chapter 2: hi, my name is... (what?)

Your name is DEREK STRIDER.

No-one really calls you that, though; your foster parents call you DEE (D███ when they're angry at you), your brother calls you DIRK, and one kid in class calls you A COMBINATION OF SLURS USED FOR BOTH GAY MEN AND LESBIANS. You've told him a few times how that DOESN'T REALLY MAKE SENSE, but he isn't interested in discussing THE COMPLEX LINGUISTIC IMPLICATIONS REGARDING GENDER AND SEXUALITY when he's wrecking your entire shit.

He won't be calling you that to your face again, because you're about to be suspended from school for biting his hand so hard you broke one of his fingers. You're pretty sure you could have bitten through it, too, if you hadn't been wrangled off him by one of the teachers. They called your foster parents while the kid got a ride to the hospital. That was a few hours ago.

Right now you're stuck in the principal's office, stuck in one of four chairs they've dragged into the small space in front of the principal's desk. You distantly wish your hair was longer again, if just to have an extra layer of protection against having to look anyone in the eye. Dark hair's nice like that. The kid's mother, wearing one of the most loud sweaters you've ever seen, is glaring daggers at you from where she's positioned herself between you and him. Protective. Like you're about to go off the rails and maul him at any second. You don't even bother turning to face her, eyes locked firmly on one of the shitty inspirational posters that every school office seems to have in spades.

The principal, sat in her office chair, is looking nervously between the harpy and you, her half-moon glasses close to slipping off the edge of her nose. You fold your arms over your chest, trying to keep as still as possible. You're unbelievably relieved that you managed to grab your sunglasses in the chaos after the fight—having to deal with anyone without them would have been a fucking nightmare. You're not good with eye contact at the best of times—and if they don't know where you're looking, they can't call you on not paying attention. Not that you aren't acutely aware of every little twitch in the principal's expression.

The only reason you get to keep your sunglasses at school in the first place is because of the months-long legal debacle that your foster parents took on to make sure your brother got to keep his. It had been a whole thing in the local press. In the end, the school relented on their no sunglasses or hats indoors policy when confronted with the possibility of having to face your relatively wealthy and very angry foster parents in court. When the dust settled, none of the teachers would dare bother you, either, out of fear of retaliation from your trigger-happy guardians. You guess you should be thankful for that, because you know that the second anyone actually went to your parents about it they would immediately turn around and accuse you of trying to copy your brother for attention. As long as no one mentions it, though, they couldn't care less what you do in school.

Well. They might have kept not caring if you hadn't gone ahead and fucked up the delicate balance you thought you had under control.

You press back in the shitty wooden chair they've sat you down in. You really, really wish you had Lil' Cal here, but he got left behind with the rest of your stuff when you got called in. This shit would be a lot easier if you could dig your hands into something that wasn't your own arms. As is, you're left with your grasp around the edge of the chair white-knuckled, trying very hard to convince your brain that you don't need to start clawing at your wrists like a fucking psycho. The mother glares at you like she can sense the barely-repressed nerves bound tightly just under your skin.

“Really, I don't understand how a man can be this irresponsible,” the mother says, drawl exaggerated and drawn out in all the wrong places—must've moved in from up north, trying to sound country 'cause she wants to fit in, “but I s'pose it ain't surprisin', considerin' how he's raisin' his daughter.”

You bristle. You can't help it. Still, it doesn't seem like anyone notices. The principal is wringing her hands like she's trying to wrest the last drops of water out of a washcloth.

“Now, Mrs. ██████, I've talked with Mr. ███████, and I've been assured he's on his way—”

“And from what I understand, that was hours ago!” is the shrill reply. Somehow, she manages to fit three syllables in hours. “You know, I don't see why I need to meet with this man—he clearly respects neither your time nor mine!”

“Mrs. ██████, in this school we believe in solving disagreements in a productive way, not just punishing those who act out—”

“And for what? Do you even know what lack of discipline in the home and school leads to? I'll tell you right here and now—it only leads to letting menaces like that run loose without anyone guiding them the right way!”

The woman points at you and she doesn't even have the decency to face you, instead sneering at the principal. The principal clears her throat and turns to you, apologetic smile plastered on her face.

“D███, do you know when—”

The door to the office opens, leaving the principal with her mouth open and the harpy swivelling to face the intruder. Your foster father walks in, in his immaculate god damn suit, almost but not quite out of breath, eyes zeroing in on you like a...

Like a father who's very angry at his kid, you suppose. You don't think there's a good simile to be made here. You're too used to the reality of it.

He takes the empty seat next to you, leaving you trapped between him and the mother now running a calculating gaze over the latest addition to this farce. You don't know if you would rather she do that than sneering in turns at you or the principal—but it doesn't surprise you. She seems like the type to ingratiate herself to the nearest male authority figure, and your foster father has just shown up looking like... not quite a million dollars, but a respectable part of the way there.

“I'm sorry for the delay—I dropped everything as soon as you called,” he says, turning to the principal with a genial smile, “but traffic was absolutely hellish to get through. I'm frankly just grateful I got here before school was out. Wouldn't want to leave two very busy women from their business longer than necessary.”

The mother huffs, but doesn't comment, crossing her arms in lieu of a response.

“Well,” the principal says, sighing, “we're glad you're here, at least. You've already heard what happened, I gather, so this is more of a formality, but... I really do hope we can clear out any bad blood between everyone involved.”

The rest of the meeting is a blur. You think the harpy laughs at some point, probably at something your foster father says, but you don't really care. Eventually your foster father pokes at you, and it seems like you're supposed to stand up—the kid is across from you, too, with his mother resting a protective hand on his shoulder.

