Social Interactions and How to F*cking Maneuver Them; A Guidebook to Normalcy by Sören and Kai

In the way that the sky has always been blue and the grass has always been green, Sören has always been awkward. It was something he couldn’t control; like watching himself be painstakingly uncomfortable in third person with no way to intervene, and it became glaringly obvious just how awkward he was when he got transferred to public school. He used to loathe his private tutors, but somehow, public school was worse than pompous Englishmen and stuffy afternoons locked away in the library of their summer home in Milano.

Public school meant conversing with other teenagers – something Sören had never obtained the skill for. He always found himself in… situations.

Situations like this.

Everyone was laughing.

At what, Sören didn’t know. He must have missed the joke. He did that a lot.

“Yo, Silver Spoon, you get it?”

Silver Spoon. That’s what they called him. He understood the nickname about as much as he understood what everyone was laughing at, which was to say that he didn’t.

He stared at the girl in front of him. Caroline, he thinks her name was. She was the type of girl that had a lot of friends. The kinds of friends that flocked around her at all times. She was always making them laugh. Then she would turn to Sören with a certain smile and a strange glint in her eyes and she would ask, “Yo, Silver Spoon, you get it?” and then everyone would laugh some more, like they were doing now.

He tried not to become too flustered over it.

What was he supposed to say?

If he said no, that he didn’t get it, then someone might dumb it down for him. Which honestly, truly, really never helped, and not understanding the joke after someone explained it was far more humiliating than not having understood the joke in the first place. But if he lied, and said yes, that he did get it, then Caroline might ask him to explain the joke that he hadn’t gotten in front of everybody, and that would be the most humiliating outcome of them all.

The longer the silence stretched, the hotter his face got.

He wished this moment would end. He hoped, and he begged, and he prayed–

“‘Course he fuckin’ gets it.” The harsh voice of an angel answered. “Your jokes are just dumb. I wouldn’t have laughed either.”

All pairs of eyes snapped towards Sören’s unexpected savior. Kai Langston, the local degenerate, stood in the doorway of the classroom and glared like they were all a bunch of idiots; Sören included.

“Hey, don’t be so mean!” a knight in shining armor defended. “Caroline’s jokes are way funny! It’s not our fault you don’t have a sense of humor.”

Kai rolled his eyes with a condescending snort, bored with this conversation as though he hadn’t been the one to so boorishly interject himself into it. “I have a great sense of humor, you losers are just too damn stupid to see that.”

“Just because Julian laughs at everything you say, that doesn’t mean you’re funny!” Caroline argued, ego hurt, cheeks puffed like Kirby.

Kai’s jaw clenched. A bright flush of red colored his face. He stomped across the room, openly seething, avoiding Julian’s gaze entirely, who stared at his desk with a matching expression of embarrassment.

Sören didn’t understand the significance of Caroline’s comment. He was too distracted with the fact that Kai had stood up for him… which was nice of him… even if he had done it in a horribly rude, terribly insulting, not-so-nice kind of way. Actually, maybe it wasn’t very nice at all. Maybe it was just nice that everyone’s attention had turned to teasing Kai and his apparent soft spot for their class’s golden boy instead of Sören’s inability to understand simple jokes. He was sure that Kai Langston, of all people, hadn’t meant to come to his aid like that. Not since he made it clear that they weren’t friends anymore. Not like they used to be anyway, before Kai’s dad died and Sören's parents pulled him out of public school.

Sören forced the death grip he’d been keeping on his school slacks to loosen.

Well… at least nobody asked him to explain the joke.

3 Months Earlier

The Start of the School Year

Despite his shoddy attendance record and the questionable alterations that he made to his school uniform, Kai was used to being praised. He was incredibly talented. He had tremendous endurance in gym class, his grades were impeccable across the board since school work came easy to him (so easy, in fact, that it was boring), and he was musically gifted, according to his fifth grade instructor. Everyone had high hopes that he would fix his attitude and turn his life around, his mother included.

She’d say things like, “aside from being able to show up anywhere on time and ironing your clothes, there’s not much you can’t do, kid,” and then she’d order him to go do chores or something.

Yet despite his many aptitudes, deciphering social cues was not one of them. Not because he was socially inept or didn’t notice the social cues when they were happening but because he didn’t care enough to figure out what someone meant to say with their body language that they could have just said with their mouths. If someone had something to say to him, they should learn to say it straight to his face like a man!

So when Sören sat next to him in the lunch room on the first day of school, Kai couldn’t find the patience to accept such a woefully stupid decision. “The hell are you doin’?”

Sören’s big brown eyes widened with pathetic innocence. “Having lunch with you.”

