ACT I, SCENE II

#2: THE LATE ACQUISITION OF TWO GALLONS OF ARIZONA PEACH ICED TEA

“Okay, so,” Sokka says, “Judging by your set of poor choices tonight—sour cream and onion—I feel that you can easily pair it with Gatorade. Lemon-lime, to be exact, because the original flavour is just lacklustre and your chip flavour is already lacklustre and overall, that’s horrible way to spend the night alone even though chips, Gatorade and re-watching CSI: Miami is already a bad night as it is. Not that CSI: Miami is bad! But. It’s just, y’know, the essence of the thing. Either that or the Gatorade grape flavour, but last time I checked, I think we ran out.”

The man stares at Sokka then at his Lays chips and then back at Sokka. Hopeful, Sokka wonders if he’s debating switching the chip flavour. He’d made several good points. Or perhaps it was too on the nose; perhaps this man really was planning to watch CSI: Miami. Sokka had only guessed that, weighing in the man’s face vaguely belonging to the 35+ age range. CSI: Miami watchers, these folks. Discreetly, Sokka thought himself rather clever for his hard-won skills in identifying members of any suburban demographic through gas station tendencies.

Soccer moms with frightening levels of conversational skills at checkout, soccer dad angrily eyeing the fuel prices. A frightening number of grandmothers who seemed to only exclusively drive Corollas.

Wordlessly and without any alterations to his late-night gas station order, the man held out his card. Dejected, Sokka punches in his total and the transaction is swift, boring and over. The man drives off and not unlike a middle-aged women at a hair salon, Sokka continues flipping through trashy tabloids. Cara Delavigne and Gigi Hadid were apparently in some sort of love affair. Awful news. Sokka was really holding out on Gigi and Zayn (mostly because Sokka was living vicariously through Gigi but this was not something he was prepared to closely examine at any given moment). 

Sokka has long accepted a sort of harrowingly dull truth in his life thus far; that working at a gas station was not in the ballot for most glamourous career conquest. But Aang had sung praises for it like it had the greatest job one could ever land next to being Tony Hawk (Aang’s dream job). Sokka did try arguing that Tony Hawk simply existing was not, in fact, a job but Aang had only remained willingly ignorant. His friend had been the one to encourage Sokka about Chell and thus, reluctantly, Sokka was thrown to the pits of Gatorade analysis and fuel prices Dads never agreed with.

It was convenient, as far as teenage careers went. It was either this or McDonald’s but Aang, in his commendation of Chell gas stations to Sokka, had screamed murder from the apparent horrors of unethical work practices coming from dear old Ronald. Which was partly hilarious because the alternative was, well, Chell.

But, car-less and persistently broke the way teenagers often were, Sokka agreed anyway, only on the account that McDonald’s was an extra 20 minute walk and located dangerously close to the upper middle class demographic’s area. People who bought stuff like Roombas or horses or $180 dollar shampoos for Christmas. He’d never been able to actually confirm the existence of such gifts from the wealthy but he blindly trusted the source of equally trashy Netflix shows and thus, avoided this suburban area like a 2nd grader might avoid cooties.

And anyway, in the grand scheme of things, Sokka didn’t mind becoming acquainted with the fuel-needing suburbia of his vicinity. Occasionally, disgruntled women will take up his expert advice on which snacks to purchase on their monthly menstruation-driven supper. Some days, Sokka will listen in to whatever rant Tom or Brett or Bob will have on how shitty fuel prices are. He tries his best to hum agreeably in a way that communicates that he, too, is totally unhappy with the state of fuel and that his marriage is failing (Brett’s wife, Linda, left him for a young hot thing in Singapore). And, whether he likes it or not, he will listen in to any 70 year old lady’s glory days stories—they were once young and wild and they drove things other than Corollas, much to Sokka’s horror.

But that didn’t mean Chell was riveting in the same way Katara pulled unhinged, overconfident children out of pools in her lifeguard job or the way Aang was slowly but surely building a skateboard cult in his job at the ice skating rink (“Enjoyed that? Perhaps you might be interested in another sport involved with the word skate…”).

