Chapter Text
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Nicholas rolls over and groans, burying his head under his pillow to try and drown out the noise.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Dude! Let me in!” Eugene calls from the other side of the door.
“It’s unlocked!” Nicholas yells, pulling his blanket over his head. He hears the door open and Eugene come in.
“Nick, bro, how are you still asleep?” he says, pulling the sheets off Nicholas’s bed.
Nicholas hisses as the cold air hits his skin. He looks around and finds the numbers displayed on the digital clock beside his bed. “What are you doing in my room at,” he blinks, the red numbers swimming into focus, “8:34 AM on a Saturday?”
“Dude, you have to get up. Shit just went down.”
“What shit? Why is it so early?”
“Exton, dude! You have to come outside and see what they did.”
“What did they do?” Nicholas asks, sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“I’ll show you, just hurry up and get changed!” Eugene throws a sweatshirt at Nicholas. “I’ll be waiting out in the hallway.”
Nicholas throws on a t-shirt and jeans and pulls on his already laced-up converse before heading out to meet Eugene. On his way out, he sees that Seiji’s bed is empty and neatly made, indicating that he’s probably already at breakfast, or practicing at the salle. In the hallway, Eugene is almost vibrating out of his skin with excitement, and he immediately drags Nicholas down the stairs and out to the quad, where there’s a large group of people gathered around the statue of a cavalier that serves as the school's mascot. Eugene pushes through the crowd and Nicholas follows in his wake, until they finally meet up with Harvard and Aiden, who are standing at the front.
Nicholas looks up at the statue, and grimaces a little bit when he sees that it has been dressed in an ugly hawaiian shirt, oversized sunglasses, and a straw hat of the same variety that middle-aged dads wear to the beach. In red paint on the base of the statue is written, ‘To the fencing team, with love, E’. There’s a little doodle of a sword at the bottom as well, and a heart.
“What’s going on?” Nicholas asks, confused.
“Look!” Aiden gestures at the statue angrily. “Look what they did to our Cavalier! Those fucking snot-nosed bastard pricks-”
Harvard reaches out and covers Aiden’s mouth with his hand, silencing him. “Seems like someone from Exton snuck onto our campus last night and dressed up the statue as a prank. And, judging from the note, they’re probably from the fencing team.”
“Oh my god,” Eugene says, a grin stretching across his face. “Fucking Jesse .”
“Jesse Coste?” someone says from Nicholas’s other side, and he turns to find Seiji, who’s looking up at the statue with confusion. “Why would he want to dress up the statue like this?”
Harvard shrugs. “Just to mess with us, I guess. But we don’t have any actual proof that it’s him, so there’s not much we can do.”
“We need to find a way to get him back,” Nicholas says.
“Like, find Exton’s mascot and dress it up too?” Eugene responds, still grinning. Nicholas responds with finger guns and a wink. Seiji looks like he’s about to say something, but Harvard cuts in.
“Retaliating would mean sinking to his level. Just forget about it, okay?”
“Absolutely not,” Aiden says. “This is a challenge. Which, I for one, intend to win.”
Harvard sighs. “Is there any way I could possibly convince you guys to drop this?”
“No,” Eugene, Nicholas, and Aiden chorus together.
“Fine. Just try not to get caught, okay? Our season has barely started, and we can’t risk half our team getting suspended for stupid reasons.” Eugene fist pumps, and Aiden hugs Harvard.
“Hey,” Eugene turns and says to Nicholas, “do you have Bobby’s number?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Tell him to meet us in Harvard and Aiden’s room. I’ll get Tanner and Kally. We’ve got revenge to plan.”
“Hey, wait a moment, who said you could use our room?” Aiden says, but Eugene just waves him off.
Half an hour later, the whole team is gathered in Harvard and Aiden’s room, spread out on the floor or sitting on the bed. Seiji lurks near the door, obviously uncomfortable with the whole situation. Eugene somehow managed to get Coach’s rolling whiteboard up the stairs and into the room, and is standing next to it, ready to write down ideas.
“Remember,” Harvard says, “nothing that could actually hurt people, okay? Inconvenience, yes, injure, no. Exton may be annoying, but they’re not evil or anything.”
Eugene gives a thumbs up. “Got it. First idea,” he says, writing it down on the board, “is releasing a bunch of live crickets into Jesse’s room.”
“Why would we do that?” Seiji asks, frowning.
“Because it would be hilarious,” Eugene says, as if it should be obvious.
“I think we should do something that will affect the whole team or school, not just one or two people,” Kally says, and Harvard and Aiden nod.
“Yeah!” Tanner jumps up. “We could release a bunch of live crickets into the cafeteria instead!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a health hazard, bro,” Eugene says.
“What about the locker room?” Nicholas asks.
Eugene points at him. “I like the way you think,” he says, writing it down on the board under the title ‘Ways to show Exton we’re superior’. “Any other ideas?”
“Decorate their salle to look like our salle. Like with the wall of forbidden phrases and stuff.”
“Cover the entire floor of the gym with maple syrup.”
“Wasps.”
“No wasps,” Harvard says, looking at Aiden pointedly.
“We could take their trophies,” Seiji says, the first idea he’s contributed.
“Their trophies?” Nicholas questions, turning around to face Seiji.
“Dude!” Eugene yells, “That’s genius! Because they came for our mascot first, which is like, the embodiment of our school spirit-”
“Nice SAT word,” Aiden says.
