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The first time Itchy saw Karla he knew he'd be a problem. Tight shirt, tighter jeans, and the thickest glasses he'd ever seen; all worn unfittingly on a twiggy fourteen year old fidgeting in the back of a Chemistry classroom. He'd heard of this guy; practically everyone had--the most dramatic kid to haunt the halls.
His was the only table left to sit at. He wrote his notes in a glittery blue gel pen and smelled like he bathed himself in a tub of cologne every morning. He kept smiling at Itchy, and Itchy couldn't figure out why, but he didn't like it, so he cornered a kid in the hallway before class and convinced him to magnanimously switch seats.
Karla quickly turned to chatting up his new tablemate. Itchy felt annoyed by that even more, but didn't back out on the new seating arrangement.
For a while, that was that. A semester passed, as slow and painful as ever, then summer, and by the new school year they didn't have a single class together.
The first picture he'd taken of Karla hadn’t been entirely on purpose. He’d only had a camera on him at school for an art project, first off, and had been using it to take photos around campus when something caught his eye. He would have filled the cheap film up with pictures of old graffiti carved into the walls and dented metal lockers if it hadn’t been for him walking by that month’s spectacle and suddenly remembering:
Karla had a new crush.
There were a few things that were considered common knowledge among the students—which teachers were easy to fuck with, which ones to avoid, the dealers around school, who gave the best handjobs behind the bleachers, and so on. Karla Pinefield’s crushes, unfortunately, were also common knowledge—everyone knew when it happened whether they wanted to or not, because he had a god damn system.
First, he’d stare. A noticeable amount. The teachers usually called him out on it, if the girl herself didn’t whip around in her seat to throw a pencil case at him (which had only happened once, but, to be fair, it’d been pretty memorable). Then, he’d start writing poems to slip into her locker. He never signed them, but he didn’t have to—the glittery blue gel pen, gold-trimmed cardstock, and surprisingly blocky handwriting were consistent throughout each gift. Itchy had seen multiple girls tear one in half before even reading it (which gave him conflicting feelings of glee and anger and envy, which he decided was too messy to deal with, and so consolidated it all down to a forced indifference).
Karla’s last step, though, was the mixtapes. He made every girl a new playlist and presented it to her on an 8-track cassette outside of class but always on campus. Hoping for--what, for them to fawn over his sensitivity and style? He had to have known by now it would never play out like that.
Itchy didn’t understand why Karla always had to make such a spectacle of himself. Yet Karla did, without fail, and people showed up for it, without fail, because if there was one thing the divided cliques of teenagers that attended Akatsuka High could find common ground on, it was the pure schadenfreude derived from watching a sincere idiot publicly humiliate himself.
Itchy knew he wasn’t truly mature enough to be above that, too, like he tried to present himself as when ditching things like pep rallies and football games and dances.
It was just that moment when Karla’s over-eager face crumpled under rejection—Itchy never could look away, no matter how hard the second hand embarrassment hit.
Like now, when the brunette girl from Algebra shoved the mixtape back in his face, looking uncomfortable. The disappearance of a sparkle in Karla’s eyes was instantaneous.
Without consciously deciding on it, Itchy realized he had raised his camera up to his face and taken a picture. Someone to his right turned their head towards him, confusion plain on their face, but he ignored them. He thumbed the slider and took another picture before dropping it back in his bag. The other people around him weren’t important. Karla hadn’t noticed, so it was fine. It was just a few pictures, anyway, no big deal.
Until it was.
If someone had asked what had led Itchy to think it was a good idea to set himself up in an old tree outside Karla’s window, he honestly wouldn’t have known what to say. Which was fine, since the only people that would really ask would be the police, and he had no plans on getting caught. His motive was as simple as it was stupid, anyway: he was just up there because he wanted to see Karla.
He’d noticed where Karla lived last month—accidentally. It wasn’t like he riffled through school records, or followed the oblivious guy home, or anything else suspicious like that. It genuinely had been an accident. He pet-sat for the old couple that happened to live across from Karla, that was all.
Last month, after his grandma had dropped him off for a full weekend stay while the couple visited family in Dallas, Itchy made his usual rounds through the house closing all the blinds and curtains. That’s when he saw Karla out on the lawn across the street—wearing jean cut-offs, a white t-shirt, chunky hiking boots, and knee-high tube socks while visibly struggling to push a lawnmower. Sweat stuck his shirt to his skin and made the barely-there muscles in his arms seem to glisten in the bright afternoon sun.
Itchy had almost torn the blinds with how violently he snapped them closed.
He kept thinking about it, though, the whole weekend. He thought about it when he went home late that Sunday, catching movement from the upstairs window facing the street as Karla walked by it in pajamas. He thought about it when he ate dinner, when he took a shower, and when he saw Karla walk by, oblivious to his existence, in the hallway on Monday.
It stayed a buzzing, not-quite-dormant thought in his head all the way up to his next weekend of work, a month later. He spent that afternoon playing with the couple’s cats, his increasingly clammy palms gripping the pole of dangling feathers on string tighter than necessary, purposefully not thinking about it, because if he did, he’d talk himself out of it.
