Chapter Text
Rodrick
If boredom could kill, I'd be a chalk outline on the carpet of Westview High's front office. The clock above the secretary's head ticked like it was mocking me, each second a tiny, precise finger wagging for the disaster I'd manufactured. Fluorescent lights hummed in a way only institutional bulbs can — a small, electric stomach ache. The air tasted faintly of disinfectant and something floral someone had sprayed to cover up fear. No one ever sprayed over humiliation and made it disappear.
I slouched deeper into the plastic chair that smelled like old gym socks, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum whenever I shifted. My drumstick keychain clinked against my jeans every time I moved my knee, a constant, ridiculous metronome that kept time to the panic buzzing behind my ribs. Through the door on the other side of the wall, my mom's voice rose and fell like a broken radio — clipped, furious, every sentence a short, hot grenade.
The principal's voice tried to be reasonable from the other side of the door: low, practiced, the voice adults use when they want to make kids accept the worst news without crying. I couldn't catch the exact words. Most of it sounded like grown-up white noise. Then, like a searing chord in a quiet song, the syllable cut through: Expelled.
I flinched, as if someone had slapped a label on me. Expelled. It felt as final as a period at the end of a sentence that they wouldn't let you finish.
I let my fingers drum against my knee because that was what I did when my brain tried to run faster than my mouth would let it. My head played the whole disaster reel on repeat, the assembly I'd thought would be our breakout moment — the one that instead turned into a slow-motion episode of everything-gone-terrible. Spirits Week had been full of dumb, bright ideas. We'd been supposed to give everyone a show. I'd been supposed to be clever.
Instead, I'd tripped.
We started strong. Löded Diper hit the first chorus, and the gym smelled like concession-stand popcorn and energy. People were chanting, which felt almost holy if you were in a garage band that mostly got cheers from your mom and the guy who fixed the vending machine. I had my foot up on the bass drum like some dramatic movie drummer, and the pyrotechnics cue went off — tiny, controlled fountains of spark that were supposed to be cool, not nuclear.
Then my foot found the drum leg. One stumble, one badly timed firework cue, and everything went sideways so fast my brain stuttered.
The curtains caught. Not in some romantic, cinematic way where the lighting made everything look like a music video. Real, hot, ugly flames licking along polyester and velvet. The cheerleaders shrieked like their sneakers were on fire — which they weren't, but the noise made your whole chest hurt. Mrs. Simmons, our choir director and the sort of woman who wore pastel scarves like armor, spun around just as a spark landed in her hair. For a full, terrible second, her coiffure glowed like a tiny, very wrong sun.
I swear to anyone who will listen; she had no business standing that close to the pyrotechnics. Also, in hindsight, maybe indoor fireworks during a school event weren't the best call. Also, I should have double-checked the cue.
The smell of singed hairspray is something you don't forget. It clung to my clothes even now, phantom-stinky, like the world wanted to make sure I knew what I'd done. Someone had screamed that someone should "dunk her head in the choir punch." Someone else actually helped the woman with the flaming perm toward the sink. It was chaos in the way only a small-town high-school assembly can be chaotic: simultaneously ridiculous and catastrophic.
The secretary looked at me as if I were a live grenade. I wanted to tell her it had been an accident. I wanted to tell her that bands make noise and accidents make stories, and later, in a different life, someone would write a track inspired by this. Instead, my voice stuck behind my teeth like a lost drumstick.
The office door flew open, and my mom filled the frame like a weather front. Her hair was pulled back too tight, her lips pressed into that "I'm furious but aren't you lucky I'm still your mother" line I'd seen a hundred times. Her face said it all: I've officially hit the limit.
She didn't look at me. She didn't have to. Mom pointed toward the parking lot with one trembling finger, as if she were directing a crime scene. I hustled out, trying not to trip over my guilt or the drumstick keychain that felt heavier than usual.
We made it to the car in silence. The silence full of words you knew would explode if you spoke them. When the doors shut, the tension was like someone finally letting off a pressure cooker valve — loud and hot.
