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There was a fateful moment in time when one measly little reaction could have lead Mitch and Jonas down a completely different path in life. It was nothing but the clench of a fist, a moment of overreaction, a bout of nerves, but it could have meant that all the years spent together were whiled away to nothing. It was a fork in the road, like a parallel universe splitting off and allowing a new brand of havoc to be wreaked.
Mitch didn’t choose that path. Instead he chose to bite down his fears and take the good thing being handed to him.
“I like you,” Jonas had said.
“You must be mad, then,” Mitch replied.
They were practically inseparable for the following years. Mitch gave things to Jonas; things that he liked and, slowly coming to the true understanding that people weren’t often like him and didn’t enjoy things like he did, he was nothing less than ecstatic when Jonas accepted his offered insects and interesting pieces of dirt. In return, Jonas showed him to a cove, like a small beach away from the coast that was theirs to roam. Jonas showed him his own idea of frogs and interesting dirt: fossils.
Jonas invited Mitch to his house one day in the winter, when the frost was a crystal sheen over their bikes and their breath obscured their vision too much to warrant riding all the way back to Mitch’s house. Dean was tactless in how he displayed that he didn’t like Mitch’s ripped jeans and comic t-shirts but he let Mitch stay, and that was all Jonas needed to uncross his fingers behind his back and let his breath go; warmer inside, no longer visible.
Jonas met Mitch’s mother, Henrietta, when he scraped up his knee falling off his skateboard and Mitch’s house was closer than Jonas’. She pinched his cheeks, cigarette in one hand wafting smoke gently to the ceiling. Maybe it should have been disgusting to a kid who had been taught all his life that smoking kills, and who had seen just a few too many images of mangled lungs, but with Henrietta’s inviting voice and the warmth of her home it seemed more calming and natural.
Mitch gave Jonas a nickname. There was a steady evolution from Mitch’s joyful yells of ‘Jonas’ through the corridors and across the street, to the quieter, but no less enthusiastic, sound of ‘Joey’ and ‘Spots’ lingering in the air. He had known ‘Joey’ before, a name his sister had graced him with, but ‘Spots’ was like a new entity, a new facet of his personality that only Mitch seemed to understand. ‘Spots’ never entered his house, but owned the beauty of the cove as far as Jonas was concerned.
Mitch tried to steal a box of gum. A stick, Joey would have understood, but a box was more risky, more likely to be seen hauled out past the cashier. Mitch was prone to madness and jeopardy but that didn’t mean that he didn’t know that Jonas got scared every time. Jonas’ dad was a cop, he had more to lose, and so Mitch took his hand and dragged him out too. There was a feeling there, like the box of gum wasn’t the only thing he was stealing.
Mitch stabbed his stepfather and went to jail.
That was the period of Jonas’ life which made the least sense. Parts of him were still thinking about Mitch, writing him letters and internally calling him his best friend, yet others knew that they could never have the same kind of relationship after this. Dean wouldn’t let go the idea that Jonas wasn’t capable of ‘choosing the right sort’, and tried to force him into new friendships with people significantly less interesting than Mitch had ever been. He met people in school that could keep him busy, keep him distracted until…
Mitch came out of prison.
He kicked through a door to announce his presence, loud and obtrusive, because he hadn’t been able to find Joey yet and some ways were sure to get attention. It worked, Jonas visibly jumped when the wood ricocheted off the wall, enough to catch Mitch’s eye. They hadn’t seen each other in too long, nobody would have expected them to fall straight back into their old routines or fit like jigsaw pieces into their new lives. Even Jonas had admitted to himself, and once to Sid, that this Mitch would be newer, different, and that he had grown too, and there was no way that they could know each other so easily anymore.
It turned out that his time spent in prison had just made Mitch want more. It made him realise what he had lost during that time, and how easy it would be to ask for it. It made Joey itch to say yes. It meant that when they met at the cove that afternoon, and they looked at each other for the first time in too long, instead of saying ‘hello’ or ‘how have you been’ or ‘it’s been a long time, things have changed, this won’t work anymore’, Mitch had the confidence to lead with ‘you can feel that too, right Spots?’.