Chapter 1
Welcome to Panda Group
Chapter Description: Brett joins Panda Group
Brett walked out of his guidance counselor’s office slightly less worried than he’d been going in. He’d expected a stressful meeting, and it had been. The words “may need to repeat eleventh grade” had been uttered. But it had concluded on a more promising note: Brett had agreed to sign up for some program the school was piloting (the “Panda Group”, the counselor said it was called) which would supposedly provide him with some extra academic help and counseling. Brett thought it sounded like a bunch of nonsense; he wasn’t good at school, and an extra tutor or whatever wasn’t going to change that. But it let him push off the problem until this program failed him just like his teachers, the two tutors he’d already tried, and everything else had. And any day he didn’t have to face the disaster high school had become was a good day.
It was only later in the day that he realized he wasn’t quite sure what the Panda Group actually entailed. He’d been given a pin, a little panda bear he’d clipped to his backpack as directed to indicate he was part of the program, been told he was enrolled and…that was it. Over the next few days, he kept expecting to hear from someone, and he didn’t. In the meantime, he looked around to see if anyone else had one of those little panda bears so he could ask what the program was like, but he never saw another. Apparently, whatever this program was, either it was very small, or he didn’t have any classes with the other participants.
The funny thing was that just knowing he was in the program, even though they hadn’t done anything for him yet, seemed to be helping. It didn’t help his grades - that Friday he failed another chemistry test. But it helped his stress level. Instead of being bothered by it, it didn’t feel like a big deal. After all, he told himself, he couldn’t be expected to start doing better until the Panda Group started doing whatever they did. Even better, his parents seemed to feel the same way. Normally failing another test would have gotten at least a long speech about his lousy grades, and possibly gotten him grounded, but his parents seemed to feel like it wasn’t a big deal either.
Brett didn’t hear anything more about the Panda Group until the middle of the next week, and even then, all they wanted to do was meet with his parents. His parents came back from the meeting enthusiastic about the program, but didn’t seem any clearer on the details than Brett was. All they had was some vague jargon about how the Panda Group would help him “explore alternative academic approaches”, and when Brett pushed for details, they seemed to get confused; eventually his father snapped at him and told Brett to stop bugging them about it.
The whole thing seemed weird, but Brett just didn’t feel inclined to look into it more. What was important was that it was out of his hands. He didn’t need to keep asking questions, because he could just count on the program to help him, and whatever happened until then wasn’t his fault.
The next day, Brett finally saw another of the Panda Group students. It was a coincidence - he happened to be wandering down the hall when a student hurried out of a classroom and the first thing Brett noticed was that he had one of those little panda pins on his backpack.
The second thing Brett noticed was that the guy looked less like a high school student than like an overgrown six year old. He was wearing overalls over a t-shirt with a dinosaur, and the panda was pinned to a bright yellow Pokémon backpack. Now that Brett looked at him, he recognized the guy - his name was Zach, and while they hadn’t been friends, exactly, they’d had a class or two together last year and been friendly, but he’d slowly realized there was something a little off about Zach, which had been confirmed when Zach switched to some special ed program.
“Hey, Zach? Are you in Panda Group?” Brett asked.
Zach stopped and looked at him, standing a little awkwardly. “Hi, Brett,” he said eagerly and a little too loudly. “Yeah, I am!”.
“Um…” Brett wasn’t sure how to even ask a precise question, especially to someone like Zach, so he just blurted out “What is it?”
“It’s just our group,” Zach explained unhelpfully, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other. “I’ve really gotta go!” he shouted and ran down the hall to the bathroom.
In retrospect, it was hard to believe he’d ever mistaken Zach for a regular high school student; it was obvious that the special ed program was the right place for him. It seemed a little weird that the only other person he’d met in the program was a special ed kid, though. But Brett touched the panda pinned to his backpack, and decided not to worry about it. He was enjoying the way being in the program made it feel like things weren’t his responsibility; someone else was in charge of fixing everything, and that meant he could relax.
He felt similarly in his classes. They weren’t going better - if anything, they were going worse. He found himself tuning a lot of it out, because what his teachers were saying seemed even harder to understand than usual. But he didn’t mind and, fortunately, neither did his teacher’s. He noticed that they were calling on him less, and that when they did call on him, they usually praised whatever he said, even if it wasn’t right. That, he was sure, had to be because they knew he was in the Panda Group, or at least would be soon, and they were giving him some leeway until that started up.
That Friday, he got home to discover his father in his room, going through his underwear drawer, pulling all his boxers into a trash bag.
“Dad, what are you going?”
“It’s for the program,” his father said. “They said participants are have to dress appropriately.” His father pulled a stack of packs of fresh underwear off the bed and started opening them and putting the contents into Brett’s underwear drawer, filling it with plain white briefs.
“Dad, that’s crazy, why do I have to wear different underwear just to participate in the Panda Group?”
His father turned to him and got that confused look he’d had when Brett has pressed for details about the meeting with the person from the program. “Well…” his father hedged, and then suddenly switched to a stern tone. “Brett, I’m not going to argue about this. You signed up for the program, and you are going to follow this through for once, not nitpick about every little thing they asked you to do.”
Brett was going to keep arguing, but instead briefly grabbed the panda pinned to his backpack. He’d started doing that a lot, whenever he got worried, and, as always, it reminded him not to worry about things. “Okay, dad,” he said quietly. He didn’t understand why he needed to wear tighty-whities now, and he didn’t need to understand; he could just trust that his father and the Panda Group were doing it for a reason.
The next morning after he showered, he pulled a pair of his new white underwear on, then pulled some jeans over it, and didn’t think much more about it. It was so much easier to just do what his dad said he had to do.
On Monday he had gym class, though, and as he went to the locker to change, he worried that someone would make fun of him for it. He dawdled a little, hesitating while his classmates pulled off their pants to reveal the usual assortment of boxers and boxer briefs before pulling gym shorts over them. Finally, unable to delay any longer, Brett took off his own jeans. If anyone noticed his white briefs, though, none of them said anything, and Brett was relieved to quickly pull his own gym shorts on without incident.
On Wednesday, as he was stepping into the shower, he realized that he had, yet again, left his towel in his bedroom from the day before. That meant he had to pull his pants back on to trek back to his room just to fetch it. Today, he decided not to bother with that, and just walked back to his room naked. It meant walking naked past the dining room, where his parents might see, and the big window, but who really cared, anyway? After the shower, he dried off and left the towel in the bathroom so it didn’t happen again the next day, and walked naked back to his bedroom again to get dressed. This way made so much more sense, and he couldn’t believe he’d been making such a fuss out of wearing a towel back all this time.
