Chapter Text
After five minutes of silence, Aubrey pulls a cigarette from her pocket and dangles it between her fingers. “They hate you,” she says.
Basil looks up. “Please don’t smoke that here."
She examines the “No Smoking, Skating, or Fireworks” sign tacked to their gym’s exterior stucco. And she raises the cigarette to her lips. “What do you mean ‘here,’ anyway? I can smoke, just not around you? Because you don’t give two shits about what happens to me unless it gets in your way, huh?”
“Why would I--” Basil swallows. “Why would I care about that? We aren’t friends.”
“Aren’t we?” asks Aubrey.
“Um… what kind of person would be a friend to you?”
“Someone who’s got nobody else.” She snorts dryly. “That being said, did you ever even consider me as a friend?”
Through clumped lashes and week-old contact lenses, her narrowed eyes meet his. Basil, unused to being so psychically searched , descends into flushing fear, his palms moistening, throat drying. He averts his eyes. “I... I know what you’re trying to do. And it won’t work. Can you please leave me alone?”
“I never touched you, Basil,” she says. “If you wanted to be friends again, you’d tell everyone that I never laid a fucking finger on you.” She shrugs. “Unless you don’t wanna. Fine with me either way. But I never hurt you.”
Blinding heat ascends from the pavement past the shade of their awning. How Aubrey walks barefoot on the same ground that melts the base of his plastic flower-pots is beyond him. Granted, she’s wearing sneakers now, but her pinky toe peeks out from a hole in the gray mesh, the pastel polish on its toenail chipped. She too, squints out into the afternoon, the ruddiness in her own cheeks a product of running laps in the school gym’s oven-air.
“You don’t really wanna make things right,” she says.
“I have a, um, club meeting to go to.”
“You don’t. But go anyway.”
“Where’s Kel?”
She knocks on the gym wall. Behind it, muffled, comes the soft patter of dribbling and the sharp squeals of basketball shoes. “Practice. They’ve got their last home game tomorrow night. I’d be in there with him right now, but, well,” nodding to the still-unlit cigarette in her fingers, “yeah.”
A while passes. Basil doesn’t leave; Aubrey doesn’t light her cigarette. They’re tired. It’s true that Aubrey’s waiting for the rest of her friends to finish class and call her to do scooter tricks on the campus steps. And it’s true that he’s waiting for Polly’s SUV to pluck him from her midst. But the two of them don’t have to be here, together, four feet away from each other, leaning on the same wall.
“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” she asks.
Basil fingers the end of his green cardigan sleeve. Aubrey’s not a listener. She doesn’t care what he has to say unless it can be turned and weaponized on him--and even then, it rarely works, not anymore. For a few months now, she’s run dry of insults. Either that, or his skin’s become thicker. Everything she could say to him she’s already said.
But it’s nothing to feel relieved about, strangely. He’s run dry of retorts as well and that thought bothers him more than she ever did. On afternoons like these, the two of them lean on the gym wall and throw half-hearted reruns of their earlier confrontations and go home simmering. She’s even stopped carrying her bat. It’s not enough anymore.
It’s not enough, and, peering up at her from underneath his translucent bangs, Basil becomes conscious of the sickening, internal tug of attachment reining him to whatever this fucked up ritual is. He can’t let it die.
She raises an eyebrow. “Nothing at all?” The gesture would have paralyzed him with dread two years ago.
“...”
“You look like you have something to say. Spit it out.”
Nauseous saliva pools in Basil’s mouth and he swallows. He tastes a bad decision on his tongue, and releases it: “Are you going to be there? At the basketball game?”
It works. The nonchalance falls from her posture--she stiffens, the breath stopping in her throat. “...What?” she says, barely a whisper.
“I’m gonna be there. I’m gonna, um, I’m going to the game. The basketball game. Are you coming as well?”
She blinks. He takes the split-second reprieve of eye contact to look away from her and look back.