An apology, then. You stand up beside your foster father. He nudges at you. You can't see his expression, but you imagine it's some version of that plaster smile that every upper-middle class parent seems to perfect the moment their children start show signs of independent thought.

“—And take those off,” he whispers, the second half of a sentence you never heard the first part of. You frown, but you still take off your sunglasses, edges digging into your palm and reminding you the world exists. The kid is across from you, looking just as displeased as you feel to be standing here. He sneers at you, a miniature copy of his mother.

“He called me a dyke," you say, “and a faggot.”

The principal chokes, tries to cover it by clearing her throat. The mother bristles.

“I didn't,” the boy says, face scrunched up. There's an undercurrent of panic in his eyes. You both know he's lying.

“The language on you—my darlin' could never—”

“Now, I'm sure that isn't what D███ meant, isn't that right?” Your foster father puts his hand on your shoulder, forces his words out with a strained tone. You try your best to suppress the full-body shudder at the contact. Feels like a judge's gavel coming down on you. Standing still, you think—what's the best way to get out of this with at least some of your dignity intact? You refuse to apologize, not to this asshole who's subjected you to every damn humiliation his tiny ape-like brain could come up with in the past months.

“Shouldn't've broke his finger,” you try instead, because it's true—outright physical violence is where you start getting punished. You should have called his mother a bitch who would fuck every man who put up with her shallow bullshit for more than two minutes, and his father a pussy who won't divorce her because he's too scared to pay alimony for a kid who's as much of a horror as she is. At least when they're still married his dad doesn't have pretend to want to raise him because his mother's coddling him so bad his dad is barely in the picture.

“And?” your foster father prompts.

“And it was a stupid thing to do,” you continue, trying desperately to figure out the fastest way out without saying sorry, “so I'm not gonna do it again.”

Your foster father sighs, letting go of your shoulder.

“That might be the best you'll get out of her, I'm afraid,” he says, and he does that fucking sickening little laugh, “but I'll make sure she understands she can't just bite her way out of disagreements in the future, even if she gets called names.”

The mother huffs again. Her eyes soften as she looks up from you at him.

“I'm sure you will,” she says, turning towards the door and dragging her kid along, “but all the same, I wouldn't want my child coming near her anytime soon.”

The boy scrunches his face at you. Fuck you, he mouths, and you have to clench your fists so you don't immediately run over and deck him in the face. Instead, you just put your sunglasses back on.

“Come on,” you hear his mother say as they walk out, “let's get ourselves home. I'll get you an ice cream on the way.”

“That went better than expected,” your foster father sighs, resting his arm on the back of the wooden chair he's been sitting in for the past while, “but...”

“She'll only be suspended for two weeks, you know,” the principal says in a tone you can't quite place, pushing her glasses up from where they've been slipping, “it's not like she's being kicked out. We've had worse here.”

“Really?” your foster father says, surprised, and then laughs, “I sure am glad I didn't go into teaching, then.”

“It's a very rewarding occupation,” she says icily, and turns her attention back to the papers on the desk.

Your foster father rights himself, shoots you a look. He's going to have words with you on the way home.

“Oh, I've been meaning to talk to you,” the principal interrupts, just as your foster father turns to the door. “She's a smart kid, Mr. ███████, I'm sure you realize. But recently her behaviour has been... disruptive. Is there anything going on at home that might be causing her to act out?”

The principal looks directly at your foster father over her half-moon glasses.

“Ah, you know about her brother's situation, of course,” he says, and you can see the way the principal's mouth twitches upwards in a humorless grin for just a second, “and we've been trying our hardest to figure out a solution, but the doctors...”

He trails off, perfect in the way he insinuates but never directly undermines the respectability and repute of the medical professionals they keep insisting on dragging your brother in front of. It's a sickening display, you think, and deeply impressive in its fraud.

Your brother has albinism. His eyes are sensitive, and his skin moreso. He needs various accommodations because of this, including his sunglasses.

He does not, however much your foster parents seem to want him to, have any sort of autoimmune disorder.

“In any case,” the principal says, narrowing her eyes at your foster father, “don't forget that you have two children, not just one.”

His eyebrows shoot up, only to come down again quick as a guillotine. He looks furious.

“I'll keep it in mind,” he answers, voice colder than the Arctic, and opens the door out of the office without even sparing you a glance.

“Dee, we will talk about this.”

You move to follow him, your body shocked into action at the direct address, but you hesitate before you walk out. The principal meets your gaze, and she grimaces before sighing and shrugging her shoulders. She nods in the direction of your foster father.

“Pleasure talking with you, ███████,” she says, glaring at the back of his head like she would love nothing more than to see it burst into flame.

“Same to you,” he says, entirely unconvincing.

You drop by your classroom to grab your backpack, your foster father leaning against the doorway. You open it just enough to stick your hand in and rummage around until you feel familiar fabric under your fingers. Your homeroom teacher looks at you oddly as you do, but you don't really care. Lil' Cal's still there, and you breathe a little easier as you hoist the backpack up on your shoulders. Your foster father doesn't say anything either as you leave, though he does smile and wave at the teacher.

You trail behind him as he walks out of the school building to the parking lot. You take your seat in the back rather than the passenger side. You don't want to sit next to him for any longer than is strictly necessary, and you've already had enough of that for the next good while. You really aren't looking forward to spending the next two weeks at home.

