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The air is hot, sweltering, with heat shimmer mirages floating on the breeze. It's drier than Texas, Dave thinks, but that just makes the warmth prickle on his skin like the beginnings of a rash. The sun beats down from overhead, his personal merciless oppressor.
Dave sits on the front porch swinging his legs, and he almost can't see the main road when he's staring down the dead-end terminus of their drive.
He doesn't know why the fuck Bro needed to come here.
The climate is unpleasant and the town is isolated, so tiny that there's only one primary highway dividing it down the middle, a neat bisection that a well-calibrated vehicle can barrel down in just under twenty minutes. It takes Bro's truck closer to thirty.
Dave hates it here already.
-
Dave makes one apathetic visit to the local high school, but he doesn't want to endure classes with hicks and hillbillies when homeschooling here is easier. It's almost as uncomplicated as the simplistic Texas system. Bro needs internet for his business, that was like his one stipulation in agreeing to move to Bumfuck, Yor Asscrack, and that means Dave can access the arguable blessing that is an online curriculum.
He loiters around home – if the little crackerbox house Bro is renting can even be deemed deserving of the name – for a week, until he's just about going stir-crazy with his cabin fever.
Teenage boys were not meant to live in isolation.
Dave is too proud to admit all the times he longed for privacy back in Houston, all the times the buildings and his brother crowded so close it was like a physical weight, all the times he passively longed for an escape. Now Bro is mysteriously missing half the time, holed up in his "office" the other half, and Dave is lonely. He might not have been drowning in bosom buddies back in the inner city, but here he's high and dry without a friend in the world.
It's sobering.
Dave doesn't like it.
He resolves to explore the town, even if it means helping little old ladies cross streets with their shopping bags, and making polite conversation about the weather and the height of the corn with aging gentlemen.
-
All the shops in town huddle to the center, gossipy old biddies who can't hear very well fighting to collect the latest news. Personal residences are outliers on that plot, and a number of those are farmhouses with land, falling even farther outside the perimeter.
Sniffing around private property holds far more appeal than nosing inside kitschy shops and antiquated restaurants, is more tempting than side-eying the hardware store with its factory-new tractors and miscellaneous farm equipment interned right out front. Some of the houses look like rambling old manors, girdled with rickety verandas that are all weathered wood and flecked-off paint and boasting high Victorian-style windows bracketed with storm shutters. They might look lonely, if it weren't for the children's toys trailing down the front steps, or the zigzags of clotheslines waving laundry like pennant flags.
One such house has the grass out front all torn-up, colorful bloomers blowing in the breeze with all the upstairs windows pushed open. Behind the building is nothing but arable land, plots or furrows or Dave doesn't know what, he's not a farmer and it's not his job to care or put a word to it. He pops about, flashstepping just as easily over soil as on concrete, subtle as an atom bomb and similarly stealthy.
The girl in the garden is hunch-backed and happy, long hair flowing out from beneath a broad-brimmed hat that flops when she moves. She's wearing long skirts but they're hitched around her thighs, loose and flowing and doing little to restrict her movement. She's nut-brown from sun, streaked with dirt, humming to herself in undeniable good cheer.
Everything about her is quaint and precious and she's just about the most honest thing Dave has seen in his life.
-
"I see you there, mister city boy!"
Dave's thighs rub up against the boundary of her fence, but his torso sways back like stretching to dodge a blow, like she's caught him in the act.
He backed away the first day, furtive and unnoticed and triumphant, but he's back and it's with no better manners than before and Dave doesn't know if he was less unobtrusive than he'd thought that last time, or if the town is just too small for this country girl not to know about him.
The latter thought, at least, is almost flattering.
"I see you there, missus country girl, all digging in the dirt," Dave says back.
She sits up fully, planting her hands on her hips. It might have had staying power if she wasn't rocked back on her ankles with folded knees, like some kind of stork, or like a dog on its haunches.
"This is private property, I'll have you know!"
"Are you threatening to throw me off your land?"
"I don't know, it looks like I could hoist you like a bale of hay. You're sticks and bones! Maybe I should set you up like a scarecrow and enjoy the company."
She giggles, grinning wide and buck-toothed.
