trigger warning: severe bullying, f-slur, non-consentual outing, mentions of sexual assualt/harrassment. if you find this content disturbing or triggering, skip this chapter or stop reading at: "and worse." and continue from: "dae and dylan skipped prom..."

The worst part was that it was a cliche.

A high schooler’s life gets fucked up at a party and then the rest of their existence goes to shit? Yeah.

Original.

Except for the fact that it wasn't a terrible early 2000s movie plot, it was Lucas's actual life, which made everything so, so much worse.

It started long, long before the party, back when Lucas first decided not to give a shit about what anyone else thought.

He would wear waistcoats and ties to school with black denim shorts, button up shirts and legwarmers over his one pair of Doc Martens, earrings with tiny whales on them in all different species, and enamel pins of his favorite film franchises and buttons of pride flags nobody would recognize all over his backpack. 

All his friends were weird kids with ostentatious fashion styles who were a little too loud when they laughed in the lunch hall. He ate the same food every day. 

He watched video essays about marine biology on his phone on the bus home, and if you paid attention, you'd know that on Thursdays and Fridays, it'd be small Youtubers analyzing movies that nobody but Lucas Choi seemed to care about, instead.

He was either the “weird kid” or the “Asian kid,” depending on who you asked, and if you asked the wrong person, they'd tell you he was “definitely gay”.

In fact, Lucas is pretty sure the only reason he didn't make it onto the basketball team in sophomore year was because the coach thought he'd look at the boys in the locker room, or something stupid like that.

Either way, people ignored him, and that was the way Lucas liked it.

“Center of attention” was never a label he was comfortable with, and even though he didn't quite fade into the background, being too weird to talk to was beyond good enough.

The only problem with that? His older brothers.

They were the only non-White pair of twins at the school, and plus the fact that they were way too good at baseball, they couldn't not stand out. 

Daehyun and Dylan (or Dyl and Dae if you were Lucas) were probably the most popular duo in the school, no question. Daehyun was the school’s best pitcher since 1989, and Dylan could both bat and catch — and was able to do those cool bat tricks that defied physics with barely any visible effort.

Lucas hated them sometimes.

And most of those times were when Dyl and Dae got invited to parties.

The Choi twins had the dumbest rule Lucas had ever heard in place when it came to parties: if you invited them, their weird sophomore brother had to come too. No exceptions.

And that meant that somebody would eventually step out of their comfort zone — almost offensively visibly — and ask Lucas Choi if he wanted to go to their house party, only hoping he said yes so that Dylan and Daehyun could come. That was usually only the desperate ones, though.

Most of the time, it ended up that instead of getting fucked up at Bradford Chadford Radford or whoever's house party, Dae, Dyl and Lucas were hate-watching the cheesiest, most problematic romances they could find in the matching pajamas that Dae always insisted on. 

(“Guys, you have to wear them. It’s for family bonding! Do you know what happens to brothers who don't bond?!” “One of them ends up a serial killer. We know.”)

It was a pretty good arrangement. Dae and Dyl weren't going to any parties since either people would give up when they saw Lucas and his eyeliner and humpback whale earrings or Lucas would just say he didn't wanna go. There was no social pressure for Lucas’ homebody brothers to agree to go anywhere they didn't want to. And best of all, Lucas could talk shit about The Notebook with his two favorite people.

(It was what he missed most about going away, honestly. His brothers and their stupid straight boy antics. Dae crying at the movies he swore up and down he hated, and Dyl pretending he hated them both as he made two different batches of popcorn for his annoyingly picky brothers.)

Until Ruqqayah. 

Ruqqayah Sadiq was the only other competitor in the Name Teachers Hate The Most competition that Dae somehow found himself winning, and Dylan had the fattest, stupidest crush on her.

