Chapter Text
Michael is in seventh grade, his hair is greasy as fuck, and everything sucks.
The punch that Brooke made was good on the first few sips, but after downing two cups of it, Michael can taste nothing but the luridly sweet aftertaste. He’s sweating, he can feel it in every fold and bend of his sweatshirt. The circle he’s in isn’t helping- all of the equally greasy kids leaning on each other to create, like… grease squared.
Michael isn’t thinking eloquently for many reasons. First, he’s sweaty and feels gross. Second, it’s 11pm at night and he rarely stays up this late when there isn’t a video game involved. Third, the bottle in the middle is spinning, and he has the strongest feeling in his bones that it’s going to land on him.
His heart is beating so fast that it might just jump out of his chest, and then it happens.
The neck of the bottle is pointing right at him, and on the other side of the circle sits Richard Goranski, blinking owlishly.
“Spin again!” says Jake, “It doesn’t count, he’s a boy.”
“No! If it lands on that person, you kiss that person. No exceptions,” says Brooke, laying down the law.
“Well… it is her house. You okay with kissing, Headphones?” Rich asks, and Michael feels rather than hears the newfound tenderness in his voice. Rich makes it sound like this is a private moment just by his voice, as if they aren’t about to swap spit in front of friends and strangers.
Michael nods numbly, he doesn’t know how to do anything else.
There’s a beat of silence, where the circle waits with bated breath, not totally knowing what they’re waiting for. Rich shakes his head a bit, as if physically shaking himself from whatever emotion was holding him back, and then he crawls across the circle, carefully trying to maneuver over the bottle. Then, he arrives at his destination, kneeling right in front of Michael’s crossed legs.
Michael doesn’t know what to do. Instead of moving, he just stares helplessly at the Dorito dust marking the corner of Rich’s mouth.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Rich asks, and Michael nods again. “So, are you going to lean in or not?” Rich asks.
“I thought you would.”
“I already crawled across the circle. I made my move, make yours,” says Rich. Michael would say he’s confident, but there’s a slight waver in his voice that betrays the idea. Something about the realization that Rich is a little bit nervous too emboldens Michael, so he takes the plunge, and presses his lips to Rich’s.
Kissing Rich Goranski is absolutely terrifying, mostly because it feels so normal. Michael doesn’t necessarily kiss tons of people, but he’s never felt this comfortable doing it. All of the worry from earlier, fear of judgement or rejection- it’s all melted away. It’s just him and Rich, kissing simply. Then Rich pulls away, absentmindedly wiping the Dorito dust from earlier off of the corner of his mouth.
If you ask Michael, that quiet moment, them looking into each other’s glazed eyes for just a few seconds after the kiss, is approximately the moment that he first fell in love.
His first letter followed soon after.
It’s a couple pages long, scrawled out on looseleaf paper with his trustiest pen. Once it’s all over, once every inch of his anguished pining is on the page, he staples the papers together puts them in an envelope. He addresses it to Rich, and for a moment, considers sending it.
Instead of doing that, he puts it in a stray gift bag from his birthday two weeks ago. It’s glittery blue and a little bit wrinkled from being flung about his room. He’s glad to finally have a use for the bag his mom made him keep “for later”.
Michael is in seventh grade, and having this little bag makes things feel a bit easier.
-
By the first day of his junior year of high school, the bag is significantly more worn and wrinkly. A lot of the glitter had been shed over time, and odd folds had been sewn into it due to years of being hidden in innocuous places.
He had woken up unnaturally early from some brew of anxiety and emotion, leaving him alone in his room at 4am unable to go back to sleep. After he had chosen his outfit for the day, he was stuck in his room, with only one logical thing to do.
He has to finish his letter to Jeremy.
Over years of crushes, this was easily the hardest one to part with, to give the closure of a letter to.
Falling in love with your best friend really isn’t a game for anyone who wants closure, and that’s never been as clear as it is right now, with Michael staring at what’ll probably be the final line of his letter.
Michael checks his clock, seeing that it’s exactly one minute before his alarm was set to go off. He takes this as a sign, and with a deep sigh, he signs the letter off.
Sincerely, Michael.