Which is how he found himself scaling the tree in Karla’s lawn that night, sitting with one hand gripping the camera in his pocket, the other in a loose fist against his thigh, legs squeezed tightly on the branch holding him up. A few feet away, through gently swaying clumps of foliage and a closed but uncovered window, Karla sat at his desk. If he looked up, he may even have seen Itchy, partly to the left of his window. It was a dark night lit only by a waning crescent moon and the leaves on the tree provided a dense little shield, paired with his dark hair and dark clothes, but it wasn’t like he’d been able to scope out his spot from Karla’s vantage point before climbing up there. Who the hell knew how well Karla could be able to see from the lamplight on his desk?
He didn’t look up, though. He just kept writing in a notebook, lips moving silently as he mouthed words. Itchy wished he could read lips or, even better, that he could get closer, find out if Karla was whispering his own words while he focused so intently on his writing or if he was singing to the music he had playing through the ever present headphones that were pulled over his ears. He was already closer than he ever should be, though. He couldn’t risk moving any further on the branch, even with the enticing and unrealistic fantasy of crawling closer and tapping on the window before climbing in, invited.
He could risk trying for a picture, though. He’d brought another small, cheap disposable camera instead of his good one, because he hadn’t wanted to risk dropping it from such a height. That, and something about bringing his best camera felt so much more premeditated. He could almost trick himself into believing that made what he was doing better, like a dismissively boyish act of privacy invasion. Almost. Regardless, it felt heavy in his hands as he covered the flash with a thick finger and aimed the lens.
Karla was tapping his pencil against his desk in thought, now, a rapid movement that drew the eye. His other hand reached up to card through his hair in frustration, leaving it there and leaning his weight onto the elbow he’d propped on the desk. His pencil stilled, suddenly, before he brought the end to his mouth and pressed the eraser into his bottom lip.
Itchy took the picture. His heart pounded, thumping in his ears at a volume that almost seemed louder than the crack of the shutter, which, in the still of the night, already felt impossibly loud. He was ready to bail from the tree, but Karla didn’t so much as twitch.
Itchy couldn’t believe that he was getting away with this. He felt so sick and giddy. His lips twitched in an attempt to quell the manic grin that threatened to slash across his face before he gave in, letting out a quiet, disbelieving chuckle.
For a while, though, that remained the only exciting thing that happened. Karla went back to writing, gently bobbing his head to his music, while Itchy sat in his tree, watching intently. From his perch he could see the bottom half of Karla’s bed and a few posters on the far wall.
Itchy entertained the idea of finally having a full conversation with Karla after this. He could rent those shitty movies from his posters and take notes, prepare a whole litany of responses, maybe force his posture and face into something relaxed and inviting and effortlessly social like he’d done in middle school. But even just the thought of adopting that persona again was exhausting to him.
Not to mention pointless, because every brief interaction they’d had thus far usually ended with Itchy lashing out in embarrassment. Even if there was someone out there that would willingly put up with his tetchy personality, it wouldn’t be Karla, no matter how nice he was—Itchy didn’t deserve it.
But it was nice to think about. Fantasies didn’t hurt anyone, right? No one but himself, at least. And what Karla didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. It wasn’t like he planned to spread these photos around. The exact opposite, in fact; he was going to guard this shit with his life .
So Itchy contented himself with watching Karla going about his night, idly fantasizing about what it would be like to insert himself in it.
After a while, Karla slid his headphones off to rest on his shoulders, set his pencil down, and stretched his arms over his head. He laced his hands together and arched his back into it, which, to Itchy, seemed obscene and almost purposeful. Like a performance. Like he wanted someone, anyone who passed by in the street, to see him from his window. Itchy’s hands shook, much to his annoyance, but he couldn’t help it. Hurriedly, he took another few pictures.
Karla dropped from his simple stretch and turned in his desk chair to get up, a peak of his tan thighs flashing before his oversized sleep shirt fell back into place, hiding them. Itchy almost fell from his perch in a rush to take three quick shots as Karla walked out of his view.
He wondered if he should leave, now, or wait until Karla had fully gone to bed. By the sparse light that reached him from the window he could see he still had six shots left in his camera, but every second he stayed felt riskier and riskier.
He heard a bike ride by in the street and held his breath until the sound of turning wheels faded without a single hitch in their stride. Still, he didn’t dare move for a moment longer, barely allowing himself to exhale. Itchy bit his lip harshly in thought.
He’d leave when Karla fell asleep or closed his curtains. Late enough to be sure no one would be on a late-night ride home or peeking out their windows before bed. His ass was, admittedly, getting a little sore from sitting on the branch so long, but he was determined to use up the film. He’d already come so far, after all. As Karla walked into view again, he relaxed his shoulders as best as he could manage, and let his thoughts of everything else fall away as he raised his camera.
He spent the next night at home in his darkroom, set up with a mix of equipment he’d either been gifted from his grandparents, pilfered from the local pawn shop, or stolen from the photography club. He had been using it mainly to avoid the social interaction that came with getting his school and personal projects printed at the store—but it had become even more of a necessity now, with photos like this that he couldn’t risk anyone else seeing and asking about.
The quality was shit, though. Between the lack of proper lighting and the nervous shaking of his hands, he’d come away with a bunch of useless, indescribably blurry or dark photos. All except the first one, of Karla with his pen pressed into his lower lip, eyes half-lidded. He set that one aside carefully and trashed the rest.
He’d felt despairing at first, wanting to twist the wasted film around his fingers and pull them apart, but then he felt excited. What a waste it would be to go through all this and come away with just one good photo. He’d just have to try again.