Well, Don’t Call Me By My Full Name

📅 Autumn 2009; Early in the school year

✚✚ ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ & ᴜsᴇ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ғ-sʟᴜʀ ✚✚

School wasn’t easy. It had never been easy: Right from the start, David had experienced it at its worst, as an inherent target. It didn’t matter that some pieces of his past had been swallowed up by nothingness; voided memories didn’t keep slurs or fists from feeling familiar. It had been this, always, for years. And “this” was unbearable.
The lunch period was the roughest, outside of gym class or the lawless land of the between-class-period hallways, and lunchtime today wasn’t to be an exception: An open palm collided with the back of David’s head, nearly knocking him into headbutting the cafeteria table. Laughter rang in his ears.
“David! Where’s your lunch, bro? Aren’t you hungry?” a mocking voice asked from behind him, “Or are you saving room for cock?”
David ground his jaw but kept his eyes fixed on the table, his head down.
“Oh, don’t you wish I was, Trent,” he hissed under his breath, through gritted teeth. Mistake. There was silence at first, then the sound of his tormentor cracking their neck.
“You implying something, faggot?” Trent asked, and the humor had left his voice, threat alone in its place. David shut his eyes and waited, silent. The blow would come.
“I asked you a fucking question, queer. What—oof!” Trent’s verbal abuse suddenly gave way to a pained noise and a thud, and David raised his head to look around, perplexed. Trent was slowly getting up from the ground, avoiding putting weight on his ankle, while a girl with short hair and dark skin stood over him, raising her eyebrows unsympathetically.
“Maybe you should watch where I’m walking, fucko,” she said coldly to Trent, who muttered something under his breath that made her narrow her eyes.
“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you calling me a cunt over the sound of you fucking off,” she replied, jerking her head aggressively to the side; “Off you go.” 

Trent shot her a scathing look as he limped away, and she impassively watched his retreat. When she turned to face David, though, a broad, friendly smile replaced her cold glare.
“Man, fuckin’ Trent, what a jackass!” she grinned, putting her lunch tray down and taking the seat across from him, “Hi, by the way—I’m Athena. I think we have English together. You’re David, right?”

“I…Yeah, that’s me,” he stuttered through a grimace, “Thanks, by the way. No one’s ever...intervened, really, before. You leg-sweep him?”
“Mm, should have! But nah, I just kicked him real hard in the ankle. He’s lucky it’s not broken, honestly. Field hockey,” she emphasized, lifting one of her—admittedly muscular—legs and gesturing to it like an over-theatrical infomercial salesman, “and soccer. These puppies can do some damage. D’you play any sports, David?” she asked, returning her leg to the floor. The amused smile brought on by her attitude and eccentricities fell from David’s face.
“Ah, nah,” he muttered, glancing away, “Not my thing, really.” 
She seemed unperturbed and tossed him an easy shrug, still grinning. “That’s cool, more for me, right?” she laughed. “What are you into, then?”

David blinked, caught-off guard by the fact that she hadn’t lost interest in him immediately. He froze up for a heartbeat or two, second-guessing all of his passions, trying to decide which were least likely to make someone from the soccer field sneer. Mediterranean history was out, definitely. 
“...Music?” he settled on, tentatively. To his relief, Athena’s expression brightened.
“Ooh, what kind?” she asked, leaning forward; “And—D’you mean just listening to it? Or playing?”
“...Both. I play guitar. Kinda,” he said, feeling the need to kneecap anything that threatened to seem like bragging. “Genre-wise I like rock and alternative stuff, yanno...Linkin Park’s about as mainstream as I get…”

The light in her eyes failed to flicker or die as they talked; as it so happened, she was a Linkin Park fan, too, and she seemed genuinely thrilled that he played guitar—it turned out that she played the drums, having ‘failed to become the violin virtuoso her parents would have preferred’ and ‘true to form, only showed interest in their least favourite instrument.’ 
“My brother used to play the piano and my mom just ate it up, of course. Maybe I could take my drumsticks and start wailing on the baby grand and that’d make her happy. Think I could find piano sheet music for ‘Numb’ online?” Athena said, a sardonic edge having made itself apparent in her tone over the course of their conversation. David couldn’t help but latch onto it.
“I feel that,” he said, maybe too quickly, nearly tripping over their newfound commonality; “My dad can’t stand my ‘music thing’ either; it’s a waste of time to him because he thinks I should be focusing everything on school. ‘Numb’ is basically my theme song.”

His intuition hadn’t led him wrong: Their conversation took on a new depth with the kinship invoked by parental disappointment and their shared love for Meteora’s end track. It turned out both of Athena’s parents were obsessed with academia and image, that she felt useless at math and was under constant pressure to live up to their expectations, the bar already set by her ‘legitimate genius’ of a brother:
“They’ve spent my whole life trying to get me to feel bad about not being him,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Thank god he can’t stand it. He always sticks up for me; he’s the only decent person in the family.”
“Aside from you, you mean?” David asked, a knee-jerk reaction that revived Athena’s faltering smile.
“Hey, yeah, thanks! Aside from me.”

