Archive of Our Own ^beta

For maybe two weeks, Julio is pretty sure he has a crush on Matilda. They’re a confusing two weeks.

He feels weird. Around her. And she makes him laugh. He likes spending time with her. That means he has a crush. He’s watched his grandmother’s telenovelas. That’s what this means. He hasn’t had a crush before. This is a bad one to have, because he knows full well that his best friend’s had a crush on her for a considerably longer time. And that it’s probably mutual. And they’re just sort of dancing around each other, but they’ll figure it out eventually. Julio believes in them.

So he shouldn’t do anything about it. But then there will be an escalation and he’ll end up objecting at their wedding. That wouldn’t be good either. He’s pretty sure he’d be best man, and he doesn’t want to ruin that by objecting because he likes the bride.

So he has to do something about it. And he can’t tell her. And he can’t tell Duncan. And he’s stressed out all the time. He doesn’t do well with stress.

Duncan kind of smiles at Matilda like she put the moon and stars in the sky, sometimes, and he’s pretty sure the same expression has never crossed his own face. He doesn’t think he likes her as much. He used to elbow Duncan when he caught him doing it, the sappiest face he’s ever seen on anybody, but he’s stopped teasing his best friend, stopped raising his eyebrows. It’d probably draw attention to how weird he feels.

He starts trying to avoid talking to Matilda. She makes jokes and fights with Jackson and needles him and he tries not to laugh about anything. He shouldn’t be laughing, probably. Maybe if he stops having conversations with her this will go away.

A week or so into everything, when Julio has been successfully avoiding Matilda and not mentioning anything about his personal emotional state, Duncan walks halfway home with him, and interrupts an unrelated conversation to ask, “Are you mad at Matilda?”

His heart speeds up. “Uh, no, no way. We’re friends.”

“You’ve been avoiding her a lot. She asked me if I knew anything.”

Of course Matilda asked Duncan if he knew anything. Duncan is Julio’s best friend. He usually tells Duncan everything, even the awkward things, the sad things, the stupid things. He wants to tell Duncan. He can’t. Is he supposed to be upset about Matilda talking to Duncan? Because they both like her? He’s pretty sure he should be. Because of a telenovela love triangle currently playing out on Mama Rosa’s screen. The two men are always angry at each other for spending time alone with the girl. But he’s trying to avoid spending time with Matilda. So maybe that doesn’t apply?

“No, it’s just…I’ve been feeling weird lately.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” Duncan does sound so genuinely apologetic. Julio feels a knot of guilt form in his stomach.

“Not your fault. Uh, I’ll make an effort. Apologise.”

“I’m sure she’d appreciate it. And understand.”

Duncan trails off for a second. They make it another street before he speaks again. “I know she’s tough, and all, but she still…she still feels bad. Thinking she’s upset you. So I do think you should apologise.”

By making Matilda feel bad, he’s made Duncan feel sympathetically bad, because Julio has the most empathetic best friend in the stupid universe. And he sucks. He feels like a slug of a person. “Uh, first thing tomorrow, I promise.”

He sits on the floor in front of his grandmother’s armchair, that night, and listens to her rant. “Which of the guys is she supposed to end up with?”

In alternating languages, she explains that the girl ought to end up with the first man, who loves her more truly, and she him in return. The second man, she explains, does not love her the same, and instead is bad for her as he is seeking to fill the void left by his being widowed last season and will try to turn her into his dead wife.

This seems complicated. And Julio doesn’t have a dead wife. So none of it probably matters here. He thought he might find practical advice here. He’s going to have to manage this apology with no advice or practical examples. He’s sure he’s competent enough to work this out.

Matilda’s waiting for him by the gate. Did she take the early bus? Did Duncan call her to tell her? Should he be jealous that Duncan called her? He doesn’t feel jealous. Mostly weird. And nervous.

“Uh, sorry.”

It’s a lame opening statement, blurted out, too concise, but she uncrosses her arms. “If you’re feeling weird, you can tell me.” She’s definitely talked to Duncan. How long did they talk for? What did they say about him? Matilda borderline scowls at him, currently standing there like a lamppost. “Am I doing something?”

No. Not really. Nothing about Matilda had changed except the uneasy feelings she now caused.

He realised she made him laugh. He realised he enjoyed spending time with her. He reached the conclusion that he had a crush. And the uneasy churning in his gut followed.

If most kids were walking around feeling like this, it was no wonder his school was such a nightmare of uneasy emotional outburst. If he kept living like this, it was going to kill him.

“No, you’re not…uh, nothing. Nothing.”

“Wow. I can’t believe the inside of your skull is so empty you can’t even figure out how to lie to me.”

His stomach backflips. Matilda grins at him.

Oh. Oh, she was joking. Of course.

“Uh, well. Lying to you would be stupid. You’d just beat me up.”

“Of course I would. I am mighty!” She accompanies his catchphrase by beating on her chest, as is customary.

It was a pretty solid impression of him, and he finds himself snorting at it. This was, evidently, the right response, as she punches him in the arm, tells him not to do it again, and starts walking in the direction of the bus stop that would drop off Jackson in five or so minutes, the usual morning congregation spot for the group.