In short, Sokka was confined to people who needed fuel but not necessarily, say, his raving review on lemon-lime Gatorade. Which was fair, if not, a little insulting. He was only seventeen, after all, and at his fumbling age, he considered his taste world-class and completely devoid of fault. He was also perpetually confined to knowing the latest exaggerated celebrity scandal à la Women’s Weekly but the benefits of that were neither here nor there. Which is, why, by exactly 11:03pm, he is grateful for even the slightest bit of distraction from Aang.

Sokka’s manager, Mr. Chen, had long expressed his distaste for phones during working hours. Sokka worked through loopholes with the Windows computer Mr. Chen had apparently bought nine years ago when he’d thought it was a hip thing to do for the business. Except that now it was aging like dollar store wine and looked like it might fall apart or, on a more violent note, spontaneously combust in Sokka’s face.

Sighing, Sokka wrote out;

Five minutes later;

Sokka frowns, re-reading in vague concern.

Not too far from the Chell, Aang was sprawled over in the comfort of his beloved beanbag inanimately named Appa—a slightly unsanitary thing that he’d neglected to wash on the account that he doesn’t really know how—reading over his email with the faint awareness that he truthfully actually grasped nothing of the ‘essence’ but that, at the very least, he’d try his best anyway.

Meanwhile, Sokka had begun rapidly typing a scathing complaint about the proposed redaction when another email appears.

Before Sokka can reply;

Sokka halts, eyes peeled away from the computer and refocused to the sliding door where a customer seemingly materialises out of nowhere. Like every other instance, Sokka tries not to make it obvious that he’s watching. He wished desperately to be subtle about this fact though anyone with eyes could likely detect his intense surveillance. The customer—a man—clad in a black hoodie and white sweatpants. A quintessial 11pm look, if you asked Sokka.

The figure slowly peruses the aisles, adapting an even slower pace by the time they’re near the tempting vicinity of the Cheetos. Mankind’s folly. Then to his surprise, they walk away—Cheeto-less—straight into what Sokka believes is the real deal of any gas station. The beverages.

Sokka holds out a breath as the figure breezes past reigning champions Coke and Pepsi. Breeze past the monstrosity that is the soda section in general, even past the Gatorade then more energy drinks then god-awful health juices into the—into the-in—holy shit?

Was this guy about to buy fucking coconut water?

Sokka gravely desired jumping over the register and wrangling the offending beverage from the man’s hand. There is just no way. No fucking way he was allowing anyone to drink coconut water, not if Sokka could help it. Not in Sokka’s station. Even Aang thought coconut water was shit and Aang was pacifist.

Before Sokka could scream coconut murder, the man freezes as he touches the horrific beverage. As if he’d just remembered that he hated coconut water and that it was all just some horrible mistake. At least, that’s how Sokka wilfully interprets the moment to himself.

In the small but not insignificant distance, Zuko silently grieved to himself about his frankly sickening habits regarding coconut water. He did this in his own personal theatrics which mainly took place in his head, something he desperately wished looked like insightful thinking to outsiders but what had actually looked more like a pained, constipated type of brooding. The matter of what he was brooding about laid on the fact he was alone, damnit. He was banished here to learn his lesson or some shit. Banished and yet he still reached for coconut water like anyone was watching over how many calories he’s had.

Hoodie man closes the fridge and just as Sokka thinks that he’s gone cold turkey on buying anything, he strolls to another section. For a horrible moment, Sokka wonders if he’s going to settle on the next worst crime—kombucha—when the man leans forward to grab..a gallon of iced tea.

Arizona Peach Iced Tea, to be exact. The huge gallon bottles with see-through packaging that without the label, Sokka would vaguely mistake it for a gallon of maple syrup. In Sokka’s experience, there had been only one demographic the gallon bottles appealed to; soccer mom with kids who chugged juice like it was an elixir. This guy did not look look like Susan, aged 46.

