#noah fei

“Please, please, please tell me you had nothing to do with the metric ton of glitter coating the fourth floor.” Noah begged as Davey strolled into the room, looking disgustingly pleased with himself.

“I had nothing to do with the glitter on the fourth floor.” Davey said obediently, then cracked up as if he couldn't even take that seriously from himself. Noah put his face in his hands and groaned.

“It was between that or the fish,” Davey's best friend Chainey ducked through the door looking grim and apologetic. “Believe me, this was the better option.”

Anthony Chainey cut an odd figure, he was six foot something, had the physique of a poorly fed scarecrow, and he- well, the closest word Noah could figure out was gangled. He gangled.

Despite sporting the most eye-catchingly horrible dye job Noah had ever seen and generating a seemingly endless supply of weird hats (Confiscated every morning and somehow magically returning to his possession by the end of the day) Chainey had the personality of a much less physically imposing person. This might have been why he was so drawn to Davey, who was in his own right, a force of nature, sweeping everyone along in his wake. Noah had long since abandoned the hope that Chainey would be any kind of influence on him, good or otherwise.

“This was definitely the better option!” Davey agreed, dumping his backpack onto a chair in the back of the classroom and taking a seat at the next desk over. “This'll take way longer to get rid of. Lazaro must have blown a gasket when he found out- I wish I could've seen his face.”

“You know,” Noah scowled as Davey let out a wistful sigh “By the fifth detention, most kids would have gotten the hint to stop messing with the principal.”

“I didn't start this war, Mr. Fei.”

“It doesn't matter who started it, he's going to be the one who ends it. For your own sake, quit while you're ahead.”

“Aw, you do care!”

“Rrrgh.” Noah rubbed his temples and wished for more coffee. “Davey, everybody else goes home at 3:07. Don't you miss that? Don't you miss not having to stay an extra hour at school, on a Friday?”

“Not as much as I'd miss spending time with my most favorite-est teacher, Mr. Fei.”

“Because I miss that. I haven't left at 3:07 on a Friday in two years. I should be at home right now, but nooo, you had to pick another fight with Laz- Mr. Palmer.”

“You'd still be grading 900 papers,” Chainey interjected helpfully.

“Yes, Anthony, but at least I would be doing that in the comfort of my own home. Instead, I'm grading them here, looking after you two in the Bad Child Room!”

“I wish you wouldn't call it that.” Chainey mumbled, lowering in his seat.

“I dunno, I kind of like it.” Davey said thoughtfully.

“You would.”

It was only two words, but those words were injected with the kind of venom that one would expect from a king cobra. Noah gave an involuntary shudder before turning to the door in perfect sync with Chainey.

Samantha Hyde stalked into the room and made a beeline towards Davey, glaring with enough ferocity to set a lesser human being on fire. It was almost enough to make Noah pity him. Almost.

“Jeremiah Jones, what the fuck have you done now?!”

“Uh,” Davey stalled, slowly inching his desk away from her with a horrible screech of metal on linoleum. “Is this one of those times where you're actually asking, or one where you already know and you're giving me a chance to explain myself before murdering me?”

“Three days!” Sam's fingers were twitching as though she were fantasizing about wrapping them around Davey's throat. “That's how long the janitors say it's going to take to clean up your mess! We can't use the fourth floor for THREE DAYS!”

“Chainey?” Davey called hopefully as his desk slowly ran out of room “Chaiiiiineeeey?” Chainey glanced in his direction, met Sam's eyes and then turned away, seeming to go temporarily deaf.

“Chainey, you filthy coward!”

“We are graduating in two months! Do you have ANY idea what I've had to do to save you from getting expelled? I have made gallons of coffee, run more errands than you would believe, started a minor turf war between the math and science departments- and for what?! For you two to put MORE of the school out of commission! Chainey, don't think I've forgotten about you, I know you helped him. Believe me, we're going to talk about that.”

Chainey made a small whimpering sound and did his best to shrink.

“Sam, c'mon, it was just a joke-”

“That's the problem! Everything is a joke to you, isn't it, and it never once occurs to you that what you're doing might have real life consequences, that it might be a problem for somebody else! Mr. Palmer has worked so hard since becoming principal, and every time you do something like this it just undermines him more-”

“Oh, HERE we go! Mr. Palmer! Mr. Palmer works very hard Davey, Mr. Palmer deserves so much better, Davey, Mr. Palmer died for our sins, Davey- Sam, GET AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT GLUE GUN! MR. FEI!”

