Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 17
Peter arrived at the lunch table on a Wednesday in early October with his tablet. He set the tablet on the table, turned it to face Quinn, and pressed play.
“Look at this.”
The footage was from the Safeway parking lot security camera. It captured his fight with the carjackers with a strange, cinematic quality. It showed the two men approaching, the interaction, and its conclusion. All visible in a single stream of action. Someone had found it and uploaded it. It had gone viral. Five hundred forty-two thousand views.
Quinn watched it with a sinking feeling.
Shit.
He glanced at the comments but quickly stopped reading. They were a mixture of admiration and speculation, all from people who probably had never been in a fight, assigning a narrative to someone who had.
He pushed the tablet back to Peter.
“Half a million views,” Peter said.
“Yeah,” Quinn replied.
“You knew about this?”
“I knew the security camera had it. I didn’t know some idiot uploaded it.”
Peter looked at him. “You don’t seem bothered.”
“I’m not unbothered,” Quinn said. “I just can’t do anything about it.”
James was reading the comment section on his own phone with the absorbed expression of an anthropologist encountering a previously undocumented tribe. “People think you’re a badass,” he said.
“I’m a kid.”
“People online do not let facts complicate their opinions,” Will said without looking up from his notebook.
Quinn opened his lunch, Maria’s special, which today contained something with chicken and avocado that he’d been looking forward to since breakfast, and ate. He let the conversation drop, which it did because they were his friends and they knew he was bothered by it.
The rest of the school, however, had different ideas.
He noticed the change in his third-period history class, which was where you could usually pick up school drama because Ferretti’s class contained a good cross-section of all the sophomore class. The attention in the room was different. Kids were looking at him way more than usual. He let it pass the way he let the weather pass. It would settle into whatever it was going to settle into, and he would deal with whatever happened.
The reality was that he was always aware that he was not one of them. He had been shaped by different experiences than the kids around him. These were ice cream kids who had been sheltered from the things that had built him.
Not that their lives were peaches and cream. Their parents had, in many cases, been so thoroughly occupied with the acquisition and maintenance of wealth that love had been intended without being present as attention. He had seen the results in the tutoring sessions — the loneliness of kids who had everything material that had been given as a substitute for something else.
He cut them slack for this. He understood that unhappiness was not a function of circumstance, that you could have the Colonel’s house and the fountain and the unbelievably luxurious towels and still be genuinely unhappy. He thought that most of the genuinely unhappy kids at St. Crispin’s were unhappy for reasons that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with what money had been asked to replace.
For himself, he was happy, or more accurately, content. This was a fact he looked at regularly with the gratitude of a person who knows what the alternative looks like.
When a negative thought or bit of self-pity arrived, he was quick to laugh at himself. Look how you live, he’d tell himself. Look where you are, dude.
It worked every time.
To the other kids, though, he was a puzzle.
The girls went to Katherine.
He found this out from Katherine herself.
“You have a problem,” she told him one Tuesday, packing up her math that she now took with confidence.
“Huh, what kind of problem?”
“The kind where four separate girls have asked me about you this week.” She held up four fingers and counted them off. “Emma wants to know if you’re seeing anyone. Caroline Harris wants to know if you’re gay because you haven’t hit on her, which she finds irritating. Lila Peretti wants to know what you like. And Madison Cole just asked, ‘What is his deal?’ and stared at me for two minutes waiting for an answer.”
Quinn looked at her. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them you were an asshole.” She giggled at his shocked expression. “And that you were possibly the only boy in this school who actually sees them as people. It pisses them off because they want you to see them as hot girls.”
“But I’m their tutor,” he said. “Three of those four are my clients.”
“That’s the other problem,” Katherine said. “You’re treating them too objectively.”
“They’re paying me good money. Tutoring doesn’t work if there’s flirting going on.”
“Quinn.” She said his name with the patient slowness of someone explaining something to an idiot. “When a girl who looks like Caroline Harris asks you to tutor her, and you actually tutor her and only tutor her, it bothers her. Everybody hits on her, even some girls. She can’t understand you.”
“That sounds like a them problem,” he said.
“It is,” she agreed. “But it’s a you problem too, because now they’re getting all obsessed with you, and I am the person who has to deal with it.” She picked up her bag. “So manage it.”
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