The man pauses for a moment, as if intensely questioning his life choices the way Sokka was, and in a bizzare moment, pulls another gallon bottle from the fridge.

Now somehow actually content with his choice, the man begins to make his way to the register. Looking everywhere but Sokka apparently. But Sokka takes it as a chance to take him in, long enough to watch as shapes turn into detail. Detail turns into a clear cut view of sharp eyes and high cheekbones and a mouth that looked like it perpetually frowned. Like those models Sokka sees on magazines whose jobs were to look utterly bored and good doing it. These details take up most of Sokka's mind that the scar—searing through patches of skin around his left eye—doesn't quite hit Sokka in any shock.

And in the cloudless view, it was beginning to dawn on Sokka that this guy was his age. Which does nothing to relieve Sokka’s theories on middle-aged-man-with-demanding-children and instead diverts it to student-on-last-straw territory.

By the time hoodie man now turned hoodie guy finally reached the counter, Sokka finds himself alarmingly convinced he’s a model on the firm grounds that not even the gas station’s unforgivably bad overhead fluorescent lighting had subtracted his looks. Something that Sokka thought was a rather huge deal considering that Chell lighting can turn a 10 into a devastating 6—himself included.

So in his utter defence, Sokka doesn’t gawk in a manner that insinuated inappropriate thoughts—though, if there had been one, an spectator could’ve argued otherwise—but in a sort of morbid fascination involving a stranger’s evasion to looking ugly.

Hoodie guy places the bottles on the counter, a soft thump audible in the thick silence. There’s a prolonged stillness in the air before:

“Okay, so,”—to his horror, Sokka’s mouth works entirely on its own accord—”Before I let you purchase this, I just..I just gotta know. Are you doing okay? The only people who buy these bottles are moms with whiny kids. And you’re not a mother. Unless you do have kids, then, uhm, props to you. Teen dad, maybe? Whew, that’s rough, buddy. Wait, I-I don’t mean it that in a disrespectful way. That’s, like, real brave and a courageous thing to do and I totally respect it. I just mean it’s a lot of hard work to be taking on, uhm, if you have kids, I mean. Peach Arizona Ice Tea..great, uh, great choice…for the kids.”

The guy stares. Sokka feels a horrible sense of premature dejavu. But the guy doesn’t take his card out and, instead, says, in a somewhat strangled voice:

“I’m…I’m not a teen dad.”

“Oh,” Sokka says then glances at the bottles again, “You sure?”

“I think I would know if I had children.”

Well. “Just making sure, I guess.”

“…That I have children?”

Yes. “No,” Sokka replies, “That you’re okay.”

His companion pauses at that then says, “I’m perfectly fine.”

Feeling uncomfortably listless, Sokka blurts out; “Are you—are you chugging these bottles to yourself?”

Somehow, the guy looks more affronted by this than Sokka’s opening sermon about teen dads. A flurry of emotions flash across his face and, for another horrible moment, Sokka fears he was too on the nose.

“I—what?” the guy sputters, “No. I…like iced tea. I won’t be chugging. I will be drinking them…normally.”

“Perfectly okay to chug it though.”

“Out of the bottle?”

“There aren’t any strict instructions to drinking iced tea, man.”

To his surprise, that gets a soft chuckle. Which turns out to bear absolutely dire consequences. The guy has those perfect set of teeth that looked distressingly identical to the ‘after’ photos of Invisalign promos which, frighteningly, made him look even more model-like. One of Sokka’s eye involuntarily twitches.

Dearest Aang, Sokka composed an email in his head, Please be so kind as to pick me up from work right now. I have a hunch that I’ve hit my head and am now currently hallucinating a walking GQ cover. Xoxo Sokka P.S be quick.

Throughout his email composition, Sokka numbly scans the two gallons and punches in the total yet again.

He nudges the card receiver forward to the guy before offering a slight smile—not too big, not too small—and saying, “Just a poor man’s way of drinking iced tea.”

The guy holds Sokka’s eye for a moment and in this tiny passage of time, thought the cashier rather cute now that his eyes put itself to use. But he pauses for a moment, brain catching up to what was said.

