A scene that comes before an early-days Shayne/Charlie hunger-related request. It became very long and plot-heavy, so I decided to split it in two, at least for now.
Takes place during the prologue, sometime after Shayne confronts Charlie’s demon and before Shayne visits Charlie at home for the first time. (Note for die-hard readers: “Rin’s Exposition Inquisition” is basically being retconned and no longer canon, because I want to develop her character and story a bit more slowly in the rewrite.)
Hunger/whump happens in part two (hopefully posted later today; if not, it’ll be next week because I’m travelling again this weekend).
CW: mentions of death, anxiety, insecurities, childhood trauma, food mention, horror elements (mentioned).
___
“Hey, Charmander.”
Charlie had been peacefully eating his ham and cheese sandwich when Rin Johnson swept up next to his desk. It was rare to see her without her band of pals these days, but she was alone.
Before he could even open his mouth to question her choice to call him by a Pokemon’s name, she pulled up the empty chair from the desk in front of Charlie’s, spinning it around to face him.
As she sat, she drew a couple of glances from some of Charlie’s classmates who’d formed little groups throughout the room. It wasn’t against the rules for students from other tutor groups to eat in another tutor group’s base classroom, but it was a little unusual. If people wanted to mingle, they went outside, or to the canteen, to eat. Rin usually went to the latter.
There was also the fact that as far as secondary school social hierarchy was concerned, Rin was considered royalty. Not quite a queen bee, but perhaps a princess.
“Charmander?” Charlie asked.
Rin smiled secretively, propping her lunch bag on an empty corner of Charlie’s desk. “We’re officially friends now, and I have a whole bunch of nicknames I want to try out on you.”
Her floral water bottle was placed on Charlie’s desk, too, while Rin rummaged in her lunch bag. She started tearing into the wrapping on her sandwich.
She hadn’t bothered to tie her hair in its usual space buns today, and it fell in fiery-orange waves around her shoulders. She had a small streak of pink glitter drawn across each eyelid, and she didn’t seem to have noticed that a speck of it was stuck to one of her glasses lenses.
She looked up at him, chewing. “You don’t even want to question me on the ‘us officially being friends now’ thing? I was getting ready to bribe you. I brought Tucs!”
In case he thought she was bluffing, she put down her sandwich, reached into her lunch bag again, and pulled out a snack-sized packet of salted crackers.
“You don’t have to bribe me, Rin,” Charlie smiled. “I already thought of you as my friend.”
She smiled in what seemed to be relief, which was a bit confusing to Charlie. What exactly had she expected to happen?
His gaze was drawn back to the packet of crackers she’d put on his desk. He remembered taking them to primary school to have as a snack, and he was suddenly in the mood to relive his youth. “Although, I do kind of want to open those.”
“Go for it! A bribe’s a bribe, even if it was unnecessary.”
Charlie picked up the packet and split the side of the wrapper. “Share them?”
“Sure.”
“When you really think about it,” Charlie said as he opened the packet, “I’m the one who should have been begging you to be my friend.”
Rin frowned.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Charlie grinned. “You’re so much cooler than I am, Rin. And even if you weren’t… I mean –” Charlie pulled a cracker out and used it to gesture all around him. There were about fifteen other students in the room, all convening at different points and at a considerable distance from Charlie’s desk. “I can’t exactly afford to be picky, can I?”
Rin bit into her sandwich and glanced around too, though she seemed to be looking for somebody, rather than following Charlie’s point.
“Well, we do have something essential in common, you and I,” she said around a mouthful. A conspiratorial look crossed her face as she swallowed and leaned in closer. “Something that binds us.”
Charlie bit back another smile, not wanting her to think he was laughing at her. He adored the way Rin could romanticise the mundane, or make a lunchtime chat feel like he was being indoctrinated to a secret society.
“Okay, well now I have to ask,” he said, crunching down on his Tuc. “What is it?”
“Rejection.” Rin wrinkled her nose, as though the word tasted bad in her mouth. “From the same boy.”
All of the heat, along with the remnants of his smile, left Charlie’s face. What the hell kind of rumours were going about now?!
“What – I haven’t – what are you talking about?”
Rin gave a thin smile and touched the back of Charlie’s hand. “Shayne Devine rejected my friendship, too. Only that was about… wow, I guess it was about twelve years ago.”
Charlie barely had time to settle his frantic heart – friendship, she’s just talking about friendship – before his head started reeling with this new information.
“You knew him twelve years ago?”
“Well, yeah. We went to primary school together.”
Charlie nodded, battling a sudden wave of despair. Of course. That made sense. Rin and Shayne had grown up in the same town. They knew each other from way back. Meanwhile, Charlie had never been in one place long enough to hold down a friendship for longer than a year, let alone know anybody from way back. The only people he knew from way back were family members, most of whom he wouldn’t have anything to do with if he wasn’t forced.
“I tried so hard to get him to be my friend, but he would never even come to my birthday parties.” Rin dropped the remnants of her sandwich back into her lunch bag and pulled a pot of yoghurt and a spoon.
Charlie nodded again. The birthday party thing was a big deal. Ingrid had insisted he go to every party he was invited to, even if he didn’t know the birthday kid for very long. Charlie had always suspected there was a political force behind children’s birthday parties. Like the more birthday parties your child attended, the better it reflected on you as a parent. He tucked that thought away for later interrogation.
Rin peeled the lid from her yoghurt pot and began licking it clean. Charlie realised he wasn’t even remotely surprised that she was the kind of person who did this.
“So, Shayne was always… the way he is?”