The drive home is spent in tense silence. Your foster father keeps his eyes fixed on the road, only occasionally looking back at you in the rearview mirror. You stubbornly keep quiet, even when it's clear he wants you to start grovelling and begging forgiveness for doing something that you now realize you should have done months ago, if only to spite this asshole.

It's a good three quarters of an hour before he pulls up into the driveway, parking the car in the garage next to your foster mother's. She's been staying home with Dante for the past two days, trying to figure out some new visual aids with the family computer. He stays in the driver's seat, even as the garage door rolls shut behind you. You don't move from the back seat.

“You've been making things a lot harder for all of us, D███,” he says, tapping the steering wheel with one finger, “and you know how stress affects your brother.”

Yes, you think, because you've been living with him your whole life, and they don't know shit about what affects Dante and what doesn't. They're coddling him, like he isn't already 15, like he hasn't already been dealing with it his whole life without needing whatever bullshit kiddie gloves they wear whenever they so much as think about him.

“Yes, sir,” is what comes out of your mouth.

“Please, just...” he drums his fingers, one-two-three-four, “think about him too, alright? It doesn't help any of us when you act out like this. He cares about you so much.”

Left unsaid: “and we don't.” A hostage situation, then, with the terms being your compliance. You're sure that, given the opportunity, your foster parents would surgically extract any ounce of affinity your brother has for you, just so they wouldn't have to do this whole song and dance.

You nod. He sighs again, leaves the car. You do the same.

The house is large, well-furnished. Two stories, with the entrance leading straight into the living room and dining area—the stairway to the second floor is sequestered in the kitchen. You follow your foster father inside and close the door behind you. As he shrugs off his jacket, you dart past him.

The living room is filled with old shit, the center piece being a sofa that's been engineered to be too large for a single person and too small to comfortably seat two. An old grandfather clock ticks away across from one of the two matching red armchairs. There's a ceremonial greatsword hanging on the wall above the fireplace. Next to it, a television on a faux-wood stand. On the opposite wall, two huge paintings of the Great Plains. Apparently everything except the T.V. has been in the family for generations, which you've taken to mean that your foster mother's parents bought a lot of shit at auctions and never figured out what to do with it.

You don't think you'll ever feel welcome here. Your brother is their charity case, and you're just the parasite that he's carried along with him. Still, you plan to exploit whatever they feel is necessary to keep you nice and sedated, like your own room and an allowance and a 33/67 split on computer time. They wanted it to be 50/50, but when they decided to cut it to half an hour for both of you due to Dante's eye problems, you needled your brother into convincing them otherwise. No need to cut down on your computer time even if your brother can't use it.

Your brother is sitting together with your foster mother in one of the office rooms. There's an array of weird little magnifying glasses laid out on the table, together with sheets of plastic with squares cut out from them. There's a white cane lying on the floor—your foster mother would have set it up against the wall, so Dante must have thrown it at some point. Considering the volume at which they're arguing now, snippy and terse rather than yelling, it must have been a few hours ago rather than just now.

“Oh, hey, dude,” your brother says over his shoulder when you pass them, and you wave a hand at him. He's wearing his prescription sunglasses still, even though he's told you it's harder to read with them than it is with the untinted ones. Guess it's just not worth sacrificing the coolness factor.

“Heard you got in trouble for beating some kid up at school,” he continues, and when you nod, he grins. “Hell yeah, fuck 'em up.”

Your foster mother bristles at the swear, and you hear another argument rearing its head as you go to your room and drop off your backpack.

Your own room is pretty barren. Dante has movie posters all over his room, mostly of shitty movies that don't actually have any proper promotional posters. He makes those himself—he prints out photos from whatever material he can find for the movie and crafts home-made collage posters at school instead of reading in the side room of the school library like he's gotten permission to. It's frankly impressive how shitty they are, considering the amount of work that goes into them. He insists that it's for the irony of it—both making visual art as someone who can barely see five feet in front of him without his glasses, and spending so much time on terrible posters for movies that are themselves unbearably bad.

He's only made a few handful that aren't part of his grand exhibition of the world's shittiest movies—one of them, for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, hangs directly over your own bed. You watched it together on the sofa once when it was on T.V., later than you should have been up, and you spent the next week talking his ear off about it. He got fed up with it and made you the poster just to shut you up. It didn't work.

Other than that, you've only got a bare minimum—a desk stacked with school books, a chair that squeaks when you lean on it, and a drawer for your clothes. Squirreled away under your bed is a book you stole from one of the office rooms on coding, and you've been slowly working out some basic scripts—you write them out in hand when you don't have the computer, and you've become very fast at transcribing from your own shorthand into script and back in the limited time you have.

Your current project is a relatively simple chatbot, based off HAL 9000. While you don't have any real end goal for it, you still end up wrestling with whatever tangle of code has gotten under your skin recently whenever you get home from school—at least, when you aren't practicing with Cal.

You fish out your notebook from under the bed and hunker down at the table, mechanical pencil in hand. There's been a recurring issue lately, where the response to anything that even mentions sickness keeps railroading the whole thing down a very specific dialogue path, no matter the input after it's been started. You've been trying to figure out how to either a. prevent it altogether—which would be the ideal solution, obviously—or b. put in an escape hatch you can pull when it starts looping in on itself. Either you get distracted, though, or you completely lose track of time, because your brother's yelling that dinner's ready before long. You haven't even gotten anything useful down. You put your notebook away and make your way downstairs, mood made worse by the lack of progress.

