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Peter Spankoffski has always been in Stephanie’s orbit—or, perhaps more accurately, Stephanie has always been in Peter’s orbit. He is the Sun, and she is one of Saturn’s two hundred seventy-four confirmed moons. (Perhaps she is Gridr because the moon’s spelling made Peter laugh when she first told him about it, and, God, what Stephanie would do to hear such a sound, such a beautiful symphony that even the angels know their fanfare pales in comparison.)
He is endlessly charming and unbelievably bright, so people cannot help but gravitate towards him. Considering he has been Hatchetfield’s beloved ever since he was a child, the public generally assumes he bathes in the attention, and they sneer because they are jealous of a teenaged boy who stumbled into the public eye. They don’t care enough to look past the strangled smiles and practiced speeches. They don’t know anything.
But Stephanie knows. She knows he hates the eyes on him more than he hates the whooping and cheering at school assemblies or the way she purposefully grazes her nails along his exposed arm. He fears their judgement as much as he fears the creatures lurking in the depths of the ocean or the sound of fireworks during the Honey Festival.
She is aware how privileged she is to know this information, to have learned all of this in real time with Peter right beside her. Information that will not be forgotten anytime soon, for she stores this knowledge in a mental filing cabinet dedicated to Peter Spankoffski because she’s a little insane and kind of obsessed.
However, Stephanie didn’t always know. At one point, she didn’t even know that Peter was aware of her existence. (Her kinship with just another moon, remember?)
They have been in classes together since first grade, but they never had a reason to interact with each other, especially not with the tiers separating them in the school’s social hierarchy that has existed for as long as Stephanie has been enrolled in the district (first grade). Peter, naturally, has always been the emperor sitting pretty at the top, and Stephanie has always been another nameless peasant at the very bottom.
She never minded this because high school is only a stepping stool to reach the next chapter of her life, something she could use to her advantage, as long as she played her cards right. Despite her godawful hand, she’s been doing pretty alright for herself—an outstanding academic record, several community service hours at the local elderly home, and two dear friends that she anchors herself onto.
Still. Stephanie cannot ignore the times she arrived at the bus stop right as the doors closed, the times another unfortunate nickname circulated the hallways, or the times she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror with a splotch of mulberry blooming on her cheek, wondering what excuse she could tell her dad this time. (Despite her intelligence, she always draws a blank. So, when she returns home, she rushes to her bedroom to avoid her dad, crumbling on her carpeted flooring the second she shuts her bedroom door behind her.)
For her, high school is a stepping stool with spikes on it, and Stephanie sees the metal points—stares at them, even—and still is enough of an idiot to walk on it barefoot. On the other hand, for the popular kids, high school is the peak of a mountain they reached via a gondola, untouched and unscathed. They have it easy for now, but there’s no way higher. They’ll look back on this period of time and sigh wistfully, claiming that these were the glory days, the days spent skipping class behind the bleachers and bruising their peers for no good reason.
So, if anything, Stephanie pities the popular kids, but sometimes she wonders how nice it would be to ride a goddamn gondola.
And she actually does end up hitching a ride—in the form of a shaky and unsteady Peter Spankoffski sitting in front of her apartment complex.
It goes like this.
Stephanie books it to the school library when the dismissal bell rings because she has to finalize and print out a trifold project on Hamlet for English, due during first period the following day. Honestly, this is the earliest she has finished a project, surprising herself by not waiting until tomorrow morning to print.
She tweaks the formatting because the text is too close to the edge, the background color is too dark, the font size is too large—everything is too, too, too much. Eventually, Stephanie figures that she will never be satisfied with the final product and will end up hating it anyway, that and the librarian warns her that the library closes in five minutes, so she sends the document to the school printer to print.
Bidding the librarian goodbye and exiting through the library’s double doors, it dawns on Stephanie that the bus left twenty minutes ago, her dad won’t be home until dinnertime, and she now has to make the trek home on her own. She’ll whine and kick her feet, but it’s not an awful walk—really, it’s about a fifteen minute walk, and she knows that Stacy’s route on foot would be triple the time. It’s the small things that she’s grateful for.
So, she texts her dad that she is walking so he knows and won’t call her, angry after tracking her phone and bombarding her with you’re supposed to be home by now, did you go anywhere else, you know you have to go straight home. Stephanie inserts one side of her wired earbuds in after she considers her father’s warnings about listening for nearby cars as she crosses the street—which is fair, incredibly so, all things considered. But she is also a stubborn teenager, it is one earbud, and she promises she will work her ass off to repay the medical fees if she ends up hospitalized from a car crash.