Normal. Everything was going to go back to normal.

Julio wishes he was better at pretending as much.

“Buddy?” Duncan, tapping his shoulder as he spiralled during math class. It wasn’t as if he was good at focusing during math at the best of times. “You look like you’re being haunted.”

He felt haunted. Haunted by visions of a million terrible futures where he messed up the lives of his friends with his stupid emotions. He was the worst at this! He was a terrible friend! Why couldn’t he figure out an escape plan? He was another week into this and he was no closer to undoing the knots in his gut or getting rid of his uneasy feeling. He was an idiot.

At every turn, he dug himself deeper into a hole where he couldn’t avoid anyone, and he couldn’t tell anyone. He felt like a shaken can of soda. He was perpetually on the verge of explosion. He was going to end up doing something totally stupid.

“Uh, fine. I’m fine.”

In the row in front of him, Ruby scratched at her arm. That was perfectly normal. There were a million allergy triggers at every turn. She had expressed on more than one occasion a distaste for the constant air of hopelessness and disappointment that ran rampant in their school and, as she had informed them, pretty much every school.

Then she turned, squinting at him.

He had something to do with this.
The full scope of Ruby’s allergies hit Julio upside the head as he remembered that she knew. Had known. Knew every secret he’d ever had, probably.

Well. That wasn’t good.

The sneeze couldn’t have come at a worse time. He sprinted out of the classroom before any of his teammates had the chance to yell the official distraction.

Before Julio could make a mad dash for the school bus, Ruby, with enough grip strength to stop a bull in its tracks, caught him by the sleeve and tugged him away.

“You don’t have a crush.”

It was a strong, attention-grabbing sort of way to start a conversation. Julio did not have it in him to come up with an articulate response.

“Scuseme?”

Ruby scoffed at him. It didn’t seem mean-spirited, really, more frustrated that he hadn’t come to the correct conclusions on his own. “You think you have a crush, but you are extrapolating.”

Julio blinked. Several times. Quick succession.

“You can sense that? With your upgrades?”

“Well, yes.” Ruby shrugged, apparently unconcerned by her semi-omnipotence. Julio was considerably more concerned. “But I am also in possession of a pair of eyes.”

Julio stared, blank, at Ruby. She sighed before she launched her clarification.

“I can tell when people have crushes. I’m allergic to love. Romantic love. I complained a lot when Agent Brand and Miss Holiday got together, and I can’t sit in the same half of the school bus when Duncan and Matilda sit next to each other without totally breaking out.” Absentmindedly, Ruby scratched the phantom sensation this thought brought on. “They’re pretty disgustingly in love with each other, particularly when you consider that we’re just kids.”

Julio laughed. “Duncan does this thing where he looks at Matilda like she created the universe or something.”

Ruby raised one eyebrow, but then added, “Matilda described Duncan as ‘radiant’ the other day, like it was a normal thing to say about someone. And she retains so many more of his tech facts than I do. She keeps showing me up by understanding how to operate gadgets. It’s very frustrating.”

Ruby scratched her arm. Julio wasn’t sure what allergy that was. Probably something about not knowing as many gadget facts as Matilda.

“But my actual point is I don’t even get a mild allergic reaction when you talk to her. If you had a crush of any magnitude, I would know. You behave as if she makes you nervous, but you’re not the slightest bit sappy. You’re not even in ‘like’. Or ‘like-like’.”

“But she makes me laugh! And I like spending time with her!”

Ruby frowned at him, furrowing her brow. “That’s all your evidence?”

Julio suddenly felt extremely, embarrassingly self-conscious. “Um.”

“Look, I normally wouldn’t take this into account, but you are a teenage boy.” Ruby made a noise in the back of her throat that seemed to suggest she believed this to be simultaneously unimportant and mildly humiliating. “Could you describe to me Matilda’s physical appearance?”

Julio scrambled for anything to say. He didn’t think about the topic much. “She’s short? She wears a lot of band t-shirts?”

“Okay.” Ruby raised her clasped hands to her face before pointing at him with two fingers, building her way to it. “Julio, I honestly believe that you are misidentifying friendship.”

That sounded stupid. He knew how friendship worked. He had plenty of friends.

“No, I’m not. I feel all uneasy around her, and that’s a crush symptom.” Television would never lie to him. Sometimes characters swooned or half-fainted because of interactions with crushes, because they were feeling sick.

“I think you’re feeling uneasy because you believe you have a crush, not because of one’s actual existence. You are just good friends with a girl.”

There was a pause where Julio’s brain began whirring overtime. Ruby, evidently, took pity on him.

“Look, do your feelings about Matilda making you laugh and enjoying her company differ any from your friendship with…Jackson, for example? Or any of the TROUBLEMAKERS?”

Julio, with the approximate abruptness of being hit by a truck, realised something. Ruby, capable of drawing conclusions, scratched the rash that had just appeared on her arm before shoving Julio in the general direction of the school bus.

“We will unpack that after we’ve saved the world.”

At least he’d solved one problem.