Todd X Maurecia Novels & Stories

Honestly, I'm not even sure I'd call it 'growth' in a traditional sense a lot of the time? The dynamic is so inherently strange from the start—a kid who gets powers from eating chalk liking a girl who turns him into a dodgeball target. A lot of fics lean into that initial bizarre hostility as the core, which is fun, but can feel static.

Where I've seen it get interesting is when writers take that antagonism and flip it into a weird mutual understanding. They're both outliers, right? Todd with his chalk-eating and Maurecia with her... intense dodgeball fixation. I read one where they started secretly practicing together, Todd trying to predict her throws, and it became less about rivalry and more about two kids finding someone who doesn't think their 'thing' is weird. The emotional shift was subtle, from frustration to a kind of focused respect.

It rarely gets overtly romantic, which I prefer. The growth feels more like an alliance forming between two oddly specialized soldiers.

Had to dust off some very old memories for this one! That's a deep dive into obscure 'Wayside School' fandom territory, which is honestly kinda wild to think about. I haven't come across a dedicated archive. Your best shot, and I say this as someone who used to lurk on a lot of old-school forums, would be to search on Archive of Our Own using the tags for the book series and the characters' names. It's not a huge fandom, so anything you find is a gift.

I'd set expectations pretty low for a pure, long-form slow-burn, though. The dynamic is so niche that most fics are probably shorter, fluffier pieces. You might get lucky with a writer who expanded a one-shot into something longer, or stumbled onto a crossover that treats them more seriously. Sometimes the old FanFiction.net category for the series has abandoned gems from a decade ago, if the links still work.

Anyone else get totally thrown by how few stories there are for these two? The premise writes itself—a teacher who dies all the time and the student who’s literally obsessed with bringing him back. I keep hunting for the ones that lean into the horror-comedy of it all. There’s this one older fic where Maurecia’s repeated resurrections start to fray Todd’s sanity, making him paranoid he’s actually a ghost she’s just imagining back to life. It’s less romance and more a weird psychological spiral, which fits 'Wayside School' so well.

Most others go for fluffy fix-its where she finally confesses and he just kind of awkwardly accepts it, which feels off. The dynamic is inherently unbalanced and strange; glossing over that misses the point. I’d take a darkly funny exploration of her obsession over a sweet classroom romance any day.