Dirt Lifter | Craig of the Creek High School AU

Fuck Mr. Davis All My Homies Hate Mr. Davis

Books, bags, snacks, shoes, stationary, and people and pets were scattered across Vanessa's living room. Cheesesticks laid his head on Vanessa's backpack next to the couch, asleep. Vanessa laid her head on the edge of the couch, wedged between it and the coffee table, textbook on her lap. The couch was occupied by the other's textbooks and her laptop. Half-a-dozen colored pens and a half-eaten bowl of pretzels were on the table Jason sat against. Craig was on the floor, leaning on Jason's leg and flipping through flashcards he'd made an hour prior. All three of them were absolutely, positively, one-hundred percent in Study Mode.

Craig was in the middle of quizzing Vanessa with his incredibly high quality (if he did say so himself) flashcards. "Total Fertility Rate."

"Average number of children per women," she replied, without looking up from her book.

"It is?" He flipped over the card. "I have it down as how many kids per one hundred people."

"No, that's Crude Birth Rate, I think." Vanessa scratched Cheesesticks' head. "Yeah, 'cause fertility is with women. That's how I remember."

"Then what's Natural Increase Rate?" He held up one of the flashcards. "I put that down as average number of children."

She shrugged. "No idea."

He picked a card out of the stack, reading its back and front. "Have..." He flipped through the cards again, frantically. "Have I been studying the terms mixed up for the past half an hour?"

"I don't know. Maybe?"

Vanessa did not sound like this was an incredibly big deal, which was not helping Craig's increasingly large panic. "How did I mislabel everything? This says that population means 'of common culture'. It's not. Why did I write that?"

They had mock exams later that week, and Mr. Davis said they would count as a graded class test for the unit. This study group was for them to cram as much correct information into their brain as possible. Craig had been cramming the complete wrong information into his brain in their precious study time. How did it take him an entire hour to notice that?

"I think we're all dead at this point," she answered his thought. Motioning to her textbook, she added "I have read this page twenty times, and the concept of city structures still alludes me."

Okay, three out of the four of them (Cheesesticks was technically not part of their study group, but Craig counted him anyway) were tired. "How are you holding up?" He looked up at the teen he was leaning on. "Jason?"

"What?" Jason looked down at him. "Oh, uh, bad."

Craig flipped himself over to look at Jason's notebook, which was lying on his lap. It had 3 and a half lines of notes written on it. Jason had made the least progress of the three, but all their work was minimal given the time.

"You know," Vanessa started, sarcastic as ever. "It would've been really helpful if Mr. Davis did some review in class, instead of talking about his trip to the West Coast for a full hour." She pushed the textbook off her lap, and it landed on the floor with a thump.

While it was Craig's fault that he somehow had been studying the wrong terms for the past hour, Mr. Davis had also not been helping any of them. "He's the worst," he replied. "He doesn't even know how to teach."

"I know! It's like he doesn't know that's his fucking job! Like, if you want to rant about your life so much, start a fucking podcast instead of spending an entire class block talking about how you hate the school system. I hate it, too, you're not special." She got up off the couch. Cheesesticks lifted his head, awoken by his owner's words. "The next time he goes off on one of his rants, I'm stabbing him with a compass."