Dinner is a silent affair. You pick sullenly at peas that you don't taste. Dante eats fast, and he eats a lot—you do too, usually, but right now the sight of chicken lathered with gravy, made even more unappetizing by your haphazard attempts at getting anything down, is making you nauseous. Your foster mother chides Dante for wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He rolls his eyes—you can see it through the dark glass, even if your foster mother can't.

“Shorry,” he says, mid-chew.

“Don't talk with your mouth full, either,” she scolds him.

“Wha'ever,” he says, and keeps eating. Your foster mother huffs, but doesn't keep going like she usually would. Instead, her gaze softens, and she looks over at your foster father, who raises his eyebrow at her, questioning. She nods.

You tense up. Beside you, you recognize the way Dante immediately stiffens in a direct mirror to your own frozen state. There's news, and news are never good for you and Dante.

“If you hate being at school that much, I guess there is one thing you can be happy about, Dee,” your foster father says at last, with a smile that mostly just looks tired, “since your mother and I have decided to enroll both you and Dante in a homeschooling program.”

You blink. There's a moment of silence around the table, broken only when your brother huffs.

“What, so suddenly Dee's doing it too?” he asks, incredulous.

Your head swivels to look over at him, and you feel a sudden sting of betrayal in your chest at the thought that he already knew he was going to start. He hadn't told you. When he catches your eye, he shuts his mouth very quickly at whatever expression you're sending his way. He doesn't have the decency to look even the slightest bit sorry about it, though.

Your foster father puts down his fork in the middle of raising it, runs his hand through his hair in frustration.

“It was on the table.” He taps the tabletop as he talks, tok-tok-tok emphasizing the last three syllables. “You know how she's been acting up in class.”

“Dante, your sister bit through someone's finger, she isn't going to—” your foster mother starts, halfway hysteric in her tone as she gestures with her fork, a piece of chicken still stuck on the end. Some of the gravy on it spatters onto the tablecloth.

“Didn't bite through it. Just broke it.”

You hate the way your voice sounds, childish and pouty—you're a teenager, you shouldn't be doing the god damn spoiled princess shit any more. Yeah, you've gotta man up, dude, your brother's voice echoes in your mind. Still, you shrink back in your seat again when your foster father looks at you, expression all quiet fury.

“Alright, she broke it. And she isn't even the slightest bit sorry about it!” Beside your foster father, your foster mother has started yelling. “We can't just let her run around doing whatever she wants!”

“Yeah, I'll bet life would be a lot fuckin' easier if Dee wasn't out there embarrassin' you all the time, wouldn't it,” your brother shoots back, crossing his arms across his chest, “so, what, you want to keep hi—her nice 'n quiet out here? And also, sorry, but you do realize we're all still, like, sitting here? Includin' Dee? Y'ever hear about addressing the people you're talking about? Or is it fine just 'cause you don't think Dee's listenin'?”

“Of course I know she's listening,” your foster mother's wide eyes are trained right at Dante, even as she gestures at you, “but it isn't like she shows it! At all! And you, you watch your language, young man—is that any way to talk to your mother?”

You know exactly what's coming next. Dante's mouth quirks up ever-so-slightly, and he says it in almost comic slow motion.

“Y'know, funny you say that,” he drawls, “'cause last I checked, y'ain't.”

“You—” she sputters, outraged expression quickly schooled with a hand across her face. She breathes in deeply, and your foster father takes her other hand in his, stroking it as she bites the inside of her lip. Dante is still sitting with his arms crossed, shit-eating smirk challenging her to up the ante.

He's done it a million times before for you, getting the heat off your back by antagonizing whoever's getting on your case. Your brother has made being an ass into an art form, setting up distractions from your weakness by tapping into hidden wells of performative cockiness and obnoxious diversions. It's nice of him.

It also makes you feel like a child.

“She's makin' this way too easy, Dee,” Dante says out of the corner of his mouth as he quirks his eyebrow at you. You let out a little laugh in response—it's what he's looking for—and the smirk widens ever-so-slightly.

“Dante,” your foster mother says, eyebrows drawn tight in pity, “you don't have to defend your sister like this—this isn't—an attack, we're trying to give her an education where she's actually learning something, not just... harassing others, or, or getting into fights—she clearly isn't suited to public school!”

The smirk falls off your brother's face instantly, replaced with the worn scowl that has come to mark almost all of your dinner conversations. Your foster father pats your foster mother on the back, and she breathes in shakily.

“Listen,” he says, sighing and turning to face the two of you, “you're both getting homeschooled. And that's final.”

You stand up from the table and go up the stairs to your room. Your foster parents don't say anything, nor does Dante, but you can feel their gazes on you like fire as you leave.

Even when you make it up to your room, shutting the door behind you, it takes a bit before you hear their muffled voices from downstairs drift up. You're glad you can't hear what they're saying.

You grab your backpack, zipping it open to let Cal out from his cramped prison. He flops over onto the floor, and you sit down with him.

You've only had him for a little more than a year now, but what started out as a way to spite your foster parents by making them spend money and time on getting you ventriloquism classes has quickly become a genuine interest in the ways of puppeteering. Having to analyze the movements of another puppeteer to figure out the mechanics of the manipulation, the need for clear and exaggerated body language to mimic human emotion in a static being, the sheer amount of control the puppeteer needs over their own body and not just the puppet's... it's challenging enough that you've kept going even after your foster parents refused to let you do another year of after-school courses.

Cal's your only puppet so far, and you like to think you've gotten relatively decent at making him seem almost life-like. You never got the hang of throwing your voice, though, so it always ends up a bit weird whenever you try to actually do a bit.