“You…” she snarls, the cast of ice crumbling from her. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you anything. You want to ruin my night, don’tcha.” She remembers she’s holding a cigarette and tries to light it over a red plastic Bic lighter, the type that are sold at gas stations. Her fingers slip on invisible moisture--it takes her a few tries before the scent of smoke creeps into the air. “You ruined my life once and you’re trying to do it again.”
“Haha, what? No. I just… I thought I’d support Kel.” Basil tries a wan smile. It doesn’t work. “He’s been so excited about it.”
“What do you care, all of a sudden?” she forces through her teeth.
Basil straightens, pushing off the wall. “What do you mean--do you think he’s not my friend? ”
“No, I don’t. He’s not your buddy. You don’t even know his birthday.”
“A-and he doesn’t know yours,” before he has a chance to hold his tongue.
Her eyes narrow. The cigarette, which she has not yet taken a single drag of, trembles slightly between her fingers. “Whatever. Come to the game, or don’t.”
Aubrey’s smoke smells like a fire season come early, an August in May. May, to him, is when his plants shake off dormancy and push out soft, lime-green growth from stem stubs that haven’t shown activity in months. Things wake up, and they grow so fast you can hear their cell walls popping as they break in the night. The growth is too wet to burn--it sizzles with fragrant oil instead. In this month, he’d set his succulents, his echeverias and his aloes, out on the porch, where they could drink from the afternoon south-side sun as much as they wanted.
He’d sit with them too, if he wouldn’t burn. But that’s what the aloes are for.
Aubrey doesn’t burn. She’s tan, lean like a redwood sapling, and, from the little he’s seen of her gymnastics performances, just as pliable--wet growth. If a forest fire swept through this school, she’d still stand tall.
Right now, she drips malice next to him, watching him out of the corner of her razor-winged eye.
He nods at her virgin cigarette, which burns away quietly towards her fingertips. “You don’t actually smoke, do you?”
She brings it to her lips, inhales deeply--slowly, to give him enough time to envision the smoke sinking into her lungs--and leans in to blow a velvet jetstream of soot into his face. Basil jerks back, but not before he gasps from surprise. His throat coats with powder; he coughs and sputters and retches plumes of burning ash from his sinuses. When his tears have cleared the haze from his eyes, she’s crushing the butt of the cigarette underneath her sneaker toe. A thin wisp of smoke--the cigarette’s last breath--wriggles out from beneath the sole.
“Ask that again and I’ll put it out on you,” she says, slinging her backpack back onto her shoulder. “See ya there.”
She leaves him hunched over, eyes brimming, throat thick, for the first time in a long few months.
a fanfiction by cicadabug
“Hey, Aubrey!” Kel whistles and points from the court. “This one’s for you.” He aims, tongue pressed between his lips, and launches his ball in a calculated arc towards the rim of the hoop. The ball swirls, its trajectory trapped within the loop of the rim. “Hah, toilet bowl. Suits you.” It doesn’t go in the hoop, instead swirling around a few times and flying back out. Aubrey holds up an L with her fingers to her forehead. Kel sticks his tongue out.
Aubrey doesn’t bother coming early to the gymnasium because she and the other Hooligans don’t bother sitting in the bleachers. There’s a spot on the sidelines of the court that Kel’s team clears for them to throw a picnic blanket over and flip off the other team from. But however close they get, the away team never overtly acknowledges them.
As Kel’s team warms up, Angel unties the blanket he’d been wearing as a cape and shakes it before letting it waft onto the ground. “I think they see us this time. But they’re trying not to see us.”
“Oh, yeah.” Alighting onto the blanket, Kim peers over his shoulder at the bench of jerseyed boys whose eyes flick everywhere except at them. “They definitely see us. That’s all we need to exact imperceptible psychological warfare on them. ...Uh, Aub, you need to wash this thing, you know? It’s got last week’s Cheeto dust on it.”
Since Aubrey’s hands are occupied with paintbrushes loaded with face paint, she can only kick futilely at the little trenches of crumbs trapped in the folds of the ratty blanket. “You do it, whore. Don’t you have like, one thousand washing machines?” She turns back to her work, which is capturing the Maverick’s fidgety cheeks to swipe orange and white on. “Hold still. I’m not trying to kill you.”
