Chapter Text
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Teqi sniffed. She rubbed her nose, not daring to open her eyes.
Whatever she was leaning on, was made of the most awful scratchy material that smelt of dried soft drink and sleep. Then she sneezed, accidentally kicking the back of the seat in front of her. Someone swore, and an empty juice box hit her forehead as she blinked and looked around.
Everyone else on the bus was either napping or staring out the window with glazed eyes and AirPods in their ears.
She looked out the window, past the smudges. Those balls of dead plants that belonged in cowboy movies tumbled across the endless red dirt. It stretched out as far as the eye could see and made the bright sky even brighter. The sun was just as harsh.
Shifting in her seat, Teqi groaned, and stretched. “Ugh, my legs’ve gone to sleep.”
“Well yeah, you were sleepin' like a baby.”
“You and I must’ve looked after very different babies, cause lemme tell you…” Teqi mumbled, rubbing her heavy eyes. She squinted down at Leo, who was fixing the collar of his scratchy jacket where she must've pulled it down. “And maybe I would have actually gotten some sleep last night if I hadn’t had to stand guard outside that old goat’s room while you snuck in… Bitch boy.”
Leo just winked; except he scrunched up his whole face brown pointy face in the process. He turned in his seat, kicking the juice box off it without realising. “Yeah, right, Jason. We’ve all been framed! I didn’t run away six times. Piper didn’t steal a BMW, and Teqi hasn’t… what did you do again?”
“Threw a cop through a window.”
Piper narrowed her eyes. One of them was brown like Leo's, with sections lighter, and the other a dark blue. “Last time you said it was a fire alarm at an art gallery, and I didn’t steal that car, Leo.”
“Whatever you say, Pipes,” Leo muttered, glancing to the white-blond boy sitting beside Piper with his eyebrows raised.
Teqi had never seen him before.
She rubbed her nose again. How did Leo handle wearing such a musty army jacket all day? She much preferred her soft hoodies, even if they got stringy after too many washes. There were less pockets, though. She stuck her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. It was the colour of a strawberry. An overripe one.
She fished out a snapped hair band and a very old stick of gum. Teqi also had a packet of stickers, a collection of knives, a few safety pins, and a polaroid photo in her pockets.
Leo tapped her knee. His curly dark hair had flopped in front of his eyes. It looked very soft. “Teqi, Jase reckons he doesn’t know us! It’s totally cause of the glue in the toothpaste thing.”
“There was glue in my toothpaste?” Teqi asked.
She couldn’t even remember if she’d brushed her teeth this morning.
Teqi shuffled across the messy floor. Piper’s assortment of hideous fashion choices and hello kitty tops mixed in with her own hacked at t-shirts and big jeans to create a swirl of denim, pink, and purple.
The bathroom fan whirred loudly when she flicked it on. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and pretended she didn’t feel like clawing her heart out of her chest. She yawned and wrinkled her nose at herself. Her eyes looked like dried up lavender and misery.
Why was she even in the bathroom? Teqi turned and left.
She ate the old stick of gum. It was mint. Then she ripped the strip of paper in half, and in half again, and then again, and then again.
“Anyways,” Leo said, moving on at the speed of a teenager who realised they’ve said something they shouldn’t've. “I hope you’ve got your worksheet, ’cause I used mine for spit wads days ago… wait, why’re you looking at me like that? Teqi gimme a moustache again?”
Leo turned to her with jokingly narrowed eyes. He could never look scary. He was like a little dog. Maybe a Cavoodle. She ripped the gum packet in half again, and it turned to mush in her fingers. She stuck it between the seats.
“I don’t know you,” Jase said hesitantly.
Good, Teqi wasn’t going insane. Ha!
She didn’t recognise him, and a growing sense of dread started to swell in her gut at her friend’s reactions to all of this. She didn’t trust her gut, though. She wasn’t about to make that mistake again. It had betrayed her. Ha!
Leo gave him a grin, with crooked teeth. He had a little gap between his front teeth. “Sure. I’m not your best friend. I’m his evil clone.”
Teqi watched Piper stick her tongue into her cheek and look away.
She squinted at this new kid. He had hair that looked like a sad albino lion’s mane and a scratched at scar on his mouth. Hopefully it wasn’t rabies. Teqi was pretty sure he wasn’t Leo roomie, the kid who was in for selling homemade brownies. He’d also smuggled in a pet snake named Snakespeare. Teqi hated snakes.
This boy, with his purple shirt, certainly wouldn’t name a snake Snakespeare.
She wrapped the snapped hair tie around her pinkie finger and felt it throb.
Leo opened his mouth once more.