It feels so final, so definite, but it also feels necessary in a way that Michael hadn’t totally expected. He stares at his signature on the page, until shocked out of the reverie by the ringing of his alarm clock. He walks across the room to his bed to turn it off, then back to his desk, where the magic was happening. He staples the letter together, folds it, and slips it into the ready envelope, the one he had laid out since he started writing the letter. He writes out Jeremy’s address with such familiarity that it feels like his own.
As he’s putting the letter into the bag, pulled out onto the bed for this special occasion, he hears a knock on the door, followed by his mom carefully opening it. It takes a moment for her to register that Michael is wide awake, instead of blearily hitting “snooze”.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at the bag he’s putting the letter in. She has the slowness of someone who just woke up, so Michael figures that there’s not too much to lie about.
“Just some letters. I finished one this morning,” he says, before turning to his mom and realizing her confusion. “I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, that’s why… I, uhh… yeah.”
“Do you need me to get those to the post office for you?” his mom asks. At the same time, Michael realizes that he had everything packed in his bag except for his protractor, so he starts to look for it, quickly forgetting the question itself in his frenzy of preparedness. Michael just hums, hoping that it’s answer enough.
“Sounds good,” she says, before leaving the room. Michael finds his protractor and places it neatly in his bag. He decides that this is the best possible way that he could start his junior year.
-
He almost gets into a car crash on the way to school, which admittedly puts a bit of a damper on his sunny mood, but other than that blip on his radar (and on his dad’s car’s bumper), the day is just smooth sailing. He listens to his teachers read their syllabuses with his normal air of boredom, he eats his lunch with Jeremy and Christine, who are doing their teenage duty of being disgustingly in love, holding hands under the table and occasionally feeding each other a piece of fruit.
It makes Michael’s heart hurt, but not in a way that wouldn’t undoubtedly fade over time. Michael just focuses on the lunch his mom packed, since he figured he’d wait until the second week of school to skip his fourth period class to grab some 7-11.
In sixth period, he discovers that he shares a class with Rich Goranski, who, when asked what he did that summer, just said “her name was Heather”.
Michael decides that it’s a “my girlfriend live in Canada dudes, I swear, I’m not making her up” situation, and decides to focus on the doodle of a flower on the syllabus page instead. His seventh grade crush is faded, long since replaced by Jeremy in his mind, but even now Micahel can admit that Rich has grown to be fairly hot, in a “there are worst people to be our first gay kiss” way.
All in all, it’s a pleasant day. The second day of school is alright, if uneventful. As is the third. The fourth day is when things go to shit.
-
He’s awoken too early, at an uncomfortably sweaty 4:53 am, by the pinging of his phone, signifying an email. He’d been a dumbass who left his phone ringer on, so he decides to check it since he’d already been so rudely jilted from his pleasant slumber.
Through the blur of his missing glasses, he sees that it’s from- this can’t be- Jerome Goss, his intense one week crush from camp, the summer before eighth grade. The subject is “I didn’t know you knew my address”, which confounds sleep-addled Michael so much that he just shuts his phone off and buries his face into the pillow, trying to push all of the confusion out of his mind until he could sleep again.
When he wakes up for good, at the ripe early hour of 7am, Michael has the absolute worst feeling brewing in the pit of his stomach. It’s not hunger, like his mom would suggest, but premonition. He pulls out his phone, vague, gauzy memories of the night before drifting into his mind, memories of an email.
He opens up his phone, hoping that the clarity of his glasses will make things a little bit easier to process.
From: Jerome Goss
To: Michael Mell
SUBJECT: I didn’t know you knew my address
Hey Michael,
So… I received that letter last night. I don’t know a polite way to say this in person, and I don’t have your phone number, and sending a letter back just seemed weird so…? Here’s the thing, we knew each other in camp, we were tight for those two weeks and whatever and it’s totally cool that you’re gay but this is weird. We haven’t talked since middle school, and it freaks me out that you’ve apparently been holding this torch? But maybe not because that letter seemed kind of old, so if this is just some “get the past out” thing then that’s alright but just like? Please don’t stalk me. I don’t know if asking would stop it but you seemed like a chill enough dude when we were friends. If this is some big misunderstanding, then I’m down to be explained to. I’m just a bit weirded out, tbh.
-JG
After reading the email, a million thoughts race through his head. Confusion, then anger, then absolute fucking panic. He looks to the bag on his shelf, and with a shock that jolts every inch of his body, realizes that it’s not there.