Guess you'll have plenty of time to practice now.

You lie down on your bed, letting Cal fall limply on top of you. If you hug him, that's no one's business but your own.

Cal's a pretty great character, you think. The excessively violent puppet is a well-known staple of ventriloquism, but combining it with the white rapper trope to create an even deeper divide between the visual element of the rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed puppet and the vile shit he spouts is a stroke of genius, if you say so yourself—and it's an interesting challenge to keep up with the act while you're spitting bars for both sides of the battle. You've fallen through a few times while practicing, much to your own annoyance. Trying to rap while not moving your lips at all is hard, not to mention that making ventriloquism work is all about misdirection, and rap battles don't leave much room for the usual kind. Every fumble needs to be accounted for.

Still, you like to think you've got a pretty decent setup going for the bit—a haunted doll belonging to an early 20th century mobster gets thrown into the streets of Houston and gets schooled in the ways of the modern era by a certified coolkid.

Through this mentorship, which would be the early arc of your hypothetical puppet-based career, he learns the power of the rhythmic spoken word, eventually culminating in Cal unlocking his secret dark powers of hypnotism and planting seeds of violence in those who hear his sick bars. He then starts roaming these United States of America, seeking out victims to exert his new rap-based ghostly powers on. Only the coolkid who unknowingly plugged in Pandora's mic—you—can keep him in check and prevent him from driving the audience at whatever show you're at mad and taking over the world.

This is all a load of horseshit, of course. Ventriloquism is about as viable a career option for you as becoming a horse rancher without any horses. But when you lie in your bed, looking up at the ceiling and trying to fall asleep despite the constant pressure in the back of your head, you still think it might be fun to try.

You like Cal. Or, rather, you like playing Cal. You, Derek Strider, have to be reasonable. You're smart, but quiet about it. You're good in school, but not too good. You've had it figured out for years now: you have to keep your head down, because if you don't, someone will take a swing at you. You learned that from your brother, who learned it the hard way—he dealt with it by beating up the other kids about as bad as they did him, or joking about it nastier than anyone else. But you're not a real guy, not like he is, so you have to keep cool, let it wash over you and through you, even when it makes you so god damn angry you wish you could just take a baseball bat and show those fucking pieces of shit the kind of violence they can only dream of—

But you know you can't do that. So you shut up and take it, be the bigger man, get in a quip or two just to show them how little you care about any of it.

Cal, on the other hand...

Cal gets to be mean. He gets to be an asshole to anyone who looks his way. He gets to call the English teacher a bitch. He gets to talk about how he wants to skin someone alive and throw them on the pavement and make them crawl around in salt. He gets to tell Dante to suck it up and stop being a whiny little attention whore even when you know that he hates the way your foster parents treat him.

You like Cal, because Cal gets to be the little voice in the back of everyone's mind telling them to do things they really, really shouldn't. Like biting someone's finger so hard it breaks. Or telling you that you should have taken the gun from the second son of a bitch who treated you both like dogs and shot him in the head, and then you would have ended up in juvie and not have to bother Dante in his perfect new life with new parents who love him like they love a show dog they can parade around and brag about how inbred it is, SEE HOW CUTE AND PATHETIC IT IS WHEN IT CAN'T BREATHE PROPERLY, ISN'T THE WAY IT'S GOING TO GO BLIND BEFORE IT REACHES MIDDLE AGE ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE?

It's wishful thinking, really. You wouldn't have ended up in juvenile detention; you were 11.

AND A PUSSY, the Cal inside your mind says, and you imagine how his wooden teeth clack together as his mouth rattles in laughter.

You like Cal. You really don't like how Cal's starting to pop in with comments even when you aren't practicing.

Well, you know it's more like your brain's approximation of what Cal, if you had been playing him in that moment, would have said, if your inner monologue was playing out in front of a live studio audience. It just doesn't feel like that sometimes. You sit him up at the end of your bed, up against the wall by your feet. Like a guard dog.

BOW-FUCKING-WOW, you imagine him saying.

For some stupid reason, it does make you feel a bit better. You're going to need any scrap of comfort you can get, you think bitterly, even if it's pathetically clinging to dolls when you're already 13.

⁙

It comes back to bite you in the ass. And like the imaginary guard dog gone anxious and twitchy at the slightest noise, it bites hard.

Very few things don't come back to bite you in the ass, you've come to realize, but that's life. A big old line of shit that keeps biting you in the ass in an endless fractal pattern that makes everything you do fuck you over eventually. It's a veritable feast of ass. A Las(s)t Supper of unimaginable proportions.

You've been doing this whole homeschooling thing for a few months now. It's... alright, you guess. Better than you expected, even if it has meant you have to spend more time at home. Your foster parents are letting you have a lot more computer time, since it turns out letting you type out your essays on the word processor means both a lot of time saved in trying to make you write them out in hand, and less arguing when you stubbornly write them out so small you can barely make out the letters. This also means you've started using a lot of time allotted to schoolwork browsing the net, lurking on forums and reading just about everything that you come across with the hunger of a teen starved of any social interaction and far too much time to waste. Dante keeps his head out of your business, whenever he has time to himself—the visits to the doctor's seem to get ever more frequent, with your foster parents leaving you to fend for yourself at least once a fortnight. You barely talk over dinner, and when there's conversation, it's about whatever they think is wrong with Dante this week. You don't recall any of it enough to look up whatever terms they throw around.