“Leo Valdez!” Coach Hedge yelled from the front. He sounded like an angry dog at a barbed wire fence, except he would probably be one of those pit bulls that you can hold in one hand. “Problem back there?”
“Watch this.” Leo winked at Teqi again. “Sorry Coach! I was having trouble hearing you. Could you use your megaphone, please?”
Coach Hedge grunted like he was pleased to have an excuse. He was a short man, dressed in spotless exercise gear. He eyeballed Jase. He knew something was up too. Satyrs tended to. He unclipped the megaphone from his belt and continued giving directions, but his voice came out oddly. He sounded like Ghostface.
The coach tried again, but this time the megaphone blared: “What’s your favourite scary movie?” He slammed down the megaphone. “Valdez!”
Piper stifled a laugh. Scream was her favourite movie. Specifically, the first one and the fourth one, of course. She had a bedazzled mask in her pyjama draw. “My god, Leo. How did you do that?”
Leo slipped a tiny Phillips head screwdriver from his green army jacket sleeve and waved it around proudly. “I’m a special boy.”
“That’s for sure.” Teqi said. She tried not to think about movies anymore. It didn’t really work. Her chest hurt, and the kid in front of her was wearing cowboy boots. She tightened the hairband. Her finger turned red.
“Guys, seriously,” Jase pleaded. His eyes were very blue and very distressed. “What am I doing here? Where are we going?”
“Jason, are you joking?”
Teqi frowned. Why did no one tell her anything. “I thought your name was Jase.”
Piper squinted at her. She brushed her choppy dark hair out of her face. Leo had had a go at it with plastic scissors last night in the bathroom while they listened to Good Luck, Babe! [the version sung by Sabrina Carpenter on YouTube]. Teqi had sat in a bath of freezing cold water next to them until they had to rotate and reheat her with a hairdryer before bed. “What are you on about? You don’t know him?”
Teqi shook her head. She wanted to go back to sleep, not talk about this stranger with the sad eyes. “Nope… I mean, like, no offence or anything.”
“None taken,” Jason said weakly. He looked close to tears.
“Are you guys joking?” Piper hissed. She was worried now. Teqi could see it in her face. She tried to grab Jason’s wrist, but he pulled away quickly.
Teqi’s finger turned purple. Like a grape. She could feel her heartbeat in her hand. Then Leo reached over and took the snapped hairband off her. He went back to fiddling with some pipe cleaners and watching the conversation between Piper and Jason as if they were a sitcom.
But Piper wasn’t a witch with a pretty smile and Jason wasn’t a dead robot.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said awkwardly. “I don’t—I can’t—”
“That’s it!” Coach Hedge bellowed from the front. For such a short guy, he sure was loud. Maybe he’d eaten one of his megaphones. “The back rows have just volunteered to clean up after lunch!”
“There’s a shocker,” Leo muttered. An empty juice box landed on his face.
Teqi turned around and glared at the boy sitting in front of them with the chunky headphones and the cowboy boots. He must really like orange juice. The rest of the teenagers snickered at them as she glared harder. He pulled his headphones off, and she looked away.
Piper kept her eyes on Jason. “Did you hit your head or something, dude? You really don’t know who we are?”
Jason stared off into the distance dramatically. “It’s worse than that. I don’t know who I am.”
Teqi chewed on her thumb nail. She squinted at Jason for a second, and then sighed. She might as well figure out what the fuck was going on. She was sort of curious, even if she knew it would end badly.
She sat back in the horribly patterned seat that was sure to give her a headache and closed her eyes against the bright sun. Something that felt like listening to music so loud she couldn’t hear her own thoughts overcame her.
She was caught in a web. Jason’s mind was like a tangled ball of string, stretched out over a frame of sharp teeth and orders. Saint Bernard sits at the top of the driveway. Empty skyscrapers.
That Coach guy knows I’m not supposed to be here. Uh oh.
Teqi pushed through the gaps where memories were supposed to line the boy.
How old am I? Fifteen? Sixteen? Who let this funny little guy drink enough caffeine to give a minotaur a heart attack? I just wanna… I don’t even know what I want to do. What’s my favourite food? Is the scary girl trying to explode me with her mind? What’s my favourite colour?
Her ears popped.
She opened her eyes and leant her arm over the back of her seat. She smirked at Jason. “Well, you’re blond, for starters, so there’s a red flag.”
The bus dropped them in front of a big brick museum-like building sitting in the middle of nowhere.
Teqi hugged herself tightly and huffed. The cold was already seeping into her bones. It made her feel emptier. She shook her head stubbornly against the chill and the thoughts and wiped her sweaty hands on her pants. Smudged sharpie came back on her palms.
Reminders to finish homework and wash her hair [herself], wobbly smiley faces [Leo], and angsty song lyrics [Piper] were drawn on the white denim.
