Chapter Text
“Hey! I brought that for both of us!”
“Should’ve been hungrier. Fridge is empty unless you’re in the mood for Budweisers and mold.”
“It's not very nice to steal.”
“ ‘IT’S NOT VERY NICE TO STEAL.’ That’s how you sound when you talk like that. You sound like a baby.”
“...”
“What?... Oh my God, are you actually upset?”
“No. It’s-it’s just, I brought that for both of—”
“Hey, wanna play ‘kick the toad’?”
“...What’s ‘kick the toad’?
“It’s a game I play by the creek, c’mon.”
Dustin pushed open the heavy metal doors. He zipped up his hoodie-jacket as he and the four other drivers stepped into Olathe’s cool, pre-dawn air. They swung their tired limbs as they exited the loading dock and herded themselves into the chain-linked parking lot.
The gig was as follows: a rattly eleven o’clock bus to the warehouse district, pushing his truck key into the ignition, driving out to the farms to load up the produce crates, rolling up to the packaging center, unloading everything, then driving all the way back to the warehouse.
Working under the cover of night, you’d think they were doing something illegal rather than just delivering the food that would be on the supermarket shelves the next morning. It made sense to Dustin, though. People didn’t like seeing the underbelly; it made them uncomfortable.
No one knew that better than him.
“See ya, Dustin,” said a squat, curly-haired driver. While his company ID card read Lorenzo Hernandez, everyone just called him Lardy. Lardy was the first—well, only—person here who tried talking to him. Dustin enjoyed waiting around before shifts with Lardy. He liked the way Lardy talked about his day, his home life. He liked the way Lardy produced accordions of pictures of his wife, parents, grandparents, and many, many brothers from his wallet to illustrate the dramas between the branches of his family tree. He liked the way Lardy pronounced his name—Dostin.
Dustin didn’t know what Lardy’s motivations were, but he didn’t really care. Sympathy, pity, religion—the result was the same. Words custom made for him and him only were the best thing people like him could hope for.
Could you be grateful but resigned? Dustin thought you could.
Lardy waved as he unlocked his car. Dustin silently waved back. He put his hands in his pockets as he left the company parking lot and its insect-flittering light into the gravel shoulder running parallel to the pot-holed road.
It was a three-mile walk back home and the buses had stopped running six hours ago. But it wasn’t too bad. After spending hours hunched over a steering wheel in a cramped truck cabin, Dustin appreciated the opportunity to stretch his legs.
After a few strides, the polite mahp-mahp of a car honk brought Dustin to a halt. A beat-up, duct-tape-on-a-tire car pulled up beside him. The window rolled down and Lardy leaned his head out.
“I know, I know, you’re tired of me asking, but are you sure you don’t want a drive back this time, güey?”
Dustin shook his head, but tried smiling in a way that showed he appreciated it.
Lardy shrugged in surrender, rolled up the window, and drove off.
Dustin watched Lardy and the other cars drive past, waiting for the droning thrum of engines to dissipate into the distance. He stayed there for a long while, staring at the horizon, unsure of what he was waiting for.
Dustin sighed. He looked down the barrel of long, dark road. He walked.
Loneliness was a habit, a skill Dustin exercised to the point of talent. It wasn’t like he liked it. No one ‘aspired’ to be by themselves—Dustin certainly didn’t think so. But some people in life are either shoved into solitude, or magnetically drift towards its seductive safety. Sometimes it was both. Either way, done often enough it sank into your skin, seeped into your bones, until it became instinct.
He sighed again. Darnit. Maybe he should’ve said yes, just this once. Maybe he could have sat in the passenger seat, feeling the car dip slightly under his weight as he ducked his head to fit inside, and maybe Lardy would have told a joke, and maybe Dustin would have been comfortable enough to ask Lardy why he kept a rosary wrapped around his rear-view mirror, and maybe Lardy would have explained it, and maybe Lardy would have invited Dustin to dinner sometime to meet that family of his, and maybe…
...Dustin would’ve screwed it up somehow. And then he’d have no one to listen to before shifts.
He walked.
The air was silent save for the crunch of his sneakers against the gravel path. He passed landscapes of industrial warehouses and cavernous truck garages leaning against each other like tired old men.
He’d forgotten how flat it was around here. A couple of hours south were towns nestled between sky-piercing mountains, embraced by wide rivers, and shaded under tall pines. But out here, everything was swathed in an impressive carpet of swaying prairie grass.
He breathed in deeply. He could still feel its texture in his memory, even if he couldn’t quite smell it anymore: the nostalgic scent of damp, earthy air.
It was sheer coincidence how it all worked out, really. The wing of the freight company he used to work at was being hit by hard times and wanted to station him in Olathe, and it was made pretty clear he could kiss his job goodbye if he had tried digging his heels in.