You go down a million rabbit holes a day, and you barely remember to eat except when prompted by your brother, when he physically wrests you out from the computer room to eat lunch or by text when he's out. Just as well that you don't eat as much anymore, you think, since that means you don't get the same searing hatred running through you every time you look at yourself in the mirror. Can't get fatter tits if you're only eating enough to keep yourself running. You run into a lot of these same thoughts on various text boards, but you dismiss any that directly suggest starving yourself for the sake of keeping whatever control over your body that you can. Anorexia is the most direct route to being labelled a teen girl with issues.

About as numerous as the threads documenting some poor girl's descent into calorie-counting, however, is the amount of fitness-focused forums, with work-out regimens made for men in their 20s-30s. You borrow some tips from these, finding yourself pleasantly surprised when the mindlessness of exercise outside of P.E. means you can forget about most everything except the next press of your arms up from the floor, the next step landing right, the next exhale following the inhale. It's a good escape from everything else.

Still, you keep yourself from eating any more than strictly necessary. You're not stupid. Progress is progress, even if it comes at the cost of whatever small comfort eating your fill might get you. Your brother has started giving you weird looks when you keep eating less than usual, but your foster parents mostly seem relieved that they don't have to make huge portions any more.

Your only real social interactions consist of infrequent questions you post on the one forum you actually feel comfortable talking on—one dedicated to puppeteering. Apparently it's less infrequent than you think, though, or the board is small enough for your presence to be notable, because eventually you start getting recognized in the various corners of the forum. It's nice, in a way, to have others acknowledge you in that way—people start getting interested in your routines, want to share theirs with you, and eventually there's a small group you've tentatively started to call your friends. You're not very open about your personal life—you do exercise some amount of caution—but the distance of the screen means you can be a lot more honest than you've ever managed with anyone in real life.

You also get some help with your code, but you mostly keep it to yourself—it's one thing to have help with a routine that other people would have to see anyway, but letting anyone else comb through your code—which you've quickly come to find is an absolute mess—would be mortifying. And anyway, you find enough people with similar questions to yours to keep working on HAL without ever having to ask yourself.

This odd rhythm of waking up, retreating into the computer room for the day's worksheets, then browsing the net—sometimes practising whatever routine you're workshoping that week with Cal—until lunchtime, then doing whatever exercises you've set for yourself that day and forcing down whatever little dinner you can post-workout, comes to a head eventually. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you haven't talked to anyone outside of your immediate family in months. Maybe it's the countless hours spent staring at a screen connected to servers containing far too much information than your puny human mind could ever begin to comprehend. Maybe, just maybe, it's what you've come to deserve after a period where shit hasn't been going down the drain in an endless spiral.

You know, logically, what it means to be hearing things that aren't there. You know what an auditory hallucination is. You know that psychosis is a relatively common occurrence, and that hallucinations aren't necessarily linked to deeper mental illness.

That still doesn't make it any less terrifying when you hear the laugh.

You're sitting in the computer room, engrossed in a website that seems entirely dedicated to some guy's weird philosophical ramblings about metaphysics, when a loud cackle tears through the room. It nearly shocks you out of the chair, and as you swivel your head in panic, you almost expect to see your brother in the doorway laughing at your terror. There's no one there, though, and it takes you a moment to recall that you're alone in the house right now.

Cal's sat upright against the leg of the desk.

The laughter comes again, this time starting out as almost a whisper.

You swear you can almost see Cal's mouth moving as the laughter grows louder and louder, until you can't focus on anything other than the way your hands itch, the heartbeat in your chest, the blurriness of your vision.

You grab Cal, running into the hallway, and throw him through the door to your room onto the floor. You shut the door, and the one going into the computer room as you sit down in front of it again. You breathe, inhale exhale inhale, until you can actually see the screen again. The laughter keeps coming through the walls, but you ignore it. Try to, at least. You don't actually manage to do any more reading before someone knocks on the door, and Dante opens it to tell you dinner's ready.

It happens again a few days later. This time, you're in your room, looking over the code for HAL, when you hear the laughter again. You staunchly ignore it. You do glance over at Cal, though, lying still at the foot of your bed.

“BETCHA IT'S REAL FUN IGNORING A GUY, NOT EVEN ASKIN' WHAT'S SO FUNNY,” you hear, almost right in your ear.

You jump at the sound of your own voice, pitched high like when you do Cal, but the puppet hasn't moved from his place on the bed.

“OH, I'M SORRY, WAS I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING ANYTHING? COME OVER HERE AND MAKE ME, THEN, SINCE I CAN'T DO SHIT WITHOUT YOU PUTTIN' YER GRUBBY LITTLE HANDS ALL OVER ME,” Cal's voice comes from the body, and you freeze. You slowly stand up, making your way across the room. You keep your sights on the puppet until you feel your foot hit the door, and then you twist around and out into the hallway, closing the door behind you.

You hate every part of this. But you really, really, really don't want to be alone right now.

Knocking on the door to your brother's room, you barely even wait for the “come in” before you swing it open and slam it shut behind you. Dante's looking over his shoulder at you, eyes wide in surprise. He's wearing his regular, non-tinted reading glasses. The blinds over the large window are half-closed, leaving the room in a half-light except for the desk where your brother's sitting. His low-lumens lamp is on, and his batch of schoolwork for the day is scattered across the surface of it like some sort of paper recreation of The Garden of Earthly Delights. He's still in the middle of writing something down, but he quickly puts down his pencil and swivels on his chair, facing you.