“Broke-ass.” Kim pushes her glasses up. “Wash it in the lake or something, it’s your turn.”
“What happened to...” Aubrey can’t recall his name while she’s busy wrestling Mav’s head. “What’s that beard guy you’re in love with again? What happened to ‘from each according to his abilities’ or whatever?”
“He’s one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century,” says Kim. “I’m not in love with him. I respect his theory.”
“You’re obsessed with him.”
“ You’re obsessed with Draco Fucking Malfoy.”
The Maverick, who had watched a Harry Potter movie for the first time two days ago, sits straighter in recognition. “Hey, I know that guy.”
“Wrong guy. His eyes are literally blue,” Aubrey says, “Also shut up, Mav, or the paint’ll get in your mouth.”
“Fine, even better.” Kim cackles. “You’re obsessed with Über Fucking Mensch.”
The Maverick, who had learned about Third Reich ideology for the first time two days ago as well, sits even straighter. “Heh, I know that guy too,” he says with pride. “Wait, who are we talking about? Are we talking about him?” He points toward the gym entrance.
Aubrey stops. Orange paint dribbles onto the blanket. Next to her, Kim’s head whips with an audible *crack.*
“Holy shit,” Kim whispers. “What’s he doing here?”
“Kel invited him, maybe. I dunno.” Aubrey breathes and continues the stroke of orange. Her hand won’t paint straight down the slope of his Grecian nose. “He’s not going to, like, bother us.”
Across the court, a shock-haired blonde boy in the stupidest puke-green oversized sweater Aubrey’s ever averted her eyes from meets resistance from the adults manning the ticket table. The sweater’s got little brown teddy bears sewn on it. It coaxes a bit of sympathy vomit from her.
The balding man, someone who Aubrey half-way recognizes as Basil’s chemistry teacher and point-guard Stewie Robinson’s dad, stands up from his folding chair, claps a hand on Basil’s shoulder and attempts a surreptitious tip of his head toward their picnic blanket. She can’t hear what’s happening on the other side of the gym, but she knows what he’s saying. She’s here-- they’re here--and so the safest place for him is anywhere that’s not here. Unless he wants what happened to happen again. There is infinite compassion in Mr. Robinson’s eyes, compassion built from a foundation of fuck-all nothingness. Well, fuck-all with a dash of spite for the bad eggs and problem students who cause issues Basil refuses to bring up to the school’s administration.
“Stop gawking.” Next to her, Kim uncoils and kicks her shoes off. “It literally doesn’t matter if he’s here or not.”
“Yeah. I brought a new switchblade,” The Maverick says.
Kim scoffs. “No one cares about your fifteen-dollar dumbfuck mall kiosk switchblade.”
“You wanna see it?”
“No.”
“It’s, like, got this cool rainbow Dragonscale™ effect.”
Kim picks at her socks and weighs the pros and cons of this decision. “Okay,” she says. “Fine. Maybe I do wanna see it. Yeah, why don’t you just whip out a knife in a packed gym. No biggie.”
Aubrey paints the finishing sweeps of paint over The Maverick’s temples and sets him free to rifle through his schoolbag for said greasy switchblade. She waves for Angel to come forward and present his face, stealing glances across the gym ever so often.
Basil’s slapping cash onto the table and sliding it towards Mr. Robinson, who shakes his head and mutters something.
“Oh. That’s the boy that said those lies about us,” Angel says.
“Shh,” Kim says, at the same time The Maverick says “You know what we should do? Slash his tires.”
“We should do that. We should slash his tires.” Angel nods, sagely.
“He doesn’t drive, remember?” Aubrey says, keeping her eye on both Basil and Angel in the same glance. “He’s a loser.”
“And a liar.”