Dustin would have said something, but he was never one to raise his voice.
◇ ◇ ◇
“So over there is the gym-slash-auditorium. Assemblies are every Tuesday.”
Nod.
“And that’s the cafeteria. Don’t drink the milk. The expiration dates are bogus.”
Nod nod.
“Annnnd down that hallway is the library. Do you do sports? My big sister Lucy does. Once she wouldn’t accept a certificate she got from soccer finals because her last name was spelt wrong on the paper and she got so mad she fractured the coach’s shin with her cleats. I would never do that though, I hate soccer. Also I am very nice.”
Dusty lifted and lowered his chin in acknowledgement as Sally Zhao led him through the crowded halls of Olathe Middle School. She continued chattering away as Dusty looked at the throng of students. It was like snorkeling in a colorful reef. Kids in bright backpacks and shoes, headbands and socks. Swimming in groups, vibrantly flashing their scales as they ran and skipped and shoved against each other. Complex subcultures and intertwining friend groups and snatches of inside jokes and after-school promises communicated in crisp, clear voices floated above their heads like bright, shining bubbles.
Sally was clearly part of them—a coral fish in her pink-yellow plaid dress, waving her fins at other girls in similar styles.
If they were coral fish, Dusty was a mollusk. Slowly trudging along the bottom. Watching them all from below.
Dusty was the new kid, but he was by no means new at being the new kid. Being moved around a lot did that to you. He was a foster, and being a foster meant having his stuff stolen when he wasn’t home, wearing old hand-me-downs that strained to keep up with his accelerating growth spurts, and, of course, doing the whole ‘First Day’ routine over and over.
He’d really thought the last place was going to keep him for just a bit longer. But after a case worker caught his last foster mother nodding off during a home visit because she’d slipped too much 'syrup' into her coffee, Dusty had to be relocated. Again.
He was taken to Olathe, a place best known for BMX and sweet corn. The new home was busy. He was the oldest of five. Three were in elementary, and the youngest was a two-year-old prone to crying at least twice a day. His new foster mother was an older lady with gray streaks and sunken eyes named Edna. She was always being stretched in all directions like one of the stuffed animals the younger boys were always fighting over.
Being the eldest, it was clear Dusty was expected to look after himself. He tried being helpful: washing up after meals, keeping his bed neat—hoping that whatever he did to help around the house would earn him some attention. A question on how his day was. Or how he was feeling. But usually, as soon as Edna saw Dusty taking charge cleaning or had ascertained he wasn’t trying to set anything on fire, she would just plod off to bed.
It wasn’t the worst house he’d been in. There was no one old enough to pick on him at least. But he really wished he could’ve just stayed in the last house.
Moving into a new room always felt like stepping into something haunted. There were signs of past life everywhere. The suspicious stains on the bed sheets that could never be quite cleaned and lingered like ghosts, the small holes and overly-worn feel of borrowed clothes, the scratches and pencil marks scrawled under the drawers that someone must’ve written while lying on the floor.
He wondered about the kids who had made these marks. The kid who wet the bed because they had a nightmare and needed to muster up the courage to tell someone. The kid who owned a printed T-shirt of a cartoon they didn’t even like that got more and more faded every year. The kid carving messages under the drawers hoping someone, anyone, would see it, understand how they felt.
Sure, they were just scuff marks, stains, vandalism. But Dusty recognised them for what they were. Pleading cries to be remembered. To be seen.
That was just it, wasn’t it? The isolating repetition. Hand-me-down sheets, hand-me-down clothes—he was living a hand-me-down life. Placed in government cars, public buses, passed from town to town, house to house, bed to bed, until he was worn down to almost nothing.
That’s what it was like going through the system. Like it was slowly sapping the life out of you. Draining you of color until you were as bleached and thread-bare and blank as the fifth-hand clothes you wore.
Dusty’s step faltered.
He looked left. Then quickly right.
Oh, God. He’d lost sight of Sally.
His eyes darted everywhere until— There. She was a few yards ahead, gliding through the crowd of kids before turning a corner into another locker-filled corridor.
Dusty gripped his backpack straps and shouldered through the sea of bodies, hurried around the corner, and got behind Sally—rejoining the slipstream of her voice as if he’d never left.
Sally noticed none of this. She hadn’t stopped talking.
“...and yeah that’s why I can’t get trying to get on a teacher’s bad side. Ooooooh, like Mr. Muehler. He’s our homeroom teacher, but he teaches science too. Word is that two days ago, someone, I don’t know who, put one of the salamanders they were dissecting on his chair when he wasn’t looking, and he sat right on it. Like—SPLAT! All over his butt! He went absolutely nuclear. Kept the whole class for nearly twenty minutes trying to figure out who did it, but nobody spilled! Can you believe it? He’s been treating everyone in his classes like satan spawn, and no one’s dared get an inch on him since. Is it weird I kinda wish I was there, though? Anyway.”
