Hadley: An Ansel Elgort Fan Fiction

Chapter 1

Comment your opinions please. I'm new to this and any feedback positive or negative would be greatly appreciated! -Beth

My best friend Dung and I sat in his truck a few blocks down the road from my house. Dung was from Vietnam. He moved here with his parents when he was ten. He spoke English (not perfectly), but nobody at school really paid him any attention. One day, at recess, I noticed him reading something on the slide. He was reading Julius Caesar by Shakespeare; a ten year old was reading Shakespeare. Anyway, I watched him for a little while. Two kids, Jeremy and Colin I think, walked up to him and started giving him a hard time about reading during recess. The kid had just moved to Indiana from Vietnam and he was already being picked on, for reading of all things.

"Shakespeare is pure genius," Dung told them. They scoffed.

"Reading is for pussies," Jeremy took the play from his hands and tossed it into the dirt.

"Pussy?" Apparently, pussy wasn't an English word that Dung knew.

"Yeah, pussy; you're a pussy," Colin said.

I knew what a pussy was, I had an older brother. I marched over to the slide and shoved Jeremy and Colin away from Dung.

"Reading's cool," I stated. "Does that make me a pussy?"

"Yeah," Colin spat.

I kicked Colin in the balls, grabbed the play, Dung's arm, and pulled him to the swings. Sure, I got in trouble, but it didn't really matter to me. From then on Dung and I were basically inseparable, and we've stayed that way for the past 5 years.

Dung pulled out a pack of cigarettes from the glove box. He waved them in front of me. I shook my head, and he whipped out a lighter and began to smoke. We did this pretty much every Friday night. Sometimes I smoked with him, sometimes I didn't. A Paper Kites cd played softly in the trucks stereo, Dung turned it up slightly.

We were fifteen now, almost sophomores. We only had one class together; Dung was in all honors classes and I was in one, English, the one we took together. He was probably the smartest person I'd ever met, not just in school either. He knew basically everything about everything, which is another reason kids didn't really care for him.

"Who invented cigarettes?" I asked him.

"Herbert A. Gilbert," he answered blowing smoke from his mouth.

We weren't stoners or anything, Dung just smoked. He knew it was dangerous and stupid but he claimed he didn't care.

"It's an outlet," he'd say.

"An outlet for what?" I'd ask.

"All the bullshit in life; there's so much of it, why is there so much, Hadley?"

"You tell me, you're the genius."

"That's one question I don't have the answer to."

Dung was gay; literally. Nobody knew, only me. He told me in the 8th grade. He was terrified of himself, what he was feeling, how people (mostly his parents) would react if they found out. I didn't know how to comfort him, I didn't know how to comfort people period. He didn't act like the stereotypical gay kid at all; he had a deep voice, he didn't know shit about fashion, and he never said anything about finding other guys attractive.
We were sitting in my basement at 3 o'clock in the morning (I'm pretty sure my parents suspected it because he stayed overnight all the time) watching 10 Things I Hate About You.

He snatched the remote off the coffee table and hit the pause button.

"Hadley."

"What? Why'd you pause it?"