy like him would fit in anywhere.

Dick gave the flyer back to Gar. "It sounds like way more trouble than it's worth," he sentenced.

He could have sworn Gar's ears actually dropped.

"Well, then… what club are you gonna join?" Gar asked.

"I don't know yet. I'm thinking I'll make my freedom last as much as I can, until I see my uncle's about to blow a fuse. But hey," he clasped Gar's shoulders in what he hoped was an encouraging gesture, "you should definitely join something, though."

With that he left. For once, Gar didn't follow him. Dick could only hope he'd take his advice, too.

Gar watched the other boy go. For once he was too tired to chase after someone who didn't want his company. Gar wasn't dumb—he knew Dick was desperately trying to shake him off.

But the night before the first day of school, a night Gar wouldn't sleep a wink of, his adoptive dad had suddenly remembered about the Graysons. How they were friends with Gar's parents and Gar had known Dick as a child. Steve said Dick was enrolled in Gar's school this year, and he went on to talk about Dick's many achievements. The point Steve was really getting at was that Dick was so accomplished that Gar was useless in comparison, but Gar had taken something else from it.

The fact that Steve made him remember Dick the night before school was a sign.

Suddenly Gar knew his fate: he had to make friends with Dick Grayson, the boy wonder. If he did, he'd be popular by extension, bullies wouldn't get near him, he'd be invited to the coolest parties, and girls would notice him. High school would go down easy, and everything would be fine. He already had a foot in the door—they were childhood friends.

But when he school actually started, he'd seen another picture. You could tell in the first day of high school who was going to be popular and who wasn't –even Gar, who had only been in formal education for all of six years, knew that- and Dick was never going to be popular. He was cute enough to aim for cool loser, but that was it.

But even though he saw now Dick wouldn't be the winning ticket Gar had thought he'd be, Gar didn't regret his trying to get close to him. Because Dick didn't have any other friends.

If he had, Gar would have admitted defeat and left him alone a long time ago. But Dick would be alone if it wasn't for Gar. And Gar couldn't wrap his head around someone choosing to be alone. Surely even Gar's company was preferable to complete solitude, right? Surely Dick couldn't have such high standards that he preferred being alone to being Gar's friend?

He was at a loss. So he kept trying. At least for now.

Despite his easy dismissal of Gar's plan, Dick kept thinking about it as the day went by.

Almost unwonted, his mind worked on the logistics of a sham club. How would one go about making a club so unappealing that no one would want to join? Hypothetically of course.

He guessed he kept thinking about it because the alternative was being mentally present at his Geography class. At the front right now, a football player was butchering his presentation on the state rivers, and their at least octogenarian teacher was nodding along, enacting a pantomime of an academic evaluation, when everyone knew the player would pass no matter what. He was too important to the school's glory to be kept from the team for something like grades, and everyone knew it—except, perhaps, the nervous kid himself.

Out of pure spite, Dick raised his hand at the end of the presentation. "Mr. Immotu, I thought the presentation was supposed to be on rivers, not lakes."

The teacher glared at him. The football player's eyes snapped up, and he looked at his papers, then at the teacher worriedly.

"The important thing to acquire in this exercise was knowledge of our territory," Mr. Immotu said.

"Then why is it okay he named lakes up north of here and didn't name some of our local ones?" Dick returned.

The teacher's eyes narrowed. "Remove your sunglasses while you're in my classroom, Mr. Grayson."

Dick didn't, because that was simply code for Shut up. He chose to stare out the window and zone out for the rest of the class.

Dick didn't understand adults—or anyone who had the power to change things for the better, and didn't. It was a childish thought, and he hadn't spoken it out-loud in years; but as he kept growing up, he still felt it.

Really, why shouldn't he make a fake club? The world was already a stupid, unfair place, high school was the navel of hell, and teachers had no respect for students. Why shouldn't he play the system and laugh back at them from the comfort of a school-issued clubroom, all while raking up college credits?

In Literature, probably because he was thinking so hard about it, he overheard a conversation relevant to his thoughts.

"…My brother knew her. She was the only girl keeping the Forestry club going," said a girl seated in front of Dick.

"She was in a club by herself?" asked the girl next to her.

"Yeah, it's really sad."

Dick's interest was piqued. After class, he went to the front office and knocked on the window.