Sally jumped to a halt, spun in place, and pulled out a slip of paper.
“This is your locker combination. Don’t worry, I only looked at the first two digits. You have your timetable, right?”
...Nod.
Sally gave him the paper slip, paused, then put her hands on her hips. It was her turn to perform a full lifting and lowering of the chin just to look him up and down. Dusty had always been a head taller than most kids—teachers had been asking Dusty if he was in the right building since he was in elementary.
There wasn’t much to see. Shoes with grubby laces; gray, washed-out jeans; and a thinning, red-and-white-striped polyester-blend T-shirt that he had to constantly pull down to cover the swell of his stomach.
Sally’s black pigtails swayed as she tilted her head to the side. “You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?
Dusty nodded in a way he hoped communicated: Yep! That’s me! Quiet Kid. Conventionally unconventional.
“All right,” she said. “Well. Homeroom’s over there. Bye.” Sally gave a hasty little wave, spotted a girl she recognised, and left to go gab away—a fish rejoining its school and swimming in perfect synchronicity.
Dusty looked at the slip of paper he was holding. He turned to the corresponding steel locker, spun the combination into the knob, opened it, and rested his chin on the cold metal shelf inside.
He sighed. His voice echoed around him in the dark.
He could think all he wanted about how unfair and crummy it was to live like he did, not being able to relate to other kids and their new clothes or cool toys. But that wasn’t the cause for his trouble with people, not really. There was something…wrong with him. Something deviant and humiliating that became obvious as soon as he opened his mouth. But even when he was quiet, he just knew that other kids could smell his deficiency, his defect, like blood in the water.
It was always the same thing. Every time he went into a new school, kids would keep their distance because he was the tall, lumpy, quiet kid. Then someone, usually a boy, would see an opportunity, and—itching to climb the social ladder—would walk on over to pick on him.
Dusty would try to ignore it, he’d get picked on even harder until he couldn’t, he'd cry out for it to stop, and everyone would know his secret.
But this time it would be different. This was a blank slate. If anyone picked on him he wouldn’t fold. He’d stand tall. He’d be brave. He was going to make an impression here. He could feel it.
The school bell clanged.
Dusty jerked his head out of the locker, slammed it shut, and leaned against the door while his heart pounded in his chest.
Good job, Dusty. Very brave.
He walked to his classroom. As always, he waited a few moments for it to fill up with kids before going in, then zeroed in on whatever seat was empty. The tactic meant a lower likelihood of accidentally sitting in someone’s seat. He wasn’t making that mistake again.
A few minutes later, the chattering skidded to a halt as the teacher walked in.
“Pledge,” he commanded.
Chairs scraped backwards. The class stood up with such efficiency and lack of protest that even the most well-behaved student would be concerned. Dusty scrambled to his feet. As he mumbled his way through the pledge (skipping the second word) he took the opportunity to more closely examine his new homeroom teacher.
Mr. Muehler was a pale, older man. He had three neat strands of gelled white hair combed over his balding head like a silver grate, and a body that reminded Dusty of a coat hanger—sharp shoulders, a curved neck sculpted specifically to look down at students, and a propensity for dark coats. He looked like he’d be more at home at a mortuary than a science lab.
Pledge recited, the class sat down. Mr. Muehler cleared his throat with a judgmental sinusy noise as if he wasn’t quite happy with their performance, but it would do. He stepped towards his desk. He took a long look at the seat of his chair, then, slowly, lowered himself onto it as he scowled at each student one by one.
Dusty straightened his back. Best behavior, Dusty, he thought.
Mr. Muehler made another low, wet noise from deep within his throat. It was like he had his own personalized, soggy fanfare each time he spoke. “I don’t know what kind of hackneyed gossip you kids are passing among yourselves—” Mr. Muehler spoke in a deep drawl as he plucked a pen from his breast pocket and aimed it above the clipboard on his desk “—but I don’t wanna hear a peep ‘less it’s the word ‘present’ when I call out your names, hear?”
The silence was pristine.
Mr. Muehler went down the list.
Martin Atkinson? Present.
Tiffany Brown? Present.
Lewis Chen? Present.
As Dusty waited to be called, he imagined what his name would sound like with his classmates’ last names. Dusty Atkinson, Dusty Brown, Dusty Chen. It was something he did sometimes. The activity reminded him of the time he’d tried on different pairs of sneakers at the thrift store last week with Edna—feet growing faster than his darn hair, he remembered her mumbling—but just like his current pair, none of the names really fit.
Still, Dusty would imagine. Last names meant history, legacy, family. Vast, ancestral trees with sprawling branches and deep, thick roots.
