Chapter Text
High school, Elliot decided, was not worth the hype. Everything here was meaningless. The people, the drama, the taunts. Nothing here mattered. Everything was masked in a shade of bullshit. Prom, football games, and pep rallies held a level of palpable fakeness, leaving a horrible taste on his tongue. They all tried to mask the angst, pain, and self-loathing that lurked within the school but ultimately failed. Desperation seemed to cling to the walls of the school, constantly growing and thriving.
The head cheerleader for one was anorexic. Elliot had hacked into her phone and computer the first semester of his sophomore year. It had actually been an accident when he found out. He had just been looking for information about his Chemistry homework and hacking simply canceled out the option for social interaction. What he found instead was an incriminating search history and emails to her psychiatrist.
The valedictorian of last year was a drug dealer. He didn't do drugs himself but sold for money. His parents were poor and couldn't afford to pay his boarding and book fees at Harvard. Again, desperation. It seemed to latch onto everyone.
The principal wasn't even clean. Everyone was too easy. They were transparent and, therefore, easy to hack. They were all secretly empty.
This was Elliot’s life. He hacked, slept, did schoolwork, and repeated the cycle. He had a few friends. Well, Angela was more of an acquaintance. She had been his friend in elementary school, but ever since she had started dating her douche of a boyfriend, she had become an annoyance. It didn’t bother Elliot much. She used to force him into socializing. He figured he could also count Darlene as a friend despite the fact that she was his sister. A year older, she and Elliot differed in every way possible. She was popular, Elliott was not. She liked parties, Elliot did not. Still, Darlene remained the only honest and constant person in Elliot’s life. Her boyfriend and his ridiculous Dark Army had separated them for a couple of weeks now. Elliot was fairly alone.
Elliot did have parents. His mom was an alcoholic and chronic smoker. She was cruel and unaffectionate, treating both Elliot and Darlene like strangers. His dad was a technician and worked all the time. He had been kind when Elliot was younger, but he had grown tired over the years and just stopped trying with his children.
So Elliot came from a broken home. He didn’t advertise it. He covered the cigarette burns that his mom sometimes left on his arms in her drunk rages with the long sleeves of his sweatshirts. There was nothing he could do about the dark circles. They would always remain as Elliot kept his insomniac routine. It didn’t matter. Elliot’s sleepless nights served as his emotional release. He would cry until he couldn’t stop, scratch his arms until they burned red, and scream into the pillow. It wasn’t healthy, he knew, but it would get him through the next day.
There was one another constant thing in his life other than Darlene, his pain, and insomnia. That thing was Tyrell Wellick, son of millionaires Carter and Sharon Wellick. Carter Wellick was some sort of banker or something (Elliott didn’t care that much) which allowed him to buy a total of thirteen cars and five different houses. To the average person, Tyrell seemed just as you’d expect him to be: well-dressed, popular, and social. He was personable, charming, and handsome - the perfect person to take over his father’s job and take any girl (or boy) home. However, Elliot saw something different in Tyrell. He didn’t know what it was exactly. He would watch him at lunch sometimes and watch the young boy smile and laugh at something his lunch mates said. There was something wrong with that smile. It wasn’t the normal fakeness that everyone else seemed to have. This wasn’t just pain. There was also something in his body language. His back was too rigid, and his eyes seemed too strained.
Elliott just didn’t understand him. He had hacked him numerous times. Every social media website and personal account brought up nothing. He was clean. Too clean. His image appeared to be perfectly crafted, without flaw and without error. Yet something was hiding in the midst of pictures with friends and family on his Facebook and Instagram pages. This wasn’t truth; this was a lie, merely a cover-up.
Why would he need to lie? What was he hiding?
Elliott couldn't deny that Tyrell was physically appealing. He would have to be completely blind to not notice that. He obviously cared about his appearance as everything about him was meticulous. His clothes had no wrinkles and always happened to be on trend. He never once had a hair out of place. Even his nails were a perfectly manicured length and never seemed to be dirty. They contrasted greatly with Elliot's own bitten nails that had turned to stubs.
It was all wrong. His wrongness haunted Elliott. Instead of crying at night, he took to thinking of Tyrell and his empty smiles. No matter how much he thought about him or how many times he hacked his personal accounts, nothing came up. Ever. It was impossible. Everyone had something. Someone like Tyrell should have numerous things on him. Half of the people he hung out with were either into child pornography or drugs. Even his father, Carter Wellick himself, appeared to have a mistress on the side. Elliott would have felt bad if he hadn't also found out that Sharon was also having an affair. With another woman. Everything that surrounded Tyrell was unclean and dirty yet he remained spotless. It was as if he was standing in a body of water but somehow remained completely dry.
Tyrell's cleanliness, in some ways, gave Eliott's mind relief. Nothing was obvious about him. He was a breath of clean air, a glass of cold water. Everything in Elliot's mind was so chaotic and jumbled, but Tyrell remained stable and constant. Always there. Always the same with his wrongness.
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Elliott sat in his statistics class, waiting anxiously for the teacher to arrive and just shut everyone up. He sat alone of course at the very back of the room. Class participation was abhorrent. Surrounded by empty desks, Elliott continued to stare down at the whiteness of his notebook's pages, resigning himself to the boredom he would have to face.
All of the sudden, he heard the sound of a chair scraping the floor next to him. Elliot's blood rushed to his ears. No one ever sat with him. Everyone knew not to sit with him as his isolated and outwardly hostile appearance perpetually suggested.
Elliot didn't dare look to see who it was
"Bonsoir," a soft voice said.
Elliot's head shot up.