“Yeah, I guess.” he finally lets out.

Very briefly, Sokka scrutinises the slight new wave to the stranger’s voice. He can’t quite place it though and he doesn’t quite get a chance to before the guy swiftly takes hold on both bottles. Hands gripping them in a way that looked like they were DIY substitutes for dumbells.

“Thanks” he mutters out.

He attempts to mirror Sokka’s previous smile but it lands awkwardly, a little flat. In response, Sokka, still in a warped daze, wordlessly waves even though Zuko had yet to move away from the counter.

The lack of verbal response launches Zuko to the movement of walking away and Sokka finds himself tracking the stranger as he strolls out, his hand robotically stuck on his Miss Universe wave. He watches, stupefied, as Zuko’s slouched figure disappears into his car and he watches as the car morphs into a blur of dark shapes, slinking quietly back into the street.

He eventually stops Miss Universe-waving, hissing at his hand to himself before proceeding to send the email forgetting that he hadn’t finished typing it.

Though something itches in the corner of Sokka’s brain, even past his shift, even past the late-night dinner of leftover pot roast and well into his bed time. Not unlike an opponent’s chess move he’d blindly missed, an error into a long code. He sorts through every little observation he remembers—not that there’s much to count, it was a 3 and a half minute of human interaction, after all—but finds himself at a blank.

So in these late haggard hours, it’s fair to say that Sokka develops something of a blind spot in his brain and he never does register the fact that Zuko had slid into a Mercedes. Blissfully and thankfully unaware that it was, in fact, a rich man’s way of drinking iced tea.

*

THE GREAT FOREIGN EXCHANGE FIRE: THE AFTERMATH

There is a certain third degree of social ineptness Zuko possessed that he never had any good chance to pour the proverbial bucket of water at. He did not think very much about this third degree burn in the way anyone would notice that a limb of theirs was benignly on fire and, therefore, must be not on fire and instead, ignored it so effortlessly that anyone who took the time to probe into Zuko’s psyche might faintly realise that he kept it around for the comfort of its familiar warmth. Some people simply never see the inferno because they were born with it and Zuko might as well have been born in a housefire so he never knew anything otherwise. This, however, was neither plausible nor a brief explanation for things like, say, accidental arson and so Zuko is forced to poorly mask his unreasonable rage at the world and everyone on it and instead, be full of shit.

“I didn’t mean to set it on fire,” he says.

Principal Piandao, a man far too old and ominously handsome for any of these high school proceedings, sighed loudly but only in his head. Professionally speaking, he refrained from things like sighing in front of children as if they were full of shit even though they were, in fact, full of shit. But things like sighing bore repercussions and the truth of it all was that children, for how little they were, greatly detested being looked down upon and if you committed such a mistake as to visibly look down on them, they committed to digging themselves further into the mud and thus began anarchy.

This is a cycle of angst Piandao has been chained to watch over and over again in his fifteen years serving as Heavenmore High’s principal—he has yet to find a resolution and he silently feared that he was going to die haunted by it. His only ray of hope he’d been latching onto was a student by the name of Aang, who, during his singular incident of detention, somehow formed a support group for those in it so effective the participants did not commit any misdeeds for the next three months.

To Piandao’s knowledge, Zuko Zheng was a new walking anomaly of angst waiting to happen, a ticking time bomb in a blockbuster action movie that was so overwhelmingly budgeted and so awfully predictable. That is all to say that the student body will be staunchly divided on whether to stare or run away from Zuko (neither options particularly friendly) and that Piandao was going to have to drink more than his fair share of sake to cope this year.

“Zuko,” he began wearily, “Have you been settling well in Heavenmore?”

Zuko stayed silent for a moment, looking mildly mortified to be met with anything other than immediate detention. Truthfully he isn’t entirely focused on what is being said to him because Zuko is trying resolutely not to stare at the fucking sword displayed in Piandao’s office, a beastly thing that was looking less and less like a prop and more and more like murder.

