Chapter Text
There are fifty-two weeks in a year, seven days in a week, twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute, and one thousand miliseconds in a second. There are ninety-six ceiling tiles, thirty stools, fifteen tables, and twenty-four students all filling one chemistry classroom. Everything at face value has a number: the number of pages in his journal (one hundred), the number of sinks attached to the wall (eight), the number of bruises on his arms (six). Numbering led to order and order led to the sanity that he desperatly needed to feel.
"Who can answer problem number three from last night's homework?," Mr. Harris asked, pacing down the aisle like a drill sargent examining his cadets for any flaw, any mistake that he can point out.
'Don't pick me, don't pick me,' he chanted in his head as Harris stopped in front of his table. 'Of fucking course'.
"Mr. Lahey, can you answer number three or did you fail to do your homework once again?," Harris asked, already knowing the answer. Isaac fought off rolling his eyes. 'No I didn't do my homework just like the last three fucking times you asked if I had done my homework,' he thought to himself, biting his lip for second, as if it would somehow keep his reply inside.
"No sir," Isaac replied, blue eyes staring at his left sleeve while three fingers idly played with it. Harris rolled his eyes.
"Of course you didn't. Mr. Lahey, if you allow your brain cells to deteriorate any farther you might just give Stilinski a run for his money." Fuck did he hate this guy. If he didn't like kids, why the hell did he become a teacher? Someone let out a cough, causing Isaac and Harris to look forward (three seats forward and one to the right, to be precise).
"Uh, for the record, I did my homework," Stiles pointed out, waving his right hand in one of his normal gestures. Harris rolled his eyes once more.
"Well every dog does have his day," he said bluntly, almost as if he was challenging Stiles to actually say something vaguely intelligent. Stiles rolled his eyes in obvious annoyance, sinking slightly in his stool and tapping his pencil in a sporatic cadence.
Mr. Harris moved on to his next victim, thank God. Lydia Martin answered the question so easily you would have thought she had been asked how to spell her name. Her pink lips rounded out each word with ease, her red hair bouncing slightly with each perfected move of her head. Isaac didn't notice, however. His mind was occupied with something else.
Three seats forward and one to the right sat Stiles, tapping away with his pencil. Isaac tried counting the beats, tried finding the timing, but for some reason he always fell short. It was almost as if there was no pattern to be found, no numbers to be assigned.
Stiles had always irked Isaac (minus the time when they were little kids with much bigger fish to fry than facing adulthood and trying to survive at home) and this was why. Stiles never fell in a cadence, a rhythym, a pattern at all. No matter how hard Isaac tried, Stiles could not be numbered. Everything he did, from his wild gestures to his sporatic walking pattern, was sudden and never repeated. Isaac was pretty sure that Stiles heart beat didn't even beat regularly (not that he wanted that; it would probably be harmful). Still, he frustrated Isaac to no end.
Isaac stared at Stiles' pencil tapping (up down right left left down left), nearly falling off his stool in concentration. That quickly came to an end when he was snapped out of his haze as the bell for the next class rang and the world around him began to shift.