Buried (a Creek fic)

23. Chance

The searing headache hit Craig like a ton of bricks when he first opened his eyes the next morning. It pounded rhythmically and woke him up before his alarm clock decided to screech at him. What a great start to the Tuesday morning.

He groaned loudly with his eyes still shut, rolled over in his bed (narrowly missing toppling off the side entirely), and lazily thumped his hand against the surface of his bedside table in an attempt to grab the bottle of aspirin he usually kept there in case of a hangover. Instead of finding it, he ended up knocking everything off in the process.

Craig let out an agitated screech into his pillow, before muffledly grumbling, "Son of a bitch."

Begrudgingly, he slowly rose up and stretched his arms up towards the ceiling. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and stumbled onto his feet, nearly tripping over the empty beer cans from last night that had fallen when he missed the aspirin. Craig located the pills, reached over, and screwed off the lid. He tipped the bottle onto its side, but to his dismay, none of the tiny capsules poured out onto his open palm.

"Of-fucking-course," he spat out, throwing the empty bottle onto the floor to accompany the other fallen objects that had been on his table.

Craig took a glance at his alarm clock, only to realize that it was a half hour later than it should be.

"Shit!" he cried out. "How the hell did I sleep through my alarm?"

And then his brain had to chime in with, Well, you did stay up until three am because you couldn't sleep, so -

"Fuck off," Craig growled to himself, before dashing over to his closet and throwing it open. He snatched up the first set of jeans and shirt that he came across and threw off the clothes he had slept in, awkwardly hopping into the clean pair of jeans and thrusting the shirt over his head.

After hurrying to the bathroom to brush his teeth, Craig pulled his hat over his head and grabbed his bag on his way out the door. He threw a sideways glance at the mirror framed in the upstairs hallway as he passed it, only to realize that the dark rings under his eyes from the lack of sleep made him look like a walking corpse. Well, it's not like he really had anyone to impress anymore, right? Ah, what a depressing thought.

Craig thundered down the stairs and - silently being thankful that both of his parents were already at work so that they wouldn't know he was late - he jumped into his shoes and went off out the door.

His footsteps boomed on the pavement below him, as he briskly started walking on his normal path to the high school. However, moments into his route, a car came to a halt at the curb beside him.

As Craig skeptically cocked his head to the side to look at the driver, the passenger side window slid down and Clyde's head popped out. He beckoned towards the car and yelled, "Dude, get in!"

Baffled by his sudden appearance out of nowhere, Craig obeyed and climbed into the backseat. As he shut the door behind him, he looked up to see the driver - aka Token - smiling at him from the rear-view mirror.

"The hell are you guys doing?" Craig asked, taken aback.

"We wanted to give you a ride," Clyde answered cheerfully.

"Why...?" he questioned, raising an eyebrow with suspicion.

"Because we're nice," Token piped up.

Clyde suddenly spun around and thrusted something into Craig's lap; a box of a dozen doughnuts, half of which had already been eaten. It wasn't too hard to guess who had done that, considering there was a gloop of chocolate frosting smeared across on Clyde's chin.