"Nah, little lady," Dave says, playing cool. "Me and crows are buddies, we go back so far we both remember our point of evolutionary divergence. It's like, crows and me aren't just bros, we're straight-up related, like in the old-testament, biblical sense. I couldn't scare off a crow, that's like turning away family from your once-a-year Thanksgiving feast. I'd be excommunicated."
He pauses.
"And I think you just told me I'm ugly, which face it, we both know is a lie."
She blows out her breath between her lips in an eruptive, drawn-out laugh. She might be laughing with Dave or at him and it isn't clear which.
"Oh my god!" she shouts, when she catches her breath. "I can't believe you said all of that with a straight face! That is the silliest thing I've ever heard."
Dave has the good graces to look a bit pleased.
"Every word stated is true," he says.
She laughs again, and shakes her head in further expression of disbelief.
"You're a weird bird," she says, before snort-laughing one more time at the joke, his or hers. "I get it, bird. You're a weird guy, mister city boy."
"Dave Strider," he says.
"Come again?"
"That's my name. It's Dave."
She looks at him, like weighing a slab of meat, and it's more incisively critical than Dave is expecting.
"I'm Jade Harley!" she says after that period of consideration, before pushing herself to her feet so she can thrust a hand out for a shake.
It's smarmy and stupid and Dave tells himself that he's doing it for the ironies, but when he grasps her hand he turns it over in his palm, ducking his head to press a gentlemanly kiss to the tanned brown backside.
She's still bright-eyed and smiling when Dave pulls his head up, and he can't remember if she was already flushed like that from the sun.
Dave absconds shortly after, because his brother taught him to get the correct word in and swagger off while obviously in the right, which he reasons applies just as accurately to making a good first impression.
-
Dave is back not three days later.
"Do you grow all your own crops?"
"Yes we do!"
"Who's we, anyway?"
"Me and my grandpa, mostly, but his mobility isn't as great as it used to be, so nowadays I'm manning most of the heavy guns."
"Damn girl, I hope those guns aren't literal, are you sure you should be packing heat?"
"Hee hee, would it scare you if I said I knew my way around some firearms?"
Jade giggles and grins at him so she's practically beaming, all pearly white buckteeth and laugh-squinting eyes, shoulders shaking slightly with her mirth.
"If you've got a shotgun, you could run me off your property any time you want."
"I don't know why I'd bother doing that!" she says. "You're kind of funny, even if it means chores get done slower."
Dave picks at the fencepost, allowing a moment of silence for the compliment.
"So how come you aren't going to school?"
"Already graduated!" Jade says. "I'm taking college classes online, it's really fun! I'd like to go away to a big school but right now grandpa needs me, and I don't want to leave him."
Dave could be an emancipated minor right now, really, scrounging and getting by on his own in Houston. But Bro decided he wanted a taste of the simple life, and Dave wasn't about to let Bro go it without him, no matter how much cows sucked.
He concedes that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do for family. Jade agrees with her enthusiasm only slightly muted, and starts to tell Dave about her college classes all of her own volition.
It turns out she's wicked boss at the sciences, and Dave is forced to color himself impressed.
-
Jade's personal vegetable garden is overshadowed by a single shade tree, for the plants that do best in only partial sun. Dave hangs out under that tree so often, Jade starts to call him her personal scarecrow anyway. She leaves out a wobbly straw hat on the lowest branch, like it's a joke, except Dave takes to wearing it anyway, invests in some nice plaid flannel from the thrift store in town so he can be all matchy.
Jade giggles at him and says he's ridiculous, and Dave is inwardly preening almost before the words come out of her mouth.
Jade works in the field, times, even though she has help besides her grandpa and even though Dave can't tell for sure what's stopping her from school. He's guessing it's filial duty more than the actual work. But Jade is stunningly capable, and Dave has witnessed her overseeing the farmhands with admirable care and foresight. He slips off most times, when she's really working, because his Bro taught him not to get in the way of business.
Dave brings Jade cookies, once, after that time Bro gets caught up in an "ironic" bake-off with one of the matrons in town, but is forced to admit that they aren't his own doing. Jade eats them anyway, crunching through gingersnaps and devouring snickerdoodles, saving the peanut butter cookies pressed with Hershey's kisses for last. Dave watches her lick the crumbs from her fingers, asks her whether she even washed those, decides he's only smiling at her affronted protests when the motion tugs at his lips.