It was practically visible from space, with Dylan acting like every time she flipped her hair, the sun came out. He would flop unceremoniously on Lucas’ bed, shamelessly invading his younger brother's space, to complain about how “super fuckin hot” she was, and how he “didn’t know a girl doing math was basically porn,” and how “her smile is like the sun or something — don't fucking laugh at me, Loogie–”

Either way, Lucas found it a little bit adorable, if not the most annoying thing that's ever happened to him. But he wasn't trying to get in their way, if Dyl actually “pulled his balls up” (Dae’s words), and asked her to their last Spring Fling dance.

Ruqqayah, though, beat Dylan to it.

“Lucas, right? I’m Ruqqayah. I’m gonna ask out your brother.”

“... Okay?” 

“You know Leyla’s holding the Pre-Fling this year, right?”

“... I don't know who that is.”

“Well, she’s holding it at hers and she says that everybody has to bring their date.”

“Okay. What does that have to do with me?”

“I’m asking Dylan to be my date to the dance. And for him to come, you've gotta come too. You can bring a plus one if you want. Are you in?”

“... Sure.”

Lucas didn't, as a general rule, enjoy parties.

They were loud, there were too many people, it stank of alcohol, and overall were just exausting.

The Pre-Fling, though, was the worst one.

It was the senior’s opportunity to go wild before they put their heads down for the last of their exams, and for them to get it on before they have to focus on college prep and everything else.

And go wild they always fucking did.

Lucas had picked Dae as his plus one — stupidly, since he'd gone off with a gaggle of seniors within five fucking minutes of being at the party — and now Lucas was stood by the cheese balls and Doritos in the kitchen watching a whale documentary on Netflix through his phone as he tried to ignore the music that leaked into his hearing. 

It was almost three hours long, and Lucas had been hoping that he'd be gone from the party before it was over.

He was over two and a half hours in.

He sighed, put a strand of hair in his mouth, and focussed back on the sperm whale family that the old, slow speaking host was narrating, willing himself not to bounce on his toes or flick his fingers.

“Hiiiiii — ooogh — ‘scusee me? Uhm, pul-eese do you have — ugh — pads on you? My–my friend needs them. I’ve asked like — hic — everyone.”

The girl in front of him was so drunk it was actually concerning, but she was supporting herself well enough that Lucas didn't even pause his documentary, and just pushed his bag towards her, letting her look through it herself.

Should he have questioned the thud of things that sounded worryingly similar to books? Yes. But the sperm whales were engrossing, so Lucas found himself only looking up to see her thank him, slurring the words into each other almost beyond being understandable, and leaving, tottering away on heels he was shocked she could walk in sober, let alone as drunk as she was. 

She’d made a mess of his stuff too, throwing practically anything and everything on the floor in the search for a pad — even though there was one sticking pretty obviously out of a pocket in the main part of his bag. 

He put everything back in its place quickly before returning to Marisol and her beautiful sperm whale family, sourly noticing the fat raindrops that played rhythm games on the kitchen window.

What he didn't notice, though, was what would turn his life on its head.

Lucas Choi was not interested in being the center of attention.

So when he heard that Leyla — the girl who hosted the party — and her friends had decided to pick on him for a last bit of fun before the full rigor of their senior year hit, it definitely weirded him out a little.

But when he heard that the drunk girl had taken his journal from his bag claiming to look for a pad, panic crawled up his chest.

He'd been in Dae’s bedroom, as far away from Dylan and Ruqqayah as he could get, annoying his brother to see what he was doing on Snapchat, when he saw it.

It was his journal, clearly. 

Patterned with different species of whale, with his name in perfect Korean calligraphy on the front from his friend Deku, who learned as many types of calligraphy as they could get their head around, it was on his older brother’s screen as a slide of his teammate's Snap story.

“Isn’t that… Allisen the Agenda?” Dae said, slowly, carefully, quietly, like he really, really hoped the answer was no.

Lucas couldn't speak.

“‘Let’s see what that creepy fa…’” Dae read the caption before trailing off. “What the actual fuck?”

