Friday, April 1st, 2016
Whenever Ryu used his paints in the intended manner, he waned to tear the pieces out of his sketchbook, especially as familiar faces took shape on the thick, firm paper that soaked up his acrylics and married with the hard graphite marks of his thick pencil. A rare smile and an idiosyncracy that Ryu had caught onto had been captured and translated to the paper with frustrating clarity, and he heavily debated scrapping the whole thing before he instead propped his sketchbook against the windowsill to allow the paint to set and dry.
School, the core classes anyway, bored the everloving shit out of Ryu. Who gave a fuck about math? How was it going to help him in the world? They were infantile thoughts, he knew that, and there was a reason he'd been avoiding his final two general ed credits. There were missed calls from his counselor on his phone, but really he was not inclined to answer them. The voicemails were promptly deleted before he even got a chance to listen to what he was saying.
He tapped his graphite pencil against the desk as he watched the teacher prowl across the front of the room, talking in wild gestures and speaking firmly into a microphone attached to his sleek blue sweater. Ryu owned a similar one, but he wore it ironically. The guy at the front of the room was begging to be taken seriously. He must have been twenty six at most, his first year of teaching university.
As he didn't care about what they were talking about, despite the fact that he'd read the book they were picking apart when he was twelve, he pushed himself out of his seat and slipped out of the room while the teacher had his back to the class. He doubted anyone noticed that he was gone.
They noticed when a new, brazen red and orange tag suddenly showed up on the wall next to the cafeteria, though. It wasn't anything in particular, didn't say words in his wildstyle way; it was just his take on a bleeding sunset, purposefully spraying too much paint and letting it roll down the wall in rivulets.
Most people knew who'd done it, but no one spoke up, even when the piece got covered up by more bland, grey paint.
crumpled mess of receipts
a debit card, nearly snapped in half
haphazardly shoved wad of bills making it hard to close totaling $254
sketched-on receipts separated from the crumpled ones
neatly folded piece of paper tucked in the back
Once a week, Ryu yanked out his wallet and threw away whatever he could. Some receipts made it into the trash, others got pinned to his walls because they had doodles on them, little ideas that fluttered through his brain too quickly for him to grab for his sketchbook. He always had it on him, of course.
One was a piece of paper haphazardly shoved into one of the hidden back pockets, and when he pulled it out, he furrowed his brows. His bottom lip poked out as he read over what he'd written in his grafitti script, but it didn't make any sense. It was his handwriting, but they weren't his words. Not his sober words anyway.
A voice in the back of his head, the evil one, whispered in his ear to throw it away, the words didn't mean anything anyway, but another part of him remembered the comment he'd apparently sent to Minhee in the middle of the night on Friday morning, and it semeed like he was playing an April Fool's joke on himself.
Wouldn't be the first time, or probably the last.
He scoffed, and pinned it to the wall backwards so he knew it was there but didn't have to read the stupid words.
