An act of desperate futility
You had never been so excited for the Sadie Hawkins Dance in your life. After the Christmas concert, Karson’s popularity exploded like a pressurized time bomb, a very small one at least, and he took the back claps and smiles the same way he took just about everything else that had to do with his social life - full of suspicion and with tremendous amounts of creative swearing. While the overall view of him was still that-weird-kid-who-sits-in-the-back-of-the-classroom-and-bugs-the-shit-out-of-the-teachers, it was met with a sense of awed wariness that even the teachers seemed caught up in. He would be sitting in the back of the classroom, tapping out beats and times with his pencil and humming very quietly to himself when a disgruntled leader of education would call him. He would proceed to strut to the front of the classroom - actually strut, hips swaying and arrogance coming off of him in waves - and write the answer - always correct - on the board. It pissed off the teachers and left the class in giggles. He got more detentions for talking back than anyone else you knew.
The reason she was excited for the Sadie Hawkins dance though was because… well, you really didn’t think he would say no. Gone were the day of going stag or just staying at home simply becauses you just couldn’t find anyone to go with. Karson was sure to say yes. He had to say yes. After all the shit he put you though just by existing he was under moral obligation to accept your invitation to go to the dance with you. That, and if he didn’t say yes to you, he probably wouldn’t say yes to anyone else either. And other people would ask.
It was that you found him packing things in his bag from his locker one day after school, a rare day you both didn’t have practice. He scowled up at you, as was his default greeting for everything from Lords of Darkness to newborn baby rabbits. When he stood up straight and opened his mouth to most likely demand what the hell you wanted, you jumped in.
“You’re going to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me.” Oh crap, you didn’t mean for that to come out so bossy.
“What.”
“Okay, rephrase. Will you come to the Sadie’s Hawkins dance with me?”
“What.”
“What?”
His face was flat, the same look of disgusted disbelief he sometimes wore when Callahan told him he wasn’t acting like a team player and that he was tearing this choir apart, Karson.
(“You did not just reference The Room in that statement. You did not. You couldn’t have because if you did, you would be the biggest tool in the entire school and I cannot take stage directions from a tool. That’s it everybody, time to vote for a new captain. Our old aspires to be a mutated burn victim who makes stupid movies. If he goes down, I am not going with him.”)
“Every time you open your mouth it’s like binary in spoken language just curled up and died in your mouth. Now it’s trying to escape and you’re unfortunately unloading it on me. Who the fuck is Sadie and why would I want to go to her party?”
You wrung your hangs nervously as his metaphor progressed. “I don’t know. I think she was this girl who asked out a guy to a dance. A Sadie Hawkins dance is a dance where the girls ask the guys out instead of vice versa.” You stood a bit more steadily. Oh, he didn’t know what you were talking about. Karson was a wealth of mismatched social complexities and intuitive information gaps. While he could talk for hours about patriarchal societies (whatever those were) and the gossip of who was hitting on who, he could not for the life of him tell you what a Pokémon was or tell you the name of the dog in Blue’s Clues. He could tell you the plot of every episode of Days of Our Lives but didn’t know that saying “fuck” to a teacher was probably not the best way to get on her good side. It was an odd mix of weirdness and genius, stupidity and intelligence, cruel malevolence and raw kindness that pulled him together to become something of a novelty to you in his exotic personality.
He considered that with narrow eyes. “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Why should it matter who asks who to a fucking dance. The answer will be the same no matter who the fuck does it. Why is gender such a thing with you people?”
Rolling your eyes with impatience you say, “It’s just a tradition or something okay?”
“Yeah, because we all know that traditions are the best way to go in a contemporary society whose ideals were founded on a breach of tradition to break apart from-“
“Look, do you want to go or not?”
“Why are you asking me?”
You threw your hands up in exasperation. “Why do you think, dipshit?”
An odd expression crossed his face and he just looked at you, blinking in the way that made him look lost sometimes and it broke your heart until he hesitantly murmured, “ You… pity me?”
“Oh my fucking god,” you yelled and punched him in the stomach and ran home and buried your face in your pillow and screamed. You expected yourself to start crying, but he didn’t really reject you, just misinterpret everything and seriously? Did he really think you hung out and talked to him because of some guilty drive to make the poor loser feel better? What a retard!
