Chapter Text
When Summer was thirteen, she went on a date with Brad Rosenthrall. Correction: Summer went on a date with Brad Rosenthrall’s clone.
The real version of the guy broke her heart in thirty-seven other dimensions. Rick cloned him using a hair in his sleep and sent him out on the date instead. It was a Thursday, it was after a bender, and it was a pain in the fucking ass to get the guy with a lower IQ than Jerry to see Summer’s future favorite movie: Tindlywrinkle 2.
It wasn’t as if he had much of choice. Sirena Ridley, the student captain of the volleyball team and the epitome of peaking too early, had decided that Summer had a peg to be taken down. She felt threatened. It was a basic social hierarchy. Someone who had an exceptional genealogy and the perfect spike needs a cut at the risk of outshining Sirena.
Basic bitch.
And then Summer was fourteen. She felt stressed about high school. Rick only knew of this when he finished dealing with an upcoming teenage heartthrob. The boy had windswept hair and looked like a modern-day tragedy, his curly hair and denim jacket a timepiece in itself.
Rick let the nanobots put in the final screw on his voice modifier.
“Oh, thanks Mr. Sanchez,” he says. “This will definitely help me get an audition and then, with hope and this voice box, win The Masked Voice in America 2: The Fifteenth Revival!”
That kid was so fucking stupid. He took two steps and collapsed onto the alleyway ground, gasping for air. Rick kicked him when he finally stopped moving to check. As he passed out on the alleyway pavement, Rick extracted his liver and swapped the two for each other.
Now he had a healthy, 17-year-old kids’ liver he could destroy. But as he shook the kid down for any money or other valuables to park off on the flea market, he saw a flyer for a high school theater club. On the edge of the paper, it said HARRY HERPSON HIGH AGAINST FLICK GLEESON TONIGHT @ 8! In bright, bold lettering. Rick blinked once. The older man felt like something should’ve clicked into place.
And like a flash, the name registered itself in his brain like a lottery machine coin. It was Summer’s high school of half a semester - and the one Beth went to if she lived in that dimension. It’s still open. Rick took off the kids’ vintage denim jacket and vaporized his corpse.
He didn’t keep the flyer if that’s what anyone was asking.
When Rick opened up the feed, he expected to see Summer at a stupid fucking football game, the two teams in multicolored jerseys tackling each other for a ball. Dogs attack each other for better reasons, in the alcoholic’s opinion. Hell, low-level civilizations have better entertainment options.
Instead, he found Summer at home. She wasn’t at a game. A smile wasn’t on her face, and dots of paint were absent on her cheeks. She wasn’t standing beside friends. It wasn’t like Rick would never want to know their names in a billion separate dimensions. Instead, she was in her bedroom.
Rick sat on the parking lot bench across town. It was almost the right place to watch her breakdown. He would’ve preferred a burger joint or maybe an abandoned strip mall’s Auntie Annie’s, but who can pick and choose?
It was a Friday night. LED stadium lights brighten up harry Herpson High School’s football field. The lights shone on teenagers whose lives were a million miles away from Ricks’. It was so inconsequential. It was fucking stupid. And yet, as the live feed of the Smith home showed, Summer cared about it for some reason. She cared about it enough to cry over it, her mascara running down her face and door locked tight.
“I just don’t get it,” she cries, makeup rubbing off viciously. “Why would they do that to me, Grace? I did everything right! I went to every game, I tried my best at every one, I did it all right!”
At the moment, Summer had a pillow clutched to her chest, and a box of tissues lost somewhere in the sheets. An absent hair tie meant her hair was loose. It rarely was unless she was heartbreakingly upset. Rick almost wanted to shut off the feed.
Rick heard a sigh on the other side of the phone. “I don’t know Summer. Just chalk it up to Sirena being a bitch and call it a day. She’s had it out for you for like, ever, since she thinks you somehow caused her to get fifteen zits on Homecoming weekend.”
Rick did that. He was unbelievably high on alien mushrooms and passed out in the bushes on her cul de sac after.
“But why wouldn’t she invite me to the volleyball varsity bender?”
“I don’t know,” Grace responded. “Look, I gotta go. Tracy and Nancy are on their way to pick me up … are you coming to the game, anyways?”
Summer wiped her eyes harshly. “No, I’ll stay home tonight. You guys can go, have fun.”
“We weren’t planning on staying behind for you, girl,” Grace responded. “But I’ll try and buy you ice cream and stop by later, okay? I’ll just drop off a pint-sized tub around 11. Do you still like coffee?”
“Yeah. Thanks Grace,” Summer said. “You’re a good friend.”
“And you have shit taste in ice cream,” Grace said back. “Who the fuck chooses coffee over cookie dough? You’re like a giant, skinless monster if you choose that. Anyways, I gotta go. Bye!”
Summer laughed dishearteningly into the phone as she hung up.
Rick watched as she rolled over in bed and stared off into space. Her eyes were unfocused, and her body just slipped off into a depressive sleep. He shut off the feed then, lending the girl her privacy. It wasn’t because he cared. It was because it was fucking sad to watch.
Rick didn’t slink over to the football field to give the players explosive diarrhea in the second quarter. He didn’t slip a new lipstick to the cheerleading team captain that would make her duck lips turn into an actual bill. And most importantly, he never used an Identity Modifier and turned himself into the ice cream store worker to slip Grace an extra pint of Summer's favorite ice cream.
No. That isn’t his style. None of those things happen.
Instead, Rick sits in the ship, his foot hovering over the metal panel. He almost takes a screwdriver out and rips the picture underneath the metal panel floor. He almost grabs a bottle of stiff vodka to pour it down his throat to get rid of the stupid emotion with something else to feel. But he keeps it down. He keeps it under control. None of those things happen.
He pops over to the Immortality Field Resort and derails a ride to feel something. When it crashes into the ground, and his body rips into tendons and blood tissue smatterings, he doesn’t think I wonder if this is how Summer feels right now. Instead, he rebuilds and derails the ride again and again until the thought dissipates like the rest of them do. It’s easy. It takes less than two hours.
And he doesn’t buy a coffee ice cream with sprinkles afterward. No. None of those things happen.