Archive of Our Own ^beta

At the end of the eleventh grade, most of the school extracurriculars get a free field trip. Some destination is chosen that, at best, has a tangential relationship to anything academic. Choir doesn’t win any points on final exams, and the students are all tantalizingly close to permanently escaping from any authority their teachers may have all of them; everyone knows that, in the Fall when everyone comes back to school, attendance will be sparse, extracurriculars all falling to the side. The kids need some sort of send-off.

Father Marcus finds a theme park he can afford to take the choir to. There’s only six people in the choir so it’s relatively easy to pay for a trip. The fifth of June is the easiest date on which to coordinate something without having to cross-check with every other class and every other extracurricular to see if it will cause any scheduling conflicts.

He plans out the excursion, gets the principal’s approval, and prints out the permission notes. 

He hands them out to the children, and the choir erupts into excited noise. 

There is one student, of course, who sits silently in the back of the room. Father Marcus keeps meaning to check in with him, see how he’s doing, but it always slips his mind. It’s not high-priority. Ricky Potts, of course, probably doesn’t have anything much going on.

Ocean doesn’t get to just have fun on field trips. She’s the leader of the choir. She has to be responsible for everyone else in a group where, at any given time, half of the members are being difficult on purpose out of spite toward the fact that rules exist and the other half, bless their hearts, don’t know how to conduct themselves in public.

Noel picking fights with her at every chance. Misha on his phone. Constance with words spilling out of her mouth, too much sugar goes to her head every time. 

Ricky, she swears to God, is even more clumsy and childlike than normal. 

He staggers around with his crutches. His path is never quite straight. He stumbles, and wavers, and every attraction distracts him. He tries to drag the whole group to a test-of-strength thing that he doesn’t even know he can’t win. Ocean, when she isn’t run too ragged to have any patience left in her, really does feel sorry for him. It’s a little hard to watch him, so oblivious and so unlikely to ever learn.

She lets him have his fun. Mostly out of pity.

Noel doesn’t actually like the idea of walking around a theme park all day in the height of Summer. It’s not what he would do in his free time, even if he could afford it. But, hey, a free trip’s a free trip. He might as well go.

He makes it a point to have as much fun as possible specifically to spite Ocean. 

She’s got this whole route planned out in her head, like a madman. She has figured out the optimal route to see as much of the theme park as possible in the allotted time and Christ alive, someone needs to knock her down a peg or several. So Noel savors his time at each attraction, and he grins smugly as he loses track of time again and again and again, and he finds himself taking sides with, of all people, Ricky Potts when Ocean starts insisting that they need to move along and experience more joy elsewhere.

It’s not that Noel has anything against Ricky Potts, for it to be so odd to take his side. Ricky is, as far as Noel knows, a nice, harmless kid. It’s just that, unlike himself and Misha and Ocean, Ricky usually doesn’t have a side for anyone to take. He’s never really been one to argue, even when half of what Ocean says to him seems overtly condescending. Even now, as he continually foils Ocean’s perfect plans, it’s hard to know if he’s doing it on purpose or just earnestly, obliviously getting distracted by every single fucking attraction. 

He’s not sure if Ricky is normally like this. He hasn’t regularly spoken to Ricky since they were, like, six.

But today, whether it’s in-character for him or not, Ricky seems to be loving the theme park. And Noel watches him flit from stall to stall. It’s wholesome in exactly the way that pisses Ocean off, which is really all he wants in life, apart from waking up in an alleyway in post-war France with missing teeth.

There aren’t enough hours in the day. Or, really, there aren’t enough hours overlapping in the day for both Ukraine and Canada. At some point in the afternoon Talya will inevitably turn her phone off for the night, and Misha’s heart goes faster and faster as that hour draws nearer. When the choir stops exploring to sit down for lunch, he has no intention at all of talking to anyone except Talya. Ricky has to tap his shoulder three times to get him to look up from his phone at all.

When he does, Ricky turns a phone screen toward him. Want some vodka? Typed in the notes app, presumably to avoid his AAC voice being overheard.

Misha blinks. “Do you… have any?”

Ricky nods. After a quick glance over his shoulder, to check that nobody is looking, he reaches into his bag and pulls something out. Misha sees just the sliver of a neck of a glass bottle, carefully hidden.

“At lunchtime?” protests Misha, weakly, dumbly. “Why?” 

But when Ricky hesitates just the slightest bit before explaining, Misha gives up. Who is he to turn down a free drink? “You know what, it does not matter. Sure, sure, I will have some.” He gestures, and Ricky hands the vodka over to him; Misha, not bothering to read the label, downs some of it very carefully with his back turned to Ocean so she won’t see. The vodka, as expected, burns his mouth on the way down with its foul taste, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. It tastes like the cheap stuff, the liquid unusually thick, but he’s not one to complain about a free drink. “Thank you,” he tells Ricky, earnestly.

