Chapter Text
“Wake up, Stephanie!”
Stephanie Lauter’s day started bad and it’s just going to get worse.
Not, like, because of anything specific. There’s no huge test that she’s going to fail or a world ending event being predicted by astrology bitches on Twitter or one of her dad’s miserable fucking political parties for her to be be dreading all day.
No. Stephanie Lauter’s day is just going to get worse because it literally always does. That shit just sort of tends to happen when you get cursed at eleven years old.
(And it especially happens when you get cursed at eleven years old by your fucking dad, but whatever. A curse is a curse. The day to day bullcrap doesn’t really get worse or better depending on how fucked up it was when you got it.)
It’s not something that ever gets… less weird; being Ordered before she’s even conscious. It only really works for things like ‘wake up’, anyways (thank god) but still. It’s disorienting, in the way she kind of assumes being woken up by a bucket of ice water would be too, no matter how many times it happens in a row. The way her eyes snap open before she’s awake enough to register it, morning breath masked by the black-coffee-stainless-steel twist of magic that an order from Tessburger leaves stuck in her mouth. It’s just weird and bad. No way around it.
“Stephanie!” Tessburger snaps again. Like she’d have any goddamn choice in ignoring her.
“I’m up!” Steph groans, slamming her pillow over her face to block out the too-fucking-much sunlight leaking in from her curtains.
“Good!” She hmphs on the other side of the door, rapping loudly on it twice. Just to be annoying, probably, “Put on the outfit I laid out for you last night, and then come down for breakfast.”
The Order settles absently on her chest. It’s not a new one. Same as her Mayoral Assistant wake up call, it’s an every day kind of deal.
“And don’t go… cutting these ones up, like you always do!” Tessburger adds on, and it’s like she’s trying to get her pitch as grating as fucking possible, “These are nice clothes, young lady!”
“Whatever!” She shouts, still fully into her pillow, rolling her eyes as the magic zings bitter up her throat. Or. At least, she’s thinking about rolling them. Emotionally rolling them.
She hasn’t been allowed to roll her eyes at Tessburger or her dad since she got cursed. It was one of the first Permanent Orders she’d been given.
(‘Don’t you ever roll your eyes at me, young lady!’)
As much as she’d like to drag this shit out, mindlessly scroll on TikTok until Tessburger gets pissed enough to actually make her get out of bed… she really doesn't want to deal with it. Not right now.
So, instead, she screams into the satin of her pillowcase, before rolling awkwardly off her bed. Whole body folding uncomfortably in half and sideways, so both her feet hit the floor without her actually having to lift her head up until the last possible second.
The ‘outfit’ Tessburger left neatly folded on her desk is just as fucking boring as it always is.
She’s given up trying to do something about it a while ago. Even if she messed with it, or threw the really ugly stuff out (which, fucking believe her she’s tried), ‘the outfit I’d laid out for you last night’ still means ‘the outfit I’d laid out for you last night’.
Magically being compelled to shove her arm shoulder deep to the bottom of a garbage can to find some fuck ass headband she tried to get rid of once was enough.
(Okay. Three times. Leave her alone, she’s a slow learner.)
Steph yanks the first t-shirt she can grab from the back of her dresser, where she hides the stuff she can actually stand. It’d been a long time discovered loophole, that she can pick whatever the fuck she wants as an undershirt, and the magic won’t care. She buttons the crisply white button up, folded neatly on her desk, over it, so her dad won’t care either.
Stupid, baby blue button up cardigan, stupid, sensible, dark wash and straight legged jeans, stupid, stupid, stupid loafers with white crew socks like she’s a goddamn receptionist or something. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. She’ll fix it later, once she’s alone and can’t be stopped. She always does.
Her body moves out of her bedroom and down the stairs before she can even think about it. She didn’t need to -- ‘Come down for breakfast’ -- when all the thinking had already been done for her. Like a half-awake robot.
“Ah, Stephanie,” her dad says airly over the newspaper as she drags her feet into the kitchen, not bothering to look up, “Nice of you to make an appearance.”
As though she’d gotten up late. As though she hadn’t followed exactly his stupid fucking assistant’s stupid fucking Orders.
“Like I had much of a choice,” She grumbles into the cabinet where they keep their cereal, grabbing for the clear, minimalist-ass reusable jar containing the least granola-looking option.
Honey Nut Cheerios. She can work with that.
“What was that?” His finally eyes cut up to look at her over the front page spread. A warning.
“Nothing,” She does another inside-her-head eye roll, slamming the ridiculous, pointlessly aesthetically-pleasing container into the countertop harder than she needs to.
He raises a hand out to her before she can open the fridge to get the oat milk, “Stop.”
She grits her teeth so hard the pressure almost distracts from the taste of her dad’s Orders. The mouthful of coppery magic that lingers a little too much like blood.
He smiles, all small and slimy, “Get me a refill on my coffee before you really settle in, would you?”
“Fine,” She seethes, instead of punching him like she wants to. That’s also been permanently prevented, like sarcastic eye rolling and flipping him off and cursing him out. Call her dad what you will, but even she has to admit the bastard is thorough when he wants to be.
He lazily holds out his mug, and Steph snatches it as aggressively as she’s magically, physically allowed to. She slides it onto the Keurig stand so sharply that the ceramic and the metal clack together.
‘Dickhead, fucking asshole,’ She thinks, becuase she can’t say it, body automatically plucking his preferred dark roast bullshit K-cup from the stand, and popping it into the machine, ‘Jackass knows that I know he could get his own fucking coffee if he wanted to. He’s just being a fucking bitch on purpose.’
She tries to walk over to the fridge as it brews, but the small of her back slams her back into the edge of the counter, keeping her stuck in place like she’s attached by magnets. She hasn’t completed her fucking job yet, apparently, and unless it’s been expressly worded, obedience magic doesn’t like multitasking.
She crosses her arms high on her chest, blowing air hard through her lips as she rolls her eyes in her head again.
“And, how are we this morning?” Her dad smiles, like he’s enjoying this. He probably is, fucking asshole.
“Fine,” she mumbles.
“What was that? Speak up.”
The Order pulls at her chest, and she repeats, crystal-clearly, “I said I’m fine.”
“Mmm, articulate as ever,” He hums, turning a page of his newspaper.
The coffee maker clicks empty, and her hand shoots out to grab the mug before she even processes what the sound means. She deposits it gently, more gently than she would if it was up to her, on the table in front of him, shoulders slumping as the fistful of magic loosens in her chest. A physical release from the task at hand.
She slams open the fridge and snatches up the oat milk before he can tell her to do something else.
Once it’s been poured, she slouches into the chair farthest from him at the table with her bowl, already scooping a spoonful into her mouth.
“Sit up straight, Stephanie.”
Her spine rights upward on its own, sloshing cereal milk off the spoon and onto the collar of her sweater. Fine. She doesn’t even fucking like this sweater.
After a few minutes of tense silence, only broken by Steph shoveling Cheerios into her mouth before they get soggy and the crisp flipping of pages, her dad folds his paper neatly in half and clears his throat.
Christ. Here they go. She is so aggressively launched into a contraband eye roll, that her eyes physically flick to the side before the magic freezes them in place. She has to blink hard to make them settle back to normal.
“Once you are finished eating, wash that bowl. Then, make sure you’ve got all your homework and assignments packed, and head straight to school. Do not be late, I’m not looking to get another call.”
She can physically feel the curl of the Orders as they stack themselves neatly in the back of her head, an organized to-do list of shit she has no say in. The magic buzzy and eager to check each one off one by one as her day goes on.
She nods, swallowing a pointedly loud slurp of cereal.
Her dad always, always, makes time to have breakfast with her unless he’s literally out of town, and even then he’ll usually FaceTime in.
Which, she knows really sounds like a sweet thing. The Hatchetfield fucking Gazette sure seemed to think so two Father’s Days back, when her dad had mentioned it during an interview about ‘balancing politics and family life’ or whatever the hell.
And, sure, in any other family, it probably would be just as sticky goddamn saccharine as it sounds like. Steph’s just not in any other family.
She’s a Lauter, through and through. And being a Lauter means that her dad ‘making time to have breakfast with her’ is just a scheduled-in excuse to make sure she’s going to behave exactly the way he wants her to today.
“Turn in your homework, and be polite to your teachers,” he rattles off, seeming tired that he even has to. Steph just wishes he wouldn’t fucking bother.
“After school, you will attend the Student Government, and participate. Be home by six-thirty. When you get home, go straight upstairs and study until you are called down for dinner. Do you understand?”
She shrugs, stabbing her spoon into the bowl so it clinks loudly into the glass at the bottom.
Fuck Student Government. Steph fucking hates Student Government. But, it’s one of those after school clubs that look good on paper and are easy for her dad to brag about to other boring, shitty, important people; so her signing up hadn’t been voluntary.
She had been getting through it by just sort of… coasting meetings in the corner, half-listening and barely participating. It’d actually been almost bearable. But stupid fucking Ms. Allen, the club administrator, had called home two weeks ago to ‘gently suggest’ to her father that maybe this club ‘wasn’t the right fit for her’, and now her fucking participation in school dance planning and policy changes to dissaude vaping in the bathroom is added to her morning slew of Orders, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Fuck. Her. Whole. Entire. Life.
“Give me a verbal yes or no. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” She says, too quickly, before forcing an immediate addition of, “Whatever.”
It’s childish, she knows, but she doesn’t really care. She’s not going to pretend to be happy about any of this if he doesn’t tell her to, and he usually doesn’t care enough to do that unless they’re in public.
“Good. And if you are planning on trying to do something stupid,” He scoffs, tone dripping with way too much goddamn distain for a fucker who just curse-magicked her whole day for her, “Just don’t get caught.”
It settles across her entire body, oat milk and honey taste on her tongue immediately cut sour and metallic. It’s her dad’s favorite Order. Vague and impossible and shitty.
(Orders she doesn’t have full control of are dangerous. She can’t physically stop someone from catching her every single time, no matter how much planning she does. And then, once she’s fucked up, the magic gets pissed off and angry and makes her literally, physically sick about it.
But, even ignoring all that, it’s still just risky.
Her inhibitions and self preservation and shit get all fucked with the all consuming drive of not getting caught.
One time, when she was thirteen, she’d broken her collarbone scrambling off Brenda’s roof before her mom could catch them smoking the cigarette Kyle had lifted off his older brother. She hadn’t gotten caught, but she had explained what happened to her dad later that night in the hospital, after he’d made her.
It hadn’t made him stop telling her not to get caught.)
She scrapes the last spoonful of sopping cereal around the bottom of her bowl, stalling. She’ll have to leave soon, she’s been told not to be late, but it makes her feel like more of a person to choose her own time frame.
After she’s done, she can rush her way through wash-that-bowl-and-then-make-sure-you’ve-got-all-your-homework-and-assignments-packed-and-head-straight-to-school-do-not-be-late-I’m-not-looking-to-get-another-call, and it will feel, just slightly, normal enough to stand, because normal teenagers panic and hurry through their mornings so they’re on time too.
Her dad, however, is apparently too goddamn set on winning ‘worst father of the year’ to let her even have that. He takes an even sip of his coffee, and cocks an eyebrow at her, “Finish that last bite and get going. Quickly.”
If Stephanie was allowed to say ‘fuck you’ to her father, she fucking would. She’d scream it until she lost her fucking voice. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!
Instead, her mouth floods with magic too much like blood for her to even taste her last spoonful, and she’s running.