Alas, she ends up in front of her apartment complex and not in the hospital, but someone nearly does. Not from a car crash—fucking hell, she’s making it worse—but from hypoglycemia.
She almost misses him, funnily enough, since he sits on the brick planter on the opposite side of the apartment entrance she arrives from. When she catches his figure, his face is hidden from her angle, but she recognizes the shoulder-length hair and the jacket—that same denim she saw in front of her during government earlier, a bleach-stained dragon slivering along his back.
(It will be weeks later when she asks about the image, tracing the intricate details with her index, reveling in the texture of the fabric. With rose dusting his cheeks, he will explain that Richie had gifted it to him for his sixteenth birthday. She will want to ask Richie for her own jacket, but he will insist for her to simply take his.)
Stephanie’s heart sinks. She’s never seen Peter Spankoffski like this. Only from several feet away, polished and untouchable, like a shiny trophy sitting on the top shelf of a locked display cabinet. Never purposefully tucked away in the corner, where no one can see him. Never curled up into himself, writhing in discomfort.
It’s an unnatural sight, yet it’s the most human she’s seen him.
Unbeknownst to herself, Stephanie carefully approaches his figure. Head down in his folded arms, he doesn’t seem to detect her, and she just stands there uselessly. It’s like she’s lingering in the door frame of a home that isn’t hers, and, intelligently, she realizes that she can turn the other way and mind her own business. She can pretend she never saw him here and enter her apartment complex, preserving the brick wall standing between the two of them.
Stephanie blurts, “Hey, are you okay?”
With one sad excuse of a punch, the fragile structure that once protected the laws of high school social status crumbles to their feet. Due to her influence. The power rushes to her head.
Peter startles, and his head snaps up, wincing after he does, dizzy from the sudden movement. Stephanie wants to apologize for some reason, but she bites her tongue as he blinks once, twice, processing the girl in front of him. His eyes widen suddenly.
“Oh shit, Stephanie,” Peter murmurs. “Hey.”
Now. Stephanie is relatively adept at rolling with the punches, willing to leap hurdles when life throws something unexpected her way. But this. This is an event that she couldn’t have predicted at no point in this lifetime or the next.
“You know my name,” she says in disbelief.
“Stephanie Lauter, of course I know your name.” Peter offers a weak grin.
Selfishly, she wishes she discovered this information at a different time, so she can rave over everything that it implies. (At a later time, on a lazy afternoon with limbs so intertwined that Stephanie cannot tell where she ends and Peter begins, she will bring this up again to her lover. He will laugh and reveal that he has kept her in his peripheral ever since she offered him a wooden pencil in third grade, sporting the widest smile he had seen up until that point, brighter than the fluorescents in the ceiling or any glowing ball of gas in space. She’ll kick his shin and call him an idiot, and he’ll point out the grin that slowly creeps across her face is the same one he saw all those years ago, except she now had all of her permanent teeth. She will kick him again just for that.)
Not now, however, because his face screws into something unfamiliar. Rather astutely, she registers that it resembles pain. She furrows her eyebrows at the sight and pushes her glasses into position with her knuckle.
“Do you need anything?” Stephanie offers. “Do you want me to call anyone?”
“No, no one would come, anyway.” He laughs at this, dryly. Peter sobers, considering, before he releases a long breath. He looks back up at her. “I have low blood sugar. I forgot to bring snacks to school—I know I could’ve bought something, but I thought my dad’s assistant was going to pick me up, so I didn’t, and now.”
He clamps his mouth shut. Now he’s here, he doesn’t say.
“This is my apartment,” Stephanie says, gesturing towards the building and feeling a little pathetic as she does so. “I can go in and bring something for you. Just anything sweet?”
Peter inexplicably softens. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “If you have any chocolate, that’d be neat.”
“We have a shit ton of Hershey’s bars,” Stephanie mentions. He hums in approval.
Stephanie orders him to stay put. His eyebrows pinch, as if he has an argument on the tip of his tongue, but she’s pushing through the glass doors before Peter can say anything. Stephanie nearly trips over the first step of the staircase, but she clutches onto the metal handrail in the nick of time, skipping every other step until she reaches the landing to the second floor.