Rin tilted her head to one side. “Well, he was always extremely shy…”
Charlie struggled to swallow a mouthful of his food. After the number of insults he’d been handed by the person in question, he wondered how anyone could ever describe him as shy. He took another bite of his sandwich to keep himself from making a shady remark.
“But he wasn’t always so…” Rin glanced towards Shayne’s empty desk, as though it might be listening in and would report back to him later.
“Cranky?” Charlie suggested sheepishly.
Rin flinched. “Sure. Let’s go with that. That only happened after his parents died.”
Charlie nearly dropped his jaw, and a mouthful of his sandwich along with it. Nobody had ever mentioned this before. Charlie had known Shayne was adopted, but he hadn’t known that Shayne had once lived with his biological parents.
“They… died?”
Rin frowned. “You didn’t know?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Oh. Crap. Um, sorry, babe! I’m used to everybody knowing everything about everybody. But, yeah, they died when we were, like… I guess nine or ten.” Rin’s eyes became unfocused for a few seconds. “Well, let’s see. We had Miss O’Rourke as our teacher that year, I think… yeah, we were ten. It messed him up really badly.”
“I can imagine,” Charlie whispered numbly. Judging by the way she had started staring blankly into her yoghurt pot, Shayne’s parents’ death had probably affected Rin in some way, too. “Are you okay?”
She nodded and cleared her throat. “I guess what I was trying to say is that I get it. He acts like he doesn’t want anything to do with you, but he still sort of… pulls you towards him, doesn’t he?”
Yes. He didn’t trust himself to say it out loud, certain that he’d betray the depth of his feelings if he did.
He nodded.
“I guess I always thought it was just me.”
Charlie was entranced by how much this conversation seemed to be affecting Rin’s mood, like it was sucking her entire personality away from her. It must have been an extremely sad story...
Charlie stiffened as goosebumps rocketed up and down his body. No. No, it couldn’t be… Someone would have told him…
Right?
“Uh, Rin?”
She listlessly picked up a Tuc and popped it in her mouth. “Uh-huh?”
Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. Charlie swallowed the fear in his throat. “Shayne’s parents weren’t involved in that… that tragedy that happened at Mulberry, were they?”
Rin’s eyes took on that glassy, faraway look again. Charlie thought she was going to slip into the habit that most people had, of avoiding that particular topic at any cost. He half expected her to tip her yoghurt all over his desk, exclaim about how clumsy she was, and run off to get some paper towels, only to never return.
“They…” She seemed to swallow with some difficulty. “They were kind of unusual, from what I remember. Shayne’s mum was… She was so beautiful and kind, but always carried this air of, like, sadness. But her pies were always the best thing at the school bake sales. I didn’t know much about his dad, but my dad got along well with him. I… I don’t think I stopped crying for a week after they…”
Charlie felt a lump in his own throat. He’d only been able to stomach reading a few details about the incident; he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be a kid growing up in a town with a story like that attached to it.
But beneath his sadness, there was a pit of anger bubbling. How had no one thought to mention this to him before?
“Anyway.” Rin drew a circle in her yoghurt with her spoon. “Have you… Have you been out in the woods since you moved in?”
“No,” Charlie croaked. “They give me a weird feeling.”
Rin looked up, her spoon stilling. The absent look fled her eyes, leaving behind what could only be described as... desperation? Like she was teetering on the edge of a cliff, and the only person who could grab her and pull her to safety was Charlie.
Charlie was just relieved that some of that furtive intensity was coming back to her.
“What kind of feeling?” she whispered.
“I…” Charlie’s heart sank as he tried to gather the words. “I don’t know. It’s…”
Careful. The voice insisted. She doesn’t know.
She might know, Charlie thought, examining the interrogative look in Rin’s eyes.
She doesn’t.
She… kind of acts like she knows.
Charlie…
“It’s kind of like… I’ll walk up to the edge of the garden feeling normal, and as soon as I think about putting my foot over the line, it’s like this huge wave of nausea crashes over me. I look through those trees and it feels like… like I’m staring into the ribcage of some huge… decaying… corpse.”
Rin put down her yoghurt with an air of finality.
“Sorry,” Charlie muttered, placing the last section of his sandwich back in its box.
“No, no, you’re good.” Rin drummed her fingers against the table. “You know, everyone says there’s something weird about Mulberry, but as soon as you start getting into detail, they just...”
Charlie’s heart skipped a beat. Does she know? ... Maybe she knows.
“Crap! I have to go,” Rin exclaimed, glancing at her watch. “I completely forgot there’s a yearbook meeting today.”
She gave Charlie a pleading look, like she wanted to be rescued from something, as she packed away her lunch.
Charlie grimaced. “Um... sorry this turned so dark.”
“Oh – no, don’t be sorry for that.” Rin’s eyebrows knitted together. “You have any idea how much of a relief this was?”
“It… was kind of a relief,” Charlie said. This was the first time in weeks that he’d been given new information, either about his house or about his desk neighbour. He also hadn’t mentioned how much the woods at Mulberry unnerved him to anybody else, and he could feel a new lightness where it’d been weighing on his chest.
He didn’t really know what made it a relief for Rin, but that was what he liked about her company. They seemed to understand each other’s emotions, even if it wasn’t clear how they’d arisen.
I’ll tell her, he realised. I’ll tell her everything. Another time.
“You have my number, right?” he asked.
“I – yeah, I think so.”
“Do you want to come over this weekend?”
Rin raised her eyebrows. “Yes. Please. I’ll text you.”
“Cool.” Charlie watched Rin scoop up her bag. “Have fun at your meeting.”
“With a room of self-obsessed control freaks? How could I not have fun, Charlie Bear?” Rin tilted her head as she stood up. A hint of her smile crept back. “Hey, I like that one.”
9 notes
·
View notes