The next day you avoided him like the plague, more just to drive in the fact that you were pissed at him than anything else. It wasn’t until history that you found a little folded up slip of paper on your desk. You opened it up and in a messy scribble was a single word. “YES.” All caps. Big letters. Totally guy handwriting. You looked around for a clue as to what the hell it meant, and your eyes lingered over Karson. He was staring determinedly out the window, a light dusting of red under his freckled cheeks. You stared and the red moved up to his ears, even if he didn’t look at you. Oh god. Oh god.
With a shriek of joy you ran back out into the hall and almost tackled Macy to the ground with your fit of enthusiasm.
“What the hell,” Macy said and you shoved the paper close to her face, while proclaiming, “He said yes! He said yes! I think I’m going to explode!”
Macy leaned back and examined the paper with a frown. “Um, who said yes to what?”
“I asked Karson out to the Sadie Hawkins dance and he said yes!”
“You asked him through a note? What are you, in middle school? That is such a kidish thing to do.”
“No, I asked him in person, but he got confused and I got pissed and I’ve been avoiding him all day so that’s why he left the note and he totally blushed when I looked at him, it was so cute, you totally should have seen it. It was the most adorable. Oh my god, this is going to be the best, you have to help me pick out a dress-“
“You did not ask Karson Vensel to Sadie Hawkins.”
“No, I did, I just told you!”
“What about Matt?”
You stop and look at her. “What about Matt? Just because we talk doesn’t mean we’re going out. Come on, Macy-“
“You are such a tard,” she said, sighing in a long suffering way that Karson did sometimes and mentally projecting the statement, “Why must I be cursed with these morons that are surrounding me?” “Look, I know you’re, like, obsessed with freaks or something - “
“Karson isn’t a freak.”
“- but you really start paying attention. Everyone thought you were gonna ask Matt out, okay? Matt even thought you were gonna ask him out.”
You scrunch up your nose at her. “So? Just because you all assumed that I was gonna ask some guy who talks to me during practice doesn’t mean that I was going to. I’m going to the dance with Karson.” And with that, you walked back into the classroom, not letting that conversation wipe the smile from your face as you threw your best grin at Karson, who was still trying to ignore you, and sat down, swinging your legs like a five year old and humming to yourself happily.
Fuck Matt and fuck Macy. This was going to be the best Sadie Hawkins ever.
The joke being that it WASN'T, obviously. I mean, it was okay, but it wasn't the BEST. I need to give the voice (AKA "you") a name, because she basically is narrating the entire second part of this story. Karson narrates the first part and then stops when he moves with his mom. And I decided it would be fun to have a stranger narrate his second part of his life, kinda an outside-looking-in sort of thing. Just the people around him trying to solve the mystery of what exactly is up with this weirdo, I mean seriously.
John, of course, jumps in and starts narrating at some point to tell about his and his friends'/siblings' own experiences after the reset. It's kind of a sad story, now that I think about it (says the girl who kills off all of her characters at the end of a story) but my god, is Karson hilarious.
"You said that you won't let anyone in."
"I never said that. You said that, I just agreed with you to get you to shut the fuck up."
"Okay, granted. But you're really close to your mom. If you let her in, why don't you just give in and start making friends?"
"Okay, first of all, the choir is full of pretentious dickweeds and I would rather smoke a joint of poison sumack and roll around in burrs before I associate myself with any of them, you included. Second of all, I didn't let my mother in. My mother waited in the shadows until I was done screaming and clawing at the air before she moved in like a fucking assassin to hold me down coddle the shit out of me. Keeping my mom out is like keeping vermin out of a shack with holes as big as a fucking fire hydrant out of sheer will alone. You can sit there with broom and whack the fuckers if you catch them, but as soon as you get lazy, you find your house is overrun by parasitic and plague infected rodents and all your food has been knawed through with a shitload of suspicious brown pellets all around. Two weeks later you die of haunta virus. THen some nooksucker in the afterlife tells you that the next house over was perfectly secure compund and you could have used some god damned chicken wire to cover the whole if you were that desperate."
"Oh wow, you totally lost me there."
"In other words, it's a fruitless act of frustration and I stopped trying."
"Oh. I don't see how that has anything to do with ghosts or whatever, but okay."
"I never- ...You are such a fucking idiot, oh my god."
"Is she nice to you at least?"
"If she was a cereal she would be Sugar Coated Chocolate Head-ache Inducing Yum-Yums."
"Aww, that's so sweet!"
"You tell her I said that and I will end you."
And so on. (WHY is he so much fun to write??? I came up with that shack metaphor while lying in my bed, trying to sleep at 3AM. I think it turned out prett good, and I'm glad I remembered it.)