The ancient Dell screen flickers like it's having an existential crisis—which, honestly, makes two of us. I'm hunched over my Jurassic-era laptop in Ashcroft High's library, bathed in the kind of blue glow that screams "virgin at seventeen" to anyone with functioning retinas. The place is more deserted than a Discord server after a major drama, which suits me just fine.
Every sane student cleared out hours ago, probably doing normal teenager things like having friends or touching grass. But here's the thing about sanity—it's overrated when you've got gigabytes of "research material" to download. And yes, before you ask, I'm absolutely browsing F95Zone in a public library like some kind of degenerate mastermind.
Look, I prefer the term "man of culture," thank you very much.
The truth is pathetically simple: no WiFi at home. Mom's convinced the internet will "rot my brain" while simultaneously binge-watching reality TV about people eating bugs for money. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife, but pointing that out only gets me lectures about "respect" and "ungrateful attitudes."
So here I am, digital refugee in glasses in a public library doing questionable things.
Mrs. Shirley shuffles around behind the circulation desk, organizing books with the enthusiasm of someone defusing a bomb. She's got that special brand of social inertia that comes from decades of shushing teenagers and slowly dying inside. We've reached an unspoken understanding: she pretends not to notice my questionable browsing habits, and I pretend not to notice her sneaking romance novels behind the encyclopedias.
My current "acquisition" is a little gem called My Grandmother's House—a visual novel about a guy returning to his grandmother's place for summer vacation and meeting her... ahem... particularly friendly neighbors. It's exactly what you think it is, wrapped in enough plot to maintain plausible deniability.
Judge me all you want, but I'm seventeen with the social life of a hermit crab. My hormones are staging a full-scale rebellion, my DMs are drier than the Sahara, and my dating prospects make the heat death of the universe look optimistic. A guy's got to work with what he's got.
The download bar creeps toward completion with all the urgency of continental drift. I adjust my glasses—a nervous tic I've perfected over years of avoiding eye contact—and glance around the empty library. The silence is so complete I can hear my own breathing.
Ding. Download complete.
I shut down the laptop with the reverence of someone handling ancient artifacts, stuff it into my beat-up messenger bag, and stretch muscles that have apparently turned to concrete. One hour of hunching over a keyboard like Quasimodo's nerdy cousin. Living the dream.
"Good evening, Mrs. Shirley," I call out, because I'm nothing if not polite to fellow social outcasts.
She grunts something that might be human language and waves a dismissive hand. Our friendship knows no bounds.
Outside, the sky has decided to cosplay as my emotional state—dark, wet, and thoroughly unpleasant. The rain's picked up since this morning, turning Ashcroft High's campus into something resembling a low-budget apocalypse movie. I pop my umbrella and shift my bag to my chest, because protecting my laptop is literally protecting my social life, gaming library, and entertainment system all in one.
My bike—a rusty monument to better times—squeaks in protest as I mount it. The streets are empty except for the occasional car blazing past in streaks of light and color, their drivers probably rushing home to families and warm dinners and all those normal human experiences I've only read about in visual novels.
Halfway home, I cut through the alley behind Merchant Street. It's a shortcut I've used a hundred times, narrow and poorly lit but shaving five minutes off my commute. The rain pounds harder here, trapped between brick walls that smell like urban decay.
That's when I see him.
A figure detaches itself from the shadows like something out of a horror movie, except this particular monster wears designer sneakers and has daddy issues instead of claws. He plants himself in the middle of the alley with the confidence of someone who's never faced real consequences for anything.
My stomach drops faster than my GPA in calculus.
I don't need to see his face to know who it is. The posture screams entitled asshole in seventeen different languages. I start turning my bike around, hoping to retreat before this becomes the kind of problem that ends with me explaining black eyes to school nurses.
But hope, as they say, is the first step on the road to disappointment.
Two more shapes materialize behind me, cutting off my escape route like some kind of wannabe gang initiation. Great. Just fantastic. I'm about to get jumped in an alley like some background character in a crime drama.
I abandon my bike—poor thing's suffered enough—and back against the brick wall, heart hammering against my ribs like it's trying to escape this situation independently. Maybe if I make myself small enough, they'll lose interest and find some other social pariah to torment.
"If it isn't the man we've been waiting for." The voice cuts through the rain with the smugness of someone who's never been told no in any meaningful way. "How are you doing, nerd?"
Sade Henderson. Of course it's Sade fucking Henderson.
Picture everything wrong with nepotism, entitlement, and small-town royalty, then wrap it in a varsity jacket and give it daddy's credit card. That's Sade. His father owns a chain of electronics stores and plays golf with the mayor, which in Ashcroft apparently qualifies you for minor deity status.
