slurp caro syrup casey yum
Blame mirabellawotr entirely for this one...
Casey looks pretty sunless at the best of times, and it's not like Zeke ever sees much of him during the day anymore, so it takes a while for him to notice anything's different.
After the-- after everything, Zeke's sunlit hours are full of football and makeup exams and Beth, Beth, Beth; meanwhile Casey's become some kind of mass media fifteen-minute wonder. The days get shorter and shorter; for weeks the only Casey that Zeke sees is twilight Casey, in glimpses, at football games, in the parking lot after school fiddling with his goddamn camera, still.
He has no idea when daytime Casey disappeared completely, when twilight Casey became the only Casey left. Zeke's eyes are on the prize up until the day he has a kind of existential crisis, re-reads Nietzsche and gets disgusted with himself; that's the day he skips every class but his last, rubs his teacher's face in his grasp of calculus and blows off the quiz, spends football practice demonstrating his new apathy til the coach benches him.
At the end of that day, Zeke goes out back of the shop department for a smoke in the early dusk, and there's Casey, whiter than even spotlights and stress and his gossip-famed breakup with Delilah can possibly account for, white as the sliver of young moon that's just starting to emerge in the deepening sky.
"Hey Case," Zeke says, weirdly pleased to see him, oddly glad at the prospect of talking to him again. Strangely hoping, and so wrong, that this means things are going to go back to normal.
Casey draws near and it strikes Zeke that it's funny how you can miss someone you never really noticed was there in the first place, how even their absence doesn't register til they click back into place and you know at last what you were missing all along... what you missed and what was missing you, what was cold and hungry for you, waiting in the dark.
Casey looks pretty sunless at the best of times, and it's not like Zeke ever sees much of him during the day anymore, so it takes a while for him to notice anything's different.
After the-- after everything, Zeke's sunlit hours are full of football and makeup exams and Beth, Beth, Beth; meanwhile Casey's become some kind of mass media fifteen-minute wonder. The days get shorter and shorter; for weeks the only Casey that Zeke sees is twilight Casey, in glimpses, at football games, in the parking lot after school fiddling with his goddamn camera, still.
He has no idea when daytime Casey disappeared completely, when twilight Casey became the only Casey left. Zeke's eyes are on the prize up until the day he has a kind of existential crisis, re-reads Nietzsche and gets disgusted with himself; that's the day he skips every class but his last, rubs his teacher's face in his grasp of calculus and blows off the quiz, spends football practice demonstrating his new apathy til the coach benches him.
At the end of that day, Zeke goes out back of the shop department for a smoke in the early dusk, and there's Casey, whiter than even spotlights and stress and his gossip-famed breakup with Delilah can possibly account for, white as the sliver of young moon that's just starting to emerge in the deepening sky.
"Hey Case," Zeke says, weirdly pleased to see him, oddly glad at the prospect of talking to him again. Strangely hoping, and so wrong, that this means things are going to go back to normal.
Casey draws near and it strikes Zeke that it's funny how you can miss someone you never really noticed was there in the first place, how even their absence doesn't register til they click back into place and you know at last what you were missing all along... what you missed and what was missing you, what was cold and hungry for you, waiting in the dark.