Chapter Text
Puke Girl is written in sharpie on her locker, she wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also scratched into the metal underneath. It’s written like it’s her real name too, first name Puke, last name Girl, middle name’s probably either April or something more matching, like middle name ‘freakout.’
So much for stepping out of the background. Well, she has stepped out of the background, in a sense, but all that’s gotten her so far is bullying. Which is sort of unfair. She thought that the world after COVID was looking up, that there’d finally be a lack of stereotypical 80’s tv show bullying.
Maybe she got her hopes a little too far up. No way humans could just improve that fast.
Classes are something of a break. April’s not a star student – she might’ve been, once upon a time, but her parents are just a bit too smart for that – by any means, but she knows how to tune into what the teachers are saying than acknowledge the mocking eyes on her back.
She dyes her curls red, again. A dark shade, not overly vibrant. She does this every so often. It’ll wash out after a week or two, but it sort of makes her feel cooler. Or more like herself. (Despite being a reporter, she’s never been too great with words.) Her parents never comment.
Attention sucks. Attention is a black sharpie, shouted insults, locking her phone because it seems like her entire tiktok feed is just her stupid face, that stupid video. She hadn’t pegged anyone here as a full-on asshole before, but nowadays she can barely tell who’s actually kind around here.
Teens are stupid. Go figure.
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Admittedly, April’s a bit hostile the first time the guy comes up to her. But who wouldn’t be?
“Are you okay?” he asks, and April turns around to face the teenager. They’re certainly… noticeable. April’s surprised that she’s never seen them around before. She’d peg them about 5’10”, 5’11”-ish, with blonde hair that’s a bright blonde that has to be dyed. The rest of their outfit just adds to the loudness of their person, a blue turtleneck, black jeans, and mismatched hightops. Again: how has she not seen them before?
“Why do you ask?” She asks.
They acquire a weird expression for a moment, before working it out with a deep breath. “I’m not going to make an Alice Oseman joke,” they repeat to themselves three times. Another deep breath. “I saw all the shit people are throwing around. Can’t believe nobody’s called bullshit yet.”
Woah, could it be? An actual, living and breathing, kind human being in the hellscape that is highschool!? Incredible, showstopping; groundbreaking, even. “Yeah, me neither. I hate people sometimes.”
“Real,” they groan. April gets a chance to scan them get again: they’ve got a backpack on, but they’re still electing to carry all of their books in their arms. Fair enough, using her backpack to carry everything makes her ache after a week of school. “So I’m guessing you’re not good?”
“Dude,” she responds. “We just met.”
They wince. Rethink their approach, and then miraculously manage to hold their giant stack of books in only one arm, extending the other to April in a handshake. “Leon, he/him.”
April’s paranoia must seriously be acting up today, because the first thing she does is watch for one of those prank rings that shock you. When she luckily doesn’t spot one, she takes the hand in return. “April O’Neil, she/her.” It’s nice that there are finally people working pronouns into conversations like they aren’t a big deal. Definitely good vibes from this guy, she’s already decided.
He takes back his hand, readjusting his stack of textbooks. Guy seriously needs to use a locker, damn that looks heavy. “So are you okay, then?”
Bruh. Back to this again. This guy’s certainly stubborn. “‘M fine,” she insists.
He arches an eyebrow at her. He’s lucky that classes haven’t started for the day, because otherwise she probably would’ve ended this conversation by now. “Nah, you’ve got angst vibes. I’m not going to make you spill anything, but don’t try to lie about it. Trust me, doing that sucks.”
She tucks her hands into her pants pockets, ignoring the way that her backpack straps chafes on her armpits. “Well, yeah, I’ve got angst vibes. I’m a teenager,” she jokes.
That earns a snrk. The guy walks beside her, and so she’s just gonna let him follow until she makes it to homeroom, or he has to go another direction.
“I’m good,” April reiterates. “It sucks a bit, I guess, but there isn’t anything that I can do about it, and I’m learning to deal. It’ll probably blow over in a few months, anyways. It’s been, like, three days? Four. Yeesh– that’s actually not that long now that I’m thinking about it.”
