Chapter Text
i. friends
Charlie asks him how school is going during breakfast. Jay narrowly avoids choking on his toast as he tries to answer that without alarming the man.
"It's going," he says.
Charlie gives him a look.
"It's going decently," he insists. Which it is. If you looked at it cross-eyed, upside down, and on drugs.
Charlie's eyebrows do the thing, the same furrow-y, confused expression that Charlie made when Jay showed up at his doorstep with a duffel bag and his mom's favorite cardigan.
Jay shoves a spoonful of egg yolk into his mouth, mind racing.
He isn't exactly sure how to break it to the man, but most of his teachers are under the impression that Charlie will come for them if they harass him. And no one wants an irate Charlie.
At first, there were a lot of questions and a lot of people humoring him. Ms. Cope seemed to think it was cute when Charlie enrolled him in the freshman class. But then Jay continued to show up, and then they realized the Police Chief's feral problem child was going to be a permanent fixture.
So now that it's October, they just treat him as an interesting sort of oddity, who gets the same homework assigned as kids older than him with increasingly wary looks. He's a curious figure, the boy who's skipped three years due to delusions that won't shut up. (Not that anyone really knows about said delusions, of course.)
It's kind of working out for him to be honest. He walked into high school as a twelve-year-old and a res kid. He needs every sort of advantage he can get.
Jay’s also aware that he’s not exactly the ideal student, but he is mostly quiet. Gets his work done. He’s not friendly with anyone, but that’s really a positive. He doesn’t want to get close to any of these fuckers, not when they’re in the way of his ultimate goal. (And if he's sometimes lonely, well. It'll pass.)
Charlie is quiet when he tells him this. Charlie, unfortunately, seems to believe he needs friends. But then again, Charlie also took him in, so maybe Charlie's the one with shit judgment.
“And uh... what is your goal?” He wouldn’t usually consider telling anyone, other than maybe his dad and Seth, but it’s Charlie, so.
“I’m going to work for NASA and see if I can punch a hole through time and space. I’m also going to be rich.” He says this with gravity, of course, as much as someone twelve can have gravity.
Charlie’s eyebrows are now caterpillars. He opens his mouth a bit, before closing it. He visibly collects himself.
“A hole in space?” He nods.
“Gotta aim high.” Charlie looks at him, and nods slowly.
“Right. Okay, but how does that relate to not having friends?” Jay tries not to sigh.
"I don't like any of them." Or rather, none of them liked him. And he couldn't even blame them, considering he was the outsider, the interloper, the weird kid bunking at Chief Swan's house while his personal life went to shit.
Charlie, being who he is, gave him another look, and hesitantly patted his shoulder. Jay, being starved for human touch, relaxed at the contact.
A moment of comforting silence between two people who were both terrible at vocalizing their feelings, and then Charlie clapped his back.
"Well," the man said, "I'll drop you off."
And Jay, knowing there was no way to dig his social reputation any lower, shoved the last bits of egg into his mouth before getting up to wash his plate.
Besides, having the cruiser there is a reminder. Jay's bigger than himself, has someone who cares enough to make sure he has friends. It's best that everyone knows that he's not going to be their easy target.