Quarter-Life

“So, Halloween costumes,” Harry starts, leaning against the bare chalkboard with his arms crossed. When a few students giggle, he notices that they’re all looking at the belt on his jeans. He looks down to see the leaves on his hips peeking out from under the jumper he’s wearing, so he straightens up.

The rain’s made it difficult for everyone to get to class on time this morning; he and Layla decided to drink their morning coffee in his classroom and work on their respective lesson plans, so Harry was in before any of his students could arrive.

She laughed as soon as she walked into the classroom, which is apparently exactly like Jodie’s save for the chalkboard and the maps hung on the walls, with a “why is your classroom exactly like I pictured it?”, and sat across from him in Madison’s usual seat until the bell rang and she left him to read over his lecture.

As badly as he wants to get started with said lecture on Austria in the 16th century (titled ‘Maria and Joseph, sans Jesus’ because Harry needs to make outlining entertaining), he’s decided to give the missing kids a bit of time. It would be unfair for them to miss out, he thinks, especially because he’s giving them an exam next week. A bit of conversation won’t hurt, and they’re already chattering anyway.

“Lay ‘em on me. I need ideas.”

The kids starts buzzing about video game character costumes and ‘sexy’ occupational outfits, which shouldn’t shock Harry as much as it does because that’s fairly normal. Daisy’s been hunting for a special Tinkerbell costume for the cabaret bar’s annual Halloween party next week (and a matching Peter Pan for Niall), and even Anna’s decided to sexualize her Ophelia costume. Harry doesn’t have a costume yet, but reckons he needs one if he’s to help set up the upcoming carnival with Danny and Mrs. Tomkins and go to the cabaret bar afterwards.

“I’m going to be Stevie Nicks,” Madison declares, tapping the toes of her trainers together. Harry doesn’t like the mud she’s shaking out onto the floor, but his face certainly lights up with her costume choice.

“Hipster,” Vanessa rolls her eyes behind Madison. There’s been tension between the two recently, but it’s none of his business, so Harry pretends not to notice.

“That’s sick,” he grins. “She’s my favorite.”

Madison’s eyes gleam, and Harry catches Vanessa’s frown behind her. “Really? I love her, too!”

“I named my cat Rhiannon after the song,” Harry admits as Madison smiles.

“That’s so perfect! I think I’m going to be Stevie from the Edge of Seventeen video, though. I like her solo stuff better.”

“That’s a good Stevie to be. You have the hair for it,” he tells her, gesturing to the wild curls hanging around her face.

“You think so? You could be Stevie Nicks, too, since your hair’s so long,” she giggles, but quickly gasps. “Oh, wait, what about Mick Jagger? He’s a Leo, but his moon is in Aquarius, and you kind of look like him.”

Harry snorts, familiar with the comparison. Ginny always told him that was what compelled her to talk to him for the first time, during one of parties at the old flat. Last he’s heard, per a conversation with Gemma on his walk home from the gym yesterday, she and Michael are having a December wedding. “So I’ve been told.”

“What about a pirate? You wear a lot of pirate shirts,” a boy with a skinhead says from the back row. Harry’s still at a loss for his name, but he knows what his handwriting looks like, and that counts for something.

“And you have a ton of tattoos,” Madison chirps as the last bit of students walk through the door, the damp smell of morning rain filling the cold classroom.

Harry waves them in. “Good morning, sweethearts! I didn’t want to start without you, so we’re discussing Halloween costumes.”

“I’m going to be L from Death Note,” the boy with the blond bowl-cut (who Harry finally remembers is named Hector) tells him, piling into the room behind Angelo and in front of the rest of the missing kids. “My sister’s going to spray paint my hair black and paint bags under my eyes. Abuela’s already having a soponcio about it.”

“I’m in between Apollo and Amenhotep the Third,” Angelo says as he holds out his fist for Harry to bump with his own before he turns around to sit in his corner desk. He asked Harry for a list of ‘cool black leader dudes’ yesterday while he skipped his fourth period Geometry class; his grandmother wants to get a head start on making his costume for next week’s carnival, and he wants to be a historical figure.

“Apollo wasn’t black,” the pink-haired girl remarks out of nowhere. She rarely speaks up, but she’s there, and Angelo’s quick to look in her direction.

“So? I’m black, and if I’m Apollo, he’ll be black, too.”

“He wasn’t black, though, and he’s not black in any pictures. You can’t make shit up like that.”