“I hate time,” Leon says, in a way sounds like he’s agreeing with April, though the sentence itself leaves that sort of up to a guess. “Like, I love knowing when I should be doing certain things, but whoever said hey, we should create these things called days– that guy? Whoever he was? Fuck him. And I don’t mean that in the– no sex jokes with people you just met.”
And then it’s April’s turn to laugh because godammit, this guy talking to himself has no right to be that funny.
She gets the barest glimpse of a relaxed and satisfied smirk before it’s gone again. The action is barely even a second, for all she knows she could have imagined it.
“Are you in Mr. Olin or Mr. Maul– oh! Maul like the guy from… from uh… Star Wars! No wonder everyone keeps laughing when he introduces himself! I thought it was ‘cause he sounds like he got a grape stuck up his throat.”
Before April can think better of it, she asks, “ADHD?”
Leon smirks in response. “What gave it away? My dazzling charm? My blinding energy? My incredible jokes?”
“You went from hating the passage of time to sex to classes to Star Wars,” April explains. She swallows down the I’m a journalist, I notice things part of the jab because the last thing she wants ruining this is a Puke Girl joke. (Great, now she’s thinking about if again.)
“Fair, fair. I still think it adds to my charm.”
“Is this flirting?” She asks, before this gets any further.
Leon fake-gags dramatically. He adds his hands into the movement, which turns into a mistake as he frantically readjusts so that he doesn’t drop any textbooks. “Yeah, no. I’m the gayest guy in this whole building, I’m telling you.”
April arches an eyebrow, even though it seems like he’s barely looking. “Sure, sure.”
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The next time she notices Leon, it’s him dropping his lunch tray at her typically empty table, which startles her enough that she slams her journal shut, right on her fingers.
“Oof,” Leon remarks, looking at her now trapped hand in question. He’s just sat down and he’s already tapping his nails against the edge of his plastic tray, knee already beginning to bounce if the way he’s shaking slightly is any indication.
Taking a few deep breaths to work off her surprise at seeing Leon, she slowly releases her hand from out of the journal. “Don’t worry about it,” she reassures. “That was… not the first time I’ve done that.”
“You giving that hand a break at least?” He asks, a lilt in his voice that April can’t quite identify. “From experience, hurting one in a set is just gonna fuck the other one up worse in the long run.” A pause. He works his jaw a bit before finally finding his words. “Should not have said that like a metaphor, ugh. Your hands get lonely, y’know?”
“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not,” April admits. She slides the journal off to the side (when there’s nobody else at your table, you’re allowed to be rude with how much space you take up, who the hell's about to yell at her for it) and begins unzipping her lunchbox.
“Part of the charm,” Leon says vaguely. He makes a disgusted noise, and when April glances back at the teen, she finds him staring down at his lunch.
She reaches for her sandwich. “And that’s why I don’t have the school lunches,” she states.
“It looks like a cooked rat,” he says. “I– yeah, blegh, no. This apple better be worth it, because it’s gonna need to carry me through work.” The hunk of… brown… that’s supposedly a chicken tender hits against the tray with a thunk, and Leon grabs his apple instead, biting into it ruthlessly. He chews, grimacing all the while. “5/10,” he decides.
“If you think I’m about to be that stereotype that offers you fruit snacks, it’s not coming,” April admits. “One, I don’t have fruit snacks. Two, this is highschool.”
“Nah, nah,” he reassures, “It’s fine. I’ve ate weirder looking shit. But I’m gonna put it off ‘till I have the energy, because yeesh. Should’ve headed the warnings.”
She doesn’t ask him what he’d been expecting from school lunches, the notoriously terrible food source. Especially when this is an underfunded public school, where there are flies going in and out of lockers and hovering above trash cans, half the bathroom stalls don’t lock, and one of the projectors is directed at a chalkboard. Yes – not a whiteboard, a chalkboard, that makes the stupid scratching sound every single time the teacher writes anything on it (he likes it, something something chalk hoarding).