Kim meets Aubrey’s gaze for a second, in some indescribable understanding--but pity as well. She never asks about Aubrey's history with Basil and Kel, and Aubrey's grateful that she never has to answer. Maybe one day, though. Once Aubrey’s finished painting Angel’s face into a creamsicle sliced in half, she and Kim wipe minimalist orange and white stripes down their own faces--to keep their eye makeup intact.
“Um.” Kim pokes Aubrey in the thigh. “He’s not going up the bleachers. I think he’s walking towards us.”
“What.”
“We’re not leaving, right?”
“No. No! We’re not going anywhere. If he wants to start shit, he can start shit. We have a right to be here.”
Mikhael mutters, head buried in his studded schoolbag. “I think I have another pocket-knife in here somewhere, just in case we need it.” Something in the pockets crinkles. “Give me a minute.”
Kim leans and whispers while Aubrey shunts the face-painting supplies back in her bag. “Everyone’s looking at us, Aubrey. Maybe we should leave.”
“No.” Aubrey looks up without looking up, feeling the bristle of a bleacherful of stares on her back, following her, following him, anticipating the sparks they’ll throw off as this evening’s pre-game show. “We aren’t leaving. He’s gonna come over and we’ll say hi and ignore him. We can be nice.”
“Good. I don’t want my mom thinking you’re a bad influence. She’s up there somewhere, I think.” She waves at the tiers of seated audience. “With Kel’s mom.” Undoubtedly watching.
Basil approaches, hesitant as a deer foal and twice as awkward. “Hey guys.” He smiles and waves, toeing the tattered edge of their picnic blanket.
Aubrey clasps her hands in her lap and smiles and fantasizes about snapping his neck. “Oh, hi....Do you--uh, what are y--”
Mikhael rises from his bag-searching with a flip of his luxurious blonde mane. “Heh, I guess it’s time to slice ‘n dice, guys,” unsheathing three gleaming gamer switchblades clenched between his knuckles. He looks up. “Uh, hi.”
Next to Mikhael, Angel’s chest is a pressure-cooker for his breath. His lips press together in a thin line and his leg shakes.
Basil swallows and eyes the knives. “H-hi. Hey. You, um, shouldn’t have those.”
Angel can’t control himself. “These knives are thin enough to fit between your ribs.” His newly-deepened voice tumbles over itself. The line he’s been rehearsing bursts out of him. “Do we understand each other?”
“Jesus Christ, Angel,” Mikhael mutters under his breath. “You fucked it.”
“Sorry.”
“Mikhael, put the knives away.” Aubrey says. “Basil. What are you doing here?”
Basil does it again, one of those diabetic smiles accompanied by a little rotational sway of his stance so that he looks like a flustered schoolgirl, complete with his Mary-Jane toes swiveling inwards. All he lacks now is long coils of hair to twirl with a finger. Aubrey imagines the sounds he’d make dying, and if they’d sound like the fear squeals squirrels make when you grab them.
“You look really surprised to see me, Aubrey. I thought I,” Basil says, “you know,” like he’s trying to piss her off, “I thought I told you... I don’t know…” and she wishes she hadn’t ordered those knives to be stowed away, “I think I told you I was coming?”
Goddamnit.
Kim leans back and chews a nail, a slight movement but it means Aubrey’s already lost. “Oh, really? Aub, is this true?”
“Must’ve slipped my mind,” Aubrey hisses. “Now go the fuck away, Basil. Run along.”
“Oh, haha, um… I don’t know if there’s any space in the bleachers for me,” he says, fidgeting with his shirt cuff. “I came a little late.”
A slow, toothy smile spreads wide enough to split Kim's face in two. “Go sit on a lap, gayboy. So many manspreading dads at this function it’s, like, a second bleacher just for you.”
Normally Aubrey’d follow this up with an even testier jab at his masculinity, but she’s not feelin’ it at this very moment. He and the exit have a non-zero distance between them, and that’s an issue. She stands up, brushing flecks of dried paint from her knees, and steps close to him. He smells of soil and solariums. “Listen, Basil. Nobody wants you here. You weren’t invited. You have no friends here. You have no one to sit with. So do what’s best for you and fuck off.”