Panic courses through him, he jumps out of bed, and mentally goes through the list of who could’ve done this to him, and he runs to the kitchen, where his number one suspect inevitably stands at the stove, stirring some fantastic smelling breakfast, but he can’t think about that right now, not when he’s in crisis mode.
“Mom?” he asks, and he’s sure his voice is getting sky-high in pitch, every single synapses is firing so hard in is mind, it’s like fireworks being powered by other fireworks.
“Yes, darling?” she asks, lilting and sweet.
“Those letters… you didn’t send them, did you?” he asks, and he can feel his face heating up in a nervous flush.
“Of course! I didn’t want you to go through the trouble of driving all the way to the postal office-” she said, and he’s sure that she kept talking, but all he knows is that at that moment, his head fills with white noise, and he realizes that his life is over.
Fuck.
-
The thing about driving to school when you’re hyper aware about the fact that your life is ending soon- that the embarrassment and anxiety is just going to consume you at any moment, is that it makes you a bit of a bad driver.
Michael gets multiple horns honked at him, which doesn’t help his state at all thank you very much, and when he parks in the school parking lot, he thinks for a moment that he can just die quietly in his car riiiight now. Nope, that didn’t work. Right now? Nope again. He needs to go out and face the day. He tried one more time to die on cue, and then climbed out of the car, hoping that Rich, Jeremy, and Blake from sophomore chemistry all moved houses yesterday.
He begins the suddenly too long walk from his car to his first period class, and he tries to keep his eyes trained on the path in front of him. Then, he hears it.
First it’s faint, coming from the direction of the track field, but far away enough that the recognizable voice could be talking to a teammate that just happens to share a name with the guy who just sent a totally embarrassing letter from 7th grade.
“Michael!” Rich yells, and Michael lets loose a full body cringe before walking faster and ducking his head down.
Then, he peeks his head up, and sees the closely familiar outline of the last person he wants to be talking to right now.
Jeremy yells out “Michael!”, and Michael goes into caveman fight or flight mode.
Michael is a cowardly caveman more than anything else, so he spins on his heel to flight the fuck out of there. Maybe he doesn’t even need to go to school, now that he thinks about it, and oh fuck.
Rich is right behind him.
“Mell, listen-”
“Rich? Not right now,” says Michael, his voice shaking. He can practically feel Jeremy moving towards him, even if from at least 50 yards away.
“Michael, I get it, we had that one kiss and it was great-”
“Shut up.” Michael tries to move past him, but Rich quickly intercepts the move, stopping him with one (really strong but now’s not the time to thing about that) arm.
“What’s going on?”
Michael looks over his shoulder. Jeremy is closer, somehow even more than expected. He is, in Michael’s scurried calculations, maximum 30 seconds away. Fuck.
“That letter is from seventh grade, sorry for the confusion, I need to get out of here. Jere also got a letter and he’s my best friend and-”
“Jeremy? You liked him?”
“Not important. I need to get him off my back because he’s-”
“Right there, fuck-”
“What do I do?”
“I don’t know maybe- kiss me,” says Rich, his eyes wide, the lightbulb of an idea flickering on.
“What?” Everything is moving too fast, and Michael can’t even keep up with this development.
“He’s like, five seconds away, it’ll work, I promise-”
“Fine,” says Michael, before grabbing Rich by the neck and pulling him into a near bruising kiss. When he slides his hands from Rich’s neck to his shoulders, Michael remembers that he was coming back from practice and was pretty sweaty, which was gross- did Rich just slip some tongue? Is this real life?
Then, suddenly, the warm wet heat of Rich’s mouth on his pulls away, leaving Michael shaken, confused, and, despite himself, bit hot and bothered.
“Jeremy’s gone,” says Rich, panting a bit. Michael, with a bit of a shock, realizes that he and Rich are still insanely close, the kind where it would just a light breeze to push them back into each other again.
“Baller,” says Michael.
He takes a breath, and then begins to detach himself, even if all of his hormones screamed at him to stay.
He takes a step away from Rich, who’s still rooted in his spot.
“You’re a better kisser than you were in middle school,” says Michael, hoping that it’ll make this blooming silence less awful. It doesn’t.
“I feel like we may have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle,” says Rich, finally taking his eyes off of Michael and looking around, seeing staring classmates and teammates.
“No shit, Sherlock.”