Then Talya responds to his text message. And so, of course, he leaves Ricky to enjoy the drink himself.

Penny, honestly, only joined choir for the field trips. She shows up to rehearsal so rarely that she wouldn’t be shocked, nor offended, if nobody else in the choir remembered her name. Even now, she flitters around the group but avoids staying too close to the rest of the choir for long, lest someone recognize her and question what she’s doing here. If anyone looks at her for long enough to say, “Oh, Penny! I didn’t realize you were in choir…” then she’s not sure what will happen.

She has a reputation, of course. She has a laundry list of slurs thrown at her in the school hallways and she’s learned to lay low. The choir is a small group, and Noel is already openly gay, but she doesn’t know that they’d all be tolerant of her, if they properly noticed her. 

She’s cautious of the whole choir. Ocean makes regular passive-aggressive jabs, at Noel, when she thinks nobody is paying attention. Misha responds irately whenever anyone so much as looks at him. Ricky…

Penny can’t put her finger on it, but Ricky is just generally offputting, and she decides she ought to trust her gut on that. 

Ricky doesn’t have any friends, as far as she knows. While Penny flits around the theme park, breaking off from the group and returning back so seamlessly that nobody knows she’s there and nobody knows she’s gone, Ricky drags the whole choir from game to game as though the whole day and the whole world revolved around him. Maybe he just doesn’t know any better, of course, but Penny just has a feeling…

That he’s one of the bad sick people. That it’s made him bitter and entitled. That he’s taking advantage of the illness to be selfish.

Penny weaves in and out of the crowd, ignored by her choir. Ricky probably gets so much special attention.

So she ignores him. Save for the occasional glare.

And she doesn’t feel bad about it.

After lunch time, the sugar rush from the morning’s snacks wears off. Constance tries to keep the tooth-rottingly-sweet spring in her step anyway. Ocean is always vaguely irate with her for being such a debbie downer, except when she’s genuinely in a good mood, and then Ocean is vaguely irate with her for coming across as ditzy and childish. The correct balance is impossible to find but she has to at least try. 

The sun beats down on her. It’s one of the first hot days and nobody has adjusted yet. Or… maybe it’s just her. She wonders if she’s the only one who’s drenched in sweat, the only one who’s breathless, the only one who’s cursing herself for not having bought a bigger bottle of water.

The field trip is nearly over, by now. She’ll be alright, she’s in no danger of keeling over from dehydration before she can get home, but she’s really starting to consider asking around if anyone has any water to spare, since she finished hers an hour ago.

Not Ocean. When she asks around she cannot ask Ocean. 

Ricky is simply the first person she sees swallowing, stuffing back into his bag something that looks like a bottle.

“Hey,” she says, nervously, with a small wave; Ricky jolts slightly as she approaches and the whole reaction seems somehow delayed. “Um, I’m sorry to ask this, but… could I have some of your water?” She laughs nervously. “I finished my bottle, like, an hour ago, and I’m really thirsty, and I know it’s gross but I can drink without my lips touching it so-”

“It’s vodka.”

Ricky’s voice, the AAC, isn’t loud. With a confession like that within a few feet of Ocean, it wouldn’t want to be. Constance is simply stunned into silence.

“Don’t tell Ocean,” Ricky adds, with a bit of a pleading look.

Constance glances over, but Ocean is still engrossed in conversation with Father Marcus. “Uh, sure, sure, your secret’s safe with me.” She frowns.

“If you really want you can have some but it’s not gonna make you less thirsty.”

“Uh… uh-huh! That makes sense!” The energy, obligingly, creeps back into her voice, and she laughs just in case Ricky is joking so he won’t think she’s a cow. “What’s the, what’s the special occasion?”

Ricky frowns at her, this time.

“I guess the school year is nearly over. If you want to party about that, go for it!” 

Then Ocean, of course, calls her name, and she dashes off, leaving Ricky to his own devices with barely a muttering of, “Stay safe!”

Ricky gets home from the field trip and dashes to his room before his parents can notice anything.

They realistically were never going to, but they pay more attention to him today. He had birthday cake for breakfast and birthday cake for lunch and they still, jokingly, ask if he wants some more for dinner, before revealing that the real dinner plan is to get Chinese food delivered.

He relaxes once he’s eaten. The smell of alcohol is probably covered up by sauce on his breath.

His parents go to bed early. Once he can’t hear them in the kitchen anymore, he sneaks down the hallway, and places the bottle back in the cupboard where it belongs. He’s not a big drinker, and neither are his parents. It’s likely nobody will ever notice the amount missing from it.

He steps back to look at the bottle in the cupboard, as though he’s admiring his handiwork. Just to check that it’s in the right spot. It’s not like it matters. Things get knocked around in cupboards all the time.

And then he closes the cupboard, and sneaks back to his room, satisfied with his perfect crime. Whether anyone from choir knows or cares or not, he has had a party today. A secret party, a party of one, will have to be good enough for him.