“I can't hear you over these 900 ungraded essays, Davey!” Noah examined a can of coke he'd confiscated earlier in the day as Davey knocked over a desk trying to get away from Sam and her allotted Leadership art supplies, then poured it into the dregs of his coffee with grim desperation. It fizzed up, then went still.

“MR. FEI, YOU ARE TURNING A BLIND EYE TO BLATANT CHILD ABUSE!”

“You've been eighteen for almost a year, this is neither child abuse nor my problem.”

“NOAH!”

“Don't call me by my first name, I'm a teacher!”

“If you're a teacher then HELP ME!”

“DON'T HELP HIM, HE BROUGHT THIS ON HIMSELF!”

“Sam's got a point, Davey.” Noah took a ginger sip of his spiked coffee and gagged.

“Mr. FEI!” In a final burst of speed, Davey vaulted over a desk and ducked past Chainey before catching his foot on a chair rung and flying forward. Behind him, Sam smacked into Chainey with enough force to knock him down, sending all three of them into a tangled pile of limbs slamming into a bookshelf. The bookshelf, which had been old when the school opened, gave a long groan before collapsing.

Noah's patience vanished.

“ENOUGH! ONE HOUR OF PEACE, THAT'S ALL I'M ASKING FOR- I KNOW AN ACTUAL DAY IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, BUT AN HOUR? I'M TEACHING CLASSES IN TWO DIFFERENT LANGUAGES BECAUSE LAZARO CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO HIRE A NEW TEACHER, JANE KAPLAN IS ON MY BACK ABOUT GIVING HER SON A D IN MANDARIN, MY STOMACH LINING IS SLOWLY AND PAINFULLY DISSOLVING, AND I STILL NEED TO GRADE OVER 500 ESSAYS! DO NOT MAKE ME DEAL WITH THIS TOO!”

“I can grade the ones in Spanish.” Sam offered tentatively after a moment of subdued silence.

“.... Have I ever told you that you're my favorite student?”

“Just remember that when I come asking for a letter of recommendation.”

“I am composing it as we speak.” Noah handed over the Spanish essays gratefully before slumping back down onto the Mandarin ones.

“Kiss ass.” Davey mumbled without heat, getting to his feet and dusting himself off. Sam shot a glare in his direction, but didn't bother responding.

“If anyone's hungry, I'm giving you full range of the confiscated food. It's that or throw it out, anyway.” Noah indicated the second drawer of the classroom's lone filing cabinet. Taking this as terms for a truce, Davey accepted and began rummaging through it. “Whose cell phone is this?”

“If it's in the drawer, it belongs to the collective.”

“It says 'Nick Carmichael'.”

“He has generously donated it to the collective.” Noah took another mouthful of his frankencoffee and forced himself to swallow, eyes watering. It tasted like graveyard dirt, but it seemed to be working- his body had all but forgotten its lack of sleep and was focusing on rejecting what he was putting in it instead. “Bleah.”

“Is this Castilian?” Sam asked, indicating something sloppily scrawled out in pencil. “I don't remember this conjugation, but I took Spanish with Ms. Vasquez and we never bothered with anything used in Spain.”

“No,” Noah said, with what had once been frustration and had now been beaten into indifference. “No, that's not even Spanish. That's Micah McQuistan's essay and I think that might be Dutch.”

“Micah doesn't know Dutch,” Davey said through a mouthful of processed sugar. Chainey, who was sitting a little too close to Davey's mouth, wiped a mixture of saliva and twinkie out of his hair with an expression of long suffering agony.

“He knows enough to spite me.” Noah growled. “You know mine is the only class he uses pencil in? Every other class he insists on using pen, I've asked. But in mine, the one class where it's actually REQUIRED, he suddenly doesn't have one. I've let him borrow pens from me. I never get them back, and the work he turns in is STILL in pencil.”

“I don't even think he hates you, particularly,” Davey said thoughtfully after swallowing. “At this point it's more like a reflex. He has this unignorable urge to be a bitch to people. If he didn't whine so much I'd be kind of impressed.”

“Unignorable isn't a word.”

“Sure it is.”

“No.”

“It is!”

“I don't care why he does it, it's unhelpful.” Noah grumbled, getting up to go search the drawer for more coke. “I have enough problems in that class as it is. There are two months before the end of the school year, and I'm still getting passive aggressive emails from his father insinuating the little menace wouldn't be failing if he were being taught by a native speaker. I lived in Granada for three years! It has nothing to do with my teaching and everything to do with him being totally uninterested in learning Spanish- and there's nothing I can do about that. Yeugh.” The last remark was less in response to Micah McQuistan's academic failings than it was the renewal of the coffee-coke mixture. Cherry Vanilla was even more potent.