And then you had…
“Dustin.” Mr. Muehler lifted the clipboard to his nose, squinting like he was making sure he was reading it right. “Just, Dustin.”
Plain, old Dustin. Like barren soil. Like dirt. No past, barely present, hazy future.
“Here,” Dusty said.
Mr. Muehler’s face shot up, then sharpened into a narrow-eyed glare.
“Weren’t you listening at the start of class?”
It was like all of the oxygen had been sucked from the room.
No one was looking yet, but he could feel the air tighten with anticipation, like an arrow being drawn. Aimed.
Mouth dry, Dusty nodded.
“Then is it that hard for you to say ‘present?’”
Dusty turtled into his seat.
Kids were starting to look now. Some peeked curiously over their shoulders, a few flashed their eyes with irritation at class being held up, and others looked on with the barbaric eagerness of having no clue what was going to happen next, only that they were about to savor every moment.
In short—impressions were being made.
Dusty swallowed. “No, sir…” he responded.
“Then answer correctly, please.”
Sweat congealed in his armpits and clung to his shirt. It felt like he was being asked to jump over a widening chasm.
Not here. Not on his very first day...
“I…I can’t.”
Mr. Muehler stared at him. Then he closed his eyes. He leaned back and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He stood up from his seat, walked to Dusty’s desk, and loomed. Blocking the ceiling light and casting Dusty in a cloak of death, Mr. Muehler lowered his face hanging from his stick-insect body so close to Dusty’s that he could see the flecks of spit forming in the corners of his teacher’s mouth.
“You—are not—funny,” Mr. Muehler enunciated. “If there’s one thing Olathe Middle is in no more need of, it's smart alecks. I want you to say ‘present’, then I want you to apologize to me and to the class, and maybe then, and only then, I won’t write you up to the principal. All you need to do is just—say—present.”
Dusty sank further into his chair. If he could just lower himself far enough, maybe he could turn into a puddle of slime, ooze between the floor tiles, and disappear to somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t here.
Getting no answer, Mr. Muehler turned on his heel and began to saunter towards his desk.
Dusty’s eyes widened. A series of events dominoed through his mind with terrible velocity. If he got sent to the principal’s office, that would mean Edna would get involved, which would mean a phone call, which would mean an incident report in his case file, which would mean reducing his already dwindling chances of ever being—
“P-p-p…”
The sputtering noise tumbling from his mouth sounded like a stalling lawn mower, like someone had jammed a spanner into the machinery of his mouth and the cogs and wheels and turbines were straining against each other to make any kind of movement.
“...p-p-p…”
Face on fire, Dusty strained his facial muscles to cooperate. But the more pressure he forced the tighter his jaw felt. He couldn’t get anything to move save for the horrible bouncing of his lips.
“...p-p-p-p…”
Dusty wrung his hands underneath his desk. Once, when he hadn’t been thinking about it, he hadn’t stuttered on the word ‘popsicle’ while his hands were folded on his lap. Connection made, every time he struggled to get his words out he’d rub his hands and fingers as if in feverish prayer, frantically trying to wring the word out of his skin.
Watching all of this, Mr. Muehler’s eyebrows were so high they’d created six folds of astonishment across his forehead.
The kids sitting around Dusty were enrapt. Some were unconsciously copying the sounds Dusty was making, like they were under his spell.
His whole body felt like it was being crushed by a garbage compressor. The air trapped in his lungs was decaying into a hot, burning gas. But he couldn’t give up now. He was so close he could taste the word. All he had to do was get over the horizon of his tongue.
Just……a little……more……
“...p-P-P-p-p-p-P-p-p-p-P-pRESENT!”
Dusty took a massive gasp. He heaved over his desk as if he’d just run a marathon. Hot sweat streamed down his nose and drip-drip-dripped on the surface of the desk.
Sitting there with his eyes shut tight, with the sunlight beating red against his eyelids and his body feeling scalding and squeezed as if he was being pressed face-first into a burning iron—he could have sworn the runny sensation dripping down the bridge of his nose was red, leaking blood.
There was silence.
Then, a giggle. Nervous, high, uncontainable—like a burp after too much soda.
Dusty didn’t need to turn his head. He already knew in his heart, in his bones, who it was. But he still looked anyway.
Sally Zhao, her hand failing to cover the wide, did I just do that? smile on her face.
(He could already hear the breathless lunchtime explanation to her friends: “I wasn’t laughing at him. It was just soooooo awkward! You had to be there.”)
But it was enough. Another giggle joined in, then a snort, then a guffaw, and another and another that grew and grew into a chorus of shrieking laughter.
Mr. Muehler covered his face.
Dusty could only sit.
Welp, Dusty thought. You did it. You made an impression.