“Thanks. So if we go for their trophies, it’s like we’re attacking their school spirit back! The only question is, what do we do with the trophies? Just stealing them isn’t really a prank…”
“Oh!” Nicholas says, suddenly struck by a genius idea. “Bobby, didn’t you say your mom was threatening to get rid of all of your old barbie clothes? Maybe we could dress the trophies up in those! Because they have the little people on the tops of them, don’t they?”
Bobby looks thoughtful. “That might work. If you guys can get the trophies back here by tomorrow, I think I can get my mom to drop off the clothes by then. That way, we could probably have them all back in place at Exton before school starts on Monday.”
“Hell yeah!” Eugene pumps his fist, then turns to Harvard. “Can you drive us? Like, tonight?”
Harvard sighs, but agrees, and they begin to hash out the details, like who’s going, and exactly when they’re going to do it. At one point, Kally asks how they’re planning to get into the gym where the trophies are kept, but Eugene waves him off, saying that he’s got that covered.
Seiji slips out of the room early, and Nicholas follows him, waving bye to everyone else who’s still planning.
Seiji’s sitting at his desk, working on a paper when Nicholas enters and flops dramatically onto his bed. He can hear Seiji sigh dramatically from the other side of the duck curtain. Pulling the covers over himself, Nicholas decides to see if he can get back to the sleep that Eugene had so rudely awakened him from.
He gets another three hours, and by the time he wakes up, it’s one in the afternoon, and Seiji’s gone, probably in the cafeteria for lunch. He doesn’t feel like getting out of bed though, so he just grabs his laptop and watches YouTube until Seiji returns.
“Hey.”
“What do you want?” Seiji asks.
“What did you think about Exton’s prank?”
“It was stupid.”
“Yeah, yeah, Exton shouldn’t be wasting its time on stupid pranks and neither should we, blah blah blah.” Nicholas knows Seiji is probably the least enthusiastic about their plan to get Exton back, even if it did come from his idea.
“That’s not what I meant,” Seiji says.
“Oh?”
“It was a bad prank. They could have come up with something a lot more creative.” Nicholas sits up, surprised. Seiji continues. “Just dressing up the mascot doesn’t do a lot. I bet it’s pretty easy to clean up, too, unlike some of the stuff our team was mentioning earlier.”
“Are you getting competitive ?” Nicholas asks, grinning.
“No.” There’s a pause. “I just think we could do better.”
“So you are getting competitive. Don’t worry, dude, we’ll definitely show them up tonight.”
“Do you know how we’re getting into Exton?”
“Eugene said he ‘had a plan’, so…”
“I hope we don’t get caught. Harvard was right. If everyone gets suspended, then the fencing team is basically done for.”
“Don’t be so pessimistic! There’s no way we’re going to get caught. In the meantime, though, do you want to watch a movie or something?”
“We don’t have anything to watch it on.”
“I’ve got Netflix on my laptop! C’mon, I’ll even let you pick what we watch.” Nicholas gets up and pulls aside the duck curtain. Seiji is still sitting at his desk. He gets up and tries to pull the curtain back.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“We’re roommates! We need to bond !”
“Absolutely not.” Seiji gives the curtain one last tug and it promptly falls, leaving the two boys facing each other with no barrier in between them.
They pause for a moment, then Seiji says, “This is all your fault.”
“You were the one who was pulling on it! Anyways, I think it’s some sort of sign. The universe wants us to take it down and put it back in the shower so we can stop accidentally getting the whole bathroom wet.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Listen, if the floor starts growing mold, it’s going to be your fault.”
Seiji picks up the curtain. “Help me rehang this.”
“Do we really need to keep doing this? Cause like, I’ll stay on my side of the room with or without the curtain.”
“NO!” Seiji shouts, then looks startled at the volume of his own voice. “Just, uh, no. We’re going to keep it. Please.”
Nicholas shrugs. “Sure thing. Here, it looks like it was that side that broke,” He says, pointing at the wall closest to the door. “Let me grab a chair.”
They spend about ten minutes rehanging the curtain and making sure that it won’t fall down so easily again. Nicholas hears Seiji sigh in relief when they’ve finished, and then say, “Sorry. For yelling earlier.”
“I get it. You want to have your own space, and that’s cool. It’s just weird to talk to you and not see your face, you know?”
“We talk to each other outside of our room all the time.”
“I guess. Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”
They go back to doing their own stuff after that, the only noise coming from Seiji flipping the pages of his textbook. Nicholas has his earbuds in, watching skating videos on his laptop. The window is open, and a cool autumn breeze blows through the room. Outside, the leaves on the trees are beginning to change color, the greens turning to red and orange. Seiji turns another page, and Nicholas clicks on a new video.
A few minutes later, Seiji says, “Um, do you still want to watch a movie?”
Nicholas pops an earbud. “Sure. What were you thinking?”
“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Stardust’?”
“Nope, don’t think so,” Nicholas says, pulling it up on his laptop. “You want to watch it?”
“If it’s okay with you.”
“Sure. Do you want to come over here, or…”
“You can come over here. Your bed probably has a bunch of crumbs in it.”
“That hurt,” Nicholas says, standing up and pulling aside the duck curtain. Seiji is sitting on his bed with his legs crossed, and Nicholas flops down next to him, setting the laptop in between them. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then,” Nicholas says, and hits ‘play’.