She practically shoves her key into the doorknob and nearly snaps her arm as she twists the door open, not bothering to shut it behind her. After flinging her backpack onto the sofa in the center of the living room, Stephanie sprints to the kitchen and pulls one of the bottom cabinets open, which now acts as her and her dad’s sad excuse of a pantry. She scans the shelves for the prized item, and her eyes light up when she finds it deep inside. Reaching inside, she has to twist her arm so unnaturally that, in an instant, she convinces herself to reorganize her entire kitchen for the sake of optimization.
(She actually will, and he will help despite her vehement protests.)
Chocolate in hand, Stephanie exits her apartment, considerably more exhausted than she was mere minutes ago. She twists the key in the lock, which she left in when she entered, a decision that she will reprimand herself for at a later time. (She will actually forget about this pretty quickly; this isn’t another glimpse into their future.)
For now, she pockets the key in her jacket and descends the staircase with her fingers grazing along the handrail. Stephanie almost bumps into the wall of the narrow hallway, but she doesn’t and the paint continues to chip near the moulding, so she declares herself the winner, as she is the one left intact out of the two of them.
When she exits the building, she wishes she could say the breeze kisses her face gently and softly, perfectly framing her face with stray tendrils of hair. In reality, the wind is violent as it propels in her direction, blowing her hair directly into her face and blocking her vision. She pushes her hair out of her eyes—not quite fighting her demons, but it’s a near thing. A hand still clutching onto stray brown locks, Stephanie regroups with Peter, who remains where she found him. He looks slightly less miserable than before.
“My God, that was fast,” Peter comments.
(Later tonight, he will reveal that he counted Mississippis in her absence—one hundred thirty-two, to be exact. He was, to say the least, pretty damn impressed. She will admit that she ran to her apartment and back, and he will give her a look before saying no shit in a deadpan.)
“I’m nothing if not efficient.” She grins.
Stephanie extends her arm holding the chocolate, an offering he gratefully accepts. Peter rips open the top of the packaging, revealing his temporary savior, yet, when he takes a bite, he still manages to bite through the plastic. He sputters and gingerly removes the piece of plastic off of the tip of his tongue, throwing it onto the ground. She doesn’t comment about the litter—it doesn’t feel like the right time.
It’s incredibly awkward to stand here because she has no idea what she’s allowed to do. Her eyes dart everywhere that isn’t where Peter sits because the average person doesn’t want to be stared at, let alone by a classmate. An acquaintance. Definitely not friends, not by any stretch of the imagination—she won’t dare to blur the lines between delusion and the objective truth—but they aren’t complete strangers, she reminds herself as she recalls that Peter had recognized her immediately.
Rocking back and forth on her feet, Stephanie considers her options. She’ll feel like an asshole if she claps his shoulder and leaves him on the side of the street to fend for himself, but she technically has done her part as a good Samaritan. Or she could sit down next to him for a couple minutes to confirm that Peter will not spontaneously keel over, unable to call for the medical aid he would desperately require. In the likely case that he doesn’t, however, Stephanie will simply look like a fool taking advantage of the opportunity to cling onto someone more popular than her. Because the fact that he’s Peter Spankoffski and she’s Stephanie Lauter still matters. Because miles of distance remain between them, despite their physical proximity.
“You’re thinking very loudly, y'know,” Peter says, quirking an eyebrow. He breaks off a piece of the chocolate bar and pops it in his mouth with an eased mind, a stark difference from the hasty bites from before. When Stephanie doesn’t immediately answer, his confidence falters. He shoots her a wry grin. “Almost obnoxious.”
“What are the odds that you will pass out?” Stephanie asks.
Peter blinks. He wants to laugh, nearly elicits a nervous one, but she is serious with her furrowed eyebrows and mouth drawn in a thin line. (At this moment, she’s so concerned with the possibility of it occurring that she doesn’t realize how idiotic she sounds. He’ll eventually tell her that her question pierced him like a gunshot to his abdomen, not only due to its suddenness, but due to the fact that no one has sounded so concerned for his well-being before.)
“Pretty low, now that I have this,” Peter replies, waving the bar in his grasp. Gradually, he diminishes her worst fears as walls of rock, usually stubborn and unmoving, permit erosion from rushing waters. “Thank you, by the way. Sorry, I don’t think I properly did.”
“You looked to be on the verge of death, don’t apologize,” Stephanie says.
“Wow, I’m flattered.” Peter snorts. He learns forward. “Gentle suggestion for the next guy?”