Dave starts carrying along his homework, does math and writes essays sprawled on his stomach on the bare wood of Jade's veranda, waiting for her to come back from the field.
Jade is his only friend, of course Dave is going to depend on her a lot.
Jade is a whiz at calculus and brilliant with physics, and Dave qualifies that of course if he's going to spend time with anyone in this ass-backwards farm town, of course it's going to be the only girl with a head on her shoulders. Who else would appreciate his sparkling wit, or listen to all his illest of jams? Jade can play bass guitar, for god's sake, it's not like Dave is going to find anyone cooler than that in a twenty-mile radius.
Nothing Dave does is for the express purpose of impressing her, that would be foolish and uncool and those are things Striders just aren't.
-
Dave is wrist-deep in loamy soil when Jade jogs up with her grandpa's ancient farm dog, Halley, trotting at her side. Her gift hat is on Dave's head and his soft flannel button-down is flopping open unbuttoned, the front of his undershirt soaked through with sweat. It isn't even that Dave has been working extra hard, or extra long, he simply doesn't spend an extreme amount of time in the sun and his face is glistening.
"Dave!" Jade exclaims.
"Sup Harley," Dave answers back, working a particularly stubborn weed out of the earth.
"What are you doing?" she asks, stalking closer with a bit more reservation, the way he reckons she would approach an animal who might or might not be injured.
"What's it look like," Dave says, as the last of the weed's root system comes free. "Gardening."
"You don't garden," Jade says, matter-of-fact.
Dave sits back on his heels, spider-pale hands stained with dirt where they rest on his knees, little flecks of grit buried underneath the nails. He looks up at her from behind his shades, the corner of his mouth quirked up in the beginnings of a smile.
"You sure about that, Harley?"
Jade puts her hands on her hips, like the day Dave met her, and he admits that the vision is a bit more daunting when she's standing, feet planted, and towering above him. Mostly, it leaves Dave contemplating the narrowest part of her waist, the way her calves taper in to meet her work boots, the swelled shape of her skirts when she doesn't bother wearing work pants.
"Jeeeeeez," she huffs, when her stern glare isn't having the desired effect.
Jade throws herself down between the rows of vegetables, as Halley barks and wags his tail from outside the fence, rummaging through the pile of uprooted vegetation that Dave has amassed. "Do you even know what broccoli seedlings look like?"
Dave gives her his best cool stare. He's watched Jade plant, and weed, and water for weeks now, he's totally got this thing in the bag.
Jade plucks one straggly green stalk out of Dave's collection, waggles it under his nose with a knowing air that teeters dangerously on the edge of the superior.
"This is not a weed, Dave Strider!"
Dave almost has the presence of mind to look sheepish. It doesn't matter, because whatever repentant faces he might involuntarily be making, they are not enough to forestall Jade's righteous reprimand.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, Harley," Dave says, heart shuddering in the face of her thundercloud look. "You don't wanna push the baby bird out of the nest before all his pinions grow in. He might be hoppin' around on the branch all ready to spread his wings and fly, but all bets will hazard even he doesn't know if he's prepared to make it happen. That's where the voice of experience needs to take him under her wing. It'd be a shame to squander all that ace potential by letting him splatter himself against the pavement."
Jade snorts at him, like she isn't impressed, or maybe like she isn't quite sure what to do with all that mouth dribble. It's the closest Dave will come to flat-out saying he doesn't know what he's doing, because some things just aren't done with Striders and admitting bare-faced incompetence is one of the hard and fast.
"God Dave!" Jade exclaims, after her half-second pause. "I can't believe you're accusing me of wanting to see a little baby birdie break his little birdie skull falling out of the nest! What kind of horrible girl do you think I am?"
Dave is half a second from a double-time backtrack, from scrambling to recoup his losses before he insults Jade beyond recovery, when it sinks in that he's letting himself be led around by the nose. He's caught himself just in time, right before opening his mouth and doing something seriously uncool.
Jade flashes a grin at him, right when Dave fully digests his mistake.
