Chapter Text
Sunday services at Grace Hill Methodist always smelled faintly of coffee and worn hymnals—a scent that Charlie used to find comforting. Now it mostly just made his stomach hurt.
His father stood inside the sanctuary doors, warm hand extended in greeting to the good people of Millhaven. Pastor Spring’s easy smile lit up the room with the practiced warmth of a man used to belonging to everyone in it. He greeted most of the congregation by name, and Charlie sometimes wondered if all those names took up so much space in his father’s head there was barely any left over for anything else.
Charlie sat in the second pew beside his mother, sister, and younger brother, shoulders pulled tight while people filtered in.
“Morning, Charlie.”
“Good to see you, sweetheart.”
“We’ve been praying for you.”
The last one always landed strangely. Like he’d been diagnosed with something fatal.
He smiled anyway. Years of pastor’s-kid training kicked in: polite nod, small smile, eye contact but not too much. The version of himself that put other people at ease.
The buzz of voices swelled as the small town settled into the creaky wooden benches, gossip passing between them at volumes that felt almost deliberate. Charlie wasn’t sure if he had unusually good hearing or if the old ladies simply didn’t quite grasp the acoustics. The first notes of the opening hymn felt like a mercy.
Pastor Spring took his place at the pulpit, the sanctuary lights washing him gold around the edges, softening the lines of exhaustion that had settled into his face over the past year.
As he launched into his familiar greeting, the doors at the back of the church opened again. The new family arrived just on the borderline of late, which immediately marked them as either visitors or Catholics.
Charlie barely looked up at first. New families drifted through Grace Hill often enough—usually for a few Sundays before disappearing again—but a subtle shift rolled through the sanctuary almost immediately. Attention. Recognition.
A woman with dark hair and tired eyes stepped through the front doors first, followed by a tall boy in a navy jacket carrying the unmistakable posture of someone who had never spent his life trying to disappear.
People turned toward him automatically. Charlie almost felt bad for him.
This town loved new people. Right up until it decided who they were.
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The fluorescent lights of homeroom buzzed with a kind of relentless, sharp intensity that reminded Charlie of a caffeine headache he couldn’t quite shake. He kept his eyes trained on his phone as he weaved between the too-crowded desks, letting spatial memory guide him and praying nobody’s backpack would betray him today. The safety of his Tumblr feed felt, in moments like this, like a completely reasonable coping strategy.
He slid into his seat near the back, fourth row, left side, and whispered a quiet thank you. The seat was cold, which was always better than the days it still carried the warmth of the person who’d been there before him.
“Alright,” Mr. Lange said, glancing at his seating chart with the weary expression of someone who had already accepted the shape of the day. “We’ve got a new student joining us today.”
That was one of the few things he could have said to pull Charlie’s eyes away from the endless cat memes that currently constituted his only form of emotional regulation.
He quickly glanced around the room, weighing his chances. Of course, there were exactly three empty seats in the classroom: one in the front, one right by the door, and one directly next to his.
His eyes caught on the new boy before he could stop himself.
The first thing Charlie noticed was that he looked like he belonged somewhere else entirely. Not in a bad way—just in a way that suggested the universe had made a clerical error that had yet to be corrected.
Tall. Broad shouldered. Auburn hair that fell across his forehead so casually that it must have taken a tremendous amount of effort. Clothing that almost certainly wasn’t purchased at the only outlet mall within an hour’s drive of Millhaven.
The teacher smiled. “You can take that open seat over there—next to Charlie.”
Of course, Charlie thought.
The boy—Nick, apparently—moved down the aisle.
Charlie immediately looked back at his desk. Carefully. Mechanically. A practiced refusal to participate.
With homeroom officially underway, the phone became less of an option than it had been a minute ago, so he focused instead on the grain of the desk. It looked almost melted in places. He was briefly jealous. If only he could melt cleanly into something inanimate and avoid the fact that roughly thirty sets of eyes were now carefully weighing his reaction to the newcomer.
The desk beside him creaked under unfamiliar weight. A bag hit the floor.
“Hi,” he said a bit too brightly for eight o’clock in the morning. “I’m Nick.”
Charlie answered reflexively, donning his pastor’s kid persona like a rain jacket in a hurricane.
“Hi,” he replied with a tight smile. “Welcome. I’m Charlie.”
Fifteen years of practiced politeness from his secondhand position at Grace Hill had morphed social norms into social reflexes. Almost against his will, Charlie’s eyes locked onto Nick’s.
If there really was a God, He was obviously testing Charlie. Or punishing him. Or rewarding him beyond his wildest dreams.
