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Missy started babysitting six months ago, and Bill and Ted are the kids she sees most by far.
It seems like their dads are constantly trying to get someone else to take care of them, which wouldn’t be that odd considering they’re both single parents with full time jobs, if only for the fact that Missy is pretty sure she’s never babysat Ted’s brother, in all the times she’s had to look after him.
Something about it doesn’t sit right with her, and she likes Bill and Ted, they’re sweet and like her a lot, so whenever she can she tries to be the one to babysit them.
Today, she’s babysitting both of them at the Preston house. Most times when she looks after Bill and Ted, it’s as a unit. It’s rare that she sees one without the other.
Mr. Preston’s car isn’t in the driveway, and when she rings the doorbell, Bill answers, his face lighting up when he sees her.
“Missy’s here! Ted, look, Missy’s here!” he yells down the hallway. Missy hears someone come running, and an “oof” as they run into something before Ted appears in the doorway.
“Hi, Missy!” Ted says, grinning at her, rubbing his arm from where he bumped it when he ran down the hallway.
“Hey guys! Ted, are you okay?” She says as she bends down to look at Ted’s arm.
“He’s fine! He bumps into stuff all the time!” Bill says, grabbing her hand to lead her inside and shutting the door behind her.
Missy frowns a little, “You need to be more careful, Ted. What if you got really hurt?”
Ted looks down at the floor, fidgeting with the sleeves of his shirt. “I try , but it’s hard. It’s like I don’t notice stuff until it hits me.”
Before she can try to respond, he brightens up a little. “That’s why I have Bill to help me! He makes sure I don’t get hurt most of the time.”
Bill beams back at him, and the happiness both of them are radiating makes Missy smile too.
Before they get any further though, Missy fixes Bill with a look and asks, “Where’s your dad?”
Bill looks a little confused, almost like he forgot his dad was supposed to be home, before his eyes widen in realization. “Oh, he left a few hours ago. There’s money on the kitchen counter to pay you, and for you to order us pizza.”
With that out of the way, he grabs Ted’s arm and they run off in the direction of Bill’s bedroom.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. It’s something Missy got told a lot in elementary school, when she had a habit of being brutally honest. Right now, she’s thinking about it in regards to Mr. Preston.
What kind of person leaves two eleven year olds home alone for hours, even if they know a babysitter is coming?
“Missy! Are you coming? Me and Ted want to watch a movie!” Bill yells, hanging over the banister to the stairs.
She pushes all of the negative thoughts out of her mind, and goes to help them pick out a movie.
Missy got her first car a few months ago, had been saving up to get it years before she could even get her license.
While she has friends she could hypothetically drive around, they all have cars of their own, cars that are way nicer than hers. Which leads her to give rides to the two people she knows who don’t have a car.
She started giving Bill and Ted rides home from school right after she got the car. It’s not a hassle, the middle school is on her way home anyways, but she likes to think she would give them rides even if it was out of her way.
Also, when she first showed them the new car, Ted had said that she was lucky, that his dad makes him walk to and from school everyday. Bill had agreed, saying that his dad is usually gone before he can even ask him for a ride to school, and doesn’t get back home until late. Missy couldn’t let that stand.
Right now, the three of them are on their way to Bill’s house. The windows are rolled down, letting in a cool spring breeze, and the stereo is turned up as high as it will go. They stopped at the Circle K on their way there, and Missy pretends not to notice when Ted spills his slushie on the backseat.
When they reach a stop sign, Missy pops the cassette tape out and replaces it with another one, the opening of “Super Trouper” filling the car with sound.
The rest of the drive is peaceful, no one talking, just listening to the music. At one point, she glances in her rear view mirror and sees Ted looking out the window, a contemplative look on his face.
When the car pulls to a stop outside of Bill’s house, she presses pause on the music.
Bill scrunches up face, leaning over the back of the passenger seat to look at her, “Missy, I think ABBA is fine, but you need some variety in your tapes. Right, Ted?”
Ted startles a little at the sound of his name, before giving a small smile, “Totally.”
Missy giggles a little as the boys get out of the car, “Well if you’re offering to buy me some new tapes, I’ll consider it.”
Bill rolls his eyes and starts walking down the driveway, “Later, Missy!”