Her hands practically blur in front of her around the sponge, as sink water splashes up her sleeves. Bowl clean. She abandons her dirty spoon, though. Feeling a, probably embarrassing, level of vindication about her dad forgetting to mention it.
There’s not much time to gloat about it, though, before her body pivots up the stairs and into her bedroom; thumbing frantically through her backpack and infuriatingly flipping through her binder for each of today's classes. She must have remembered to put everything away correctly last night, some-fucking-how, because she doesn’t get enough time to read what's on each page before her hands are snapping it shut and zipping up her bag.
She only slows for a moment to click her door shut (‘Never slam your bedroom door again, young lady. I mean, really! Does this look like a barn to you, Stephanie?’) taking all of the three seconds of pause to catch her breath before she’s launching herself down the stairs, feet haphazardly skipping steps to get her down to the bottom faster.
“Drive responsibly!” Her dad calls, all smarmy and self-satisfied sounding as she books it past the kitchen to the front door. The Order locks itself in place over the next several. Like bright yellow highlighter to make sure they all happen at the same time.
She digs her nails hard into her backpack straps instead of flipping him off like she wants to (and can’t).
‘Drive responsibly’ is another daily Order that pisses her the fuck off, becuase it’s another one of those things her dad does that would be sweet, probably, if Steph wasn’t a Lauter. But, because she is, it’s just shitty and annoying.
It’s nothing like when her friends absently call after her to ‘drive safe’ as she leaves a hang out. An unintentional Order she doesn’t mind as much, when she knows it’s just because they care about her.
No. When her dad or Tessburger Order her to drive responsibly it’s because they don’t want her to do something scandalous. It’s got nothing to do with Stephanie’s safety at all. It’s not because he cares.
Motherfucker. It’s not like she wasn’t planning to, but now that she’s been told to, all she wants to do is crash her fucking car.
Which she can’t.
Not unless she gets t-boned by a semi truck or some other shit completely out of her responsibly driven control.
Steph’s body gets rapidly piloted into the driver's seat of her car, tossing her backpack into the passengers side and shoving her lanyard full of keys into the ignition-- before the tightness in her chest snaps and she’s allowed to slow back down.
(Well, the magic tightness snaps. The actual, physical tightness of sprinting up and down two flights of stairs three times in a matter of four minutes, all at six-thirty in the morning, stays right the fuck where it is. Which Steph personally thinks is bullshit.)
She slams her head as hard as she can back into the headrest and screams into her hands. Fuck this fuck this fuck this.
A part of her feels stupid for still being so angry about it. She should be used to this shit by now. (Another part is obnoxiously, defiantly proud. Fuck this hard. It sucks and she gets to be fucking angry about it.)
She glances at the clock in her dashboard. She’s still got fifteen minutes before she actually has to
leave. Which, to be fair, she knew already. She’d been Ordered not to be late, so if she was out of time, her body would have turned the key into the ignition and stepped down on the gas, whether she’d been ready for it to or not.
But, it’s still nice to have a time frame; she generally prefers to fucking avoid being puppeted by magic if she can help it.
She easily unbuttons the blouse and cardigan, shoving both their sleeves up so it all looks like intentional, if vaguely preppy, layering as opposed to Grace-Chastity-core. Plus, the shittily self-cropped Fiona Apple t-shirt underneath definitely manages to soften the someone’s-mom-bought-this-at-the-fucking-Gap of it all, which helps, at least, a little.
She stares accusingly down at her sensible, casual-friday ass jeans. They honestly could be worse, at least they aren’t fucking slacks or some crap, but still. It’s the principle of the whole thing. She’s seventeen and she’s still not allowed to dress herself.
‘Don’t go cutting these ones up!’ The curse reminds her, absently. Annoyingly.
So, she doesn’t.
Instead, she yanks her lanyard out of the car, presses the edge of her house key against the denim, and rips out both of the knees. Two jagged, fucked up holes; no cutting required.
Get fucked, Tessburger.
---
Steph clicks on her turn signal, checking in both her mirrors, and twisting in her seat to double check her blindspots, before gently turning her wheel. Her car carefully inches forward and to the side, sliding neatly into her assigned student parking space, perfectly between the lines.
She pulls up her E-brake, before putting the whole car into park, and easing off her gas pedal.
The Order releases. All responsibly driven out.
She slumps her forehead into her wheel, pulling at her still-clicked seat belt until it locks, feeling suitably lame as shit. No one is watching her, she knows that, and even if they were it’d be fucking ridiculous for them to care, but it’s still embarrassing.
No one in the fucking world drives that much like a grandma. Not even, like, actual grandmas.
She’s barely even conscious of what fucking playlist she’s got on (she isn’t allowed to actually pay attention to the music when she’s driving-- it’d be too much of a fucking distraction) but she lets the current song play out to the end, sitting like that; locked in and slouchy, while there's no one there to tell her not to.
She registers her phone buzzing next to her head, and she glances up just a second before a text notification pings across her screen. And then another one. And then another one.
New text from: brenda 💙
[Picture attached]
Steph spotted! come sit w us!!
New text from: brenda 💙
LOOK UP
New text from: brenda 💙
GIRL
New text from: brenda 💙
COME OVER HERE
New text from: brenda 💙
r u literally fucking DEAD
Steph rolls her eyes, fondly, but as aggressively as she can, now that she’s allowed to actually do it, hoping it reads through her windshield. She likes just the text where Brenda asked if she was dead, before freeing herself from her clicky seatbelt.
For a second, she considers leaving her backpack behind; she can’t ‘turn in her homework’ if she doesn’t have it, but the magic pings with a warning she doesn't want to have to deal with.
(It used to be her go to: when a teacher said ‘Do the questions on pages 12-18 for homework tonight’, she’d had to, so she would. And then she’d just not turn them in. It got her more than a few detentions but that had been the goal. It made her feel more like a fucking person.
But, eventually, her dad had caught on and amended his morning checklist.)
She climbs out of her car, and before she can actually look up, her phone buzzes frantically again in her palm.
New text from: brenda 💙
I SEE YOU BITCH
New text from: brenda 💙
GET UR ASS OVER HERE
She snorts, very, very greatful, for the millionth time, that commands don’t work in text form. Hooking her bag over both shoulders (‘Don’t wear your backpack like that, Stephanie, it makes you look lazy. You are only to use both straps, as it was intended. Do you understand me?’) and squints across the lawn, trying to follow the visual line from the creeper photo Brenda had sent of her car.
A blur of blue and white waves widely at her from against the fence, right at the edge where the school yard meets Witchwood. The same place, Steph knows from some of her most voluntary, involuntary personal experience, that kids usually sneak out to do drugs in the woods during their lunch periods.
The blur, also known as an arm, is attached to a beaming Jason Jepsen, who cups a hand around his mouth to shout for her, “HEY, STEPH! OVER HERE!”
Not ‘come over here’. Just ‘over here’. She grins, making her way over. (Jason doesn’t know or anything, obviously, but he’s always good with shit like that. Mentioning and asking, but not usually telling.)
She steps over Brenda and Kyle’s suspiciously intertwined ankles to plop in the free space across from him.
“No! Steph, sit by me!” Stacy giggles, yanking her down by her cardigan before the curse has time to burn its way down to her knees and make them buckle.
(Her mouth still tastes like magic; bubble-gum, Stacy-sweet coating her teeth, but she doesn’t care about that nearly as much. It’s just sort of gross, instead of, like, a cause for righteous fury, or whatever.)
(Plus, her mouth sort of just always tastes like magic. It’s the kind of shit that lingers.)
She snorts, leaning her temple into the sherpa-soft of Stacy’s jacket, “Morning.”
“Oh my god, you have to look at what I got last night at the mall!” Stacy Orders brightly, absently, thrusting her house keys in front of Steph’s face so she doesn't need to actually do anything to comply. A sparkly-pink My Melody keychain with a jingling little yellow bell, shakes excitedly in Stacy’s hand.
“Oh, sick.”
“I got it in a blind bag! Isn’t it cute!”
“Super cute,” She agrees, easily.
Steph knows that she could probably get more annoyed with her friends, and how often they casually throw her Orders, than she ever actually does. But she can’t really find it in herself to care much.
(Not unless she’s having an incredibly shitty day.)
It’s not like they know and are doing it on purpose. That’d be different. And, anyway, the shit they ask her for is always so fucking chill, stuff she’d do anyway, that it’s never feels nearly as invasive as when Tessburger or her dad do it.
It’s just, like, really powerful peer pressure. And she, mostly, just kind of thinks that’s funny.
“Babe, try this, it’s fucking gross!” Brenda snorts, shoving a coffee cup at her with Kyle’s name scrawled on the side in thick black marker. Bracketing her on either end, Jason and Stacy laugh their obvious agreement.
“No, hey!” Kyle complains, with a careful nervous-smile, like he wants to seem playful but is actually kind of upset at whatever teasing has gone down before she’d gotten there, “Come on!”
‘Sucks for Kyle, ’ she thinks, as her arm automatically reaches out to snatch it out of Brenda’s hand, and swig a mouthful of whatever the fuck he’d gotten from Beanies this morning.
The bizarrely sweet burn of the coffee clashes badly with the cherry-tart burst of magic that set itself down her throat the second Brenda made the order, but even then, she tell it’s disgusting.
“Jesus, dude,” She chokes, handing his cup back to him the second the curse lets her, “What the fuck is that?”
“I just get extra caramel!” Kyle pouts, protectively cupping it against his chest.
“How much is extra?” She scoffs, “That tasted like they used the entire bottle.”
“See, I told you!” Brenda insists, reaching over their backpacks to shove his shoulder, and Kyle lets himself be jostled, an actual smile slipping through his sulking.
Steph rolls her eyes (twice, just to make up for lost time) and glances around, catching Jason doing it too from where he’s sprawled on the grass next to her. He catches her eye, and smirks.
They’re all a little too on time for Max to be here yet, he’s usually cutting it so close he’s late for class. But, still. Kyle and Brenda are being way too flirty for it not to go wrong, and it’s way too goddamn early to be dealing with his shit.
(It’s an unspoken thing that her, Stacy, and Jason have just mutually agreed on being on the lookout for. Though, it’s usually just her and Jason. She’s pretty sure Stacy can only clock when the two of them are flirting if they’re actively making out.)
She realizes, as she glances around lazily, that someone is watching this time.
But it’s not Max.
Across the lawn, sitting folded up around his knees, some fucking kid is staring straight at her. She half-recognizes him-- he’s in her grade. That… weird, nerdy guy who's always wearing a bowtie and a beanie, like he’s a hipster background character from Pitch Perfect or some shit. She’s actually pretty sure they’re in the same English class.
She considers him for a second, and then flips him off. Creep.
Someone says her name, not an Order, just to ask her a question and she turns back to her friends, “What? Sorry.”
Brenda rolls her eyes, “Did you do the homework for World Gov?”
“Don’t I always?” She sighs, with what hopefully reads as overdramatic and annoyed on purpose, “Why? You forget again?”
“Yes. Can I copy?” She asks, making her eyes big, and reaching out to do pathetic little grabby hands at her jean cuffs, “Please.”
And because she asked, instead of told, Steph yanks her laptop out of her bag and pulls up the assignment, handing it over, “I can’t guarantee I got shit right, but go crazy.”
(And. Yeah. Okay. If she’d told Steph, then would have let her copy too. She wouldn’t have had a choice. But she would have cared more.)
(Right now, her friends being able to cheat off her is, like, the only thing that makes her forced fucking studious-ness actually worth it.)
“Oh my god, I literally love you,” Brenda grins, “Mr. C would have fucking killed me.”