"Yeah, we been waitin' for ya for quite some time, nerd. That's not cool."
The dynamic duo flanking him—Tyler and Brian, or possibly Brian and Tyler—are so interchangeably generic they could be copy-pasted NPCs. In any self-respecting visual novel, they'd literally be named "Bully #1" and "Bully #2." Their entire personality consists of laughing at Sade's jokes and having the collective IQ of a potato.
"Yeah, we gonna bust yo' teeth for that. Making us wait in this rain."
I want to scream that their poor life choices aren't my fault, but that's the kind of logic that gets you hospitalized. These aren't the type of people who respond well to reason—they're the type who see reason as a personal insult.
"Look, Sade," I say, trying to inject some calm into my voice while my fight-or-flight response does the Macarena. "I don't know what this is about. I just want to go home. Can we maybe not do this in the rain?"
Dealing with people like Sade is like trying to negotiate with a hurricane. De-escalation just pisses them off more, and escalation gets you murdered. Your only options are to somehow beat them at their own game—which, let's be honest, involves me bench-pressing their combined weight—or talk fast enough to find an opening.
"You see, nerd," Sade takes a step closer, his cronies moving to flank me like wolves circling a particularly pathetic deer, "I'm really unhappy right now. You know why?"
"I honestly have no idea what's going on," I say, which is the truth but probably not what he wants to hear.
His hand lands on my shoulder with the weight of impending violence. "I found a message on my girlfriend's phone. Guess who sent it?"
My blood turns to ice water. "I—"
"That's right. You." His grip tightens. "And now I want to know why the fuck you're flirting with MY GIRLFRIEND!"
The last part comes out as a roar that probably wakes half the neighborhood. My shoulder feels like it's being crushed in a vice, and I'm pretty sure he's about to escalate this from "unpleasant conversation" to "dental reconstruction."
What girlfriend? I don't even talk to girls, let alone flirt with them. My idea of smooth talking involves explaining game mechanics and arguing about anime power scaling. The closest I've come to romance is choosing dialogue options in dating sims.
"Sade, this is a misunderstanding. I don't even know your girlfriend."
His eyes narrow to slits. "Are you calling me a liar, you fucking nerd?"
"N-no! I'm just saying there's been some kind of mistake—"
"Amber Sullivan. Ring any bells?"
The name hits me like a freight train made of embarrassment and confusion.
Amber. Blue-haired Amber with the hazel eyes and that way of talking about video games like they actually mattered. The only girl in school who doesn't look at me like I'm some kind of exotic zoo animal. We paired up for a computer science project a couple weeks ago, and afterward, I helped her build her gaming PC—purely platonic tech support, nothing more.
But the idea that she's dating Sade Henderson makes about as much sense as a vegan steakhouse. They're like opposite ends of the social spectrum. Oil and water. Peanut butter and... I don't know, existential dread.
"Sade, I swear I wasn't flirting with her. We just worked on a project together, and I helped her with some computer stuff. I didn't even know you two were—"
The punch comes out of nowhere.
My left eye explodes in stars and pain, the world tilting sideways as I double over. Before I can recover, Tyler and Brian grab my arms, hauling me upright like some kind of meat puppet.
"I'm gonna fuck you up so bad you'll never dare to look her way again," Sade says, cracking his knuckles with the grin of someone who's found his calling in life.
The second punch catches my jaw. The third splits my lip, filling my mouth with the metallic taste of my own blood. The fourth breaks my nose with a wet crunch that makes my stomach lurch.
By the time he moves to body shots—probably worried about leaving visible evidence—I can barely see through the swelling and tears. Punch after punch lands on my ribs and stomach until even his henchmen can't keep me upright anymore.
They release my arms just as Sade throws one final uppercut. The force sends me stumbling backward like a drunk toddler, and I crash into a puddle of rainwater that's been collecting near the alley's dead end.
That's when I see it—the exposed electrical cable lying in the water, sparking intermittently like some kind of cartoon death trap. In the split second before I hit the puddle, I have just enough time to think: Of course. Of fucking course.
Electricity courses through my body like liquid fire, every nerve ending screaming in unison. It feels like being torn apart and reconstructed at the molecular level, like someone's rewriting my source code with a rusty knife.
The last thing I see before consciousness abandons ship is Sade, Tyler, and Brian backing away with the horrified expressions of people who just realized they might have graduated from "assault" to "manslaughter."
Then darkness swallows everything, and for once in my life, I'm grateful for the reprieve.