“Okay,” Harry sings, clapping his hands together. “That’s enough of that. Did you lot re-”

“He wasn’t even real! Just ‘cause, like, marble’s white doesn’t mean it’s not, like, up to interpretation.”

“The Greeks weren’t black, at all, so it’s really not,” she tells him with a self-assured smirk on her face. “You’re distorting historical facts by pulling the race card.”

Harry takes a deep breath and tries again, raising his voice a bit and pushing aside the direction this is heading in. “Remember when I said tha-”

“Are you serious? Have you ever read a fucking history book, you basic ass...” Harry clears his throat and tries to interrupt Angelo, taken aback by the loathing in pink-hair’s tone, and wanting, but failing to diffuse what quickly spurs the entirety of his first period out of their seats to shout over one another.

He’s stuck against the chalkboard, watching his class unravel.

“What about Egypt?” blends with “Do you really believe that?” atop a shrill “Fascist!” and a million other complaints—and Harry’s about to lose his mind.

He can’t bear to listen to them shouting over one another anymore, most directing their words at pink-hair, and he starts to crave a cigarette he can’t have when “How are you this fucking stupid?” and “Are you a Nazi?” almost (but don’t) obscure a loud, malicious slur coming from pink-hair.

Harry puts his fingers between his lips, but feels they’re too sweaty. With a swift wipe of his hand on his jeans, he moves to catch their attention with a harsh whistle. The room stills, and he knows he looks as angry as he feels when he sees Madison’s frightened reaction in his peripheral.

He allows them, and himself, a moment to catch their breath.

“You’re wrong, um—” he pauses to gesture at the girl so she can remind him of her name, and she does so bitterly. “—Lianna. Very wrong.” Harry tries to remain calm despite the terrible word she’s just used, despite her misinformation, and despite the shame he feels for shaking in his pink shoes. He feels like he’s lost all control.

“Oh, yeah?” She crosses her arms, and Harry feels like she’s trying to mock him by mirroring his position. It only pushes him to almost-growl in order to wipe the arrogant smile off her sharp face.

“Yeah,” he says. “The people who originally settled what we know as Greece were African, and I’m sure you’re smart enough—because you’re in an honors class—to know that the whole of Africa was occupied by black people before imperialism destroyed the continent.”

Lianna clicks her tongue. “Okay, then why a-”

“More importantly, I find everything that’s come out your mouth in the last five minutes out of line—no, fucking repulsive, if I’m being honest.”

Everyone is looking between Harry, Angelo, and Lianna. Harry’s never spoken to them in an authoritative tone, let alone cursed at them; pink-haired Lianna has never contributed to the occasional classroom chats Harry allows them; Angelo’s never looked so heated.

“I don’t know what the fuck your parents preach to you at home, but it needs to stay at home. I’m not gonna tolerate any kind of bullshit, racist rhetoric in my classroom, so I’d really appreciate it if you lot respected that and the people around you; Greek, black, or anything else. ‘S that clear?”

Silence... until Angelo bolts up from his corner desk and out through the door. Harry finds himself fighting the urge to chase after him, and takes a deep breath.

“Well? Clear, or not?”

Everyone hums in agreement, except for Lianna, who decides to put her head down to (probably) escape the awkward vibe that’s washed over the classroom. It’s especially awkward because Harry’s made it a point to make his classroom a safe space where there are no stupid questions, or hateful comments unless they’re about the terrible figure being discussed. Moreover, not only is this the first time he’s had to scold a student, but it’s the first time he’s ever felt insecure—vulnerable, even—in his own classroom.

He’s sure they remember the lengthy kindness lecture Harry gave them the last time someone picked on Angelo. Then, it was because his hair “is too big”, which is why he’s relegated himself to corner desk and still hesitates to speak up. Harry never expected racist vitriol to be directed at him, though, that’s for sure, and his heart twinges with hurt for Angelo.

Harry puts his palms to his face, not caring about how he must look to the kids, and tries to slow his heartbeat. Then, he motions for Hector to tap Lianna on the shoulder. She twists her head up to face the blond boy so quickly that Harry’s already hoping she gets whiplash when she turns her head in his direction.

“You’re to stay after class,” he tells her, and turns to grab the chalk behind him to write today’s date on the top corner, above the lecture topic.

There’s a throbbing in his chest that’s preventing him from shifting gears; he still hasn’t turned to face them. He’s gutted by the sourness that’s hanging over the morning now, and he feels a bit at a loss for how to proceed, so he simply draws a chart with Maria Theresa and Joseph II on either side. The chalk slips through his fingers.