“It's Cal,” you start, back flush against the door. You immediately have to rewind in your brain because even if you've told him about Cal as an idea, a shitty little puppet made up of pure Id, he doesn't know about the way Cal's been taking the place of l'appel du vide in the recesses of your mind. He doesn't know how that's normal. You're used to that by now, but he isn't, so how can he know how it's different when you start actually hearing him in the real world—even if it isn't the real real world because obviously he isn't talking for real—

“He's—he's real,” is all you end up saying, because you've just been hyperventilating at Dante for the past seconds, and you regret it immediately when you see the confused look on his face—of course he's fucking real, jackass, he's still sitting on your bed on the other side of the wall. You press your hands against your eyes and breathe, breathe, breathe, before you start again.

“Not—not physically—” great, that just makes you sound even more insane, “—it's. The. The fucking. You know the—”

Your hand travels up to make vague shapes in the air, but you stop in the middle of the sentence, frustration pressing a grumble up through your throat. You've explained the concept of Lil' Cal to him before, you idiot, why are you rehashing it again. You really must be as stupid as your foster parents think you are.

“AND INSANE TO BOOT, TOO,” Cal says, yelling at you over your shoulder, “YOU'VE GOTTA STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE, BOSS—WHAT D'YA CALL A CRAZY TRANNY THAT GROWS UP IN TEXAS?”

“Calm down, lil' man, y'ain't makin' any sense,” Dante says, over the fucking cacophony in your mind. He's slipping back into that stupid exaggerated drawl he used to do to make fun of your dad. You huff, a laugh that isn't even halfway to being a laugh. It still gets a smile out of Dante, though, who leans back on his chair. “What's buggin' ya?”

“TRICK QUESTION,” Cal laughs, “EVEN IF YOU BEAT THE QUEER OUTTA THEM, THE CRAZY OFFS 'EM BEFORE THEY GROW UP!”

You growl, like a god damn child, and Dante's face falls at the sound. He doesn't say anything for a bit, just sitting there awkwardly while you try not to bawl your god damn eyes out like the pussy you are. Eventually you get your breathing under some kind of control, and you relax, letting yourself slide down the door and landing on the floor with a dull thump.

“Have a sit, alright? You don't gotta talk if you don't wanna,” he says eventually, patting his bed.

Sniffling like a baby, you stumble over to the bed and flop down on it.

“Ksrrht—come in, bro-brewski,” Dante mimes turning on a walkie-talkie, “seems like we've got a class one bro-mergency on our hands here, requesting debrief on status, over.”

You don't respond. Even when he nods at you, eyebrows raised in expectation, you just turn to look up at the ceiling.

“Mission control, we have a man down, I repeat, man down,” he says, muffling his voice with one of his hands to simulate the static, “requesting permission to bring in the big guns.”

He pauses, letting you take a moment.

“Might have to make an executive fucking decision if I'm the last man standing,” he continues, when you still don't say anything. “Might have ta' bring out the nuclear warheads here.”

You think. A hug might be nice, but...

“No need, sergeant,” you respond, turning your head again to face him, “shit's locked down tighter than Gitmo.”

“Alright,” he says, mimes putting the walkie-talkie back in his pocket. He turns back to his worksheets, mumbling under his breath as he writes. You lie on the bed for a bit, trying to get the words to fit right in your mouth. Eventually, as Dante keeps glancing over at you, you decide that the straightest road is sometimes the best, after all.

“I heard Cal,” you say.

He stops, looks at you over his shoulder. You can see as he starts putting the pieces together in his mind, his face more open here, talking to you in his room, than it is anywhere else.

“Alright,” he replies, quietly pushing his work to the side and letting a faux-casual tone cover his words, “what'd he say?”

“Don't matter,” you turn and mumble into the covers, “'sall stupid anyway.”

Dante doesn't say anything to that. You lie with your head down in the duvet, your hands itching to tear the damn thing to shreds.

“Guess you do have a case for this driving you crazy now, huh,” he says, eventually, with that shitty dumb sad voice he puts on when he's trying to cheer you up with a joke he knows isn't fucking funny.

“Only about 0.0025 percent of kids under 13 have schizophrenia.”

You hear the words before you realize they're coming out of your mouth.

“Albinism affects around 0.0058 percent of the world population, with a higher prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa than in Europe and European-descendant Americans. Adolescent schizophrenia is more commonly diagnosed, with the reported rates varying from 0.0052 percent to around 0.018 percent. Schizophrenia affects around 0.6 percent of the adult population. Psychosis in children is difficult to distinguish from regular play, although by adolescence the child is often developed enough to separate imagination from reality.”

You let the statistics rattle through your throat, syllables hard as marbles hitting the walls of your teeth and dropping out into the room to fall flat onto the covers.

“Schizophreniform disorder presents as symptoms of schizophrenia lasting shorter than the six months required for diagnosis, although schizoaffective disorder also shares some symptoms with schizophrenia, most often psychosis. Schizophrenia often presents later in women than men, with the peak ages of onset being around 26-32 and 20-28 respectively.”

You can hear Dante breathing. It's even—far too even for him not to be conscious of it. You don't know what you'll do if he—if he doesn't understand what you're saying. The marbles start rolling off the bed, click-click-clacking as they hit the floor, turning and turning and turning. He needs to understand this. He has to, or else he might tell them and they can't know. Eventually, the chair squeaks.

“Dirk, if you're thinking of waiting this out just so our parents don't start their whole fucking spiel with you,” he starts, and the sudden anger in his voice shocks you back into your body, the duvet rough against every part of your skin, “I'm going to—”

He stops himself, sighs, and you sit up to see him running his hand through his hair, leg tapping against the floor in a tup-tup-tup that bounces off your skull like those reflex hammers at the doctor's. Whenever it hits one of the marbles it hiccups, the rhythm offset by a moment as it pierces through and leaves colored glass dust in the cracks of the hardwood.