The Murakami High secretary slid the window open and looked at him like she always did—like she didn't actually work here and he was a kid bothering any old woman in the street who didn't owe him anything. She was a woman of utterly undiscernible age—her orderly bun was completely white, but she stood straight and firm.

"Miss, I want to know about the Forestry club."

"Yes?" she prompted impatiently.

"Is it true it had only one member? I thought a club needed five people."

"You need five people to start a club. That club must have been preexisting."

"So you only need one person to keep a club going?" Dick asked, his brain working fast. "How about if an old club stopped existing for a while and one wants to restart it?"

"Restarting a club needs two student members."

Dick fought back a smile. "Thank you."

He went to the library next. He pulled up the list of the school's active clubs on his phone. Armed with that, he cross-examined it with the clubs in old yearbooks.

He searched through dead and forgotten clubs until he got one that gave him pause. A 'Project Club' dissolved in 1997.

Dick felt an instant kinship with a title so perfectly ambiguous. A quick read-through told him that what they actually used to do was community outreach, of the tree-planting variety.

Dick stopped his search there. That was it.

He went to find Gar after third period.

"Hey. Gar. You still wanna start a club?"

And he watched Gar's face light up so bright it almost hurt to watch.

"Here's the con," Dick told Gar over lunch. "You need five people to start a club, but to restart one, you only need two."

"So, who's the lucky club?" asked Gar between mouthfuls of his sandwich. Gar brought his lunch packed from home—he was a vegan and trusted nothing in the building that was unpackaged.

Dick showed him the picture of the yearbook page he'd snapped on his phone. "The Project club. Closed for decades. They used to do like trash pickup, community gardens, fundraisings… stuff like that."

"So we take their name but make the club really dumb so no one will want to join?"

"Exactly."

"Okay, we need a teacher," said Gar. "What about Mr. Bill? Everyone says he's nice."

"Absolutely not," replied Dick. "Someone nice is gonna get invested. He'll make us be an actual club, with events, and… other people."

"Then who'd you have in mind?"

Dick smiled. "Principal Blood."

"The principal? Why?"

"Think about it. He's always busy. He's not gonna pay attention to a small club. And he doesn't look like the type to get invested in anything, does he?"

Gar thought about it. Blood's regular state of being looked bored out of his mind. He slowly smiled. "So, we get or own clubroom, and what? Play video games all afternoon? Can I bring my console?"

"Sure!"

"And a mini-fridge?"

"Yeah, whatever."

Gar smiled at Dick. Dick noticed he didn't even ask about getting other members. He felt a pang of guilt, because while Gar seemed to have decided he was content with Dick's friendship alone, Dick was still conniving to get rid of Gar.

He forced himself to smile back.

The checklist on Dick's mind was now as such:

1. Get Blood on board. Survive club rush day. Start the club.

2. Find a large, diverse group of cool and amazing friends. For Gar. So he'd leave Dick alone.

And finally, 3. End up blissfully alone in his clubroom and hide out there until the end of high school.

The Murakami High teacher staff didn't look like other schools' teaching staff. It wasn't the first time Dick had thought it.

Maybe it was just because he knew each of them individually—maybe this happened to every kid, in every school: as you got to know your teachers they began to seem bizarre in a unique way.

But as Dick advanced into the teachers' lounge, he couldn't help but think they looked way more like a collection of misfits from various walks of life, as one might assemble to save the world. Or, no. That wasn't exactly it. They looked more like a team of supervillains. Yeah, that was it.

Just now there was Mr. Mod, the odd-looking, Beatles-haired, brightly-dressed man who taught American history despite being, himself, British. Talking to him was Miss Mae Eye, the plump, sweet-looking but oddly terrifying girls' gym teacher. Mr. Fixet was the Woodshop teacher turned Computer Science teacher: his class involved no computers and all his assignments were theory-based and had to be turned in handwritten in paper. There was Professor Chang, an old but upright man who looked like a crazy scientist who'd committed heinous crimes against humanity in the name of science and was hiding from the law as a school teacher. And then, on the corner, there was Mr. Bill, The Last Normal Teacher of Murakami High. With his tucked-in button-up and sensible hairstyle, his only transgressions were bad puns, plus the times he'd pulled out a guitar to try to sing his Maths lesson. Dick politely asked to speak to the Principal, and was let into the office of Mr. Blood.

"Right, so you've submitted your club application," the principal said, glaring at the form Dick had handed him. "Quite late, I might add."

"We were polishing off some last details," said Dick.

