Chapter 3
A Friend Returns
Chapter Description: Austin returns to school and notices that Brett is acting different
Austin had been out of school with mono for a month. It had been awful.
Awful.
The illness was bad. Trying to make up a month of work was bad. Missing out on a month of absolutely everything was bad.
When he got back, the wheels of drama in his friend group had moved on without him. The girl he’d kind of been flirting with was dating someone else. One of his best friends had broken up with her boyfriend. Two close friends weren’t speaking to each other.
Oh, and Brett was acting completely different.
Completely. Different.
Last year one of his closest friends, a guy named Zach, had turned out to not really belong in regular classes, and at the time it had felt like it explained a lot - like, “how did I never notice he was like that?” - when Austin had found out. Brett, though, had been a pretty normal guy - not the brightest tool in the shed, and kind of lazy, but a really nice guy when you got to know him - and now he was acting kind of like Zach had. He’d sit in the corner doodling, and the teachers didn’t seem to mind. When Austin tried to talk to him, he mostly wanted to talk about toys and cartoons.
And, doubly weird, no one else seemed to notice. Austin asked, and everyone else seemed to think nothing had changed with Brett, and that was definitely weird.
Austin started investigating. He hung around Brett more, asking him questions, which was easy enough to do, since most of their friends were spending less time with Brett; they hadn’t cut him out entirely - he sat with them at lunch still, and got invited to group things - but Brett was getting treated like a little kid mascot, cheered on and condescended to, but not included. But that just meant Austin had plenty of opportunities to talk to him.
He didn’t learn anything that explained Brett’s behavior, but Brett seemed glad that someone in the group was paying a little more attention to him. It wasn’t hard for Austin to invite himself over to Brett’s house to look around.
He’d been to Brett’s house before, and it was mostly the way Austin remembered it. There were just a few touches, mostly in Brett’s bedroom, that reflected his new behavior - a couple little stuffed animals on Brett’s bed, a colorful night light, and a bin of toys. It was the bin of toys Brett was most interested in, and Austin reluctantly indulged him, not sure what else to do with their evening. After a while, Austin, interminably bored by the toys, talked Brett into watching cartoons, so at least he could zone out on his phone.
When Brett’s parents got home, Austin realized that they’d somehow come to accept the new Brett as well. Brett’s mother made them sloppy joes, and didn’t seem to mind how messily Brett ate. At an absurdly early eight pm, she told them it was time for Brett’s bedtime.
She promptly started herding Brett through his bedtime routine, so Austin used the excuse of needing to get his backpack to poke around Brett’s bedroom quickly for clues. A look through his friends dresser revealed not only that Brett had changed his underwear, but also the collection of other clothes to match, especially a collection of t-shirts with various cartoon characters on them and some overalls that he hadn’t yet worn to school.
He also finally noticed the little panda pin on Brett’s backpack. Maybe he could look up the logo online and see if he could learn anything more about it. He pulled it off and stuck it in his own bag, hoping Brett wouldn’t realize he’d taken it. He then hurried out and said goodbye before anyone got suspicious. As he left, Brett returned from the bathroom wearing just a Spiderman t-shirt and a pair of the white briefs Austin had seen in his drawer. He waved a happy good bye to Austin, who awkwardly took his leave.
At school on Monday, he had a new bright idea. He decided to track down Zach’s special ed classroom and see if he could learn anything.
It took some exploring around corners of the school he rarely visited to find his old friend, but he only had to walk by the room once to identify it: through the window, it was decorated like a kindergarten, with short desks in rows, a colorful floor mat, a small indoor play structure with a slide and a swing, and posters with animals, numbers, and the alphabet on the walls. There were six teenagers in the class, all dressed in bright, childish clothing, looking absurdly large sitting in the small desks, all focused on coloring in a worksheet with crayons at the moment Austin looked in. And, sure enough, there was Zach, on the far side of the front row.
While he was staring, hoping to see a clue of some kind, someone behind him said, “Can I help you?” which made Austin jump.
“Oh. I was…I was just looking.”
The speaker was a teacher, a younger woman, probably in her twenties, and slightly shorter than Austin, but she spoke with authority. “That’s not very nice,” she told him. “We’re just trying to provide a supportive environment for kids who are a little different. It’s really unkind to gawk at them.”
“Woah! I didn’t…I wasn’t gawking. Zach was a friend of mine, before he transferred here, and I was…” Austin scrambled frantically to come up with an excuse, “…I was just walking by and was glad to see he looks like he’s having fun. I think what you do here is really great.”
The woman nodded, though she didn’t look entirely mollified. “Oh, I see. Yes, Zach’s been doing really well. We think we’ve really found the right fit for him. It’s nice of you to still think of your friend,” she said, her tone a little too cold to match the words.
“Alright, thanks,” Austin said. “I didn’t mean to bother anyone. I’m really sorry.”
Austin scurried off to think. What he’d seen was enough to convince him that whatever had happened to Zach was happening to Brett, and it was hard to believe that it was natural. Over the next couple of days, he had a chance to talk to Brett some more, and asked some questions about Zach; he wasn’t surprised to hear that they’d reconnected recently, and, as Brett was eager to tell him at length, had a lot of fun playing together.
Looking for the panda logo online hit a wall, too. Image search found the logo in exactly one place: a single website proudly announcing “The Panda Group”, but with no actual information. He hid the pin back at the bottom of his backpack, and put the investigation on the back burner for a while. He didn’t understand what had happened to his friend, and it was strange that no one else seemed to notice or care, but Brett seemed pretty happy, and maybe that was what mattered. Besides, he had no idea how to investigate it any further, and he had a month of school he needed to be catching up on.
He still thought about it, on and off, and he kept chatting with Brett hoping to get a new clue, but stuck on how to learn more and buried in school work, one day went by, then another, and then a couple weeks, without Austin ever getting back to investigating what had happened to his friend.