“This is the most you've said to me in months,” he says, and he sounds bone-deep tired.

Is it?

You try to roll back the days in your mind, but everything blurs into gray sludge, days flattening into nothing with the occasional bright technicolor flashes of mania.

That's... concerning.

He's looking at you like he's studying your every little twitch. Have you talked to him? Is he lying to you to spot your reaction—see if you can remember it? He was barely surprised when you told him you heard Cal—has he heard Cal, too? You're barely breathing, trying to run every possibility through your mind at once. Dante's still not saying anything, and you're afraid to ask why.

“Dirk, seriously, you've gotta talk to someone about this—and I don't mean just me, I mean like, doctors and shit,” he says at last, rubbing his face with one hand. “I'm not a medical professional. Don't know anything about all of that psychology stuff.”

“You hate going to the doctor,” you mumble, “why the fuck d'you want me t' go?”

Does he want you out of the way? Put you away where you can't mess everything up even worse. You thought you were doing good, staying out of the way—a pressure is building behind your eyes, and you recognize the headache brewing.

He groans, apparently not noticing your distress, and waves his hand in the air. His frustration is palpable.

“That's—the only reason I fucking hate it is because I don't have whatever fucking sickness they want me to have so I can be their special little baby boy that they can just—fucking—prance around with and feel good about helping!” He hisses it out like poison. “You have barely been talkin' to anyone for months. You are hallucinating at 13.”

“They don't care about me,” you say, “they won't notice it.”

Dante looks at you, eyes wide in disbelief.

“Derek,” he says, slowly, like you're a child that hasn't been listening, “they're shitty, not blind.”

That—that can't be right. Why would they think about what you're doing? Especially if it isn't making life harder for Dante? They've barely even—they barely even talk to you outside of school stuff, if you just keep that up they won't realize anything's different now—

“You don't think they ain't talking about, you know,” he whispers, expression almost manic in the way he keeps glancing over at the door, “the whole gender thing? We slip up all the fucking time, they're just waiting for us to fuck up irrevocably so they can call us out on it! And I don't know about you, but I do not trust your fuckin' brain not to make this shit even worse, and I can't fuckin' cover for you if you fuck up in front of them, not like last week, not if you start doing obviously crazy shit—hair is one thing, plenty of girls have short hair, girls can wear pants, girls can like video games, whatever the fuck—but this? You're literally going crazy, dude.”

What happened last week? It wasn't when you first heard Cal, right? You don't remember what he's talking about. You suppress the urge to ask him—if you don't remember, if you admit to it, that just means he's right.

“You're not going to be able to last ten more years like this. I don't know if you'll last five—not if you don't want them to know. Not if you still come running to me whenever you get scared.” His words are burning ice through your veins.

You don't say anything. You can't argue your case, not when it's got so many holes in it you could use it as a sieve. It leaves your stomach in knots.

“I'm not going to tell them,” he sighs, “but...”

He runs his hand down his face, laying it over his eyes and letting his head hang back over the chair.

“I don't know if I can file for emancipation when I'm 16,” he says, looking up at the ceiling, “not if I'm still registered as a dependent in the medical system. They've got my ass on lockdown, man.”

He laughs, dry and humorless.

“But I'm gonna try, alright?” he says, voice soft like you haven't heard it in years. “We might be able to move out on our own,” he glances over at you, “could find a place just for us. Get you a doctor for your brains, get you on hormones. Be with you every step of the way.”

“Not like you're going anywhere without me, anyway,” you say, rubbing at your eyes, “not if you don't start using your cane. I'm home all the time, man, I can see you leaving it here when you go out.”

He breathes in sharply through his teeth, winces.

“You got me there,” he sighs, leans back in his chair again, “and it's not like I'm about to go get a driver's license.”

“Could do it in your place,” you say, sitting up, “just bleach my hair—I could totally pass for you, man.”

He barks out a laugh.

“Sure you could, little man,” he smirks, reaches over to ruffle your hair, “I'll getcha looking like a bootleg version of me and you can just waltz into the DMV askin' for a license—yessir, that's me, Dante Strider, logged as legally blind, racin' the track like a man with 20/20 vision.”

“Might work,” you shrug, folding your arms, “it'd be a real win for the legally blind representation. You'd be the guy getting all the awards, I'll be the one actually in the car—ain't like they're gonna see, what with the helmet 'n everything.”

“Yeah,” he says, “and get outed for fraud when they spot me gettin' a burger while you're on the track posin' as me.”

“A sad end to an otherwise brilliant career,” you say, deadpan, and he laughs again, high and clear.

“A real fuckin' tragedy,” he says, smiling. “Seriously though, just... I'm gonna get us both outta here, alright? Let me worry about that shit. And if you want an in to a doctor's office, just say the word, man. I'll smuggle you with me.”

You bite your lip, don't say anything to that. You stand up from the bed, make your way towards the door. Just before you leave, you stop, feeling Dante's gaze on you.

“...Thanks,” you mutter, and go to your own room before he can say anything in response.

⁙

Your name is DEREK STRIDER, and your brother does not file for emancipation at 16. He doesn't have a steady source of income. He doesn't have a place of his own, nor means of transportation. It would require a lot of time, and a lot of money, to go to court about it. With your foster parents' continued badgering, he has neither.

You're 14, and in a little more than a year, you will have fucked everything up.