She fixes her hair in the mirror, but before she heads out she sees Ted hovering around the driver side door. Missy taps on the portion of the window that’s still up to get his attention. “What’s up, Ted?”
He glances up at her quickly before returning to staring at the ground.
“Hey Missy? Do you think you could tell me what album that song was from?” Ted asks, refusing to meet her gaze.
Missy takes the cassette out of the player, puts it in the case, and tosses it to Ted. He scrambles to catch it, almost dropping it a couple times.
“Super Trouper, it’s their seventh album. Keep the cassette, I can get another one.” She says, taking off her sunglasses to smile at him.
The smile Ted gives her makes it worth the loss of the tape.
“Thanks Missy!” He says before bounding up the driveway to meet Bill in the garage.
She watches as the boys wave goodbye to her, before putting the car in reverse and pulling out of the driveway.
Missy is eighteen, set to graduate in about a month, when Bill shows up on her doorstep one evening.
Her mom’s not home (she never is), so Missy is making dinner for herself when she hears someone knock on the front door. She turns the heat down on the stove and goes to answer it.
When she opens the door, Bill is standing there, arms wrapped around himself. He looks up at her, and she can see dried tear tracks on his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, It’s just my dad’s been on a business trip for a week and he forgot to get groceries or leave money before he left, and I didn’t have anything to eat and I couldn’t go to Ted’s house cause his dad hates me, and I didn’t know where else to go.” He starts rambling before she can even say hello.
Missy looks at him a moment, before holding the door open wider so he can walk in. “Hope you like Kraft Mac n’ Cheese, because that’s what I’m making.”
Bill takes in a shaky breath, and gives her a small smile as he walks in.
As they eat dinner in silence, Missy decides on something. She’s not going to let Bill spend high school like she did, fending for herself because no one was looking out for her. She’s going to be there for him, the way she wanted her parents to be there for her.
In one month, Missy graduates high school.
In three months, she starts dating Ian Preston, who doesn’t seem to notice that she's the person who’s been looking after his son since she was fourteen.
In six months, they get engaged.
By this time next year, she’ll have been Bill’s stepmom for two months.
“Hey Missy-I mean Mom?” Bill says while she’s doing dishes. He sounds so unsure of himself, so nervous, that it makes her stop what she’s doing to give him her full attention.
Bill’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking like he wants to be anywhere else. For a moment, Missy is reminded of him standing on her porch a little over a year ago.
She sets the plate she was scrubbing back into the soapy water, and motions for Bill to join her at the table.
He hesitates, before following her lead. When he sits down, he almost seems to shrink in on himself. It’s a jarring change from his usual loud and carefree nature, and Missy desperately wants to fix whatever's wrong, but she waits for him to tell her first. It takes a few minutes, but he finally tells her what he came in here for.
“I think there’s something wrong with me.” Bill says, his eyes filling with tears threatening to spill over.
“Why do you say that? Are you hurt?” Missy worries, because it would be just like Bill to get injured and hide it because he thinks he can handle it himself.
He shakes his head, wrapping his arms around himself.
“No, I’m not hurt. It’s just-” he stops, takes a deep breath, and continues, “It’s Ted.”
She brings a hand up to rub his shoulder, “Did you two get in a fight?”
Bill folds his knees to his chest, curling in on himself. “We didn’t get in a fight.”
He glances up at her for a second, before going back to staring at the floor. After a minute he screws his eyes shut and takes another deep breath in and out. “Missy, I’m gay.”
Missy pauses for a moment. This is… not a surprise. She has had her suspicions for a while, but now that everything’s out, now that Bill is staring at her, searching her face for anything that might give him whatever answer he’s looking for, things have changed. She leans forward in her chair and pulls him into a hug.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Bill leans into the hug, and Missy adjusts her arms slightly so she can run a hand through his hair. After a few moments, sitting there with only the dripping of the sink’s faucet to fill the silence, he starts to pull away.
“Thanks for, uh, being so cool about it. I-” Bill cuts himself off, looking down at his hands “I wish it was different but…” he trails off, but Missy understands what he means. She waits for him to look her in the eye again before she starts talking.
“Bill, listen to me. There’s nothing wrong with you. And if you ever need any help, with anything, I’ll always be here.”
