Chapter Text
Mikey was glad, at first, when school started again. He'd spent the summer missing his best friend, and wanting to call Gerard a lot but talking himself out of it because he was full of guilt and sorrow, which only got worse the longer he put off calling him. But school meant he couldn't dwell on Gee anymore. He just didn't have the time.
Everyone had talked up the kinds of freedoms and extra “character-building” responsibilities that came with being a junior, but as far as Mikey could tell that was nonsense. Eleventh grade was just tenth grade on faster speed. It was like those egg-fried egg posters in the (well-meaning, utterly useless) guidance counsellors’ office. This is your brain on education. This is your brain on education now.
The teachers really started to push college applications, and the math problems were harder. The other students were amped up too, and not in good ways. Everyone worried about grades. Mainly because the teachers were starting to push college applications in huge ways, Mikey’s class freaked out about the PSAT for weeks before the actual test. They peppered their teachers with questions about questions, but since it was literally illegal to talk about the test at all so their teacher wasn’t much help. The richer kids got their parents to buy them the practice-PSAT packets and bragged to each other about how many thousands of points they got. For the poorer kids, like Mikey, that wasn’t possible. The only thing they could do was study. Consequently the library, which had for two years been one of Mikey’s places of refuge for at least a few hours a day, started to be packed all the time with kids he knew. It got so loud he could barely think. But he couldn’t fault anyone for it, either. He moved from his preferred spot on the floor by the comic books to in behind the stacks of atlases and World Books where no one ever looked and wouldn’t bother him. There were already some kids there, snoozing with study guides open in their laps. He left them alone.
It made him kind of angry, honestly. Not even just for himself; for everyone. The adults at school were always talking about Your Future like it was some benevolent pagan god that took sacrifices of tears and physical energy wasted during hours you should’ve spent asleep. As projects piled on, way faster than Mikey could remember them happening in the past, it seemed like the Future was the only thing that anyone cared about. It wasn’t fair at all.
Some kids wondered if taking the vocational track, like engineering and welding, was any easier. It seemed like it might be. But the kids who left for half the day to start their engineer-weld education came back saying it was just as hard as regular classes, only with more industrial machines.
The tension just floating around in the air was enough to make Mikey’s head throb and his stomach tense. It seemed like everyone else could feel it, too. There were more fights in the hallways, more dramatics in the classroom and in the parking lot after school.
Also a lot more kids were sent home at lunch because of “moral misconduct”, i.e. getting too fresh with their girlfriend or boyfriend of two weeks in the middle of school grounds. Everyone had been pairing off since they were like, twelve, but now it started happening in earnest. Some kids swore they’d get married to their date once they both turned eighteen. Some kids—mostly girls—had to go to the counsellor’s office because they were having such trouble getting rid of their date.
The two health teachers started nervously skirting around the topic of condoms. One time actual wrapped condoms turned up in the guys’ bathroom, and no one knew where from.
Rumours swarmed around like locusts. Not just about the condoms; about everything.
Of the entire grade, only three things were truly good. One, as juniors Mikey and his friends weren’t fresh meat anymore, so slightly less people kicked them around verbally and physically.
Two, there were a lot more electives available along with the mandatory science, math, and English courses. Mikey practiced bass and clarinet in concert band for his Fine Arts elective. For the “future career development” one he took Home Ec, because if he’d gone into woodworking or drafting he would’ve killed someone by accident.
The third good thing was that they got spares sometimes, like last year. Mikey’s was just after eleven. He spent it in the stairwell by the English wing, where he’d write, sleep, or do homework that he definitely hadn’t had time or energy for over the weekend.
By mid-October Mikey had decided once again it was all bullshit. Same old and same fucking old.
He spent as little time physically in school as he could, except on Wednesdays, which were gaming days still.
Him and the guys met in their darkroom and exchanged the coolest or most fucked up rumours they’d heard during the week over soda before they started playing. It was weird without Gerard, but none of them talked about it. Mikey had given them Princess Juana as an archer NPC to balance out their melee versus long-range, and he was thinking of adding another magic user to help out Gulstaff.
Making up new voices was fun—or in Juana’s case, really solidifying voices, while not playing too much into Nightblade’s fantasies. (Though for all of Ray’s more carnal interests in barmaidens, having a lady he could actually speak with in-game had him surprisingly polite and prone to blushing. Frank hadn’t stopped laughing evilly since he’d noticed.)