“Yeah, probably,” she snorts. Mr. Castellino is one of those hardasses who assigns lists of questions and then actually checks all your answers. She’s completely fucked herself over a couple of times by just filling in random shit when she didn’t feel like looking stuff up and wanted to speed run her way through ‘do your homework’. Brenda just, regularly, doesn’t even remember to do that.
“No. Seriously, babe. I owe you, like, forty coffees.”
“Whatever,” She flaps a hand at her, leaning back down to close her eyes against Stacy’s teddy bear soft arm, “Just don’t let Kyle anywhere near them.”
“Come on! This is so fucked up!” He cries, but he’s laughing. They’re all laughing. Because Steph, on her own, without anyone dictating what she fucking says or does, is fucking funny.
She feels herself relax, completely and totally, for the first time all morning.
When the first bell rings, and she has to drag herself up (‘Do not be late.’) she glances around for beanie-bowtie weirdo again.
She doesn't know why, but he just sort of stuck out somewhere in the back of her head. (Probably because of the bowtie, honestly. Like. Jesus christ.)
But, he’s gone.
‘Good,’ she thinks, a little belatedly. She hadn’t liked the way he’d been staring at her. Like he was actually seeing something instead of just spacing out in her direction.
Her body drags her into her first period World Gov class, she sits in the desk cluster in the back, right next to Brenda all on her own, and she forgets about it.
She kind of had to. Mr. C had told the class to settle down and pay attention.
(And, later, when halfway through the class, Brenda had GamePigeon-ed her a round of 8-ball through her Mac’s iMessage, she paid direct and undivided attention to that until the bell rang. Loopholes, bitch.)
---
“Steph, lets go, dude,” Max calls, reaching across the lunch table to grab Jason’s Pepsi off his tray and finish it off in one long swig.
Jason doesn’t even try to fight him on it. Steph fucking wouldn’t.
Instead, she just rolls her eyes, and pushes herself standing. She shoves a fistful of half-cooked cafeteria tater tots into her mouth before she’s forced to fully abandon the table; trying to wash out the stale, house-party-beer taste of magic that a Max Order leaves in her mouth.
Max crushes the can against the side of his head, tossing it back on the table. He claps her too hard on the shoulder, leading her out of the cafeteria like the world’s most reluctant baby duck or some shit.
Their friends shoot her a half-sympathetic glance when she looks over her shoulder to them. Or, well, most of them do. Jason’s staring too mournfully at what’s left of his Pepsi to notice.
She tamps down her annoyance, and general dread that comes with fourth period on B days. When she and Max sit in the back row of Remedial Statistics together, barely paying attention unless the teacher tells them to. And, then it’s still just Steph.
It’s really not that bad. When Max isn’t pissy or sees her as some sort of dumbass solidarity he can actually be kind of funny, and, anyway, she’s just so fucking proud to be in Remedial Statistics that it helps way more than it should.
(It’s one of her crowning achievements, honestly. How fucking furious her dad had been when she’d failed her regular Stats class last semester; despite all his pretentious, specifically worded Orders trying to force her into passing.
It’d gotten her grounded for the entirety of Christmas break. Trapped inside her completely unlocked bedroom for fourteen straight days, unable to leave, but it’d been fucking worth it.
Well… sort of worth it. At least, she’d felt like a real fucking person, experiencing consequences for her own fucking actions for once.)
As they walk, Max hooks an arm around her neck. It’s uncomfortable as fuck, too much like a headlock for Steph to feel like she’s not halfway to getting tackled, but she doesn’t shake him off.
“You comin’ to Brad’s party next weekend?” He asks, head on a weird swivel around the hallway.
“Probably,” She shrugs.
It honestly depends who gets to her first. If it’s her dad or Tessburger, no. If it’s her friends? Absolutely. Either way it’s not going to be Steph’s decision.
“I’m makin’ him get a keg,” Max leans forward to grin at her, arm still around her neck, so he just lurches her down with him, “So, it’ll be fucking lit.”
“Where the fuck are you getting a keg?”
“Nah, nah, I’m making Brad get a keg. I don’t got that kind of fuckin’ cash.”
“Right,” She scoffs, hoping it reads like an actual laugh. She’s pretty sure Brad doesn’t independently have keg money either, but Brad’s an asshole. He probably deserves it for something.
“Wait a sec--” Max stops walking so suddenly she gets yanked completely off kilter. She freezes. One-Mississippi. And then unfreezes.
“Dude, what the fuck--” She weasels out from under his arm. But Max is clearly not paying attention to her right now, his jaw set hard.
“Well, well, well,” He laughs, low and angry, “What do we fucking have here?”
If Steph was any fucking stupider, she thinks she’d say something about him sounding like a goddamn Disney villian. But she’s not, so she doesn’t. Instead, she steps back a little, “I-- I’m gonna head to class.”
“Wait a fuckin’ minute, Steph!” He snaps, absently. Which. Fuck, that’s longer than a second.
She's processing it, feet planted in place, when Max lunges forward. He slams someone hard into the lockers with a bang, before Steph can even see which poor fuck ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I thought I told you I didn’t want to see your ugly fuckin’ face when I was walking to class, dickhead!”
“My… this is just where my locker is--” Aforementioned poor fuck chokes, sounding frantic. Which, like, Steph doesn’t blame him.
“I don’t give a shit!” He slams the kids head back with another clang, and something about the angle that his skull rockets into a locker, Steph can actually see who it is.
Beanie-and-bowtie kid.
What the fuck?
Her minute is up, and her feet un-stick from the tile, lurching her a little off-balance at the suddenness. She should go. She should get the fuck out of here, but for some reason, she stays put. Discomfort churns in her stomach. She should… she should fucking do something, right?
“Dude, c’mon--” She tries to grab Max’s arm, but he just shoulders her hand off.
“I-- I’m sorry, I--” Beanie-bowtie stammers, but Max just cuts him off with a laugh. Mean and shitty.
“I’m, I’m,” He mocks, “Nah, fuck that. Maybe I just gotta force it through your thick fucking skull--”
He slams him back again, pinning him across the throat with one arm, that looks fucking massive against under his head. Beanie-bowtie is really goddamn tall, but somehow, as Max cocks his fist back, he looks tiny, pinwheeling his arms helplessly to try and protect his face.
“Max, stop!” Steph shouts, and even as it comes out of her mouth she doesn’t fucking know why. It’s like someone told her to do it, even though she knows they haven’t.
Steph’s not an asshole, but she’s also not about to get into a fight she can’t fucking finish. And Max Jägerman is a walking fight no one can finish. All she’s going to do is make shit worse for Beanie-bowtie, and get her involved when she doesn’t fucking want to be.
But she still shouts. Like an idiot.
“Shut up, Steph!” Max snaps over his shoulder.
Fuck.
She feels the physical click in her jaw as her mouth snaps shut, tongue tasting sour and gross with the PBR-tint of the Order.
She plays it off best she can, rolling her eyes and throwing up her hands in a silent ‘fuck this’ she’s managed to perfect after years of… specifically this.
It’s easy enough with Max totally re-distracted back on the kid he’s got pinned. She’s pretty sure he doesn’t even notice her leave. Which is good. Max is a fucking idiot, so she’s not, really, all the worried about him being the first person in the entire school to figure it out, but she’s certainly not risking that shit.
Max Jägerman is the last person, maybe, in the world that she wants knowing he has complete, conscious control over her. (Well, right after her dad. But that one is really a non-fucking-starter, isn’t it?)
Beanie-bowtie gives her a pointed look right as she leaves, eyebrows scrunched together and lips pressed and head tilted like a goddamn puppy.
She can’t really tell what it’s supposed to mean, so she lets it piss her off, just so she has something else to focus on. If he’s trying to guilt her into sticking around and helping him, she fucking tried. Okay?
He’s just gotta suck it up and deal. Steph’s got a class to skip until she figures out a way to fucking talk again.
The school days almost over, anyway. She’s kind of just hoping she’ll be able to wait it out until Student Government, where someone will directly ask her to voice an opinion, or her dad’s Order to participate will overrule Max’s.
‘Turn in your homework,’ the curse sing-songs, when she tries to walk right past her classroom. Fucking fine.
The second bell rang when she was stuck in place, so everyone is already in class, which fucking sucks. This would be easier in a rush of students. But whatever, Steph’s done this before. She’s fine.
She stops right next to the door, so the teacher, Ms. G, can’t see her through the little window, yanking her Stat’s homework and AirPods out of her backpack. Connecting them to her phone, she shoves both the earbuds in, and cranks the sound up as loud as she can, so all the background noise of Hatchetfield High School gets lost under a randomly shuffled Panic! Song.
Fine. Okay. In. Out. Don’t get caught.
Steph shoves her way in, dropping her homework sheet into the wire-basket next to the door, where it belongs.
Ms. G pauses from where she was writing something on the board, looking over at her to ask something, but Steph can’t fucking hear her so it doesn’t register. She nods, and turns to leave, but her stomach lurches, nausea crawling its way up her throat at doing something she’s been told not to.
(‘-- and be polite to your teachers.’)
Fuck. Right.
She opens her mouth for an apology and excuse about going to the bathroom but no sound comes out. Right. Right. Fuck Steph’s whole entire life.
Ms. G asks another question she can’t hear and pointedly doesn’t risk trying to lip read.
She awkwardly forces her eyes big and pleading, trying to look as pathetic as possible without fucking throwing up at how goddamn cringey it is that the whole class is watching her do it.
‘Bathroom. Sorry.” She mouths.
Ms. G tilts her head, confused, but apparently the sorry made it polite enough for her dad’s fuck ass command this morning, and her stomach settles.
Before the teacher can ask another thing Steph won’t hear or understand, she turns on her heel and fucking dips.
Her dad will probably be pissed later, but whatever. He’ll be more pissed if someone figures out she’s Obedience cursed because she can’t fucking talk.
Hopefully, Ms. G just thinks Steph is shitting her brains out or something else equally humiliating, and will cut her some slack. (Which is… fucking depressing, as far as hopefully’s go, but when the fuck has Steph’s life ever been anything but?)
A lot of the teachers who teach the flunk-out classes don’t care as long as you’re moderately trying most of the time, and Steph is nothing if not moderately trying against her fucking will.
Luckily, she’s also nothing if not great at skipping classes. It’s a practiced skill, that she’s perfected through a level of obnoxious detail work and loophole-finding that most people don’t have to bother with.
‘Go to all your classes, Stephanie, unless told otherwise’ had been both one of her Dad’s first commands, and one of the easiest ones to find a fix for.
She went, and then she left. It hadn’t been particularly specific, and ended up getting her in more trouble than it prevented.
He’d tried ‘go to class and don’t leave until the bell rings’, but that’d been its own far-too-public-for-his-liking problem. Her friends still make fun of her for the time in seventh grade she’d puked all over her desk because she literally couldn’t go to the nurse.
Eventually, her dad replaced it with a more general: ‘Fine, Stephanie. Ignore that previous command. If you’re going to skip, just don’t get caught.’
(A lot of her corrected commands got edited to the watered down, summative, ‘just don’t get caught’. It covered a lot of ground at this point.)
The library has always been one of the best hiding places. It was easy, if she pretended she was doing homework on her laptop and hid in one of the corners that wasn’t immediately visible from the front door or desk. Then everyone just generally assumed she had a study period. Plus, it was one of the only places in the school that visible headphones were allowed, which was a good excuse if someone tried to get her to make conversation.