Bill scrubs away the few tears that had appeared in his eyes, and gives her a smile. Missy smiles back, relieved to see him close to his usual self, not the withdrawn person he was a few minutes ago.
Part of her wants to ask about what he said earlier, about this being about Ted. She thinks she already knows what he meant, but right now, it’s not the time for those questions. Missy claps her hands together to get his attention.
“Your dad’s working late, how about tonight we order pizza and watch a movie? You can invite Ted over if you want.”
The small smile on Bill’s face grows at the mention of his best friend. He jumps out of the chair and runs into the hallway, making his way to the phone.
Missy goes back to the sink, trying to finish doing the dishes. She’s about to turn on some music when she hears Bill call out from the hallway.
“Thanks Mis- I mean Mom!”
Missy has just divorced Johnathan Logan, and just finished unpacking all of the stuff in her new house when Bill calls her, wondering if she can come over for dinner.
It’s not often that she gets to visit Bill and Ted’s apartment, and she doesn’t think they’ve ever invited her over for dinner. She hopes this means something. Maybe they’re going to move somewhere better, because while she’d never tell them, their apartment complex is pretty gross.
Missy makes some cookies, because even though they didn’t ask her to bring anything, she knows they’ll appreciate it. At six o’clock, she knocks on their apartment door, and Ted answers.
The first thing she notices is the tense and guarded look on his face. He smiles at her, but it’s forced.
“Hey, Missy. Bill just finished cooking. He has prepared his signature pasta with tomato sauce” Ted says, while he steps aside so that she can walk in.
Once inside, she sees that Bill is putting plates of pasta down on their tiny kitchen table. He looks up when he’s done, smiling and walking over to give her a hug.
“Thanks for coming, Missy.”
She smiles, setting the tupperware of cookies she brought with her down on the table. Bill’s eyes dart to the side as Ted walks around her to stand next to him, so close that their arms are pressed together.
Bill glances at her, then back at him. Ted stares at him and scrunches up his face a little bit. There’s a conversation going on between the two of them, but it’s one that Missy can’t understand.
After a few moments of this, Bill sighs, and moves to sit down at the table, Ted and Missy following.
It’s awkward, which is not a problem that she’s ever had while talking to them before. Ted keeps fidgeting, refusing to look her in the eye. Bill shifts his chair to sit a little closer to Ted, but that doesn’t help. He just keeps picking at his food, and occasionally looking over at Bill like he’s trying to tell him something.
Missy decides to wait, that hopefully they’ll tell her the reason that they invited her over, and they’ll go back to being their normal carefree selves, not this anxious and tense Bill and Ted that are sitting in front of her.
“Me and Bill are dating now!” Ted says suddenly, cutting through the silence. He looks over to her from across the table, his eyes wide with fear, and Missy’s heart breaks at that. She never wants to see him look at her like that again.
Next to him, Bill clears his throat a little before speaking, “That’s why we invited you over, to, uh, tell you.”
Missy beams, and gets up so she can move around the table and wrap them both in a hug. She feels Ted relax, burying his face in her shoulder.
“I’m so happy for you guys.” She says as they pull away from the hug.
Bill turns to Ted and takes a hold of his hand. “See, I told you she’d be cool about it, dude.”
It’s clear that Missy wasn’t supposed to hear this, but Bill is not good at whispering quietly. She stands up straight and turns to the table, where the tupperware she brought with her is still sitting.
“I brought some cookies, how about we go ahead and eat them?”
Ted smiles at her, a real one this time, while Bill looks at the tupperware like he’s never seen it before. “Missy, I told you that you didn’t have to bring anything.”
“Well maybe I wanted to bring something! Besides, it’s polite to bring something over when someone invites you for dinner.”
Missy picks up the cookies and moves to the kitchen, trying to find a plate to put them on. When she peaks behind her, she sees Bill give Ted a huge grin, before tugging him over to her by their joint hands.
She’s watering the flowers in her front lawn when she sees Ted out of the corner of her eye. He’s standing on the sidewalk, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking almost like he’s hyping himself up to do something. Missy sets her watering can down and turns so she can see him properly, and that’s when he notices her standing there.