He shifts his attention the two Bunsen burners—both practically burnt to crisp—displayed like a crime scene on the desk between them.

“I’m fine” he replies hoarsely, “I can—I can pay for the damage.”

Yes, Piandao thought, Zuko Zheng most definitely could pay for the damage. It was laughable how rich the Zhengs were; Piandao was more than sure that not only could Zuko Zheng pay for the damage but that, if he wanted, he could very well buy the school itself. Given the source of his unfortunate birthright to those parents of his with ludicrous amounts of money and whom Piandao had the misfortune of speaking to over the phone during their son’s enrolment. This misfortune had been so mentally taxing, Piandao resolved to never encounter it ever again. Hence, his kindly deflection.

Piandao nodded warily, “That’s fine, Zuko. We will sort that out later. But I wanted to know if you felt comfortable in your first days here. I understand that you recently transferred and feel unfamiliar.”

Zuko shuffled into his seat, looking like he wanted to play dead than be consoled in gentle manner, “Can’t you just…put me on detention or something? Are you gonna call my parents?”

Let it be known that for all intents and purposes, it would have been reasonable—nay, proper—to call Zuko Zheng’s parents whom probably lived in some gaudily geometric high-rise penthouse practically billions of kilometres away from their son to inform them of said son’s youthly misdeeds. But let it also be known that Piandao was exceedingly weary, longing to return to his half-eaten tuna sandwich in the teacher’s lounge and had come to greatly dislike Ozai Zheng for all of the seven minute and twenty-four seconds he’d been acquainted with the man’s voice.

Across him, Zuko sat stiffly like a melting wax sculpture, sweating profusely beneath his feet and armpits. Because while Zuko means to be casual about the fact that he’d just committed arson—accidentally—and that he did not care for all the hell that might come hither, the mortifying truth was that he did. He did and it was fucking awful that he did. How unpunk. How careful.

In the tiny beat of silence, Zuko had floundered through ten different equally miserable scenarios that may now occur, now that he’s fucked up again. By the time Piandao speaks, Zuko is hysterically convinced that Ozai was going to banish him to Australia this time.

“Tell you what, Zuko,” Piandao says, horribly gentle “Between you and me, I think it can be tough being an exchange student. Now I’m not saying you’re getting off scot-free—”

Zuko visibly winched and Piandao felt his heart unbearably soften. He hated seeing his worst assumptions come to be confirmed.

“You’re just going to get detention for a week, this will stay between you and me,” he says, hoping to ease and landing just right; Zuko features becoming smoother, the worry seeping out.

“But,” he continues, “I’m going to put you in a club.”

Zuko frowns despite himself.

“But I don’t know any clubs,” he says weakly.

“I’m aware,” Piandao says, opening a cabinet and pulling a sheet of paper out, “That’s why I will pick it for you.”

“But—”

“It will take a week for me to work through the arrangements. You will be joining a club of my choosing next week.”

Zuko stared. As far school punishments go, this was creatively hellish. He’d never intended to join a club. Optimally, he aimed to keep human interaction at a minimal so that his singular Spotify playlist jammed exclusively with obscure indie artists belting about their life problems could be at maximum volume.

Glancing at Zuko and then at his sheet list of school clubs, Piandao guessed just as much, eyeing the stark white string of earpods running down Zuko’s jean pocket. Perhaps the school’s music club would not fare well for what Piandao rightfully guessed was a temperamental case of Teenager. Piandao knew, painfully, that it ran in close circles with, God forbid, the Theatre Club. A group of students so stunningly removed from reality that the entire student body and staff was unanimously resigned to an annual dogfight in the cafeteria between no less than four students each year, the proceedings bearing an uncanny resemblance to the UFC.

Some smaller clubs came to mind, none of which seemed like they were sufficient. That left the overwhelming chunk the staff referred to as the ‘Aang Clubs’, which were arguably rather varied but all carried the same cult-like quality. But it’s all rather hasty to choose now and Piandao is an esteemed man of patience and perseverance and he—he longed for his sandwich.

“You’re dismissed, Zuko.”

And so he was.