Instead, she asks, “Do you usually not buy lunch?”
Leon winces. He covers this up quickly with another large bite into his apple, grimacing slightly as he’s hit by the mediocre taste. “Me ‘n my brothers were homeschooled. This is my first year.”
“Ah, that explains it.”
“Hey. That felt rude,” Leon points out.
April smiles. She’s known this guy for what, a few hours? But he seems to be the one teenager in this entire building who doesn’t participate in public shaming, and other than that he doesn’t seem like all too bad company. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,” she remarks.
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He wears the same outfit the next day. She knows because he does the same routine of sneaking up on her before classes start, and then again at lunch. They’re both talkative, but Leon knows how to own a conversation and so she ends up just listening to him run randomly from topic to topic most days.
Yeah, most days. Two weeks later, Leon has shown that he only wears two outfits, and is stubborn enough to talk to April every chance that he gets.
What about his brothers, you might ask? April certainly did. She didn’t really get a clear response, just a deflection, and then in typical Leon fashion he got himself sidetracked quickly.
April’s beginning to assemble a page for him in her notebook. This kid, apparently homeschooled his entire life with brothers, does not interact with anyone except her at school. It seems like he’s singled her out for no good reason – he’s easy to get along with, he could totally slide in with the popular crowd, but instead he spends every day sitting in the corner of the cafeteria with Puke Girl.
It’s almost like he doesn’t want any attention, despite the way he looks. Like, in general. He’s pretty bright, all over.
She doesn’t like the picture that her brain begins to paint for her. It’s probably not right. Because when he talks about his brothers, he’s always smiling, and yet…
He doesn’t want to talk to them. Are they… bad brothers? She’s not going to ask just yet, she needs a little more proof, but that question begins to nag at her as she continues scribbling thing on his page in her notebook.
A month passes. She still doesn’t have any of his socials, let alone his phone number.
For the record? No, she’s not invested in this. She just has nothing better to do. Getting invested in someone else’s personal life is weird and wrong and she’s not about that. Totally. That’s of course why she got into journalism– she is going to stop this train of thought right here—
Time is certainly… moving. The news keeps reporting on these mysterious ‘mutant’ cryptids, performing robberies from the shadows. Despite all of those stories, nobody has managed to get a proper picture to accompany those headlines, not even a silhouette. April’s getting slowly and slowly more intrigued by the story, especially when the mysterious Superfly enters the equation of higher crime rates. Shit’s getting dangerous, sure, but that also means shit’s getting interesting.
It doesn’t take any attention off of her, but still. The thoughts keep her distracted.
Leon gets invested in the same story. They shoot ideas back and forth at their lunch table, both getting more and more outrageous about it every time, like it’s a game. It does create some interesting theories, however, and before April knows it, she’s stashing up a conspiracy board in the photo lab, sneaking in during fake bathroom breaks and study hall because things quickly get interesting.
Majority of the crimes are tech-related. There are plenty of people who know Superfly’s name, but nobody seems to know what the crime lord actually looks like. He has his own goons, but aside from some vague height/weight descriptions (that are probably bullshit, considering one of them is supposedly shorter than the average height of a person with dwarfism) nobody has any idea who any of those guys are.
Following this story, even in small moments and with barely any leads, is like a breath of fresh air. There’s no concrete answers to anything, which is such a refreshing thrill. Sure, somehow the Puke Girl thing refuses to calm down even though it was ages ago, but when she’s sitting with her laptop in a room bathed in red, for a moment the world just gets a little bit more exciting.
Leon asks about her board, once. He makes a strange expression when he sees it, asks a few vague questions that send April’s head spinning, and then he leaves. It’s the most dismissive thing that he’s ever done.
He’s just sort of… like that, sometimes, with no real explanation. Random things will suddenly make him completely divert the conversation, happening so often April figures that it has to be intentional.
To end her status update? Confused. Two different mysteries have rooted themself into her life, and she promises to herself that she’s going to be the first to solve at least one of them.