“Because?”

“Because you’re sitting alone.”

“And who asked you?”

“No one.”

“So what makes you think I want you sitting here?”

Sören stared like he was trying to decipher a particularly difficult maths problem. “Were you waiting for somebody else?”

Kai’s eyes shot away, drawn to a passing figure on their way to the food line. Sören followed his gaze.

“Would you rather sit with him?”

Kai’s muscles tensed like he was preparing to tank a gnarly hit. “I don’t always have to sit with Julian all the damn time!”

Sören blinked, looking lost. “Okay.”

“Don’t you have someone else to bother?” Kai swiftly changed the topic.

“No…” Sören fidgeted. “I don’t have any other friends.”

“You don’t have one here either,” Kai reminded him with a glare.

“Oh,” Sören glanced down at his gourmet curry like a kicked puppy. It made Kai uncomfortable.

“Just flash your cash around or somethin’,” Kai grumbled bitterly, snatching up his bagged sandwich and standing. “You’ll get chummy with everyone in no time.”

“I don’t want to be chummy,” Sören mumbled to his rice. “I want to have lunch with you.”

Kai winced as if he’d just been slapped before he walked away. “Tell someone who cares.”

~~~~~~

Sören closed his textbook with a sigh when class finally ended, still thinking about the joke that Caroline had dangled in front of him earlier. He’d never felt such self-pity before. It was truly pathetic.

“Alright cretin, listen up,” Kai appeared in front of him as though he’d been summoned from thin air. He clicked the eraser of his mechanical pencil, slapped a piece of paper onto Sören’s desk, and settled in to straddle Caroline’s vacant seat. “You’re embarrassing me, so I’m gonna teach ya a few things about the chucklefucks at this dump.”

Sören blinked, stunlocked amidst the chaotic cacophony of their classmates preparing to go to lunch. “How am I embarrassing you?”

“‘Cause you’re lettin’ everybody walk all over you!”

“How is that embarrassing for you?”

“‘Cause I fuckin’ know you!” Kai seethed, furious. Sören still didn’t get it. “Now pay attention. We’re gonna go through this shit fast, boom-boom-boom, so keep up. I ain’t repeatin’ myself.”

Sören tensed, suddenly aware of the other students still lingering in the classroom. He knew that Kai could be tactless but this was on a whole other level.

“Could you please wait until we are alone?” Sören hissed.

Kai’s entire body froze at such an outright demand. He stared at the half-written sentence on his paper like it had personally insulted his honor. His sharp eyes flicked up to glare, mouth poised to argue, when a different voice intervened.

“Sören~!”

Kai snatched up the paper and stuffed it away in his pocket just as Evelyn peered into Sören’s line of sight with a familiar smile and a pretty flush of pink coating her cheeks, cradling her textbooks close to her chest.

“Will you be walking me to lunch again?”

Kai’s eyebrows twitched somewhere past all of Evelyn’s distracting features, his face overshadowed with rampant disbelief. Sören couldn’t possibly understand what could have made him react in such a manner but he didn’t have time to consider it because Evelyn was still staring at him with those dark slanted eyes, differently than how Caroline and Kai stared at him, and she was far prettier to look at than they would ever be.

“Sorry,” Sören stood to offer her an apology. “I can’t today. I have something planned with Kai. But tomorrow, if you’re free, and all the days after until we graduate, I suppose.”

Evelyn’s cheeks turned darker with rosy color, for reasons that completely escaped Sören’s comprehension. She covered her painted lips with a dainty hand and laughed. It was a very pretty laugh. Tinkling and soft as wind chimes, nothing at all like Caroline’s mocking tones or Kai’s rough edges. Sören had never thought much of people in terms of their laughter but Evelyn’s was probably the most beautiful sound that he would ever hear in his life.

“You are very funny, Sören,” Evelyn smiled, and it was pretty enough as well that Sören didn’t even bother to clarify that he hadn’t been trying to make a joke. “Have fun,” she imparted the pair of them with a friendly wave and hurried to catch up with the last remaining stragglers.

Sören reseated himself at his desk once the room was empty, startling when he registered the incredulous look plastered on Kai’s face.

Sören blinked. “What?”

“You’ve gotta be yankin’ my chain,” Kai crowed, his loud voice bouncing off the walls. He pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket, slammed it on the table, and leaned forward, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “You’re foolin’ around with Miss. Priss, the straight-A goodie two-shoes?” Kai snarked like he couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth before he rolled his eyes. “Nah, actually, that makes perfect sense. You’re both so vanilla; a real idyllic family icon, the pair of you two make. My old hag would lose her fuckin’ mind if she knew I was railing someone like that.”

