Chapter Text
Albert has had his little bug-eye out for a special somebody for—well, he stopped counting—no, he never started counting, but it’s been a long time. A long enough time for it to drive him crazy, at least.
Albert has never necessarily been ‘cool,’ not in any traditional sense, but he does have his small little circle of jocks because he manages to drag himself into deep shit with his gym coach almost every day, and idiocy is entertainment for most. But he doesn’t care much for them, to be honest. Or the getting in trouble part. He just wants to be funny. He just wants to be liked, and it just so happens to work.
Jake is a complete and total geek. He sits alone at lunch every single day, and Albert has never seen him speak to another human being before, but God is he cute. He’s smart, too. He hasn’t had a single grade lower than a 90 all semester. Albert watches him draw in his journal on the occasion that he’s willing to sacrifice a formative grade. But Albert can’t tell him that. Albert will lose everything he’s worked for. All of those fights picked for things that even he recognized to be utter nonsense would be null in the eyes of the collective of noise that follows him around like a swarm of flies. He hates jocks. They bore his tongue out of his mouth. But he needs them. He can’t go back to freshman year when they’d walk on the back of his shoes like grotesque, snotty, disturbingly large baby ducks. The thought sends a shiver down his spine like accidentally drinking spoiled milk because you forgot to check the expiration date and you’re an idiot and you’re never going to amount to anything (and this totally isn’t personal because Albert totally didn’t do anything like that this morning.)
Albert tunes out all of the voices that he wouldn’t have paid any attention to anyways to dreamily rest his chin in the palm of his hand and stare across the cafeteria at the dreamboat he’d like to be sailing on sooner than later. A cartoonishly dramatic sigh rolls out of his mouth as he mopes around in his puddle of false-conscious pleas for anything, anything at all to whack him in the face and call him a bitch, just so that he’ll have an excuse to stand up.
His sister comes by to hand him his $4 to get her and himself a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine just outside the gymnasium.
His sister.
A sister.
A girl.
THAT’S IT!
Unfortunately, the realization does come with having to look at the startled faces of the dull tools sat around him after he slams his fists on the table, and the sickening visible amusement on his sister’s face as she walks away as though she can predict the future.
His sister would never be nice enough to talk to Jake. He’s gonna have to think up a brand-new one.
Once he sees it that the collective attention span underneath the table-wide dunce cap has dwindled and migrated, he makes like a tree and leaves. He pops his sister’s $2 bill and the two remaining $1 bills into the cash slot in the vending machine, and he gets himself a Big Red instead, because he feels like doing something different. He’s already dead-set on pretending to be a girl, so it can’t hurt.
Albert faceplants onto his bed like he’d just come home to his wife after being devastated on the battlefield and just hardly escaping with his head, before groaning, forcing himself over onto his back, and pathetically worming his hand into his back pocket to retrieve his crack-infested iPhone SE that he desperately needs to replace.
He scrambles through misspelled links as he regrets disabling autocorrect on his phone before he finally makes it to Instagram, that he was banned from using five years ago after uploading a picture of his friend’s ass covered in green frosting to the internet for everyone to see. Well, surely nobody cares about that anymore. Except for maybe his friend that he swore secrecy to.
Yikes.
He thinks of a couple random girl names and settles on Audrey Aretz before creating his account and setting the profile picture to a photo of cherries with a pink filter over it, which isn’t obvious at all.
He searches for a couple minutes before finding a Jayingee, which would be confusing if his display name wasn’t his full legal name. He considers advising him to protect his privacy before realizing that failing to protect somebody’s privacy was the reason that he wasn’t allowed to use Instagram anymore, and he decides to PM Jake for the first time under his shiny new undercover identity.
Audrey: heeey ;)
He slams his phone face-down on his blanket to keep himself from ripping his hair out in anticipation of Jake’s respo—
Ding!
Nevermind.
Jake: bot
Audrey: im not a bot wtf
Jake: thats exactly what a bot would say
Audrey: its not my fault that the only girls texting you are robots
Jake: wow okay nevermind
Jake: who are you???
Audrey: well youve been so mean to me idk if i wanna tell you
Jake: ok
Albert doesn’t exactly know how to escalate the conversation, because he just accidentally insulted the boy that he’s crushing on.
Albert has spoken to Jake a couple times, in passing, but it was mostly just him sending soft apologies his way after his gaggle of ghouls decided to sink their dirty claws into him. Maybe he remembers?
Audrey: u know albert aretz?
Jake: yeah i know of him
Jake: why
Audrey: im his sister
Jake: oh neat!
Jake: he’s nice
Jake: why are you texting me does he talk about me
Audrey: sometimes
Jake: what does he say???
Audrey: smart
Audrey: good looks
Jake: does he actually
Jake: dont troll me pls
Audrey: yeah LOL
Audrey: and i thought you sounded kinda cute
Audrey: and i saw you in the cafeteria today
Dead silence.
Albert’s brain is whirring like the second hand of a clock on cocaine. He doesn’t exactly know how to talk to people, or act, or act convincingly at that.
What if Jake hates him? What if that’s why he isn’t responding? Why won’t he respond?
10:22
Audrey: hello?