He lets Jade spend the rest of the afternoon showing him the looks of all her different plants, expounding on the shapes of their leaves, their coloration, the rate and ways in which they can be expected to grow. They put the sprouts that are still intact back in the ground, and Dave ribs Jade for jumping down his throat when the majority of his uprootings are bona fide weeds.
Dave doubts his bumbling overture of gardening assistance has done anything to impress Jade.
He feels good about it anyway.
-
The veranda is breezy as fall draws inexorably closer to winter, funneling wind down the front length so that Dave learns to sprawl on the stretch of planks sheltered in the lee of the house itself. With his back against the wood he can only look up at Jade's dangling legs, trailing over the edge of the hanging swing that huddles over the front porch. The swing creaks dangerously above him as Jade stirs it to move, but Dave ignores it.
He perches one of Jade's science textbooks on his stomach, quizzes her attentively on the material covered thus far in the course.
Dave only squirms a little as she quotes great technical passages back at him, cites definitions of terms and explains complicated equations, makes extensive mathematical calculations in her head. Jade is whipcord smart, too intelligent to be underestimated no matter how her green eyes smile.
Venturing inside the big old house is not something Dave does often, nor does he enjoy the feeling of all those empty rooms, of the stale air in places it can't circulate due to disuse. Jade flings open the upstairs windows in the summer, but her grandfather is virtually bedridden, and she only maintains the rooms she actively enjoys being in. The rest of the house is a cathedral to ghosts.
Dave doesn't mind coming in the kitchen, slipping through the back entrance like they're both servants and sitting against the countertops, eating sugar snap peas Jade has picked directly off her vines.
It feels like a victory, the first time Jade invites him to stay for dinner.
She's a slapdash cook, likes her meat rare and slightly bloodied, but her food all smells like heaven after Bro's studious disinterest in preparing proper meals. They take their dinner at the kitchen island, perched on high stools, and Dave is shamefully relieved when Jade brings her grandfather his dinner without inviting Dave upstairs. From what Jade says, even infirm as he is, any encounter with grandpa Harley is intense.
Dave wouldn't ask Jade to face off with Bro, if she couldn't assert to being properly prepared.
They rattle around that huge, ancient building like tiny pebbles caught in a too-big shoe, but when Dave goes home to his matchbox house with its cardboard walls and too little space, it feels so much more empty than Jade's decrepit mansion.
-
"C'mon Harley, it's been half a season, when are you finally gonna tell me what you do for fun around here?"
Dave curls over the fence, ever the contortionist, as he watches Jade gather the bounty of her garden into a basket. It's late afternoon and the air is crisp, not warm, total hoodie weather. Jade pops a pea pod into her mouth right off the vine, sticks her tongue out at Dave as if to say "This is what I do for fun around here!"
"Stick that back in your mouth if you're not about to use it," Dave chides, unwilling to be deterred. "I know you're studying up to be an early-bloomer grandma, but you've gotta want to do something other than bury your hands in dirt like a little kid making mud pies."
"I do fun things!" Jade insists.
Dave looks at her, long and even.
"I read books! And do experiments!" She can see the sheer overwhelming bulk of Dave's failure to be impressed. "I am a very fun girl, Dave Strider. Maybe your council of cool doesn't think science rates, but I know you like music just as much as the next pseudo-hipster, and I can play great!"
"You cut me to the bone, Harley."
Jade has her arms crossed over her chest, face stony, and it's only the amount of exposure Dave has had to her hyperbolic reactions that assures him he hasn't driven this one into unsalvageable territory.
"How could you say something so cruel," Dave continues. "Being a pseudo-hipster means being a half-pupated frankenbug, stalled out in the middle of a horrible transformation, stuck as a mindless slave to pop culture. Doomed to forever wail the names on the billboard top forty, trapped in an endless loop of useless reality television and celebrity drama. You're wishing me a fate worse than death, Harley, I hope you know."
Jade snickers despite her best attempts at a straight face, still an amateur by Strider pokerface standards. But she taps her toe, telling Dave he is still on the hook.
"At least let me go the full hipster, so I can idolize a preordained subset of indie bands and scorn everything that's ever been touched by the chill grasp of popularity."
Jade is starting to put on her "would you just get on with it!!" face.
"Let's go see a band that doesn't suck, to prove we still have taste," Dave finishes.