“‘The next guy’?” Stephanie echoes.
“Just skip to the Pasqualli’s part,” Peter says. “No one really bothers to spend time on the build-up, it’ll just save you the trouble in the long run. And definitely don’t tell him that he looks like he’s on death’s fucking door.”
“Pasqualli’s—” She chokes on her saliva, doubling over in her coughing fit. She inhales, then exhales, then steadies herself. “No 'next guy,’ no Pasqualli’s. I don’t intend to do whatever you’re implying. I could’ve left you out here, but I have, like, morals.”
“Never heard of that.”
“I just wanted to help.”
“Yeah, what the hell is that?”
“Fuck off,” Stephanie says, but there’s no mal intent behind her words, for she says it through laughter, with a stupid grin stretching across her features.
“My GPA is six feet under,” Peter bemoans, “I need you to dumb it down for me.”
“Dude, that’s as simple as I can get,” she says with an eye roll.
(He will eventually tell her that it wasn’t so simple for him to grasp. His whole world finally started spinning sometime between her return with his coveted sugar and the amused turn of her eye. She will tell him that he’s being dramatic, that she truly only wanted to help. Exactly, you were thinking of my best interest, not yours, he will say, barely a murmur, in a tone so delicate that a stranger could be convinced that she leaves trails of peonies and hydrangeas in her wake.)
They lull into a content quiet. Not a silence, not with the car engines roaring past them, the birds chirping in the distance, or the wind overtly preferring Peter over Stephanie.
Something inside her crumbles when she realizes that this is temporary. The second he swallows the last piece of chocolate, the tentative connection they have formed will be forcibly ripped apart, stomped on, dragged through the mud—the whole nine yards to ruin this instance of innocent happiness, truly. God, a whole interaction hinged on a chance collision and a piece of chocolate. It’s a little sad. She’s a little sad.
So, Stephanie just stares because he’s allowing her to. She’s cemented to her spot on the sidewalk because she’s afraid the fragmented illusions in her head will shatter if she dares to take one step to the left. A surprise to herself, she thinks she appreciates his presence and finds that the air around them is easier to breathe in, despite inhaling it everyday.
She knows that this should end at Peter’s insistence. Perhaps childishly, she also knows she cannot bear witness to such a reality. She begins to wriggle herself loose from the silicone that holds their mold.
“So, like, you’re good?” Stephanie asks.
“Yes,” Peter smiles. “Great, even. No need to call the paramedics on my dumbass.”
“Okay, cool.” She flexes her fingers in her struggle to appropriately dislodge herself. “Well, you should probably get home before it gets too dark. I don’t want to keep you here too long.”
Peter’s face shifts. Stephanie doesn’t notice as her words tumble faster out of mouth.
“I'll—uh, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she rushes to finish and turns on her foot.
“Stephanie, slow down,” Peter calls.
Stephanie whips around. He’s standing up now, and she has to tilt her head upwards to meet his eyes.
“Just Steph,” she says instinctively. She cringes.
“What?” A little breathless, amused nevertheless.
“I go by Steph,” she repeats, slowly, not believing herself. Her heart pounds against her rib cage.
“In that case, my friends call me Pete,” Peter tells her.
“'Friends’?” Stephanie echoes. She takes the slightest step forward.
“Do you need me to run around the city and announce it to all of Hatchetfield?” Peter grins wildly. “Because I will, don’t doubt me.”
He starts to run when she vigorously waves her hands for him to stop. “Friends,” she agrees with a nod.
“And people ask their friends if they can come over to their place, especially when they’ve both been standing in front of it for ten minutes.” Peter shifts one leg to the other, shoving his hands into his pockets.
Stephanie wishes she could say she feels the ground beneath her quake, hears fireworks in the distance, sees crystals reflecting their visages. But no. She only absorbs in the boy in front of her because, starting now, she’ll find that he’s all that matters.
And her answer comes as easy as breathing.
“'Course.”
His answer follows a long exhale.
“Yeah?”
Her answer is paired with a shrug because this is casual. She can be casual and dispense a casual answer.
“Stay for as long as you want.”
(A shaky breath will escape his lips, then he will take her hand in between his and brings her left ring finger, adorned with a glistening wedding band, to his lips for a sweet and simple kiss—the seal of an unspoken promise, agreed upon in that one look they shared as teenagers all of those years ago. He did stay. He will stay. Today, tomorrow. Forever.)