"Rodrick. Daniel. Heffley." Middle-name alert. The one used when you're about to get a lecture you'll replay in your head at 3 a.m. "I have tried, I have supported, and I have defended you through every suspension, detention, and 'creative incident,' but this—" Her grip around the steering wheel made the knuckles shine white. "Setting a teacher's hair on fire, Rodrick?"
"It was an accident!" I said before I could be clever. "A small one."
"She had to dunk her head in the choir's punch bowl!"
"Okay, that was resourceful—"
"Enough." The word landed like a gavel. It was the sound adults make when they've catalogued your catalog of mistakes and finally decided the warranty is void. She exhaled, the breath that was the cumulative sum of years spent bailing me out of holes I hopped into for the fun of it. "Your father and I are done. No more excuses, no more second chances. Now we have to look for other schools."
My ears perked at other schools because sometimes the world will throw you a lifeline, and you can catch it with both drumstick-y hands.
"Wait—what? You can't just—"
"Oh, we can," she said, and reached for her phone like a gladiator. "Your father is calling his contact at North Shore as we speak."
"North Shore?" I laughed because I had to. Laughter was cheaper than crying. "That's where the preppy kids go. The ones who think 'punk' is a nail polish color. I'll die there."
She gave me a look that could melt plastic.
"You should've thought about that before you brought fireworks into a school gym."
The radio played a pop song that would've been perfect for a montage if this were a movie and not the slow-motion end of everything I liked. We drove through a sunset that turned the strip malls golden and my future shrinking into a neat little box labeled "New School." Every traffic light felt like a personal judgment.
At home, I went straight to my room. My posters rattled in the small breeze coming under the cracked window. Löded Diper stickers plastered the foot of my bed; our name, hand-lettered on a faded banner, looked pathetic and hopeful at the same time. I flopped back and stared at the ceiling until the cracks blurred into a lightning bolt that looked oddly heroic.
There was a knock, two sets of footsteps, and then my parents in the doorway. They wore the look couples get when they agree on something awful: the kind that says, This is for the best, even if it hurts.
"Rodrick," Dad said, voice softer than his face was. He rarely got soft. "I pulled a few strings. North Shore agreed to take you. You start fresh on Monday. No more screw-ups."
I tried to picture myself in a polo, and the mental image made me want to die, or at least barf in a very dignified way.
"They wear so much cologne and turtlenecks! You want me to be one of those people?"
Dad folded his arms as if he were holding a shield.
"I want you to graduate high school before you burn it down."
Mom's nod had the weight of a verdict.
"Final warning, Rodrick. You so much as sneeze wrong, and you're grounded until you're forty."
They left before I could whip up a comeback that would have been both witty and survivable. I lay back down and let the ceiling swallow the rest of my thoughts. My fingers drummed an automatic rhythm against my stomach — the same motion I'd learned behind a drum kit, a beat I could trust.
"North Shore High," I muttered to myself. "Home of the rich, the fake, and the doomed."
I pulled the pillow over my face as if it might block reality. Through the thin fabric I could still hear the distant, phantom echo of Mrs. Simmons' scream, the stifled laughter of kids, the low murmur of my bandmates in the next town saying things like, "We'll get studio time, we'll make it work." The promise tasted like pennies.
If there were a hell on earth, I was pretty sure it had polished floors and a perfect blonde waiting to make my life miserable. But then I thought about things I wanted that didn't include popularity contests or perfect hairdos — studio time, a demo that didn't sound like the garage after a thunderstorm, a chorus that made someone feel less alone. Those were small, stupid things that kept me on the bed instead of out on the lawn trying to set the sprinkler off just for the adrenaline.
I had until Monday to figure out how to survive being the lone piece of chain-link in a school that prized polished leather. I rolled the thought around like a drumstick between my fingers, feeling both ridiculous and frighteningly determined.
The sun slid down. Somewhere outside, a kid laughed, sharp and young and oblivious. I shoved the pillow further down until I couldn't see, until the world smelled only like cotton and my breath and the faint phantom of singed hairspray. For the first time since the curtain had caught, the buzzing in my chest quieted into something like a plan. It wasn't a very good plan. It probably involved more trouble. But it was mine.
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