“Oh, um… alright.” His voice hitches at the end. If he starts crying, Aubrey will rip his head off. Even now, her nails dig red crescents into her own arm as she fights the delicious impulse to make him cry.
She could do it. She could start a fight right now, and she’d win. They’d win--the kids around her are taut as crossbow wires, cocked back with the same violent stillness. She and her friends could fall upon him like a swarm of locusts, ripping and tearing, wild in thirst and divine in starvation. She could do it in front of everyone, take the knives and show them their kind, soft victim-boy’s nothing but bitter viscera on the inside like the rest of them. That he and her are cut from the same moth-eaten cloth, but she is stronger, tougher, cooler . And, to make a martyr of him, she’d--
“Wow, you guys are getting along again,” Kel says, striding up behind Basil. Aubrey stifles a scream-groan. “Never thought I’d see it before I graduated.” He sips water from a plastic canteen and fist-bumps first Basil--who gingerly taps his smooth knuckles against his--and then Aubrey--who grinds her fist into his like she’s tenderizing a sirloin.
“I was literally about to kill him,” Aubrey says. Kim nods. “We are not getting along.”
“Yeah,” says Kel.
Basil's eyes dart between the two of them. "W-what?"
“Like, I was this close,” pinching her two fingers together, “ this close to hospitalizing him. This close.”
“Mhm.” Kel gives a thumbs-up.
“I had a vivid power fantasy and everything. I, like, tasted blood in my mouth. I was possessed by a fucked-up violent shadow of my normal self.”
“Wow. That’s cool, dude.” Kel bobs with tranquility. “Hey, Angel, do you want a Capri-Sun? Ask Mikey on the bench for one ‘cause he has an extra.”
“Hell yes.” Angel bounces away from the blanket, in search of sweeter fluids.
Aubrey squints at Kel, and then at the scoreboard timer behind him. “You’ve still got time to redeem yourself for that awful hoop you shot for me.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Kim grumbles.
“Ha, thanks.” Kel brushes a flyaway back into his damp ponytail and grins. “Maybe. If you guys hype us up hard enough I might make it this time. By the way, thanks for showing up. I know you’re not, like, sports guys. But you are tough guys, and it means a lot--and also scares the other dudes.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Kim snorts. “Sports and war are the same thing, anyway.”
Kel scans the four of them, pride lifting his features. “You guys look really badass ‘n scary. ‘Cept Basil. Are you allergic to paint, or something?”
Basil, who still looks like he’s about to cry, smiles. “Um, no… I just got here a little late so they haven’t, um, they haven’t put it on me yet. The bleachers are all full too, so…”
“Glad you found a seat here, then! Aubrey, there’s still some time for you to get Basil painted.” Kel beams. “Man, this is great. You’re all here. All of my best buddies here to cheer me on. We should get pizza later. Alright, I wanna get a few more hoops in before we have to start.” And he trots off after the nearest free basketball.
Aubrey must have stiffened, because Mikhael puts his hand on her wrist. “It’s gonna be fine, my lady. The Maverick won’t let that scoundrel dash away with thine honor.”
“What?” Aubrey says.
“Huh?” (says Basil, but no one really wants to pay attention to him right now.)
“Just kidding. Have fun painting Boy Nuremberg's face, loser, I’m gonna take a piss.” Mikhael struggles to stuff all three shitty mall kiosk knives into the pockets of his tight pants without tearing the faux-leather. He gets up and saunters off into the sunset, or something like that. He rides into the horizon that is the boys’ bathrooms.
Kim frowns. “Okay. He can’t just be saying things like that.”
“This is your own fault. You call him… what, Übermensch?” Aubrey shrugs and leans back on her palms. “And Hitler Youth. And White Boy. And--”
“His dad works for Raytheon. I know what I’m doing.”
“Guys… I’m right here,” Basil says, to no one’s delight.