They dove into the ‘Numb’ music video and ended up railing against school culture, a shock to David’s system to hear from Athena’s mouth: He’d expected her to—despite her decency—have been at enough ease with the jock-down pecking order of the cliques around them. Instead, bitterness welled up in her tone again.
“Nah, because, I mean, it’s exactly like my parents’ whole shit,” she scoffed. “It’s all that status-is-who-you-know-and-how-you-look crap. And then you’re supposed to keep it all up, like...in the music video—you relate with the girl, right, David?”
He froze and his voice got stuck in his throat; the question sounded like too easy a trap, a perfect lead-in to the barbs of ‘tranny’ or ‘faggot’ with which he was so well-acquainted. He risked the smallest nod, though, and Athena carried on like it was nothing;
“Yeah, so, her, in the vid—she gets pushed down, right, and everyone just moves on around her because that’s the status quo. She’s the outcast and no-one’s gonna risk their stupid perch on the social ladder by being kind! Total bullshit, I can’t stomach it. I’m never, ever, gonna be just another cog in the machine.”

And she isn’t, David realized with growing admiration; she’s living that. Honestly. Athena was talking to him, smiling at him; had kicked one of the King Jocks in the leg to break the clockwork clique-work of highschool. An anarchist, a rebel, on the level and actually fucking interested in what he had to say; talking to him like no one else ever had and asking questions like she cared about the answers. She kept catching David off-guard but it was a mere few minutes before the bell rang that she totally blind-sided him.
“Do you use a nickname or something?” she asked, out of the blue.
He stared at her. “...What?”
“Dunno, maybe I’m off-base as all heck, but the whole time we’ve been talking...You have this little pause if I say ‘David.’ Like, you just look down for a second, or frown, or it takes you a beat to reply. Thought maybe you go by a nickname or something instead and I’m making you feel all weird.”

David shook his head and started to wave it all off; “Nah, no, nobody likes me enough to use a nickname anyway…” He trailed off and frowned; probably in the exact way she had just described. 
A spark, an ember, an inkling had been awoken in him and he struggled to reach it. Turning inward, the bags beneath his eyes felt heavier; his body felt bigger than meant as some sort of youthful vulnerability crept in. David didn’t quite know how to articulate it, so he offered a vague, uncomfortable hand-wave instead; feeling somehow “caught.”
“…I dunno. I just...I have issues with my name, I guess, maybe. Probably sounds stupid,” he said, retreating into self-dismissal, but Athena propped her chin in her hands, clearly still interested.
“Yeah? Try me. What kinda issues?”
David hesitated at first—but Athena seemed honest, and kind, and...fuck it.
“It doesn’t feel like...like ‘me,’ I guess? Or who I wanna be. Like, ‘David’ is what they call me,” he explained, sweeping his hand out in indication of the cafeteria at large; “All these shit people. Like, Trent and his gang, and the teachers, and my parents...It’s the most ordinary name on the planet, I think my dad chose it because it’s practically what you’re supposed to name your son. At least if your son’s supposed to be normal. I’m just sick of hearing it, I guess. Being him.” He half-expected Athena to not get what he was saying; to be confused or think he was weird—but instead he found her thoughtfully nodding.
“That makes sense, I think,” she said, straightening up, “Do you have something you’d rather be called? ‘Cause I’ll use whatever name you want.” The look in her eyes was still unmistakably friendly, but David quailed under her attention all the same; insecurity hunching his shoulders as he averted eye contact again, finding it far too vulnerable.
“I mean...I dunno,” he mumbled hesitantly. He’d never been given the opportunity to rename himself outside of choosing usernames online, and suddenly second-guessed what small amount of thought and impulse he’d given his indisputably nerdy handle. 
“...It’s just sorta...Maybe it’s dumb. ‘Kato’? Like Cato the Elder, the Roman historian. I spell it with a K, though…I don’t know, I’d even go by my middle name; I’m fine with Julian, too, I just don’t want to be David—I’m not ‘David!’ Do you know how many ‘David’s there are? It’s like being a middle America clone trooper. It’s like being nobody at all.” Self-consciousness about how open his rant had been abruptly crashed down on him, forcing his shoulders into a half-shrug, though he clenched his jaw and braced himself for mocking laughter.
Instead, Athena clicked her tongue interestedly and tested the new name out:

“‘Kato,’” she said slowly, testing out how the moniker fit in her mouth before smiling brightly up at him and chirping, “I dunno the Rome guy you’re on about, but I like it, it’s unique! Kato. K. K-O. Yeah, no, I’m super down with it; very nickname-able. And Julian’s pretty, maybe it can be for special occasions. Just ‘David’ would be a lot harder to work with.” Her grin was genuine and friendly and lit her eyes like sparklers; Kato couldn’t help but find it contagious.
“You think so?” he asked; a small, shy smile playing on his own lips.
“Yeah!” Athena beamed back at him, “I mean, a) ‘Kato’ is way more individual, and snappy, but b) think about it: K-O is a bomb nickname, super badass. What are the options for ‘David’? Just ‘Dave,’ right? And you look like you’d rightfully murder anyone who called you that! Though getting stabbed actually sounds preferable to the sheer terribleness of walking into school and greeting someone as ‘Big D.’”

Kato couldn’t hide his snort of laughter behind his hands and she started cracking up, too: It was something light and easy and wonderful—and entirely alien. Kato felt distinctly nervous about the hopeful warmth in his chest that she inspired; about lowering his hands to uncover the full, open-mouthed smile he offered Athena—though he knew his cautious eyes would still betray his anxiety.
“Okay, yeah, that would be the absolute worst,” he said, “Definitely don’t call me that. But, for real, like...thank you? For...all of this.”
Athena returned his smile delightedly. The end-of-lunch bell rang in the background but couldn’t drown her words:
“Yeah! No problem-o, Kato.”