Chapter Text
When he opened the journal to look for a name, Kyle didn’t expect to find his own.
High schoolers dropped shit all the time- Kenny had gotten half of his school supplies from dropped pens and abandoned notebooks- but for personal items, it was expected to make an effort to find the owner. So, when Kyle accidentally kicked the little red book coming out of study hall, he figured he’d have a mildly interesting side adventure. At the very least, make someone’s day a bit better.
Eighth period English literature gave him the chance to open it. It really should’ve been his favorite class, because reading and writing came naturally to him, and (not to sound like pretentious dick or anything) he actually did like Shakespeare and stuff. It should have been his favorite.
“Kyle?”
“Here.”
“Eric?”
“Pre-sent.”
But it wasn’t. Not only had that fatass bitch ended up in the same class as him, they had to sit in alphabetical order- giving Cartman ample opportunity to get on his fucking nerves. Not that it took much. Cartman breathing in his general direction was already enough to create a baseline level of irritation.
In any case, the journal provided a nice distraction, at least at first. It wasn’t an amazing looking book, but it was a hardcover and closed with an elastic strap, which put it above the spiral notebooks you got from the 99¢ section that most kids used. The section on the first page where the owners name was supposed to go was left blank, which left him in a bit of a conundrum.
Suppose this was someone’s personal diary? Would it really be ok to read through it, even to figure out who it belonged to? He didn’t keep a diary himself, but imagined that under no circumstance would he want someone to pry. It would arguably be best to just leave it at the lost and found. And honestly, he would have done that, but if Eric threw another little piece of paper in his hair he was gonna fucking snap, so he decided instead that he was going to continue to distract himself with the book in front of him.
He flipped to the first page, dated two years ago.
‘I saw Kyle today, his eyes looked so pretty-‘
Kyle sat up straight, and whipped his head around class as if that would tell him who wrote this. No one had told him he had pretty eyes before. He scanned the page, seeing his name a lot- and on the next page, and all the pages. This entire book was about him, his hair, his nose, his skin, musings on how pretty he’d look dead.
“What the fuck.”
Snickers filtered through the class, but his teacher seemed only mildly irritated.
“Kyle, I told you all about this quiz two days ago. If you took reading notes it shouldn’t be hard.”
He looked up at his teacher, the words not even fully connecting. He just found out he had some creepy stalker and now he had to what, worry about Othello? At the teachers command, the class shuffled to clear their desks. Kyle closed a bigger notebook around the journal, clearing his desk in one sweep. He didn’t even look behind him to hand Cartman his quiz.
It wasn’t a difficult assessment by any means. Character matching, some basic questions about the plot, like “Why is Desdamona’s father upset she’s with Othello?”- so long as you went to class with a pulse, you’d get it right. And yet, Kyle remained unable to pick up his pen, grimace plastered on his face. Someone, someone that he almost certainly knew, mused about finding his corpse attractive. And wrote that down. Like it was totally chill.
The pen felt like a lead weight, and his handwriting was incredibly sloppy, but he managed to fill in his quiz. He knew that he knew the correct answers, but couldn’t focus enough to make sure he was putting them to paper. The quiz took up the remainder of class, thank god, and Kyle grabbed his stuff, handed in the quiz and bolted.
———————————
“You called me over for some book?”
Stan didn’t ask too many questions. A text from Kyle saying he needed to see him asap was enough to summon him- something Kyle was eternally grateful for. He realized with some embarrassment that he didn’t have too many answers for him. Even by the time Stan had let himself in, greeted Kyle’s parents, and shuffled up the stairs to his room, Kyle really didn’t have any idea where to start.
So, he didn’t, just tossing the book at him when he plopped onto Kyle’s bed.
“Open it.”
Kyle saw in real time a mirror of he must’ve looked like in English. Stan flipped open the journal with mild intrigue, then intense interest, sat up straight, deep confusion, and then-
“What the fuck.”
“I know!”
“Where’d you get this?”
“On the ground at school.”
“Where exactly?”
“Outside my study hall- uh, 215.”
Stan clenched his jaw. They both knew the line of questioning would yield little answers, but Stan’s protectiveness forced him to get all the info he could. He flipped to random pages, running the whole thing through his thumb, and then started to flip through pages from the back cover.
“This whole thing is just about you.”
“I know, I don’t even want to look at it.”
“They drew you.”
Despite his better judgement, Kyle scooted his chair over to Stan for a better look. And sure enough, little drawings of him looked back. Stan fanned through the book, stopping only where drawings were present. It was pretty much just his face, but from all different angles. Sometimes it would include his upper body, like a few that showed him working at his desk or…at lunch? A few more ambitious sketches featured his whole body- usually viewed from behind.
“They’re pretty good.”
“Stan!”
He shrugged. “I’m just being honest. Whoever this is, they’re obsessed with you.”
Kyle bit his cheek. “Yeah, I got that part- but who is it?”
“I have literally no idea. It could be anyone- fuck, it could be me.”
“Is it you?”
“No.”
Kyle stared at him.
“No!”
He sighed. “Ok, well that rules out one person. Just the rest of the school to go.”
Stan pulled out a notebook of his own, along with a pencil.
“There has to be hints in the writing, right? We can go through it and like gather evidence or something.”
Kyle nodded, taking the journal back to read through it, giving Stan relevant info to jot down. The book itself was a mess- it started two years ago, with sporadic journal entries like a normal diary, but then a bunch of pages would be left blank before the next page was filled with whatever- poems, quotes, how Kyle looked a certain day, drawings of him…a cut out from a magazine of someone’s eyes who the author claimed looked similar to his. Just really bizarre, sick shit. The writing itself was weird too. Most of it was print, and not particularly neat, but sometimes they’d randomly switch to cursive. A lot of misspellings, missing words, and words crossed out only to be replaced with another, incorrect word.
Once he got to the page about him being bound and gagged, he had to stop.
“That’s alright,” Stan assured him, “we got some good stuff.” He looked back on his own notes. “Ok, so- they mentioned on an entry from last month that you were absent, right? So they probably have a class with you.”
“I have at least one class with everyone in our grade,” he protested.
“But that’s good,” Stan said again, “there’s only a handful of underclassmen it could be, and so it’s probably someone in our grade.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Stan ignored him, going off on a separate lead.
“Who do we know in our class is into guys? Me, you, Wendy, Bebe, Tweak- holy shit what if it’s Craig-“
“Why the fuck would it be Craig?” Kyle snapped.
Stan shrugged. “I dunno, I bet he’s into weird shit. I’m putting him in the suspect pile.”
Kyle’s stomach twisted into knots, quickly losing hope that they’d get anywhere. Stan wrote and erased Butter’s name several times before coming to a similar conclusion.
“Do you…” he suggested weakly, “wanna have Kenny take a look at it?”
Kyle gripped his chair.
“I don’t want anybody to take a look at it. What if it’s Kenny?”
Stan snorted. “No shot it’s Kenny, dude.”
“I dunno, he kinda flirts with me sometimes.”
“Yeah, because he’s a whore, not because he’s into you like that. Like this,” he said, gesturing to the book. “All I know is that Kenny knows everything about everybody.”
Kyle gave it some consideration. He didn’t seriously think Kenny was his stalker, but he wanted the least amount of people to know about this.
“I’ll give it a week, and if I really can’t figure it out, I’ll call Kenny.”