Jade drives into him for being so obtuse about something as obviously straightforward and simple as an invitation out, which is not the same as refusing to come with Dave.
-
Cajoling Bro into the use of his truck is going to cost Dave later. He knows that nothing comes free and he hasn't paid the full tax, but he doesn't have a car and his lady needs a noble steed, even if the best Dave can do is his brother's beat-to-hell old Chevy. The windows get stuck halfway down and something rumbles menacingly in its guts when Dave puts the vehicle in gear, but they have transport.
They can get the hell out of this backwards town.
The nearest real city is an hour off, an hour of rambling through open farm country, the wind whistling through the cabin of Bro's truck when Dave pushes it past sixty, seventy, courts eighty. Jade whoops, and Dave doesn't tell her that he doesn't have a real license. He isn't certain her grandpa even has a car, is fairly positive Jade hasn't learned how to drive. Dave doesn't know the last time she's been on the road and he's not going to dampen her excitement.
The city is nothing like Dave remembers.
Logically, he knows that this is because he's not back in Houston, he's in a whole different city in a whole different state with different buildings and a different feel. The city layout is counter-intuitive and he has to rely on directions, a point of shame Jade giggles over when Dave displays just a bit too much machismo.
They arrive at the venue safe, and wind-swept, and craving drinks and snacks that Dave can hardly pay for, what with the twenty bucks he swiped off of Bro. In the end they split a sandwich, its thin sauces running down their fingers in temptation to licking them up, packed in with so many teenagers and twenty-somethings thrilling on adrenaline and waiting for a show. It's more people than Dave has seen in one place in months, hot and claustrophobic and utterly exhilarating, and Jade is daunted by absolutely nothing.
She screams and shouts to every loud song, picks up words to lyrics she doesn't know quick as lightning and botches them anyway, coaxes Dave into dancing with her despite the tight press of bodies, so that they shuffle to and fro more than anything because there's no room for rhythm.
When they climb back into Bro's truck, Jade is cheeks-flushed and eyes-bright and energy incarnate, a hot firecracker pop compared to the low, steady burn of her drive when she's working on the farm. She fades back into languid quiet, flops in her seat with all the grace of a bag of bones, knee up and elbow jutting and utterly comfortable to spite all appearances.
Dave is just powerfully happy that she had a good time.
He couldn't talk much amidst the crowd and with music playing, but now that they're boxed up in a little tin can with miles to go, his tongue loosens and indulges itself. Dave rambles, sinking to chest-deep in the warm mire of metaphor, spooling out long ribbons of words that begin to lose their meaning as he goes on. But Jade giggles and hums and cuts in with her own commentary, until the tires of Bro's truck grind against the dirt road leading up to her house.
If showing a girl the town with all the oil of a smooth operator isn't enough to impress someone, Dave is fresh out of original ideas.
-
"I was gonna walk you to your door, Harley, like a real gentleman, do you just get your jollies from emasculating every nice boy who wants to treat you right?" Dave asks.
"Hush!" Jade protests, like there's nothing else to it.
Her legs pump the swing, propel its hanging chariot into the soothing back-and-forth motion for which it was designed. At first Dave drags his feet, stubborn, needing to convey the image of the one cheated out of his just desserts. But the sway of the swing slowly lulls him, until Dave falls against its cushioned back and looks over at Jade slantwise, his shades slimming down his expression to a minimal reveal and restricting his vision in the gathered-in night.
"C'mon, we've got a schedule to stick to here, chop chop, there are very specific stipulations to how this kind of boy-girl outing has to go down and we are not gonna like what happens if we disappoint the fates."
"But this is nicer," Jade says.
Her toes drag against the porch-planks, keeping the passage of the swing slow and sedate, and something about it is just simple. This is nice. Nicer than tipping Jade out at her door like he's dumping ballast from a floundering balloon. Nicest still when Jade jostles against his side and sticks there.
"You're a weird bird, mister Dave Strider," Jade jokes, lightly elbowing him just under his ribs.
"You're a cruel mistress," Dave jokes back, rubbing his side where she jabbed at him. "Didn't I ever tell you I bruise easily? You're gonna ding me up like an over-ripe fruit, and then what is my Bro gonna say when I come home? I can't bear the shame of letting Bro see I am a battered woman."