“What is that?” Sam asked, looking a little alarmed.

“Well, I haven't decided on a name just yet, but so far I'm kind of partial to Brain Juice.”

“Okay, you can't go blaming us for your stomach lining destroying itself and then drink shit like that,” Davey said disapprovingly as Noah held his breath and began drinking. “It's so bad for you, you can tell just by looking. Is this part of your plan to seduce that doctor? You keep coming in with worse and worse health problems?”

Noah choked on Brain Juice, spraying it all over his desk before going into a violent coughing fit. Chainey thumped him on the back, giving Davey a reproving look.

“Doctor?” Sam repeated, nonplussed.

“Yeah,” Davey said, having the grace to look at least a little apologetic. “She's Noah- sorry, Mr. Fei's- GP. She's into geology and she only speaks Spanish.”

It occurred to Noah as he continued trying to hack up his own lungs that his students knew far too much about his personal life.

“No one is trying to seduce anyone.” He growled in between coughs. “I see Dr. Garcia for health issues. Our relationship is strictly professional and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop spreading lies, Jeremiah. I could get sued.”

“For that? Nah. Maybe if she worked here, I think it's illegal to date your coworkers once you're past twenty one...”

“I can't believe your vote legally counts as much as mine.”

“Hey!”

“How did you end up with a doctor that only speaks Spanish?” Sam asked, bringing a welcome distraction. “I mean, your first language is Mandarin, right, so I'd understand that, or English, but Spanish? Did you specifically request a Spanish speaker?”

“I think it must have started off as a mix up.” Noah gave gave one final wheeze and began breathing normally again. “The doctor I saw previously was retiring and I asked for a recommendation. He mentioned Dr. Garcia, I set up an appointment, ended up arriving a little early and came in just in time to hear her saying goodbye to the previous patient in Spanish. I'd heard a lot of good things about her, and it wasn't as if we couldn't communicate, so I never requested a change.”

“That's it?” Davey looked unimpressed.

“That's it.”

“What kind of meet-cute is THAT?”

“This isn't a romcom, people don't have meet-cutes in real life! And especially not between doctors and patients!”

“You're kidding, right? That's a classic! Yours just sucks.”

“DAVID.”

“Why are you yelling at me? Chainey's the one who told me you had a thing for your mysterious miracle doctor.”

“That's not what I said!” Chainey protested as Noah turned to him, betrayed. “All I said that you talked about her a lot!”

“And?” Davey prompted.

“And... and, well, I mentioned that you really seemed to admire her, but I didn't mean anything by-”

“Aaand?” Davey sang, looking smug.

“...And that it kind of reminded me of how Fiend used to talk about Sam.” Chainey mumbled sheepishly.

“Wait, what?”

Noah put his face in his hands and groaned. Davey gave a triumphant cackle. “I told you! And Chainey's never wrong!”

“Fiend used to talk about me?” Sam asked, bewildered. “When?”

“So what's your plan? Hopefully you two talk about something besides your failing body. You said she likes geology, you could take her to... shit, I dunno, a museum or something? Of course, that means you'd have to actually ask her out-”

“I refuse to have this discussion with a student.” Noah made a desperate grab for the Brain Juice as Chainey stole it, mouthing the words 'It's for your own good'.

“But you need help!”

“I need nothing.”

“That is the biggest lie you've ever told.”

“Did Fiend have a crush on me and I just never noticed? Why didn't somebody say something?”

“Are you this nosy about all of your teachers? Does everyone suffer the way I do? Chainey, do not throw that away. Do not do it.”

“I care about you more than I care about them. Aren't you lucky?”

“Chainey, if you take one more step towards that trashca- what did I just say?!”

“Sorry, Mr. Fei.”

“No, you're not!”

“I kind of thought he was scared of me.” Sam stared incredulously at nothing. “Did everyone know he liked me? Am I just dense? I thought I was pretty good at noticing stuff like that...”

“All right, look.” Davey gave an impatient sigh. “If you're not ready to ask her on an actual date, just try meeting her for lunch or coffee or something, as friends. It doesn't have to be romantic, just spend some time with her and see how that goes. Just please, for the love of God, stop using medical emergencies as an excuse to talk to this woman.”

Noah took a moment to ponder the possible implications of the fact that he was genuinely considering dating advice from an eighteen year old, and wondered where exactly he had gone so wrong in life. Once upon a time he'd had potential.

“The next person to make any kind of speculation about my personal life is getting their Grad Night privileges revoked!”

“You know, I don't have to grade these.”

“Except Sam!”