Kim said once to her that she’d known her as eyeliner first and girl second. Aubrey was the idiot who sat behind her in English class and leaned over the desk with her hands dangling off the ledge like the way lions sit, paws in front, sprawled. Her arm there to lay her head on when she, inevitably, would fall asleep, every class period. And Kim couldn’t see anything of her face except those shut eyes lengthened with hard kohl.
They bonded over putting pigment on their faces. Kim never could approximate the razor-edged wings that sliced from Aubrey’s lashline to her temple, but it was alright, because she pulled a mean red lip and faded glow that made her look like a dark, wasted Old-Hollywood icon. Even in the long afternoons they spend emptying Kim’s mother’s vanity upon her shag carpet, Aubrey’s never touched Kim’s face. It was unsanitary for a creature like her to smear her talons all over Kim’s cheeks.
“You look invincible, bitch,” Kim had gushed then, still thirteen and as new to profanity as she was to painting her face.
“I am invincible,” Aubrey replied. “Bitch.” And she felt that she was, that the redness burning in her eyes were the result of powder fallout, pinched lids, mascara residue, lash glue, kohl wax--anything and everything but last night’s emotions.
Aubrey wets her brush with orange sludge and poises it in front of Basil’s face. The memory--and the heat blossoming in her gut--stops her hand. The curious part of putting colors on someone else’s visage is you end up knowing what they look like. It’s tactile and spatial, mapping what’s normally a collection of planes of shadow and light to a three-dimensional object of soft flesh, cartilage, and down. Every inch of skin, and the bones underneath, becomes realer than life.
The thought of it softens her stomach like bruises on ripe fruit. No one should know someone like that. No one should be known like that.
Moreover, she observes him only in her peripheral vision because he’s pale enough to blind her--not just his coloration, but something else about him that feels stripped and unprotected by pigment. Peeled. Fragile. Might be why he’s always wrapped in soft, organic fabrics like some sort of g--
Yeah, she doesn’t wanna know what he looks like. “This is stupid,” she spits. “What are you, an infant? Paint yourself.”
“Um. Okay.”
She dumps the supplies at his knees and rises, brushing last week’s Cheeto crumbs off her sweatpants. Kim reaches forward.
Aubrey steps between them. “Leave it alone, Kim. He can do it himself.”
She freezes but doesn't shrink back. “You sure?” Behind her glasses, her eyes are dark and searching.
“Yeah.”
“...Alright.” She retreats.
“There’s a mirror in Mav’s bag’s front pocket." Aubrey nudges it with her toe. "And bobby pins, if your hair gets in the way.”
“T-thanks,” Basil says, and tows the bag toward him by the straps. For how full it looks, the bag’s light enough for Basil’s thin arms to effortlessly gather. It crinkles too, but Aubrey’s too wasted on a strange, warm nausea to question it.
For the moment, the ground burns acidic, and she can’t sit down, can’t even watch him dabble paint onto his face for more than a few seconds at a time.
She turns and shoves her hands in her jacket pockets and surveys the gym: in her peripheral vision, Kim, folded into a little ball, watching her and watching him, and him a hollow-boned oaf fumbling with paints; past them on the oak courts, the tangerine and cobalt-jerseyed boys lining up for tip-off, tense calves and clenched jaws, golden sweat, Kel one of them, his hair a sweated frizz, eyes locked--set--wild--on the ball perched on the referee’s fingertip; after them, on the benches, the backup players plus Angel cannibalizing sweet juices, a centipede’s worth of legs bouncing a patternless rhythm; on both sides, rising, families, parodies of silent stone, decorate the tiered bleachers; at the farthest end of the building, the exit, cold maroon night, and the faint, growing halo of Mikhael’s fool’s-gold hair.
She looks up.
Far above them, above the court and above the rafters, in the highest bleacher seat, she knows someone’s watching--doesn’t matter who. They’re watching her--the anathematic--and him, the--the whatever-he-is. They’re wondering what she’s doing. They’re wondering if their lions’ den is broken.
The referee tosses the ball into the air. As it falls, the boys become a furnace of motion; the court becomes a theater of war.
Sports.