“Get a fucking grip, Haz,” he whispers to himself as he bends to pick it up.

He quickly stands, readjusts his beanie, wipes his stupid fucking fingers on his jumper, and takes a deep breath before starting. “You have an exam next Friday, by the way—on Halloween. I’ll be giving you a study guide sometime this week so you have plenty of time to revise. If you have any other exams that day or other pressing matters to attend to, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to help you.”

His jaw’s clicking by the end of the lecture, because no one asked a single question, so he talked until the always-jarring bell rang at the nine-thirty.



Three periods later, when he meets up with Layla at the stairwell door once the lunch bell rings, he’s still craving a cigarette. He heavily considers spending his lunch time in the car park with his black pack and his funk, but he doesn’t. He’s not going to bail on Layla after he reassured her they’d keep working on her lesson plan, just before she told him she felt like she was never going to ‘get the hang of it’.

“No way,” she gasps, her hand clutching at the black top she’s wearing.

Harry’s just finished recounting this morning’s incident as they’re walking by the auditorium, though without tears because he already shed them all between his second and third periods. They’re heading to the teacher’s lounge, though it pains Harry to relinquish his not-so-secret wallow spot, because their colleagues are too distracting to get anything done.

“Then, her charming mother had the audacity to email me, like, how dare you corner my daughter about her beliefs? You’re a pedophile, and I’m going to report you, like a proper—” he drops his voice as they pass a group of students, “—like a proper cunt. It’s not my fault her precious little candyfloss is a white supremacist.”

Layla stops to look at him with wide eyes, and they’re so dark that Harry thinks to the cigarette he could be smoking if he didn’t hate breaking promises. “Did she?”

“Yeah, and now I have to see Monique after school today, so there goes any hope I had,” Harry groans as they continue to walk past the garden full of students. The lounge is in building B, just before the music room, and because he’s leading Layla, he doesn’t stop to talk to the students calling his name over their lunches.

If it were still raining, he wouldn’t feel so bad about ignoring them.

He thanks her when she opens the hallway door for him, not missing the shocked look that’s still on her face, and in turn holds the door to the teacher’s lounge open for her. The first thing Layla does as he flicks the light on, and drops himself onto the only couch in the room, is plug her nose.

“Hope for what?” She asks, and Harry surprises himself by giggling at her nasal drawl.

“What?”

“You said—I can’t talk like this—your talk with Monique is going to do away with the hope you had. Hope for what?” Layla asks while urging him with her chin to move his legs so she can sit. He does, drawing his briefcase and his long legs up to his chest while she crosses her ankles and leans back on the opposite end of the couch.

“Hope in general. I guess. I’ve been doing a pretty good job at not letting... ‘til today, at least, I’ve been doing a good job at...” he trails off before he almost wrings what’s left of his intestines out to Layla.

The comment about his sweaty hands (he’d wear mittens if the thought of wet fleece didn’t gross him out) was enough considering he doesn’t know her like that. He hasn’t even told Danny about his funk—and he considers Danny a mate just as much as Louis, Liam, Zayn, and Niall. The last two on that list are the only ones who know anything because they’re the only two who noticed something was off.

Niall was first to bring up the whatever-the-fuck-it-is. He asked after he found Harry cross-legged on the kitchen counter, chewing a hole in his lip—a literal hole that bled—as he tried to scrape a vile tuna cake out of a muffin tin while Louis cried on loudspeaker from under Rhiannon beside him.

Zayn followed, and Harry suspects it’s because of his current Psychiatry clerkship. He’d sat in for adolescent group therapy and mentioned Harry was exhibiting patterns akin to those of the teenager with bipolar disorder he’d been assigned.

He googled it; apprehension, loss of interest, and unwanted thoughts don’t mean he has bipolar disorder, and frankly, it’s a bit of a reach.

Telling Danny would drive Harry berserk, mainly because Danny likes to fix things; “There’s nothing like looking at your hands and knowing you can piece anything back together with just your fingers—and that’s the T.” That’s why he’s always setting him up with his girlfriends and (only at first) his Gaymer Club acquaintances. He even made him a Tinder profile back in February, though sex with those birds was okay at best—the internet’s never been good to Harry.

“At what? Not losing your temper? Because I’ve heard a few stories,” Layla admits, holding her hand out for the other half of the chicken wrap Harry’s pulling out of the paper bag that was in his briefcase. Her eyes search his face and her brows knit together when he doesn’t oblige. “What?”