Sören’s eyes narrowed. A harsh, unexpected wave of indignation flooded through him. His slender fingers curled around the cool metal of his desk legs to try and ground himself against this unfamiliar emotion.

Why did Kai have to be so crass and vulgar all the time?

“We are not having sex,” he protested. “And she’s not vanilla. She works hard for her grades, and she’s very talented at the piano, and–”

“Holy fuck, that’s disgusting,” Kai interrupted with a hefty snort into the crease of his elbow. “Keep all that romantic bullshit to yourself. I didn’t even ask!”

“It’s not romantic,” Sören insisted because he assumed that Evelyn would have liked for him to defend her independence, especially against someone like Kai. “It’s common decency.”

His routine of walking Evelyn Baker to lunch every day merely started because, once-upon-a-time, he had a vague question or another about a homework assignment, and she was the best student in their class, and her desk was right next to his, and she was – as accurately described earlier – very pretty, and engaging to speak with, and nice to him… there was nothing romantic about that.

Kai stared with an amused sort of fascination, twirling his mechanical pencil round and round in his fingers like a drummer playing with their sticks between sets before he gave a firm shake of his head. “Whatever. Rule number one, Caroline Jones is NOT your friend, understand?”

But Sören wasn’t ready to let it go. “Why did you think it was romantic?”

Kai sighed with another impatient roll of his eyes. “Listen nerd, you ain’t ready to hear what I’ve got to say about that kind of shit, so drop it.”

Sören frowned but decided not to push it. He didn’t want to make Kai regret talking to him again. This was the most they had spoken to each other since they were nine. He didn’t want to ruin it.

“Okay,” Sören agreed. “Sorry.”

Kai sighed again. “And stop apologizing all the damn time. It’s annoying.”

“Okay. So–” he stopped himself.

Kai glared.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “Is it romantic between you and Julian?”

Kai’s biceps flexed. His jaw clenched. He peered around the empty room like he was searching for hidden cameras and covert spies. “The hell makes you say somethin’ stupid like that?”

“I don’t see how it’s any different from me and Evelyn.”

“You don’t see how it’s different,” Kai deadpanned.

“No. I mean, you like his laugh, right? That’s why Caroline says you always try to be funny in front of him, isn’t it?”

Kai stared with a blank expression; completely void of any weaknesses. “Why’d you come back?”

Sören fidgeted, unsure what that had to do with anything.

“After you left without saying something, why would you come back? Why do you still think we’re friends?” Kai continued to grill him.

“Why did we stop being friends?”

Kai clicked his tongue, annoyed by the deflection. “You first.”

Sören had never known Kai to be scared of anything, but his fear to confess something now was palpable. If only Sören had the ability to decipher what that was.

He hadn’t planned on telling anyone why he came back to public school because nobody seemed to want to know but now Kai was asking and the words were getting all tangled up in his throat. He tried to loosen them. He tried to speak without his voice cracking. He wanted to tell Kai. He trusted him.

“Dad won the lotto when I was 9, that’s why we left.”

“I didn’t ask why you left. I know why you left. I asked why you came back,” Kai persisted, stubborn.

Sören took a deep breath. “I guess the jackpot wasn’t enough for him because he kept gambling and he lost all the money. Mom had to sell the new clothes she bought, and then they sold the houses, and now we’re right where we started.”

“So now you’re back here.”

Sören nodded. “So now I’m back here.”

“But things here aren’t where you left them.”

“No… you got taller,” Sören observed. “And you have an earring now.”

Kai touched his ear. “Things change.”

Sören didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t like change.

Kai turned to stare out the window. “You still could’ve said somethin’ before you up and disappeared. That really sucked.”

“I’m so–” Sören stopped himself. Kai glared. “I didn’t think it would have bothered you this much.”

“Yeah, you didn’t think,” Kai mocked before he frowned. “Sorry ‘bout your old man.”

“I thought we weren’t allowed to say sorry?” Sören’s head tilted in confusion.

“Idiot,” Kai kicked his shin under the desk. “Don’t tell me what to do. That rule only applies to you!”

Sören laughed despite himself. Kai was so awkward.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Kai threatened, standing. “About what we talked about today. Julian, or anything.”

“I won’t tell, if you don’t,” Sören compromised.

Kai considered him for a moment before he nodded. “Deal.”

“I’m glad I came back to school,” Sören confessed. “And that we’re friends again.”

Kai stopped in the doorway, stared, blinked, and then laughed; rough and coarse and grating on the ears. “You’re such a weirdo.”

Sören smiled. He liked Kai’s laugh too, even if it was a little ugly.

.

.

.

Was that romantic??