He's this slouching ink-stained greaseball in the back corner of the art room. Frank sees him every day for the two straight weeks he has detention; by the third day he's forgotten what he did this time. It's just routine, like everything else.
For the first few days Frank trudges in at lunchtime, tripping over the trailing threads and denim at the bottom of his jeans and skidding his half-dilapidated book bag across the long row of tables at the front of the classroom. The supervising teacher never sticks around long after Frank starts to pretend to write his lines - trying out increasingly inventive variations of I must not be disruptive to keep himself looking absorbed - until they're slinking off to the staff room for a sly cigarette under pretense of having work to do and leaving the two of them alone.
I must not have fun, I must not speak my mind, I must not be myself, I must not question bullshit-- it gets old pretty fast, especially since Frank's not even really angry about it anymore. Day five is when he finally breaks and can't pretend he's not paying more attention to the sporadicskritch-skritch behind his ears any longer, and turns around to get a proper look.
The dude is seriously fucking weird, Frank can tell just from looking - wouldn't even have to bring into the consideration the fact he's actually here by choice, in a classroom for his entire lunch hour every day without fail. He's practically the model of angsty teenage isolation, all black-covered and twitchy-fingered, long hair hiding his face where he's hunched over the wide slew of paper and various drawing implements, easy and cliché.
Frank's interested anyway, but he forgets about it over the weekend, until he jerks awake Monday morning hard and desperate and remembers, suddenly, as he's fucking his hand against the sheets: this vague, faceless, brooding image - white, slender fingers - and comes messy and juvenile inside his underwear.
Frank doesn't turn around that lunchtime, even though he's pretty sure the guy doesn't know he exists anyway. The skritch-skritch has been replaced with shh-shh, like watery brush strokes or the flat drag of the side of a piece of chalk, maybe graphite. Frank drops his chin in his hand and stares blankly out of the window for the hour, lets himself listen as his eyelids droop, mind wandering with the motions, trying to imagine the picture taking shape.
As the end of lunch bell sounds the teacher returns and starts making shooing motions at them. Frank takes his time shoving his shit back into his bag, watching the guy carefully sliding paper into a folder out of the corner of his eye, slotting utensils into their proper places in their little boxes. He's wearing a plain, stained hoodie with ripped, tattered cuffs, and when he straightens up and his hair falls away from his face there's a dark smudge on one high cheekbone.
Frank can't stop thinking about it the entire day. When he gets home he locks the bathroom door and jerks off in the shower to images of the white flash of wrists between straggles of dark fabric, chipped black nail polish and tiny front teeth nibbling nervously at an already red bottom lip, sore flesh and ragged skin.
It's not as easy to stay facing forward the next day. For some reason the dude seems louder - sniffing and shuffling in his seat, clattering things against the table, raspy breathing. Frank's always first to leave no matter how long he dawdles, and, like, he can't hang around outside, because the hallway is already full of people. He couldn't anyway, of course, but by Thursday he's toying with the idea that he wants to. The teacher fucks off about ten minutes in and Frank turns around immediately, drops his elbows back against the table and just lets himself look, considering. It had happened again last night, and Frank might not be the brightest spark but he knows himself, even if he doesn't quite know what, exactly, this is yet.
It's warm today, and the guy's dressed refreshingly sparse, wearing a band tee and baggy, paint-splattered jeans, arms bare. He's drawing something with a lot of sweeping lines, charcoal smudged all the way up his right forearm from sliding widely over the paper. Frank gets glimpses of something dark and whimsical; his messenger bag is covered in doodles of violence, zombies, gore. Frank thinks about horror movies, mind flashing back to the last Tim Burton he saw - and that's when he realizes he's going to talk to greasy art room dude.
