#sorry if this was incoherent i think abt this funny stoner a lot

[teknicaldifficulties]

my autism has been vindicated, so here's my ziggs high school hcs yippee

not technically school-related, but they realized they were nonbinary during the summer before they started high school. their parents sent them to camp idonwannabang bc they were caught smoking weed (abstinence includes abstaining from drugs, don'cha know), they saw the whole "pink shirts for the girls, blue shirts for the boys" thing, and a very specific part of their brain that they didn't know existed went "hm! don't like that!". by the halfway point of their freshman year, they'd learned what "nonbinary" meant and went "oh that me".

on that note, tom was the first teacher they told abt them being nonbinary. they'd already told their immediate group of friends, and just about every other student in their grade kinda figured it out via gossip, but they were particularly nervous about telling their teachers about it. tom- being the absolute Dad that he is, was immediately super accepting and encouraging, which was a gigantic weight off of ziggs' shoulders. they just really like tom in general, and they were super bummed when he had to leave after jane's passing. on the flipside, they were absolutely overjoyed when they started working at perky's buds and learned that their new boss was "mr. houston's" sister-in-law. you've heard of the queer kid who's super tight with their english teacher, get ready for the queer kid who's super tight with their shop teacher.

they dated steph lauter for about half a year, had a relationship with the hatchetfield bee for nearly 3 years (they were actually each other's prom dates!), and did at one point reciprocate deb's old crush on them (though that never went farther than the occasional flirty banter). also, ruth flemming got super into them after they were nice to her Once, but they never found out about that before graduating. (this bitch is getting long, so i'm putting the rest under a cut)

they never really gave a shit about hf high's weird "cool kid vs. loser" hierarchy thing, nor did anyone else in the smoke club, really. this is ziggs "tried to 'peace and love' their way out of a tense conversation" nolastnamegiven we're talking about here. which made it all the more surprising to them that max jägerman was like, weirdly chill with them. like, yeah ziggs is a grade above max. but max has been a known menace since 1st grade, has been known to torment students in grades higher than him if they were particularly unpopular, and also significantly taller and more athletic than ziggs. max's influence over hf high only grew stronger as the years passed, and while ziggs wasn't scared of him per se, they did occasionally worry that he would suddenly decide that they were no longer cool and start turning people against them. only occasionally. but it never happened, and to this day ziggs doesn't really know why max was so cool with them- a pacifistic, unathletic, trans, autistic stoner.

oh yeah, ziggs is super autistic, also. they'd been diagnosed sometime either just before or during middle school. they didn't think it really affected them all that much, but then high school happened, and Oh No Now It's A Problem. the high stress and general chaos of high school made them kinda prone to sensory overload. of course, cool kid ziggs didn't need their peers to see them having a meltdown in school, can you imagine the gossip if that happened? so, if they felt sensory overload coming on, it was off to the restroom to hide in a stall and wait it out, even if it took two whole periods to get their bearings. unless it happened during lunch period, at which point they'd go to tom's classroom and ask to spend their lunch period there (which he always allowed bc again, tom is everyone's dad).

that whole situation kinda caused them to wall off their more negative emotions for a long time. like, ziggs is generally a cool, funny, confident kid, but there's still a small part of them that believes they don't deserve to be as well-liked as they are. imposter syndrome at its finest. so, they felt as though they'd lose all that goodwill if they ever let those self-doubts and negative emotions and (to an extent) their more noticeably autistic mannerisms show themselves. as a result, they got good at hiding all that stuff away, and it wasn't until after graduating high school and going to work at perky's buds that they learned not to repress all the "ugly" stuff. and even then, it took a while.