She switches her airpods for over-ear headphones, and now, if anyone tries to talk to her, she can just pretend she wasn’t listening before they can say anything more demanding than ‘Hey, Steph!’
Sure, the whole thing was a habit that had made her seem like a walking contradiction to all her friends, but she couldn’t give less of a shit.
They could tease her about how funny it was that ‘Steph Lauter, the bitch who never, ever turned down a dare, and will chug Jungle Juice like her life depends on it, no matter how nasty, could almost always be found in the quietest, lamest place in the school.’
It was better than the alternative of them figuring out why.
(Plus, her dad’s bullshit ‘homework, study, rinse and repeat’ has made her at least sort of academic, in the vaguest possible sense. Her grades are dogshit, because being Ordered to ‘study’ isn’t the same as knowing how to study in a way that fucking makes things understandable. But, she’s doing the closest Walmart equivalent version of ‘smart’ in a friend group like hers.)
She thinks, for, like, point-five seconds about doing her homework ahead of time, but that’d be just… straight up stupid. It’s not like she’s going to have more free time later tonight if she does it all now. She’ll just have less things to do during her endless hours trapped in her room ‘studying until she’s called down for dinner’.
Instead, she shuffles her Favorites on Spotify, just quiet enough she can sort of hear over the songs, but high enough too, so that she can crank it to where she can’t, if need be, and settles in to spend the next few hours crushing her high score on Geometry Dash. And, honestly, Steph kind of fucking loves chances like this. It’d be better if it was her own choice, instead of a necessity because she can't talk, but still. Completely wasted time, where no one has told her to do anything, so she literally just doesn’t-- it rules.
Her dad would be so mad if he found out about it.
(Which is, admittedly, 90% of the reason it rules so hard.)
Suddenly, a pair of beat up, black sneakers step into her sight-line, old enough they’ve started to do that foggy, yellowing thing that Converse-rubber does. Steph’s always worn out the soles too fast for hers to get like that.
She ignores them. They don’t move.
“You can talk now, if you want to.”
Her hand spasms across her trackpad, and the little geometry square on her screen stumbles into a spike. Game Over.
The magic curls gently along her jaw, unlocking it. It coats her teeth like hot chocolate.
“What?” She snaps, before she can actually think about it. Not due to the curse, or anything, the Order had been given too carefully to actually trigger anything; just a gentle kind of statement that broke Max’s previous one more than it asked for something different.
It’s just the dread. All human and Steph and there. What the fuck? She shoves off her headphones and lifts her head from the yellow-black sneakers, meeting the eye of… fucking Beanie-and-bowtie kid.
Mother fucker. Is he fucking stalking her or something?
He smiles down at her, awkward and crooked.
“Yeah, ‘course I can,” She says sharply, probably covering her ass a second too late, “Why the fuck would I not be?”
“I…” He yanks at the hem of his sweater, “Sorry. I know this is probably… this is probably really weird. Just. I wanted to say thank you, for trying to help, and it felt shitty to just leave you like that when I could help you and… and I’ll stop talking now. Sorry.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Out of all the fucking people--
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, dude,” She tries to laugh, but it comes out too forced. It just makes her look even more suspicious.
“Right,” He fiddles with his backpack straps. He’s also wearing both, though, probably of his own fucking choice, and the comparison pisses her off for some reason.
“Yeah.”
She’s being too confrontational, she knows that. She’s acting exactly like a person whose secret has just been found out, which isn’t goddamn smart for someone who's trying to seem like they don’t even have a secret in the first place.
But, hey, when has Steph ever been fucking smart?
“I… I’ll go. I’m sorry.”
Fuck.
“Wait,” She reaches out and grabs his pant leg, not sure why even as her hand wraps around his ankle. She wants him to go. She doesn’t want him to have been here in the first place.
But she’s suddenly fucking freaked out and she doesn’t want him going where she can’t see him. Not without making sure he’s not about to ruin her entire fucking life.
“Just. I don’t know what the hell you think you know, but don’t go… don’t go telling people.”
Good job, Steph, that’s really freaking convincing.
“Oh. I won’t, don’t worry,” He insists.
For some reason, that doesn’t make her less fucking worried.
It must show on his face, because he tilts his head, tugging at his hat so it pulls over the tops of his ears, “Seriously, I won’t. I… I get it--”
“Sure,” She scoffs, mean and hard and out of her control. Because no he doesn’t. No one does. And she’s not going to just sit here and let this guy she doesn’t even know pretend he knows what the fuck her life is like.
“No! I--” He squeezes his lips together abruptly, glancing at the aisle around them, “Do you wanna talk about this in the computer lab? I have the key.”
“Dude, there is no fucking way I’m going anywhere with you,” Not alone, not now, not fucking ever. Not with this boy she barely knows, whose name she can’t remember, who knows that he can make her do literally anything he wants.
“That’s-- yeah, that’s fair.”
“So, if you’ve got shit to say just say it.”
“It’s more… show?” He pulls at his hat again, “And I don’t really want to do that in the middle of the library. So.”
“You know that sounds creepy as hell, right?”
“Shit. It does. Sorry.”
She gets it. Talking about being Cursed in public makes literally everything inside of her feel weird and shaky and nauseous-- and it’s only half because this feels way too much like a conversation she’s been Ordered not to have.
But also, fuck this. Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this.
“Look, I don’t even know your name, so. Fuck off, okay?” She’s being confusing, she knows she is. She’s confused too. She wants him gone, she wants to know exactly what he’s saying at all times, she wants him to know literally nothing about her.
To his credit, at least, he doesn’t look offended, “It’s Pete.”
Right. Pete. She vaguely hears it in the back of her head, in Mulberry's nasally droning voice, while she’s taking attendance.
‘Peter Spankoffski?’ ‘Present.’
There’s a weird moment of silence, the two of them, just staring at each other. He’s avoiding eye contact, eyes darting to hers and then away again. It makes her nervous, a tiny Steph in the back of her head just insisting that she fucking deck him hard enough to make him forget this entire thing.
“Hey, I’m not gonna tell you to go anywhere, if you don’t want to,” Pete says, still speaking quietly, but firm.
It’s too serious of a tone, it doesn’t fit on Peter Spankoffski’s bug-eyed, Blaine from Glee vibe. And, maybe, it’s stupid. But she thinks it’s the first time someone has known, actually known, and not just used it to make their lives easier when Steph was being an asshole.
And, maybe, that’s why she agrees.
---
Hatchetfield High School has a state of the art computer lab. Or, well, had.
It was brand, shiny new when her dad funded it right before the 2008 mayoral election, at-the-time-best-money-could-buy iMacs and rolling chairs, and, now, literally no one uses it. Everyone got school issued laptops, or started using their own. Everyone, that is, except Pete, apparently?
“Why do you even have a key for in here?”
“Oh,” Pete pulls the door shut behind him, flicking on the lights that Steph had fully ignored on her way in, “I’m in the coding club.”
She drops herself into one of the chairs, letting it roll back into one of the computer desks. The iMac audibly wobbles back and forth for a second, and they both go abruptly silent, waiting to see if it’ll fall.
(A part of her desperately hopes it does, just as a built-in, twelve-years-belated fuck you to her dad.)
It doesn’t. Which is, reluctantly, probably for the best.
“We have a fucking coding club?”
“Yeah?” He pulls out his own chair, sitting right on the edge of it, like he’s getting ready to bolt or some shit. Which, really, Steph thinks is un-fucking-fair, when she’s the one with a reason to freak out here.
“And you’re in it?” She snorts, crossing her arms.
“... yes?” He says, like a question, before countering, “Aren’t you in Student Government?”
“Literally why the fuck would you know that?”
She’s being a bitch now, but she doesn’t care. Consider her hackles fucking raised or whatever.
“You’re our class secretary,” He scoffs, sounding completely bewildered. Like, everyone is keeping a close eye on public school politics.
“Not by choice.”
Pete pauses, taking a second to hiss air through his teeth, “That sucks.”
“Yeah. It does,” She plants her feet so she can twist back and forth in her chair, pointedly avoiding Pete’s obnoxious, pitying eyes, “So, is there a reason we’re in here?”
“Okay. Yes, right. I’m also cursed,” He says. Just. Fucking says.
And, like, sure, it’s what he’d been implying, but it still knocks her over a little. She whips her chair back to face him so fast her knee whacks back into the table, “Huh.”
“Not that--” His eyes widen slightly, “I don’t know if yours is like fully a curse, but it definitely seems at least… curse-adjacent.”
“Yeah,” She snorts, because like, dude, “It’s a fucking curse.”
“Figured,” Pete smiles, a tiny, nice looking thing she promptly ignores.
Because, like. She’s never met someone else who was cursed before. She, honestly, had sort of doubted that there was anyone else. That she, Stephanie Lauter, was just uniquely, universally fucked.
Her stomach squeezes as the realization sinks in. Fuck. She’s not alone.
“Clap your hands three times,” She says before she can actually think through how vaguely fucked up it is.
Pete blinks at her, and doesn’t.
All her hopes crumple. Sharp and uncomfortable and humiliated at them fucking existing in the first place.
“Why…?” Realization dawns on his face in steps, eyes flicking back and forth, eyebrows scrunching together, before his expression blows wide open and vaguely offended, “Oh, come on.”
“Just fucking checking, asshole.”
“It’s a different kind of curse!”
“Okay, well you’re taking fucking forever so fuck me for assuming--”
“Oh my god,” He huffs a deeply sarcastic laugh that works better coming out of his mouth than Steph expects it to, “Just… promise not to freak out?”
“I’m already freaking out.”
“Fair.”
Pete squeezes his eyes shut, swallowing visibly, before reaching up and yanking off his beanie.
She’s not sure what she’s expecting, but the top of his hair braided into two weird, bumpy pigtails is… absolutely not it.
He flicks his eyes open at her as he reaches up to undo them and she swallows back something shitty about his curse being whatever the fuck that is. He looks a little too embarrassed for it to not just feel mean.
He yanks at a little rubber hair band until it snaps, shaking his braid-crimped hair out and grinning at her sheepishly, “Ta-da?”
Horns.
Peter Spankoffski’s got goddamn, motherfucking horns.
“Holy shit.”
“You promised not to freak out!”
“I literally didn’t!”
She reaches out to touch one automatically, probably a little too internally-skeptical for a person who knows for a fact that magic exists, and Pete lurches back in his seat.
“Please don't?”
She yanks her hand back faster than she’d stuck it out. It hadn’t registered, completely, as an actual Order-- not exactly specific enough, but Steph’s not a complete asshole.
“Or, no. Not like that. Sorry. I’d, um, rather you didn’t.”
“No, you’re totally good, sorry. Just… you’ve got fucking horns?” It’s a dumb thing to say. Obviously he has horns. Not even, like, particularly small ones either.
Right behind his hairline are two thick, coppery-brown fucking goat-ass horns that arch up a little along the curve of his skull.
“That would be accurate, yes,” He laughs, but it’s semi-strangled sounding.
He glances nervously back between her and the door, and when he turns his head, she catches that each horn ends weirdly abruptly. The tips flat and wide-ish, instead of tapering off to a point.
Huh. She wonders if he cuts them down, and then doesn’t ask. Because, that feels kind of fucked up.
Steph’s, suddenly, grateful in a way she’d never considered being before, that her curse isn’t visible. It seems like it would be inconvenient as fuck.
(She also doesn’t say that, because it’d probably also be fucked up to. Even if she’s sort of really impressed that Pete’s been able to, not only, hide them for so long, but also hide them so well. This is Hatchetfield High School, if he’d ever slipped up, even a little bit, she would have heard about it.)