Jade breathes out through her lips, all fast and almost-startled, that weird laugh-sound that Dave likes so well.
"It serves me right," he continues. "I keep telling myself and telling myself that I'm gonna make an honest man out of you, but all I get for my troubles are hurt feelings and cold shame."
"Dave!" Jade exclaims, like she's scandalized.
Dave likes that sound almost as well as her funny, shuddering laugh.
He breathes in with a shudder of his own, and it's not because she's shoving at his shoulder, pushing him into the railing of the swing in retaliation for his jabs at her honor. Dave fends her off weakly, bracing against the arm rest and letting Jade shove at him while he laughs, until she either tires out or decides she's satisfied with his repentance, Dave isn't sure which of the two.
"Don't you want to do a girl right, Harley?" Dave starts again.
She laugh-snorts, and for a moment Dave expects another round of play-shoving, but the moment holds.
It's teetering on the edge, toeing the line of the brink between safe happy banter and the wide open spaces of sincerity, and keeping his balance on the boundary leaves Dave breathless with the uncertainty of whether taking one step more will make the bottom drop out. Or whether he can catch himself as he falls.
Dave thinks that his brother might have told him, once, that the hardest thing in the world to counterfeit is honesty.
He thinks it might have been said with sarcasm, but the words ring starkly true.
"Hey. Jade," Dave tries, like he's rolling marbles over his tongue. "You wanna do this boy-girl outing thing the way the love poems say? I mean. Do you--"
"Jeeeeeez, Dave!" Jade interrupts, cutting him off. "No one ever said that the front step was the only place you could kiss a girl after a date! Boys can be so stupid sometimes!"
She grabs him by the front of his shirt, a nice big fistful of fabric, and pulls Dave towards her over the bench of the swing. It's not hard enough to send Dave's forehead crashing into hers, thank god, and Dave has a moment to stop falling and consider whiplash before her lips are pressed to his. There's no way this qualifies as textbook romantic, having a girl haul him around and assault his mouth like they're sparring, but there's something charming about it all the same.
Jade's kissing is quick, short starting motions like she's challenging Dave to keep up, and for a moment their noses do mash, her glasses clicking gently against the edge of Dave's shades. They come back together, softer presses of lips and more of Dave trying to lead, plucking at her lower lip with his affection. Dave's hands are nowhere; he forgets himself until his arms protest their odd hovering, ends up placing his palms above Jade's knees, on her upper thighs. They lean together, breathe briefly against each other's mouths, until they drift apart like the abruptness of their meeting has finally cued its counterbalance.
Jade's face is bleached of color in the watery porch light, but her lips turn up at the corners and that's nothing if not a smile.
"Lose your silly shades, cool kid," Jade tells him, reaching up from his shirt to lift Dave's sunglasses off his nose.
It sharpens Dave's vision of the girl in front of him, resolves out the green of her eyes and the flush of her cheeks, intensifies the wattage behind her brilliant smile. He's offering a crooked little lurch-grin in response.
"Better!" Jade says, but the force is quiet for once, conviction without volume.
"Yeah?" Dave asks. Then: "So was that your patented liplock technique, Harley, 'cause I don't know if I got a full dose of the potent power you've got stored behind that devil-may-care grin. We might need to give it another try. I need to make an honest man out've you, we have got to tame the beast."
Jade just shakes her head at him, amidst the dropping of a few fondly exasperated giggles, and kisses Dave firm on the mouth.
It's better, he thinks, more certainty and conviction, and she's still the most honest thing Dave has ever seen in his life. Except now she's also the most honest thing he's tasted, the most honest thing he's sucked into his lungs and held in his gut. Her mouth yields when he kisses her back, the same quick, firm press of lips, and then they're exchanging short little kisses, a smattering of pecks and light contacts, until Jade is breathless and laughing and even Dave is smiling too strongly to hide.
They swing on the swing for a very long time, talking about nothing and anything and holding hands, after Jade snatches up Dave's fingers and laces theirs together like it's the most natural thing in the world, like Dave would be insane to try and refuse or pull away.
When Dave walks Jade the entire half-dozen steps to the door, he drops one last kiss on her lips on the threshold, like the most ironic goodnight that was ever given without making the barest stab at effacing.
-