“What are you doing?”

“You said you always share with Niall, and I may not be an Irish movie snob, but I am a half-Chinese art snob, and I’m really hungry.”

Harry laughs again, and hands her the other half of the wrap. He doesn’t answer Layla’s question, not while they eat, and he doesn’t try to touch back on the topic while she starts sharing stories about her own encounters with racist white kids. Instead, he focuses on her, because anything is better than addressing the panic in his veins.

“Did they honestly think you ate cats for lunch?”

“Yeah,” Layla chuckles softly. “The kicker was that they’d spread those rumors, but then ask me for help with their math homework. I always said yes, but I got straight Cs in math every year.”

Harry bites into the last of his wrap as his eyes grow wide. “That didn’t stop them?”

“Nope.” Layla wiggles her eyebrows, her dimples deep in her cheeks as she finishes the half of the lunch Harry initially set aside for Niall.

“Revenge of the art nerd,” Harry hums with a full mouth, and Layla laughs through a tight-lipped grin. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I don’t know why-”

“It’s not your fault,” she quickly tells him as she stands to throw the crumpled paper bag he’s handed her into the bin. They don’t talk about what he’s omitting after they’re done, either, and go straight to the abominable lesson plan.

As Layla studies the outlines Jodie left her, Harry’s alternating between wiping his fingers on his eyelids, and chewing at the skin between his lips.

He tries to hope that Monique won’t fire him, but he can’t help think about the tiny possibility that he’ll lose his job because he didn’t do anything to stop what happened this morning, and then he essentially called pink-hair an idiot (which goes against Monique’s whole respect and responsibility mantra). He cowered against the chalkboard like a miserable fuck—and the worst part is: he knows that without this funk, he wouldn’t be here, scrambling for the type of last-minute Plan B he’s never been one to keep.

He can’t lose his job. He prefers the racing thoughts, heart palpitations, and nausea-inducing hole in his midsection over losing the only thing that has ever made him feel secure.

He doesn’t need Niall to tell him he’s insufferably charming, or a sleepy-eyed Anna to tell him he’s intimidatingly cute, or Mrs. Tomkins to tell him he’s “so darn well-mannered”, or his mother to tell him he’s impulsive. He knows these things about himself—he likes who he is. The thing about being a teacher is that it fills that spot of doubt he always had tucked away in himself, and it makes him feel like he’s whole.

A frustrated growl on Layla’s end of the long, leather couch pushes through his nervous thoughts and allows Harry to set his raw lip free. “Alright?”

“How do you go from this cute, little outline,” Layla frantically waves the general outline Jodie left her and makes him chuckle over his own, “to a full-blown lecture? A handwritten lecture?”

“It’s simple; you look at the outline, and you—I’ll take that—” Harry pinches the outline from her hand, and he puts his briefcase on the floor so he can scoot over to look at the paper with her. “You look at the outline, and you work on each bullet point. I know you’re winging it with the Ancient Greeks because that’s all Angelo’s been talking about for the past few days,” he says, feeling just as heavy as he did this morning at the mention of his favorite student.

“Poor Angelo,” Layla laments. “Okay, so I work on each bullet point... how?”

“Like, you dissect it. So, you take something like... ‘South, Southeast, and East Asian Art’, yeah? You split it,” he starts marking each topic on her outline with his pencil, and he feels slightly bad for doing so without her permission, but the more they talk about her, the less likely it is that it’ll come back to him—he knows her memory’s good. “You talk about whatever South Asian art means, Southeast Asian art means, and so on. That’s where your knowledge comes in, unless you rather cross-reference text.”

“Well, how do you do it?”

Harry turns to look at her, and notices that they’re much closer than he meant, so his nose almost nudges the top of her ear that’s peeking out through her hair. At least she smells nice, he thinks, like pears and not the off-putting vanilla perfume Jodie always wore. “I, uh, I do both. My mentor at uni told me that the key to a good life is to be a perpetual academic.”

Layla turns to look at Harry, her nose near his, but her expression is the opposite of what he knows is on his face; totally serene, like her tone. He wonders when it’ll start to piss him off the way his drawl pisses everyone else off, but it has yet to bother him. Then again, it’s only been a week.

“Smarty,” she simply coos with a smirk as he scoots back to his original spot, and she doesn’t mention how close he’d been, nor does she bring up the old hopelessness.