“Hey Missy!” Ted says, trying to mask the worry that she can see in his eyes.
“Hi, Ted. I didn’t know you were coming over today?” She’s trying to figure out why he’s here, because something tells her this isn’t just a casual visit.
Ted stammers, unable to come up with an answer. After a few seconds, Missy cuts him off. “Why don’t we head inside, then you can tell me?”
Ted nods his head frantically, running up to her so she can let him in.
They walk up to the front door, and once they get inside to the living room, Missy motions for him to sit down on the couch. She sits down in one of the armchairs next to it, wanting to give Ted some space, and looks at him for a moment before moving forward.
Ted is looking everywhere but her, his eyes darting around the room while he fidgets with his hands.
“Ted, there was something you wanted to tell me?” Missy reminds him gently, and apparently it’s enough to break him out of whatever was going on in his head, because he sits perfectly still and stares at her for a second. She waits for him to find the answer he’s looking for.
“I need you to help me buy a dress!” Ted blurts out, before slapping a hand over his mouth, like he shocked himself with what he said.
“Okay, we can go shopping together sometime soon. What time works for you?” she says, smiling at him. Missy can’t tell Ted this right now, not when he’s looking at her with wide eyes like he’s about to cry, but she’s so proud of him.
Ted slowly removes the hand covering his face, and clears his throat a little. “Um, if we could go today, that’s kind of the reason I came over.”
Missy nods, reaching over to the couch to grab Ted’s hand. He looks down at her hand on top of his, then back at her. “I just don’t know how to- I mean I’ve never done this before, and I asked Bill and he didn’t know either, so he told me to ask you.”
Ted reaches up with his other hand to wipe away the tears that have started to flow down his cheeks, his voice getting more choked up as he continues talking. “I, um, lately it’s been starting to feel like maybe I’m not a dude, but I don’t feel like a babe either, so I don’t know what I am. And I told Bill and he said I didn’t have to figure it out right now, but it would just be so much easier if I had it figured out. You’re, um, you’re the first person I’ve told besides him.”
Missy gets up from her chair and moves over to the couch, wrapping Ted in a hug. She can feel him burying his face in her hair, the way his body shakes with sobs as she rubs his back, until he stops crying and pulls away.
“Ted, thank you so much for telling me.” She says, reaching up to wipe away the stray tears on his face.
Missy sits up a little straighter and smooths out her shirt. “Now how about we go to the mall and get you a dress?”
Ted giggles a little, and follows her lead as she gets up from the couch. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and they start walking towards the garage door.
It’s a Friday night, and Missy is going through every dress in her closet.
In two weeks, Bill and Ted are getting married, and she doesn’t think she’s ever been excited for a wedding, including her own. The past several months have been a whirlwind of planning, something she had helped with, because it had seemed like Bill and Ted were a bit overwhelmed with it.
Recently, they had asked her to wear a blue dress to the wedding, so now she’s looking through all the ones she owns, trying to find her favorite.
She’s in between two dresses, and is about to go try them on when she hears the doorbell ring.
When she goes downstairs and opens the door, Bill is standing on her front porch. She frowns, there’s no reason for him to be here this late. “Bill? Is something wrong?”
He startles a little, “No! Nothing’s wrong, I just needed to talk to you.”
Missy nods, waiting for him to talk. He rubs the back of his neck, and shakes out his hands in front of him. They’re not getting anywhere, and even though Bill says that nothing is wrong, he’s lied about that before.
She opens the door wider, letting him into the living room. Bill looks relieved for a split second before walking in.
He turns around, and she looks at him. He looks tense. She’s about to ask him again if there’s anything wrong, when he starts talking.
“Missy, me and Ted are getting married in a couple weeks.” Bill says, his voice much more serious than usual. It makes her pay attention, unsure where he’s going with this. She nods to show she’s listening.
“And I was wondering-” Bill stops himself and runs a hand through his hair, “You can say no if you want, but I was wondering if you would walk me down the aisle?”
Missy takes a moment to process what he said. Then she smiles so wide that she feels like her face will ache later. “Bill, I would love to.”
Bill lets out a deep breath, and beams at her before pulling her into a hug. She can barely hear what he says, muffled by her shirt, but when she does her heart swells.
“Thanks, Mom”