The charity bins in upper Manhattan were a gold mine.
“So, a crash course for the amnesiac,” Leo interrupted her miserable thoughts with his overly loud voice, as usual. Thank the gods.
“We go to the Wilderness School, which means we’re bad kids. Your family, or the court, or welfare, decided you were too much trouble, so they shipped you off to this lovely prison oops, I mean, ‘boarding school’—in Armpit, Nevada, where you learn valuable survival skills like running ten miles a day through the cactuses and weaving daisies into hats!” He grinned.
Teqi hadn’t been too much trouble for her parents, though. She’d been too much trouble for the police. “Cacti.”
And now she scrubbed her skin red raw in the freezing water every night til she felt like her blood was going to burst through and pretended she was just another teenage delinquent who grew a taste for graffiti or shoplifting or not having parents.
“Shush,” Leo whispered. He spun around, walking backwards as the four of them trekked across the expanse of concrete.
He pointed at the building behind him with both hands. “And for a special treat we go on ‘educational’ field trips like this one with the one and only Coach Hedge, who keeps order with a baseball bat… Is it all coming back to you now?”
“Uh…No.” Jason glanced apprehensively at the other kids.
Teqi patted his muscled arm. There were scars on them that looked like teeth marks. She tucked that observation into the back of her mind. “Don’t worry, no ones in for murder! I mean… they weren’t sent in for murder, but who knows…”
Piper rolled her eyes at Teqi. Teqi just looked down at her hands. The thin scar down her left pinkie seemed to get more prominent every time she looked at it. She put her hands back in her pockets.
Leo elbowed her out of the way in a move that wouldn’t have been rude if he didn’t immediately grab her sleeve and hold onto it.
He raised his eyebrows at Jason. “Okay, okay, you’re really gonna play this out? So, the four of us started here together this semester. We’re totally tight. You do everything I say and give me your dessert and help me with pranks and do my chores and stop Teqi from bullying me—”
“Leo!” Piper snapped, glaring at the lying boy. “…And she doesn’t bully you, she just… calls you bitch boy.”
“That’s literally the definition of bullying,” Leo said. He winked at Teqi. “Don’t worry, I know you love me.”
She pulled her arm out of his grip and felt the mint gum in her mouth begin to dissolve.
“He’s got amnesia or something,” Piper said, folding her arms. Piper tended to worry about things too much. Like what the meaning of life was and if that girl was taking photos of her to send to magazines about her dad and his delinquent daughter and if snails were sad that they couldn’t feel affection. “We’ve got to tell somebody.”
Leo scoffed. “Who, Coach Hedge? He’d try to fix Jason by whacking him upside the head.”
The coach was at the front of the group, barking orders and blowing his whistle to keep the kids in line. Every so often he’d glance back at Jason and scowl. Juice-box boy was bugging him for painkillers. Teqi could hear him complaining about his migraine.
“Leo, Teqi, Jason needs help,” Piper insisted. “He’s got a concussion or—”
“Yo, Piper.” A dark haired, spray tanned boy wedged himself between Jason and Piper like an unwanted Tetris shape, knocking Leo down in the process. “Don’t talk to these bottom-feeders. You’re my partner, remember?”
Teqi had gotten used to Leo’s leaf-in-the-wind properties, and reached out when he fell backwards, holding him by the collar as he made an acute angle with the ground. His face went red as he mumbled thanks and glared at the toothpaste-commercial-worthy boy.
“Go away, Dylan,” Piper grumbled. She yanked her hood over her face and pulled on the strings to cover everything but her nose. “I didn’t ask to work with you.”
“Ah, that’s no way to be. This is your lucky day!” Dylan hooked his arm through hers and dragged her through the museum entrance, not even tripping on his untied shoelaces. Piper shot one last look over her shoulder, practically begging for help with the small portion of her face they could see.
If Dylan had a pet snake, he would call it something stupid, like Thrasher. Or Venom.
Leo stuck his tongue out at Dylan’s retreating figure. “I hate that guy. I’m Dylan. I’m so cool, I want to date myself, but I can’t figure out how! You want to date me instead? You’re so lucky!’”
“Leo,” Jason said, fiddling with a loose string on his jeans, “you’re weird.”
“Yeah yeah, but you’re my best friend, you have to deal with it.” Leo grinned, grabbing onto Teqi’s sleeve and then Jason’s too. He marched forwards. “Besides, if you don’t remember me, that means I can reuse all my old jokes. Come on!”
Teqi wrinkled her nose. Her gum was starting to turn bitter and sand-like. She looked to Jason. “If you had a pet snake, what would you call it?”
“Mr Wiggles,” Jason said immediately.
She nodded. “Hm.”
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