“It’s, um, not just the horns, actually,” Pete awkwardly patters his hands against his knees, “It’s technically more of a transformation curse kind of thing. By, like, actual ‘curse classification’ terminology-- which… I’m actually pretty sure most of that stuff is complete bullshit, but still.”
Steph knows what he means. She’s done her fair share of desperately throwing herself down internet rabbit holes to try and find out literally anything. And everything, the Reddit boards full of curse concepts, and WitchTok info posts, and DnD masterposts, feels fucking fake.
It’s all either clear writing inspo or some scammy cash grab or a twelve year old with a ‘big imagination’ who is desperately trying to be unique for their Tumblr followers.
It’s why she’s always, secretly, not-admitting-it-even-to-herself-incase-saying-it-outloud-is-what-makes-it-true, sort of thought that she was the only one.
But, also, that’s not the most relevant fucking shit he just said.
“Transformation?” She asks, “Like a fuckin’ werewolf?”
He ducks his head in an approximation of a nod. All embarrassed looking and awkward again. Steph wonders if Peter Spankoffski always just walks through the world like he’s apologizing for something.
“Less… cool, but essentially, yeah. Just, think more were- goat.”
She snorts, and then feels like a total shithead.
He tilts another tiny-nice smile at her before she can apologize, “It sounds completely ridiculous. I know.”
She relaxes a little, going to slump more comfortably into her chair, before she realizes that she already has. At some point during this conversation, Steph untensed and hadn’t even noticed it. Huh.
“No more ridiculous than being told to wear a fuck ass cardigan everyday and actually doing it,” She smirks, shoving her sleeves up, almost entirely for show.
“It’s a… nice cardigan? At least?” Pete says with an audible lack of confidence.
“Literally fuck off, dude, it’s awful.”
“Yeah, okay,” He drops his head to laugh, pointing it down at his knees.
God, Steph’s got… so many questions here. Like, way more than she’s actually comfortable having.
(Not that she’s not constantly confused enough to have questions about something, she is, she just usually doesn’t care enough about figuring it out.)
She just really doesn’t know how to ask any of them without sounding insane.
What the fuck is a weregoat? Does he know anyone else like her-- like them? Does he know how to break her curse?
(Though-- she doesn’t really need to ask that last one. She knows the answer. Pete seems way too humiliated on the horns-front to be a willing participant in having them. If him living cursed is anything like Steph living cursed, he’d have already done something if he could.)
Lucky for her, Pete fills the silence before she makes herself look stupid.
“Does… like, telling you to do things work over the phone?”
Suddenly, she’s tense again. Less than before, which is probably-definitely bad survival instincts, but still. Fuck.
“Why?” She asks, too fast and mostly through her teeth.
“Oh, just, I thought… if you needed a curse buddy to get you out of something you don’t want to do, we could exchange numbers and I could call you,” He says, all in one breath. It’s both sort of impressive and sort of makes her chest go sympathetic-tight.
All she manages, after literally all of that, is a skeptical, “Curse buddy?”
“Only if you want to!” Pete’s cheeks immediately flush and she feels a tiny bit bad, “Just, I figured I’d offer. Since I already know, and you know I wont tell anyone. But… yeah.”
Which is about when what he actually had been saying catches up to her.
A way out. A way out. A way out of nights stuck uselessly ‘studying’ in her room, outfits she hates, weekend plans that aren’t her own.
Actual, literal independence for the first time since she was eleven goddamn years old.
Sort of. Assisted independence-- which would probably defeat the purpose for someone with a less fucked up perspective than Steph’s.
Holy shit.
“It works over the phone,” She says, after a long silence that Pete sits really patiently through. Feeling half numb and half like she’s going to vibrate right through her spinny chair.
“Cool,” He breathes out. Casual. Like he’s not changing Steph’s whole life, “So… do you wanna give me your number and I’ll text you so you have mine? Or, I guess, visa versa--”
Wait.
“What's the catch?”
It’s too life changing. It’s too nice. Stephanie has been her father’s daughter too long to think a favor like this won’t cost her something.
Not from a boy who knows what her curse means.
Pete shrugs, still too fucking casual, “No catch.”
“Really?” She says, instead of ‘I don’t fucking believe you’. Though, she thinks the general message carries over anyway because Pete starts worrying the hem of his sweater. Apology shaped all over again.
“Really, Steph. Curses suck bad enough already. I’d be a pretty big asshole if I made you, like, give me something for being a decent person.”
It feels bizarrely in reverse of how it should be: she desperately doesn’t want to believe him, but she does.
It all just feels way too fucking vulnerable and generous, even though she knows it’s not actually asking that much of him. She doesn’t think it’s a favor she can really pay back, and that makes her uncomfortable.
But Pete’s too goddamn sincere looking, with his crooked smile and stupid, brown cow eyes. (Goat… eyes? Actually. No. Goat’s have those creepy as fuck rectangle pupils, and Pete’s are reassuring, normal, nice-to-look-at circles.) (Thank god. Could you fucking imagine? Can’t hide that shit with a hat.)
“Give me your phone.”
“What?”
She shoves out a hand at him, “Gimme. I’ll put my number in.”
“Oh,” he looks surprised, for some reason, “Okay.”
She grabs it, half clocking the stock-photo galaxy background and plain, dark blue case. She likes reading people by their phones, but Pete’s is a perfectly boring blank slate. It feels accurate, but in a significantly less shady way than that actually sounds. More… simple than boring, maybe. Practical.
(Though, the shadier than it sounds part of her is secretly, absently surprised it’s not an Android. She’s glad, she doesn’t know where the fuck she’d add a contact on one of those, but still. Look at him.)
She puts her number in, and then sends herself a text.
steph 💚
You
heyyyy u sexy bitch its me peter spankoffski the cool guy who completely saved ur ass in the library today
You
if i wanted ur number i could have just asked for it btw :p
She kicks her chair forward, so they’re knee to knee, tossing it back to him. She swallows back the laugh that threatens its way up her throat when he fumbles it.
Pete’s eyes flick across the screen, reading. The tips of his ears go pink.
(His ears that, she clocks now that she’s closer, are a tiny bit pointed at the ends. Not notably, where she’d think about it hard enough to realize if she didn’t know about the preexisting horn situation. But still. Huh.)
“Thanks,” He sort-of-squeaks, staring at their very close legs, like he’s deciding if it’d be rude or not to move away.
“I think I should probably be thanking you, dude,” She scoffs, taking pity on him after a second and pushing herself back to where she’d been before.
“You really don’t need to,” He insists.
And, since he does, right then, Steph decides she’s absolutely going to. Both, because he’s just too fucking nice to not thank, but, honestly, mostly out of spite.
She rolls her eyes, “Too bad. I’m gonna.”
(It’s funny. She’s never spited her way into being polite before.)
He rolls his eyes right back, “That’s your prerogative.”
“Jesus,” She snorts, “Prerogative.”
Before Pete can start nerd-splaining his SAT-word usage, the way she can palpably feel in the air that he’s raring up to, she asks, “How… long have you known?”
“About…?” He gestures lamely at literally all of her.
“Yeah, about,” She scoffs, motioning down her body sarcastically. Because what the fuck else could she even be talking about?
“I mean, I didn’t know for sure, until just now. I just knew something sort of weird was going on.”
As he’s talking, he reaches up to absently run his thumb along his horn, before he catches himself and snaps his hand down; death gripping the arms of his seat.
“Weird how?” She asks, rankling a little at the implication she hadn’t hid it well enough. If Steph is good at anything, it’s hiding specifically this.
She kicks the toe of one of her stupid fucking shoes against the leg of the table, trying to scuff through the leather. It doesn’t work.
“Well, um, just little things you know? Like, in English I’d notice you’d always do whatever Miss Mulberry said to right away. Just, like, taking out your notebook, turning to a page, and, I mean. You, famously, aren’t usually that…”
“Behaved?”
“I was gonna say prompt?” He fucking lies, because Steph knows the face of someone trying to reword something rude they thought, and Peter was wearing it, “But… yeah. And, like, I just wrote it off, but then I kept hearing your friends tell you to do things and you would, and then with Max--”
“Yeah,” she nods. It makes sense. More than she’s super comfortable with, actually.
“Yeah,” he echoes, before adding, “Don’t worry, if I wasn’t also a member of the Curse Club there's no way I would have picked up on it.”
“The Curse Club?” She snorts.
He shoots her a close lipped and blatantly embarrassed almost-smile, “... yes?”
“We should make jackets,” She teases, just to make him stop looking like he wants to hide in his own sweater.
He laughs, “That might defeat the purpose, don’t y’think?”
“Maybe a little,” She kicks her legs out into the air, shoving off the desk so her chair whips around in a full circle, “But it’d be fucking cool.”
Pete’s smile widens back into the real, nice to look at one, as he yanks his hat back on over his horns, “If you say so.”
---
Her dad hadn’t been home when she got back. (Exactly at 6:30-- she’d fucked around in Starbucks for like two hours after Student Government. There’s no fucking way she’s setting foot in her house until she literally has to.)
Which, generally, would be a good thing. Her dad’s a dickhead who likes telling her to do things just because he can and she doesn’t like spending time with him.
But when she’d been told to go to her room and study until she’s called down to dinner, and dinner isn’t fucking coming… well, it’s not like her dad is the lesser of the two evils, but he’s definitely the less boring one.
She clicks so hard on her laptop trackpad her finger actually fucking hurts, switching between Quizlet flashcards without even reading them.
It wouldn’t fucking matter anyway. That’s the really twisted shit with her dad sending her off to ‘study’-- it doesn’t mean she’s good at it.
She should be. After six goddamn years you’d think she’d have figured it out, but Steph is still just too fucking stupid to retain anything.
She tried, at first. It had felt like a waste of time not to, and, like, it still is, to be fair, but it doesn’t matter.
The Order ‘study’ just means study.
It doesn’t automatically make her fucking competent, she doesn’t suddenly, magically learn the years that wars happened or understand formulas. Just like how being told to do her homework only means she has to answer all the questions, not that she has to get them right.
It’s something her dad could probably fix.
He’s obnoxiously fantastic at finding ways to word complicated, annoying instructions, just so he can force Steph to do exactly what he wants her to. He’s got the money for tutors or whatever, who could figure out what works for her broken, useless brain, and then he could tell her to do that. But he hasn’t.
It’s like ‘don't get caught’, lazy and pointedly unspecific, because, really, her dad just doesn’t fucking care.
He cares if she’s passing her classes, he cares if she’s turning in assignments, he cares if it becomes public knowledge that the Mayor’s kid is incompetent.
And Steph wasting her nights miserable and too dumb to do anything about it doesn’t, necessarily, effect any of that. He can pay her name onto the High Honor Roll list in the newspaper at the end of every school year no matter how upset she is.
She switches tabs, hitting play on a Hank Green CrashCourse video she’s been watching in forty-five second intervals until she gets bored.
Unfortunately for her and Hank, she’s already fucking bored.
And hungry. But, technically, that one is fixable. Steph’s kept a well hidden stash of protein bars and Slim Jims and fruit snacks in her room since she was old enough to realize getting sent up to her room was, regularly, a one way trip.
(Her dad and Tessburger regularly like to pretend they just ‘forgot’ she was up there. The responsibilities that came with being the mayor are just so, so overwhelming, he didn’t have time to remember he Ordered his daughter into a personal fucking prison cell.
And, yeah, Steph’s stupid, but she’s not a fucking idiot. She knows when someone is lying right to her face. They just want an excuse to get her out of the way.)