Lucas couldn't speak.

The next slide was worse.

The next one was worse still.

The deeper they got into his journal, all his notes, all his plans, his doodles, his fucking thoughts, it just got worse.

And worse.

And worse.

They tagged Roman Rodriguez on one of the slides, telling him exactly what they thought Lucas thought about him.

‘The faggot really seems to like your legs bro. Brandon says wear pants for the rest of the year lmaoooooo’

Lucas couldn't speak.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, arms wrapped around him, cradling him close enough that Lucas’ nose pressed up against the vinyl lettering of a hoodie.

At least the smell meant he couldn't feel his tears as they slipped down his cheeks. 

“I’m gonna fucking kill him, Ggukie,” Dae gritted out in clipped Korean, using a nickname Lucas hadn't heard in a very, very long time. “I promise, I’ll fucking kill him.”

“...Hyung—” was all Lucas could get out between ugly, heaving sobs. 

He threw up.

Things didn't really get better.

His friends stopped talking to him, claiming he was ‘creepy’ and ‘abusive’ for writing about the guy he thought was cute in his journal.

People pointed and laughed at him in the halls.

Boys cornered him in the bathroom and called him slurs, sometimes putting their hands on him when he refused to respond the way they seemed to want him to.

Girls harrassed him with questions about the position he took when he had sex, sometimes pulling out Japanese words for tropes he had no idea about — calling him the “perfect uke” and promising to post fanfiction about him and Roman Rodriguez.

His brothers defended him as much as they could, but they got punished so many times that their grades fell and they were on probation on the baseball team.

And then the rumors started.

That he was sleeping with his brothers.

That he was sleeping with Roman.

That he was sleeping with every single person who could get their hands on him.

Someone vandalized his locker with the phrase “fag slut” four times in one week, which turned out to be far from the record by the end of the year.

Teachers refused to help him with work, and he knew it was because they didn't want to he alone with him just in case the rumors were true.

Someone asked him if he sucked the principal's dick to keep his grades up.

A senior grabbed his ass and told him he thought Lucas would like it.

Ruqqayah broke up with Dylan because she thought he was putting Lucas above her.

He lost his job because someone emailed his boss some of the rumors that were being spread.

The only people who would sit with him at lunch were the girls who wrote stories about him being pregnant and called him an omega and asked him if all Asians had a small dick or if it was just a stereotype.

He stopped eating lunch at school.

Someone followed him home to try and find out if he met up with gang members for sex, like one of the rumors said.

They didn't even have gangs in his town.

Senior girls offered him pads, and he knew they were the ones who filled his locker with painted tampons.

He cried so much that he was always dehydrated.

His parents tried to get it to stop, but the school wouldn't do anything but put on anti-bullying seminars and lecture kids about kindness.

He got called so many racial slurs that he started tallying them by frequency.

He stopped going to school eight weeks before the semester ended.

Dae and Dylan skipped prom to watch Leo DiCaprio's Romeo and Juliet with him and didn't make fun of him when he couldn't finish the movie without crying.

They didn't make fun of him when he couldn't sleep alone because he'd started to get almost violent nightmares.

His parents pulled him out of the school, told him they loved him and asked him if he wanted to live with his aunt so he could go to school with his cousins.

They promised it was an inclusive school.

Lucas didn't, couldn't, wouldn't care.

They told his aunt to put him in therapy.

Daehyun beat up Cody Haynes and got Lucas’ journal back.

He couldn't look at it for weeks.

Lucas had packed his room up, finally.

He hadn't had a nightmare since the start of summer, he’d been sleeping alone for at least two weeks, and he'd packed his entire room up within hours.

He was proud of himself.

“Daeguk?” His mom said, calling him by the Korean name he was considering returning to. “Everything ready?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

And he knew he was. 

He reflexively put his hair in his mouth, before catching himself and snatching it back out.

The first thing he was doing when he got to his aunt's place, was finding a fucking barber.