Chapter Text
I'm shocked. Flabbergasted, even. I'm sure there are several other words for completely and utterly mind-blown I'm not thinking of right now that would also fit. Casey Daley, my best friend for a few months in middle school who I'd been trying to find for years, is standing in my classroom and offering to help me clean up the mess I made.
In that same gentle voice he had as a kid–maybe a little deeper now–he says, "I'm surprised you remember me."
I need another word for surprised again. Astounded? Yeah, that'll work.
"How could I not? You were my best friend!"
Casey's eyes widen a little bit. He's surprised, but I can't imagine forgetting him; he was such a good friend to me for the short amount of time we knew each other. Probably the only real friend I had as a kid, now that I think about it.
"You really thought so?" Casey smiles as he kneels down to pick up some of the books off the floor. I sear the image of it into my brain for reasons I'm going to choose to ignore right now.
I grab a few books and shuffle awkwardly to the shelf they belong on. "Well, yeah! You never made fun of me for rambling, or called me annoying when I went off on tangents or corrected you while we were doing homework together." I take my glasses and hang them from my ear again. "And! You never shoved me in a locker. That was pretty cool of you."
"Your standards were low," Casey argues. He gets up to hand me the stack of books he's gathered. "I wasn't that nice."
"No way; my standards were really high. That's why I had no friends." I re-shelf the books he handed me with a poorly hidden grin on my face. "You were so nice, Casey!"
"Okay," he laughs. It's so soft; just like his voice.
He continues to pick up books while I carefully arrange them back on the shelf. He lets me ramble about literally anything; how my bike lock keeps getting jammed in the mornings, the cat I rescued during a rainstorm and am now fostering, how excited I am to start the school year again…
"Man, here I go again!" I barely avoid running my hip into a table as I step over one of my bins. "I just keep talking; you know you can interrupt me or tell me you want me to be quiet, right?"
Casey has sat himself cross-legged on the floor. He tilts his head. "I like listening to you talk."
Holy moly, okay. That shouldn't have sent my heart racing like it did. Another thing I'll pretend to think about right now and have a late-night crisis over. Man, I'm glad I'm facing the whiteboard. My face is probably bright red.
Casey is rummaging through my models and trinkets and I'm working on the part of the board I don't erase all year. A little bit of quiet fills the space between us. For once, I don't feel the urge to fill it with unnecessary chatter.
Half an hour or so later, our little reverie is broken by three knocks on the frame of my classroom door.
I wave at my friend without looking. "Hey, Rocky, what's up?"
"Have you met the new machine shop teacher yet?" Rocky moves some stuff on my desk and sits himself down like he belongs there. I know there's going to be soot left when he stands up, somehow. "I was going to introduce Adrian to him, but he disappeared. Kind of like your glasses have disappeared from your face again."
"This machine shop teacher?"
I pause my writing to gesture to Casey, who is still seated in between all my decoration bins and rolling my Earth beanbag in his fingers. He waves at Rocky, and Rocky points excitedly at him like a kid who's just discovered a cool bug under a rock.
"Yes yes yes!" He claps once, "Leave it to you to pull someone new into your orbit immediately, Grace."
I wave my right hand dismissively. "He heard me knock stuff over and offered to help me clean up."
Rocky smacks me on the back with a laugh that sends me stumbling into the board. Whatever word I was trying to write is now smudged and interrupted by a wayward line. I hear Casey cover his own laughter with a cough.
"We were friends before," Casey stands up and dusts off his jeans. He still has the beanbag in his hand. "Small world, I guess."
Rocky adjusts his glasses and gawks at me. Oh boy. Here we go…
"You didn't tell me you had friends before Adrian and I, Grace!"
I roll my eyes and erase the Rocky-induced catastrophe. "Believe it or not, I wasn't always a jerky academic, Rock," I mutter.
He laughs again. I decide to ignore him this time. No need for Casey to see us bicker like an old married couple when he's probably only just met Rocky today.
"Manolo, I'm certain the arts department can hear your laughing." Adrian pokes their head into the classroom with a wry smile. Their earrings and necklaces clink against each other pleasantly. They wave at me, then at Casey.
"And who is this, Grace? A friend of yours?"
I fumble with my dry erase marker and screw up another word–which makes Rocky laugh at me again–and look over to Casey. He doesn't look uncomfortable, but I remember him hiding behind me a few times when we had to do presentations in class. I'm prepared to do an introduction if I have to.
"Casey Daley," he says quietly, and Adrian comes into the room to shake his hand with that brilliant smile of theirs. "Your partner knows me as Driver, though."
"Ahh, so you're the "cute new machine shop teacher Grace is going to love"!" Adrian grins at Rocky. He decides my mostly blank whiteboard is more interesting than anything else in this disaster of a classroom for the moment. "It's so nice to meet you. I'm Adrian Ortiz; Manolo's partner and the anatomy teacher here."
Casey's cheeks are a little pink at the compliment. He smiles shyly at Adrian. "Nice to meet you, Mx. Ortiz."
"Just Adrian is fine," they pat his hand. He nods.
Adrian comes over to my desk. "So, Ryland Grace, how do you know this mysterious Mr. Daley?"
"We were friends in middle school," I smile over my shoulder mid-word. I fix it–and my attention–and continue talking. "It's crazy we were able to meet up again and recognize each other so quickly. This sort of situation is almost exclusively reserved for books and movies because of the statistical improbability."
I'm choose not to mention how I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for any clues or potential lines of contact between us when I moved back to California. Rocky would just call me a stalker, even though I never really found anything concrete enough to be sure it was Casey.
Speaking of… Rocky groans. "If you start doing math at me right now, I'm welding just one of your chair legs to the floor while you're gone."
"It's fun math!" I protest. I was never much of a stats guy in school, but it is fun to think about. I stop myself before I actually start writing equations on the board. "But yeah, Adri, that's how we know each other. Childhood friends."
"That's sweet," I can hear Adrian's smile in their words. It makes my face heat up a little bit. "Well, I'm glad you two were given the chance to reconnect."
There's a buzzing in my fingertips as I finish drawing a little cell in the corner of the whiteboard. Rocky doesn't have to tell me I'm smiling like an idiot; I can feel it in the stretch of my cheeks.
"Me too," Casey and I say at the same time.
I drop my marker.
Rocky laughs.