But, fuck her or whatever, but she doesn’t want to choke down a fucking Clif Bar, right now. She wants to watch TV, and fuck around on her phone, and UberEats Taco Bell, and she should be fucking allowed to.
“So, forget everything you’ve ever learned about acids, wipe the slate clean,” Hank Green says cheerfully from the still-open tab, “The most common acid on Earth is water!”
Steph buries her face into the fold of her arms, muffling a scream into her sweater sleeve, “I don’t care!”
“And water is the most common base!” He continues, because he doesn’t care about her, and also Steph didn’t pause the video, “And am I saying this purely to confuse you? Yes!”
Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this.
She grabs her phone and turns up the sound on the stupid fucking YouTube video, before the curse can start getting testy about her, god fucking forbid, taking a motherfucking break.
See? She’s learning about fucking… Acid-Base Reactions in Solution or whatever the fuck. Just auditorily. She’s still studying. Fuck you.
pete 🐐
You
heyyyy can i call u and u tell me i dont have to study
You
and also to go downstares for dinner idk whichll work
You
im taking u up on ur offer right tf away huh?
You
rlly hope u meant it lmaoooooooo
Steph feels a little bit weird about it. Too vulnerable to be trusting some literal stranger with something so deeply humiliating, and also bizarrely guilty for even asking. Like, maybe, he’d just said she could ask him for help to be nice but didn’t really want to.
She pushes the feeling down so hard that she somehow ends up sort of backwards-annoyed with Pete, even though she knows it’s unfair. He’d offered. If he regrets it, that’s on him.
“Okay, so the average ton of coal in America is 3% sulfur,” Hank Green says, through her laptop speakers. Steph pushes off the floor, tilting her desk chair back on the legs so she’s as far away from his percentages as she can physically get without standing.
This sucks. This sucks. She’s just so fucking bored, that she wants to claw her skin off or some shit--
Her phone starts buzzing.
Holy shit. Pete’s just fully cold calling her.
(Or, okay, it’s probably not cold calling when she’d literally texted him, asking to call. But, like, not even a confirmation text, first? Crazy work.)
She picks up before she can overthink it.
“Hi?” Pete says quietly, “You, can, um. You can stop studying and go downstairs for dinner? If you want to?”
Her whole body relaxes, having been wound tight in the way she never actually is able realize until it’s not anymore. The soft hot cocoa taste of Pete’s almost-Orders even less noticeable when it comes over the phone.
She slams her laptop shut with a probably-concerning-sounding clack, not even bothering to turn off the video. Holy shit. It fucking worked.
Steph laughs without meaning to, punched out of her and relieved, “Holy fucking shit, dude. Thank you.”
“No… problem? You okay?”
“Yeah,” She shoves out of her chair, checking through her window down to the driveway, just to make sure her dad isn’t actively pulling up. It’d be just her fucking luck to find a walking get-out-of-jail-free-card only to get caught with it literally a couple hours later.
He’s not. Thank fuck.
“Glad I could help,” Pete says, still sounding uncertain, like he’s worried he’s done something wrong, somehow.
“Pete, you’re a fucking life saver, you don’t even know. If I had to listen to Hank Green talk about acid for another second I’d kill myself.”
“Oh, CrashCourse?”
“Yup,” She closes her bedroom door (gently) behind her, making her way down to the kitchen.
“Their videos are awesome, man, what are you talking about?”
“Y’know, that makes sense,” Steph snorts into the receiver before putting it on speaker, resting her phone on the counter. She’s not entirely sure of why they’re still talking. She’s gotten what she wanted, and he’s done what he offered. Just, on a base level, the conversation should be over.
She doesn’t hang up.
Pete laughs on the other end, “I’d ask what that was supposed to mean, but, unfortunately, I am aware of exactly what kind of vibes I’m giving off.”
She tilts her head out the fridge so he can hear her clearer, “I think it’s the bowtie.”
“They’re high class!”
She rolls her eyes, grinning without thinking about it, “Sure.”
“They are!” He insists, but she can hear that he’s smiling too, “And, anyway, it distracts from the hat. So, from a risk standpoint… y’know.”
That tracks, in a sort of sad, Hatchetfield High School kind of way. The bowtie is definitely the more obviously insane fashion statement between the two. If someone was just fucking with him in passing, it’d be the first target.
(Jesus Christ, having horns just seems so wildly inconvenient. Steph would be fucked.)
“Just… thanks,” She says again, because it feels like she should.
“It’s really no problem,” Pete hums, like she didn’t.
And she doesn’t know what the fuck to do with that, so she just shoves a full tupperware of leftovers into the microwave and changes the subject.
They talk, stilted and only about shit that doesn’t matter, until her food is ready, and she goes back upstairs to hide in her room.
She’s still not sure why neither of them hung up earlier. Not that she’s upset about it, but still.
Huh.
Whatever. She’s free from studying, so she’s got Glee to watch and Twitter fights to get into until someone comes home and tells her to go to sleep.
She’s not going to waste her first real, uncomplicated, entirely-her-own couple hours of free time in six years worrying about it.
---
pete 🐐
You
woagh dude u wanna tell me to go walk around the mall after school or some shit so badddd
You
u at least want to tell me i dont have to go watch afucking TRQCK MEET vomit emoji vomit emoji
pete 🐐
Who the fuck is asking you to go to a track meet?
pete 🐐
Also:
pete 🐐
Click to Open: Voice Memo – 0:06
Transcript: Hey… Steph. Go somewhere you want to go after…
You
thxxxxxx lifesaver
You
uhhghghghhhhh stacy is frends w a girl on the team but she doesnt wanna go alone
You
but its litreally CROSS COUNTREY SEASON
pete 🐐
Ah. Should I know what Cross Country season means, like, in this context?
pete 🐐
Obviously, I know what Cross Country is, but, is it… particularly worse to watch or something?
You
wow rlly spoken likea guy who dosnt now what cross country is
You
u literally sit on thebeleachers and watch a bunch of runners Start
You
and then like1000000 hours later u watch them show back up and cross the finsh line
pete 🐐
Responding to: @ steph 💚 ‘wow rlly spoken likea guy who dos…’
Okay, so… 1. Fuck you??
pete 🐐
2. Jesus Christ. That feels like something that should exempt it from being a spectator sport.
You
YOUDTHINK WOULDNT U PETE??
---
pete 🐐
You
help imdtubg stydtubg
You
boreddddddddd
pete 🐐
Wow. Nearly incomprehensible!
pete 🐐
Do you need me to call to get you out of… studying, again? That last word looks studying-adjacent.
You
gotit in 1 :ppp
pete 🐐
Okay, no problem. I’ll call in one second!
You
hero shit
---
pete 🐐
You
brenda is pissing me offfff 2day can u stop me from buying her starbucks
You
she doesnt deserve it
[Incoming Call From: pete 🐐]
---
They fall into a rhythm easily. Like, almost a little easier than Steph is entirely comfortable with, actually.
She texts Pete, and, usually, unless he’s got something else going on, he’ll call her immediately without responding, and say what she asks him to. So simple it’s stupid.
A couple of times, during English or passing in the hall she’ll be able to shoot him a look, and if he’s got enough context, he can side-swipe whatever Order she’s trying to avoid away. But mostly, it’s over the phone. Calls, and voice memos.
They don’t always end up talking longer than they need to, half the time Pete gives Steph her digitally-requested out, and that’s the end of it. But sometimes they do. And it’s weird. Not in a bad way, just in a she’s-still-not-willing-to-consider-it-critically way.
She wants to hate it more than she actually does. She should hate it more than she does. Steph’s built ninety percent of her personality around independence and being difficult and self-reliant. She’s had to.
She doesn’t, like, like that things are that way, but they just are. She’s too used to it for the idea of all that changing so radically, in tiny, Peter Spankoffski shaped pieces, to not freak her out.
But. It’s… nice. It’s really nice. It actually kind of fucking rules to have someone who genuinely has her back.
She doesn’t think that’s something she’s ever actually had before. Especially not after the curse came and fucked all her friendships up so complicatedly that the other half of each of them doesn’t even know anythings been fucked.
And, well, as far as curse buddies go (a term that, to clearly both of their dismay, does seem to be the one that’s stuck), she thinks she could do way worse than Peter Spankoffski.
He’s nice enough that it doesn’t feel nearly as embarrassing as it should to ask him for help. He’s, also, kind of a total jackass, which stops her from feeling too fucking reverent or whatever the fuck. A good balance. One that Steph can work with.
Plus, he’s clever. Which, like, she knew. He’s Peter Spankoffski, she’s pretty sure their English class is the only non-AP-or-Honors course he’s taking this semester, but still. It’s less a smart thing, and more a calculating, cleverness.
Not every Order needs another one to negate it. Little things can be brushed off with a ‘you don’t need to do that, if you don’t want to’, but sometimes it’s more complicated. Sometimes, one Order has to be replaced with another or else all the fucked, twisted up magic coursing through Steph’s circulatory system gets confused and makes her puke her guts out instead. And Pete’s good at those situations, even without Steph being able to explain with much detail. Like, really good.
If he was anyone else it would honestly make her so nervous, how good he is at finding better worded, less invasive alternatives for shit she doesn’t want to do.
She’s actually… not sure why it doesn’t make her nervous. It still should.
Maybe, it’s how fucking pitiful he looks everytime she catches him in class, tugging down his beanie low over his ears. They don’t really talk about it, the complicated, upsetting bullshit that comes with being cursed, they aren’t that kind of close. But, still. It’s kind of a silent understanding, a trauma bond.
Or, maybe it’s just that there is an equally undiscussed level of mutually assured destruction with literally every interaction they have. A undercurrent of ‘don’t fuck me over goat boy, because I know where your horns are’ and ‘don’t be a dick about this, walking puppet freak, becuase I’m really good at wording Orders, and could just as easily use that against you as for you.”
Steph kind of wants it to be the latter. It feels safer, if a on-the-brink-of-nuclear-war kind of dynamic can really be considered ‘safe’.
(A tiny, well suppressed part of her, gets the feeling it’s the former. Luckily, no one has told her to tell the truth about it, so she can keep lying to herself about it.)
---
The third time Pete’s head dips down towards his desk before he snaps back upright into attention, Steph actually realizes what’s happening. And then she can’t stop staring.
Which is, probably, rude and maybe sort of creepy, but the only person who is going to call her on it is actively falling asleep so she’s not too worried.
It’s kind of weird. She’s not really well-versed enough in Peter Spankoffski to be confident on literally any of his behaviors, but she’s pretty confident that this isn’t normal.
Even before the two of them started… doing whatever the fuck you’d consider what the two of them have been doing-- Curse-Buddying, maybe, unfortunately-- one of the only things she’d known about the dude was that he was a good student. A+, high honor roll, always raising his hand, and reminding teachers about homework, kind of good student.
And good students don’t really nap through their English classes instead of reading through the next twenty-six pages of The Great Gatsby and filling out a worksheet about the different ways F. Scott Fitzgerald uses imagery to communicate his underlying themes.
It’s almost fascinating to watch. His head fall-snap-back circuit. The way he tilts full body towards the side that he’s got his cheek smushed into his fist, glasses pushed off kilter. How, even when he’s trying to focus and do his work, he mostly seems to just be staring blankly down and chewing on the end of his pencil. Which, like, ew. But, Steph’s not going to judge. She’s certainly done weirder shit half-asleep and trying not to be in class before.