"So this is why you weren't joining any other clubs. It could've saved me a conversation with your guardian had I known your… intentions."

Blood always made pauses in odd places of his speech, as if he was willing you to get more from his words than what was apparent.

"Well, the Project Club is Murakami High legacy. Gar and I wanted to make sure we did it justice. We've been planning it since the summer, you see."

"That's wonderful," Blood replied, in a completely flat tone. "Do you have a teacher advisor?"

Dick put on a winning smile. "Actually, we wanted you to be our advisor, sir."

Blood looked up, icy eyes glaring at Dick. "You know as your principal, I don't have much time left over to run after a new club. But, I suppose I could oversee it."

A less keen observer might not have noticed Blood's ego had been stroked.

"Have you got the forms you would give the students?"

"Yes." Dick handed him a bright and orderly-looking form, which clearly detailed club goals and meeting times, around a nice stock picture of kids jumping. Dick had even gone and found one without a watermark.

Blood looked over it. "It looks like you'll do well. I don't think you need me to overlook the table and posters and things."

"No, I don't think so, sir."

"Now, since this is so last-minute, I'm afraid you'll have to make do with the room that's left."

That was the first time in the entire process that Dick's smile waned. "What's the room that's left?"

Minutes later, having followed Blood's directions, Dick stood next to Gar in a two-by-four room, fuming.

"This is barely a room. It's barely not a storage room." He seethed, looking around accusingly. "I guess we should be grateful there's a table."

Gar clasped his shoulder. "Dick, my friend, look. I say we just count our losses and call it a day. We got the room, we got the club! It doesn't matter that it's not perfect."

"Yeah, maybe you're right." It's only gonna be me in here in a week, he thought.

"Did Blood buy the fake forms?"

"Yes," said Dick, and, being reminded of it, he took out the paper he'd shown Blood and ripped it in half. "You have the real ones?"

"Feast your eyes," Gar said, handing Dick a stack of forms. "It's my greatest work."

Dick inspected them. He had been afraid Gar might have second thoughts and try to make the club appealing. He was relieved at the perfectly awful forms in his hands. All black and white, no pictures, typesetting all over the place. Clearly, the kid was loyal. "Spelling mistakes. Nice touch."

"Uh… yeah. That was totally on purpose."

"We meet Monday through Saturday, three pm to ten pm?" Dick read.

"I know. Genius."

"Fifty bucks entry fee." Dick looked up at Gar, mystified. "For what?"

Gar wiggled his eyebrows and tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "Exactly."

Dick had to laugh. "No one's gonna touch this club with a ten-foot pole." He clasped the other boy's shoulder. "Gar. Let's do terribly at club rush day."

"Aye, team leader!"

Principal Blood didn't show his face at club rush day, just as Dick had hoped.

The plan seemed to work. Most people took a look at their undecorated, sad booth, then at the two unpopular freshmen manning it, and passed right by. Those who did stop typically read through the form, were quickly appalled, and moved on. Those who persevered enough to ask them questions directly got repelled by the conversation that ensued.

"What do you actually do?" asked a kid.

"What it says on the flyer," answered Dick. "Fun learning, new experiences and activities."

"What does active engagement mean?"

"It means we do so many fundraisers," answered Dick, and the boy walked on.

"You meet six days a week?" asked a girl in disbelief. "That's longer than the rules allow."

"We got special rules, because it's such a prestigious club," answered Gar, and Dick felt honestly proud.

"I want a club that prepares you for college," said one driven soul.

"Model UN is that way."

"How can you be so ambitious and not have a delineated plan of objectives?" asked a boy.

"Oh, you had to do that, Gar."

"No, you had to do it, Dick."

"Ugh," went the boy, and finally left.

So come the next afternoon after school, Dick walked into his new clubroom, looked around on his rightfully acquired space, and smiled. He took one of the three chairs and leaned back, looking forward to the next four years like he thought he never would, now he had a cave to burrow in. Finally, he could relax.

Gar popped his head into the room. "Hey, Dick? Blood wanted a full explanation of our fundraiser plans?"

Dick groaned, getting up again to his great regret. Okay, maybe one last thing before relaxing.

Thank you for reading, and especially thanks for the reviews and follows! My plan is to update every Sunday!

Eris: Huh. Of all the things I planned to happen, Gar as mascot wasn't one of them. We'll see, though. Thanks for reviewing!