Chapter Text
William stared blankly at the notebook that he was meant to be taking notes in. His desk for Calculus 1 was sticky and a lifeless brown. The hard plastic absorbed just enough to leave imprints of arms and hands in their wake. The room sweltered with the summer heat, nearing the end of the school year, humidity sat heavy in the air. Heatstroke felt like a real possibility at that moment.
Less than a month away from graduation, nearly every one of William’s classes had turned to jokes devoid of content as each and every senior lost their will to learn. Except for Calculus. A cruel and lumbering march of derivatives and integrals right up to the bitter end.
Not bothering to pretend to pay attention anymore, he held a pencil loosely in his hand and mindlessly traced curly squiggles onto the page in front of him, intermittently pausing to scribble in scraps of angsty poetry that popped into his head,
‘You're a stranger I know well
And not at all
In front of your house, alone on the street
You ask me to come inside
Asleep through all our classes
You hang me out to dry’
Smudging out the middle two lines, he replaced them,
‘Let's imagine the end before we even begin’
William lived with an itch under his skin, some deep ancestral yearning he couldn't quite place, calling him to be something. He was trapped restless, yet completely wistless. As the end of school approached the reality that he would have to find his way outside of it, in the ‘real world,’ approached. He had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with his life. Days passed him by as he tried to ignore them, neglecting to engage in the senior year staples of college applications and high school sweethearts, which only dug him deeper into a hole that seemed to be leading nowhere. A dead end that’s back wall was a gas station and an employee name tag.
He felt his phone beginning to vibrate in his bag, the pocket it was in pushed up to where his ankles lay crossed under his desk. The class continued to drone on, sickeningly silent as he began to wonder who could be messaging him this insistently at 10:30am on a Tuesday. The air was thick with dust, as the static of instruction began to melt his eardrums.
Too curious for his own good and not wanting to sit in wonder for the next 17 minutes, he bit the bullet and leaned down to grab his phone from the backpack he’d gotten his sophomore year, hyper aware of his teacher that was needlessly strict about the use of electronics in class looking keenly out at William and his peers. Flipping the screen of his phone open while being careful to conceal it from view, he opened up his messages to see a text from his brother,
“br0.
sm j c4m3 up
m0n3y 1nv0lv3d
f0r th3 summ3r. d0 u w4nt 1n”
William squinted at the borderline unreadable text, Levi’s jumbled use of numbers and abbreviations straining the definition of the English language. Once fully comprehending the messages’ meaning he decided that this definitely sounded like a bad idea, like most of the ideas his beloved older brother had. Sighing as he took the time to type out a proper response as to be understood(and maybe subtly shame his message’s recipient.)
“This sounds like a crime.” He sent, considering the interaction done and going back to the words he’d digitize and post to Livejournal once he got home.
‘you play these reckless games
You'll never lose
As long as I'm around’
William had discovered Livejournal by accident, trying to find Star Wars message boards he hadn’t already scoured for every bit of content they had to offer. He’d come across a header touting an unheard of theory on Vader’s mask, and clicked it open, mildly intrigued and always open to junk theories he’d most likely disagree with or fellow fans he could decimate for daring to speak positively about the prequels and the monstrosity that was Jar-Jar Binks. People online were such idiots. William scoffed even thinking of it, as the page loaded. Once scanning the unhinged blog post that turned out to be an open (spiteful) letter to the Lucasfilm props department he noticed a logo hanging in the upper left corner of it. Livejournal, the blocky blue text read, under a simple image of a no.2 pencil. For some reason it seemed to glow more than the rest of the horrible low contrast graphics of this idiot’s blog, almost drawing him to it, magnetically drawing his eyes and mouse to it. Clicking around it’s homepage he eventually found his way to its generic mission statement,
“We strive to create an environment where you can connect with others, share your thoughts, and be yourself. Our core values guide us to protect and cultivate that community.”
For some reason, the decently soulless slogan resonated with him. Closing his computer, he slumped up the creaky stairs of his childhood home to his bedroom and turned in, his soft comforter for some reason bringing his mind home, filling it with thoughts of those same words. It was weird to think that maybe it had been a long time since he had been himself. It was stupid.
The following day he progressed as normal, sitting quietly at the back of his classes and greeting friends in the halls with empty small talk. He felt like he was trapped in some bad 80’s high school movie, some kind of breakfast club he didn't fit into. Trying to map himself to a John Hughes archetype, he realized in slight disdain that he was probably some mix of Bender and Reynolds. An asshole and a woman. Great.
When he finally made it home, William bit the bullet and powered on the family computer, the fans starting up to make it sound like a jet engine entering orbit. He opened up Livejournal and set up a simple profile. At a loss for the required username field he entered the cryptic ‘Hughes_Loser’ before shaking his head and going with the appropriate yet cheesy ‘ArchetypeReject.’ William cringed at the thought of his friends finding his account and laughing at his faux-deep sensibilities, but figured none of them were nerdy enough to find this site that seemed to be filled with conspiracy theorists and dorks, in the first place. Hopefully. Maybe he really could ‘be himself’ here.
Going forward he found it a decent place to share the poetry he’d been casually(shamefully) writing for the past few months. A test run to actually showing it to people. This experiment seemed to be going surprisingly well for him as he kept it up. Starting with some nice comments a week in, he slowly started to discover that there were more people on Livejournal than he’d thought. And that they liked him, like, the real version of him, that could be sappy and nerdy and out of place. The dorks and conspiracy theorists he’d originally dismissed started to warp into an audience that slowly grew until a year in he had a group of people to come home to at the end of each day and update. Friends to talk to and a reason to write. He was actually getting quite good at it after a year of feedback and practice, maybe good enough to actually show someone.
And that's the story of how Levi had stumbled upon the computer’s search history and William’s secret world. At first it was humiliating, he felt over-exposed and ashamed, just as he was working up the confidence to maybe show someone on his own terms. But after the initial shock of confrontation, he found a strange sort of acceptance. His brother did rib on him a decent amount, calling him a 'gay loser whose only friends didn't really exist.’
That line would probably stick in his head for the rest of his life. It made him feel small, like the empire he’d built up in his own little corner of the internet had come crumbling down. But the next day he’d logged on to find likes from a new account with a username that seemed suspiciously like something Levi would come up with. ‘1nTh4G4rd3n’ seemed to follow him around for a bit after that. The week following his discovery, William always seemed to see notifications from that account pop up a few hours after he’d posted. Having that little bit of validation(no matter how under wraps) made his heart soar. A real live human person that he knew and (somewhat) valued the opinion of liked his work, and the truest version of himself William knew how to be at that point.
He quickly jotted down a few final lines down in the nonsense filled graph paper page of his math notebook,
'The hallways are filled with silence
And gawking stares that don't care
This is where that ends'
William felt his phone vibrate one more time and, nearing the end of the block, moved to grab his phone slightly less discreetly; flipping it open to read,
“1ll t3ll u 4b 1t l8r”
{I’ll tell you about it later}