(Not that she’s ever gotten past ‘half-asleep’. She’s not allowed to. Sleeping in class has been a big no-no from her dad ever since she got caught doing it Freshman year. Before then, she doesn't think he would have really given a shit. He certainly didn’t Order like he did.)
She leans over, close enough that her stupid-pinstripe-New-York-And-Company button up sleeve brushes against his sweater, whispering, “Hey, you good?”
“Yeah,” Pete says, too quickly, like he’d been less conscious than she thought. With wide eyes, he yanks his pencil out of his mouth, “Sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” She snorts, “You just seem like you’re about to pass the fuck out.”
“I’m fine,” he swallows around a yawn, which doesn’t really help his argument.
“Yeah, okay,” Steph scoffs.
“Really, I’m all good,” He insists, continuing to sound and look as unconvincing as possible, eyes practically drooped shut even as he looks at her, worrying his bottom lip in place of the end of his pencil, “Just… new moon last night. Didn’t really sleep.”
“Okay, Twilight. Fuck it up.”
That surprises a laugh out of him, loud and awake and immediately clapped behind his hand. What she can see of his face between his fingers is bright pink.
“Mr. Spankoffski!” Mulberry warns, vaguely from the front of the class, and he squeaks out the most pathetic ‘sorry’ that Steph’s maybe ever heard in her life.
Steph turns back in her seat, pretending to focus on her work for just long enough. It’s a well practiced time frame, the right amount of stalling between the teacher paying closer attention to you than normal and half the class staring, hoping things will get more interesting.
Once everyone else starts turning back to their friends, or staring unsubtly under their desk to check their texts, she’s back in the clear.
She leans a little out of her seat, shoulder bumping against Pete’s. He flinches, blinking fast. He’d actually fallen asleep sitting up in the four minutes she hadn’t been talking to him. Jesus christ, she doesn’t know how he even got to third period in the first place.
“Okay, like, what the fuck does that mean, though?” She whispers, and he glances nervously between her and Mulberry’s desk. She suppresses an eye roll the best she can. It feels mean to be annoyed with a guy who's barely conscious enough to support the weight of his own fucking head. And, like, his head is probably double hard to keep up, with the horns and shit.
Instead, she flips to a blank page of the notebook she hadn’t actually been taking notes in, scrawling in the top corner: is this twilight related dude i gotta kno now
Pete, it seems, has no reservations when it comes to eye rolls, but he leans closer to her desk, writing something in big, messier letters than she’d expected, on the page closer to him: No, it is not Twilight related. And then, when she lunges her pen back to the page, he quickly adds, But, yes, I’ve seen Twilight.
She puffs a laugh through her nose: okkkk so like wtf does new moon have to do w u zzz?
She scribbles what could, generously, be considered a tiny, sleeping goat with a bowtie under the ‘zzz’s.
Pete tries to hide his smile when he sees it, but he’s either not very good at it, or too tired to make much of an effort, because Steph catches it anyway. The corners tilted up unevenly and lips squeezed tight.
You Know What happens every syzygy-- so, most consistently, at least twice a month; every new and full moon. Hence why last night’s moon phase is relevant+I need a nap or I’ll die.
Steph does know what, at least, she knows the What that Pete had been implying.
She doesn’t know why she just sort of assumed his curse went by werewolf rules, if it was something Pete couldn’t just control in the first place. Full moons, or whatever. Which, she guesses, is still half right. It’s just objectively more confusing now.
wt the actual fuck is a syzygy??
Pete huffs a much more classroom appropriate laugh, down at her side of the notebook.
Basic definition: When three celestial bodies line up. It generally refers to the Moon+Earth+Sun, and as far as I know that’s all that matters for my thing too.
She, admittedly, puts almost zero effort in trying to make any of those words make sense together.
wow! still confusing!
He tilts a clearly amused, and still deeply sleepy, smile in her direction, before hunching forward towards the paper, and beginning to write with a purpose. It takes Steph an embarrassingly long time to realize he’s drawing a diagram.
Under his explanation, he’s added two circles, a big one labeled SUN and a slightly smaller one titled EARTH (aka us). He glances over his shoulder to make sure she’s watching, and then scribbles in a tiny circle at the end of the line. MOON.
He traces the line down the middle of the three circles with his pen tip, just light enough to make a thin, faint connecting streak of blue ink. Underneath, he writes SYZYGY.
Before she can either admit she half gets it now, or, the more likely option, lie so she can see how many levels deep in diagram they can get before he realizes she’s kidding, he starts on another one.
The same three circles, SUN, EARTH, MOON, but this time the moon is towards the top of the Earth.
Steph doesn’t know nearly enough shit about astrology, except what she bullshits for TikTok trends or when she wants to order cool Scorpio themed shit off Etsy, to know what phase of the moon that’s supposed to be. Just that it’s a different one.
Pete draws another line across the sun and the Earth, curving it up in a, genuinely kind of overdramatic, little corkscrew of loops up to the moon.
Underneath, he labels it NOT SYZYGY, and then he underlines it, like, six times.
yea ok wise ass i get it
She tries to draw a little hand, flipping him off next to it, but it doesn’t really read, so she just smiles at him, and does it with her actual hand under her desk. Pete snorts, and tries to draw his own middle-finger-doodle on his page.
Steph feels stupidly vindicated that his doesn’t look much better.
It’s actually sort of interesting, getting a glimpse into Pete’s whole… goat thing. She won’t pretend she hasn’t thought about it a lot. It’d be unconvincing, and, frankly, she fucking thinks she’s got a right to, but Pete doesn’t really bring it up.
She’s not gonna ask, not when he doesn’t ask her about hers, past, like, clarifying shit for her safety and well being, or something else lame and sweet like that. But still. Huh.
She adds it to her mental-folder dedicated to ‘Peter Spankoffski Bonus Curse Facts’, next to horns and the still fucking baffling phrase ‘weregoat’.
Pete transforms every time the moon and sun line up with the Earth and, apparently, it’s exhausting.
It’s not much, but it’s something for her to consider, roll around in the back of her head the next time her dad makes her do something boring and time consuming. (So, like, probably literally tonight.)
wait she adds, thinking about it for a second isnt that litrlly what an eclipse is?
A surprised grin breaks across Pete’s face, bouncing over to her and then back down to the paper.
Yes! A total eclipse is the closest we get to perfect syzygy! It’s less consistent than moon cycles, obviously, but it does the same thing C-wise.
C she’s assuming, means curse. They’re really, probably not being as subtle as they should be, but she can’t find it in herself to care. She learned pretty early on that most people’s minds don't jump to ‘curse’ unless you give them an incredibly good reason for it to. And, even then, most of the time they’ll just assume you’re joking.
She makes a mental note, next to the Pete Curse Facts, to rip these pages out of her notebook later, though.
is it worse when the line up is better?
She doesn't consider how invasive that probably is until it’s already been written, and she’s using a pen, so it just sits there.
Pete stares at it for a long second. If he seems upset by it, he doesn’t show it, just sort of examines her question clinically, before reaching out to add something, hesitating, crossing it out, and then settling on, right below: Yes.
Steph feels guilty. And then she feels stupid for feeling guilty. It’s an annoying sort of back and forth, the urge to apologize, and the annoyance at feeling like she has to.
So, instead, she clicks her pen and writes: o FUCK eclipse is a twilight book too
Pete physically bites down on his sweater sleeve this time to stop himself from laughing too loud, but Mulberry clocks it anyway.
“Stephanie, Peter, be quiet and do your work. Am I going to have to separate you two?”
Fuck.
“No, Miss Mulberry,” Pete apologizes, sheepishly, but she only half hears it, “Sorry.”
She grinds her back molars together in frustration as her eyes flit down to her desk, not even looking as she snaps the notebook shut and automatically opens her book to the right page.
‘There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights--’
“Hey, if you want, you should do your work and be quiet only as is relative to the rest of the class right now,” Pete whispers, cutting through the dull, already-muddling-together Great Gatsby bullshit on the page in front of her.
She only half understands the Order, based specifically on how he words it, but the tightness in her chest loosens; her body processing it before her brain can. No one, literally no one is quietly doing their work right now, and everyone is being only as quiet as they have to be without getting in trouble.
It’s a subtle shift, an easy transition. The magic barely notices the original Order had been replaced with a new one.
She grins over at him, and he grins back.
Five minutes later, he falls asleep with his chin against the cap of his water bottle.
She doesn’t wake him up.
---
“If you know how to work out linear equations on a graphing calculator, you can do nonlinear equations too.”
Steph groans, overdramatically and not for the first time, ignoring Pete’s earnest attempt to walk her through a cheat sheet full of ways to graphically solve equations in favor of pressing her forehead into the top of her coffee cup. The tiny mouth hole in the lid leaks hot steam between her eyebrows.
They’ve been in Beanies for an hour at this point, studying, or, trying to, and Steph’s not understanding shit.
“Pete, I’m just stupid,” She insists, lifting her head, “Once you get over that, I think this’ll be less frustrating for you.”
At some point between texts asking him to help her not study, Pete’s got it in his head that he can help her do it better. Y’know, ‘if she wanted to’ and ‘just so she can actually have something to do if she ever gets stuck again.’
(She’d mind it more a month ago, when she had to waste her nights uselessly staring at Quizlets no matter how long she’d spent reviewing earlier in the day. Pete can help her study after school, if he’s getting her out of it later. It’s his dork-ass right.)
In his defense, he’s at least trying something newer than she ever has, breaking everything down so it’s a little more swallow-able, and drilling her on mnemonic devices or some shit. If she’s being honest, at least half of it is making slightly more sense than it normally would have, which is impressive.
Steph’s just a dumbass. It’s not his fault the other half refuses to stick.
“You aren’t stupid.”
“Yeah, okay,” she scoffs.
“You aren’t,” He insists, knocking his graphing calculator against the table with a clack, “Whoever didn’t think of helping you find your optimized method of study is stupid.”
It’s a dumb, earnest kind of belief he has in her, that she still thinks is insane, and unfounded as fuck, but it also makes her feel all warm and melty in a way she doesn’t know what to do with.
So she ignores it. Types 800085 into her own calculator and slides it across the table to him.
He looks down at it, and snorts, “Dumb.”
“A-ha!”
“Not you.” He says, voice flat but smiling, “The calculator boobs.”
And, okay, maybe it’s just the way he whispers boobs, like he’s not allowed to say it, or just the general insanity of him saying ‘calculator boobs’ at fucking all, but she tosses her head back and laughs.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m not… trying to be?” Pete snorts, looking both confused and a little too proud of himself.
“Yeah, I know.”
The bell rings, and behind Pete’s head, she catches sight of familiar blue and white uniforms as Stacy and Brenda walk in.
She flicks her eyes down to her notebook, and all its incomprehensible numbers and letters and Pete’s dumb, helpful annotated notes, before they automatically snap back up to her friends. Steph’s brain must be more desperate for a distraction that she thought, because she’s already completely fucking forgot the problem they were trying to solve in the first place.
It’s around then that Stacy spots her, glancing absently around the cafe as she rocks up and down on her toes. She freezes, tilted up, and whacks Brenda’s arm hard, before waving at Steph so frantically her whole arm goes blurry.
Brenda’s eyes flick around the room, before landing on Steph too, her mouth dropping open, which is, honestly, way too big a reaction for the situation. She absently hands her card over to the, clearly disgruntled, barista with one hand, aggressively gesturing for her to come over with the other.
Despite herself, Steph snorts.
Pete follows her sight line, twisting around in his seat. He turns back, mouth rounded in a little ‘oh’ of understanding.