He expected it to end there. The polite, mandatory exchange of names between strangers, followed by the immediate pivot away. That was how it worked.
But Nick didn’t look away.
The eye contact held for one second. Then two. It stretched just long enough to cross the invisible boundary from a casual greeting into something else entirely.
Charlie felt his chest tighten, the breath stalling in his throat as muscle memory locked his jaw. He knew exactly what came next. It was a sequence he could storyboard in his sleep: the moment of quiet realization, the subtle narrowing of the eyes, the slight, mocking curl of the upper lip as the new kid put two and two together. Charlie braced for the impact, waiting for the familiar, heavy weight of the grimace. He kept his own face perfectly, rigidly blank, refusing to give this boy the satisfaction of a flinch.
Three seconds. Four.
But the grimace never came.
Instead, the bright energy in Nick’s expression merely softened into something quieter. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and his smile shifted from a loud, obligatory greeting into a small, genuine curve. He looked at Charlie not like a punchline, or a cautionary tale, or a scandal to be whispered about in the church foyer.
The jarring lack of cruelty was so disorienting it made Charlie’s head spin. The heavy, protective walls he had spent the last year building around himself suddenly felt useless.
He was completely unmoored, the air knocked out of his lungs by the quiet force of a friendly face.
Before Charlie could figure out how to arrange his own features into something resembling a normal human response, the shrill scream of the first bell tore through the classroom.
Nick blinked, startled by the noise, his attention finally snapping toward the front of the room as Mr. Lange clapped his hands together to start the announcements.
Charlie immediately dropped his gaze back to his desk, his heart hammering against his ribs in a frantic, irregular rhythm. He unzipped his bag with trembling fingers, pulling out a notebook he didn't need.
The next fifteen minutes were worse than P.E., which was saying something for a kid who had frequent nightmares about the locker room. Keeping his eyes on Mr. Lange felt like an exercise in pure endurance. By the ten-minute mark, Charlie was already quietly repacking his bag, timing every movement so he could bolt the second the bell rang.
That night, Charlie stared blindly at the dark ceiling of his bedroom, analyzing the interaction from every possible angle. Turning it over. Pulling it apart. Testing it for meaning it probably didn’t have. Then, worse: playing out the myriad of horrifying possibilities that tomorrow’s homeroom might bring.
What would those warm eyes look like when they learned the truth? Which iteration would be worst? Pity, maybe. That was familiar enough to be almost easy. Or disgust, quick and involuntary, like a reflex he wouldn’t even bother hiding.
Or maybe worst of all—something more careful. A quiet determination to fix him as if his wiring was faulty and the right combination of pliers and electrical tape could just solve the problem.
After all, if the past year had taught him anything, it was that he was fundamentally miswired. He had—no—he was a problem to be solved.
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Three hours of sleep and two cups of black coffee later, Charlie stood in front of his bedroom mirror, staring critically at his footwear because the Lord knew they might somehow determine the trajectory of his whole day.
He pulled on a pair of white Converse and stepped back to admire the whole ensemble. The white contrasted well against his dark sweater and the even darker circles under his eyes.
But were they cool?
He sank to the floor with a groan, yanking them back off and replacing them with an electric blue pair.
No—definitely not. Too bright. Too noticeable. And probably too feminine, if he was being brutally honest with himself. He shoved them into the back of the closet where they’d been quietly collecting dust for months.
By the time he was shoving his feet into a safer black pair, his bedroom door creaked open.
His sister leaned against the frame, dragging loudly on an iced coffee until the straw pulled uselessly at the bottom of the cup with a hollow gasp. The sound scraped across Charlie’s already frayed nerves.
“Jesus, Tori!”
“Ah, ah, ah!” She clicked her tongue in mock reproach, wagging a finger at him. “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s goddamn name in vain.”
Her eyes drifted over the pile of discarded shoes littering Charlie’s floor.
“Is there a reason why you’re dressing like an extra in a commercial for SSRIs, or can we just leave?”
She didn’t even wait for an answer before turning on her heel and heading downstairs. Charlie followed behind her, completely unready to face the day but devastatingly out of alternatives.
The drive to school passed in silence broken only by the occasional rattle of Tori’s iced coffee in the cupholder.
By the time they pulled into the parking lot, Charlie had locked everything back down again. The nerves. The spiraling. The humiliating, persistent awareness of a boy he had spoken to for approximately twelve seconds.
He pulled the mask back on carefully and double-knotted it for good measure. He would not be affected by the new kid. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not at all.
Because New Kid Nick meant absolutely nothing to him.