“Steph! Get over here!” Brenda, apparently already done with being ignored, whispers so loudly it’s completely audible through the whole room.
Her legs jolt her half-standing before she can stop herself; bracing her hands against the underside of the table to keep her body, just for a second, from launching across the cafe.
(Which, actually, fucking gross. She’s in Beanie’s; they barely clean the top of tables. She yanks her hands back, pinning them crossed under her armpits instead.)
Pete leans his elbow on the table, tilting his head so it looks like he’s staring down at her notebook, muttering with… actually pretty impressive subtlety, “You don’t have to go over there if you don’t want to.”
The urgency in her stomach loosens. She glances over her shoulder. Both her friends stare back at her.
Pete flips a page in her notebook.
“And… if I… do want to?” She asks, carefully. Because, like, she definitely does, but that feels like a dick move when Pete is taking time out of his day to literally help her.
He glances up, with a confused little smile that's… way cuter than it should be, “Then you should go? That’s kinda the point of me saying ‘if you want to’.”
“Right, just…”
“It’s fine,” He laughs slightly, eyebrows still scrunched like he can’t even sort of understand why she’d feel bad about abandoning him here to go talk with her friends, “Really.”
“Thanks,” She says, trying to say so that it sticks. It’s almost frustrating how fucking touched she is every time Pete is a decent goddamn person. Well, touched, and a little uncomfortable in a way she can’t really name, “I’ll be right back, I swear.”
“Take your time,” He shrugs, yanking up his backpack to pull out a stupid thick textbook for, what she’s assuming, is one of his own classes. (Because it absolutely isn’t from a class that Steph is taking. That’s for fucking sure.)
His head snaps up so fast she doesn’t even have time to clock his wording, eyes huge, “If you want.”
She snorts, the stupid, dumb, ridiculously fond ‘touched’ feeling squeezing in her chest again, still sitting next to the same weird, unavoidable discomfort, “You’re ridiculous.”
He just rolls his eyes, pointedly slamming open his book, which feels like the Peter Spankoffski equivalent of ‘fuck off’.
So, she does. Because she wants to.
“Hey,” Steph grins, sidling up to them by the to-go counter, “What's up?”
“What's up?” Brenda scoffs, “What the fuck are you doing here with the fucking bowtie kid?”
She shrugs, hoping it looks just as casual as she’s forcing it to, “We’re doing a project together.”
Brenda crosses her arms, “For what class?”
“Why do you care?”
“You’re dodging the question,” Stacy points out, helpfully.
“No, I’m not. I just don’t appreciate being fuckin’ interrogated,” A barista sets Brenda’s coffee down on the counter, and she snatches it up before she can grab it, taking a sip just to be an asshole, “You not trust me or something?”
“Rude,” Brenda says, holding out her hand for the cup. She hands it over easily. It tasted like shit, anyway, “And no, I fucking don’t, babe. You got that look.”
Stacy nods in agreement, “Yeah. You, like, super do.”
“What look?”
“The hiding something one,” Stacy says, like she’s an idiot
A familiar, nervous feeling starts to squirm in her guts. The ‘being found out’ feeling that always comes, all on its own without any magic assistance, when someone looks a little too closely, or asks a question that's a little too relevant.
She knows, she knows that her friends aren’t gonna just fucking guess that she’s hanging out with Pete because they bonded over both being under mystical, magical curses, but still. She doesn’t want them thinking about it very hard.
“Come on, guys,” She says, meaner than she normally would be, “Do you actually think I’d be voluntarily hanging out with Peter Spankoffski if I didn’t have to?”
Guilt immediately replaces the nerves in her stomach. It’s a fucked up thing to say about someone who has done nothing but help her. And if she’s being fucking honest, Pete’s way chiller to hang out with half the people she’s actually friends with most of the time.
She glances over at him, on feeling-like-a-piece-of-shit autopilot, and is relieved to find him still buried in his textbook. She really hopes he hadn’t been listening.
But, no matter what a bitchy move it’d been, it worked. Brenda and Stacy both nod at her like they’ve bought it.
“That’s really fair, though.”
She rolls her eyes, “I know it is.”
The barista sets down Stacy’s frappuccino. Hot pink with raspberry syrup and off the menu (and therefore probably spit in.)
She grabs it, sticking her straw in the very, very top, “Okay, but actually, that’s not what we wanted to talk about.”
“Yeah?”
She asks through a mouthful of just whipped cream, “Are you going to Brad’s party?”
“Probably?”
Once again, and surprisingly, no one has, like, explicitly told her to yet, but she’ll probably go anyway if she’s got the choice. As much as she doesn’t like being Ordered to get fucked up, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t generally like getting fucked up.
It just depends on if her dad needs her for something else. Ugh. Fuck, she hopes not.
“It’s gonna be crazy,” Brenda adds, leaning her hip into the counter, even though they’ve both already got their drinks.
“Yeah,” Steph scoffs, “I heard he’s getting a keg.”
“Oh shit,” She grins, “Gonna defend your title?”
(Steph is well known for her keg stands.
Her freshman year at a party she probably shouldn’t have been at, some senior had clapped her on the shoulder and told her to ‘show them who's boss’, probably half to make fun of her, and, apparently, the Curse’s interpretation of ‘showing who's boss’ had been a full seventy four seconds. She’d felt like there was beer burning up her nose for, like, a week after.)
“If I gotta,” She grins back, eyebrows raised like a challenge. She kind of hopes she doesn’t gotta, right now, but who knows? Maybe Saturday Steph will feel differently. Probably Saturday Steph will feel differently. It depends on how many shots she gets told to take.
“You have to come,” Stacy insists, grabbing her arm in a hug and shaking them both back and forth.
The Order settles sugar sweet behind her teeth. Well, then, that’s settled.
“Yeah, I mean, I was planning on it.”
Stacy twirls her straw into the cup, “It’s gonna be, like, so fun.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s not, ‘least we got an excuse to trash Brad’s house.”
Stacy giggles around a sip, and Brenda throws the arm holding her drink up into the air and tosses her head back, “Fuck yes.”
“You guys got practice?” She asks, even though she knows the answer. The only time she isn’t aggressively invited to do literally anything with her friends is when they’re actively running late for cheer to get a little drink.
“Ugh, yes,” Brenda groans, “I’m literally dead though.”
“Well, I’m excited,” Stacy says, rocking up and down on her toes again. Brenda stretches out her leg and to kick at her.
“Have fun,” She snorts.
Brenda swerves her foot around to swing it at Steph’s ankles too, “Yeah, well, don’t get murdered by the nerd hipster while we’re gone.”
She rolls her eyes, ignoring the extra push of guilt that bubbles back up the back of her throat, “I’ll do my best.”
Stacy gives her a very solemn hug, like she’s going off to fucking war or some shit, and then they leave.
“Hey, sorry about that--” She swings back into her seat.
“You’re good,” Pete shrugs, voice a little muffled, like he's actively taking a sip. He blinks, pulling his cup out of his mouth, “Sorry. I mean, you’re all good.”
He sets down the cup, and the lip of the paper is unrolled a little, like he’s been gnawing on it.
Or. Actually. Had he been gnawing on it? That’s a thing goats do, right? Eat paper or tin cans or some shit? She’s definitely seen him chew on pencils before.
“Wait,” She asks, not able to keep the delight out of her voice, “Was that, like, a… Thing, thing?”
His eyes flick down to his cup and then back up to her, whole face pink, “I. I do not want to talk about this.”
“No, come on! If it is, you have to tell me.”
He laughs, “I don’t have to do shit, Lauter.”
“Wow, okay,” She crosses her arms, raising her eyebrows with a smirk, “Rub it in.”
“No, shoot, I didn’t mean--”
“Yeah, I know,” She scoffs, “Don’t worry. I’m just teasing you.”
“Right.” He rolls his eyes, lifting his cup again to take a sip before, presumably, spotting the chewed up edge and stopping, shoving the lid back on. It doesn’t go on easily, sitting a little crooked along the bitten side.
“You gotta stop making yourself such an easy target, dude.”
“Okay,” He chokes out an offended little laugh, “Is it just, like, be mean to Pete day? What's up?”
“No,” She concedes, the feeling-bad kicking off inside her again, “No, I’m sorry--”
“It’s fine,” He snorts, “I’m just teasing you.”
“Asshole.”
“I’m the asshole?”
“Yeah!” She balls up a napkin and throws it at him, landing it somewhere against his shoulder, “You didn’t even answer my question!”
“Oh my god,” He throws his head back, before dragging his hands down his face to sit him forward again. He drops his voice quiet, “Yes. It’s probably because of… that.”
“Insane.”
She says, because it is. She doesn’t know why it didn’t, like, cross her mind that there would be other lasting goat shit, past the horns and sort of pointy ears. Her curse isn’t nearly as physical, and there’s still random extra bullshit, like knowing the different fucking flavors of Magic.
But, like, still. Wild.
“Can we go back to studying?” He asks, a little pleadingly.
She groans, slumping low in her seat, “Do we have to?”
“I mean, you don’t, but I’m gonna.”
“Boring.”
“Yeah, well…” He shrugs, flipping a page in his textbook so fucking theatrically that it literally has to be for show.
“Fine.”
She cracks her notebook back open, flipping between pages for half a second to try and remind herself what the fuck she’d been doing, before another question shoves itself to the front of her mind.
“Okay, actually--”
Pete flops his face down into his book, “Oh my god.”
“No, but, like,” She reaches out, swatting limply at the hair that’s fallen closer to her side of the table, whispering, “Do you do other goat things?”
“What the--” He pushes himself sitting, face screwed up in a mishmash of obvious amusement and frustration, before it shifts hard to the side of clearly finding this funny, “Okay. Actually. No, I’ll tell you, if you can name a single other goat thing.”
“Wow,” Steph draws it out, long and falsely-offended, “And suddenly he does think I’m stupid.”
“No,” He insists, still looking a tiny bit frantic, the way he always does when Steph fucks with him, but it’s way less desperate this time. More fondly done with her fucking shit, “Just, generally, people don’t know shit about fucking goats, Stephanie.”
“This is fucked up.” She whines.
“I try,” He nods, unphased by her fucking plight, “Now, do you wanna keep going over variables or should I go back to my AP Chem homework?”
“Ugh.” She knows Pete won’t make her keep reviewing if she doesn’t want to. Genuinely. He probably won’t even be disappointed, the fucking asshole.
He stares at her, expectantly.
She groans, pointedly, grabbing her calculator from where it’s still sitting between them, “Fine.”
---
pete 🐐
You
wait dudde do u crave that mineral
pete 🐐
… pardon?
You
thats antoher goat thign right? liek the fuckinggg meme from 1 millon years ago
pete 🐐
1.This absolutely does not count for my offer to tell you, it’s been, like, six hours and you’ve had time to research. That’s 100% cheating.
pete 🐐
2. Holy cow, I haven’t thought about that since I was, like, eleven? What the fuck??
You
thats bulshit u did NOT fgive me a time limitt
You
anwser the question goat boy
pete 🐐
I’m rolling my eyes at you. Can you picture me rolling my eyes at you?
You
PETER DO U CRAVE THT MINRAL??
You
HOW HARD DO U FUCK W SALT??
You
YOU LEGALLY HAVE TO TELL ME I THOGUHT OF ANOTHER GOAT THING
pete 🐐
Okay, once again, this feels like cheating. But, I mean, I guess?
pete 🐐
My mom gets really offended over how much I salt her cooking?
pete 🐐
That may not be a goat thing, though. She’s not a particularly good cook.
You
ILL TAKE IT