Titania had all-but disappeared from the game. Neither of the guys asked Mikey why, or asked about her at all.
*
Around December Mikey’s life started to change a little.
Mikey had this thing. It wasn’t exactly a new thing, with him. When he was little all his family used to say that he was a quiet kid who just “got into moods” sometimes, and he definitely had, especially during the shitty Jersey winters. For some reason his moods had suddenly gotten worse.
There were weeks—literally--that he wanted to do nothing more than lay on the couch with his mom watching Wheel of Fortune every afternoon way into the night and not want to get up, ever, even at her half-hearted suggestions; or he could get up, but he couldn’t focus on anything, couldn’t bother to write a bad poem for English or list out basic food safety precautions in Home Ec. Definitely couldn’t bother to clean his room, even as it got like, genuinely disgusting.
Then there were other weeks where Mikey wanted to do everything, all the time, but he couldn’t focus enough to decide what to do; like, an abnormal amount of not being able to focus. He couldn’t sleep and everything happened so quickly. It felt like his head was a steel machine full of loose gears that were creaking and jangling apart.
And always, always, Mikey thought too much. He’d do something mildly weird in public, or accidentally misspeak, and the instant would loop over and over in his head like a stuck tape. He hated being in front of people; sometimes he wouldn’t be able to breathe.
None of it would’ve mattered on its own. The problem was that the better teachers at his school started to notice his bad weeks. They started calling him up to the front of the class after everyone else had trudged out, asking him, “How’s your stress? How’re things going at home?” The kind of questions you ask when you think someone’s at risk.
He lied to them, of course, but still.
Mikey wasn’t stupid. He knew that that wasn’t a normal way to be. No one had ever told him anything about shit, as far as mental and maybe emotional problems went, but he knew from normal.
The problem was that shrinks and meds and hospitals or whatever weren’t cheap. Especially not for ratty geeks in Essex county. His mom didn’t have a lot of money, and while Mikey’s job restocking shelves at the bookstore was okay for a high school geek, it was still retail. He literally couldn't afford to be crazy or whatever, and he couldn’t afford to tell anybody either. But he couldn’t fail out of high school. Couldn’t risk the better, well-meaning teachers finding out and ruining his whole life.
He had to find a way to deal on his own.
During the really bad days he started skipping school. The rest of the time, he did what all kids he knew did: he faked it.
First he tried smiling a lot. Teachers looked at him with sharp eyes when they thought he wasn’t watching, and Ray and Frank levelled with him one lunch hour about how creepy that was and what was up with him. No dice.
Next he tried not showing a lot of emotion at all, ever.
He’d done it before, kind of, when he was just a kid in elementary school. Mikey hadn’t talked with the other kids much (until he and Gerard had gotten paired up as reading buddies in Mikey’s third grade); all the teachers had thought he was slow, although they’d never actually out and say that in front of him or to his mom. Mikey had still been able to tell. It was the way they’d talked to him, almost baby-voiced even though he’d been nine. Now, though, it was different. For one thing he was doing it on purpose. For another it was expected; being a “sullen teenager” was normal in a way that being a un-talkative little kid wasn’t.
He didn’t make jokes in class, didn’t smile that much (even with his friends), didn't volunteer a lot of information. It felt weird at first, but Mikey could deal with weird.
What was important was that it worked. The teachers stopped asking to talk to him one-on-one. His friends were still concerned, but after the first few times he waved off their concerns they stopped hovering over him. Frank and Ray paid more attention to him than anybody, and eventually they were only asking him every so often if he was okay.
Mikey got pretty good at pretending to be okay.
*
In early February things started changing a little more, because he started drinking after classes. At first it was casually, for lack of anything better to do.
He chilled out with a group of kids—none of them were actually of age--in the back lot of the Dollartree a couple blocks from his house, just standing around knocking beers down. One of them, Graham, was nineteen, which was close enough to twenty-one that his fake ID was actually passable. Graham bought the beer and the rest of them paid up to get into the cooler. They could spend the whole afternoon there, easy.
One day one of the other kids turned to Mikey after she finished her second Budweiser and said, “So Anthony Kyshenko’s having a bonfire later on the field out back of his house.”
“… alright?” Mikey replied, still holding his own (second, half-full) beer. The girl’s name was Heather. She’d never spoken to him before.
Heather shifted on her feet, looking over at the cars passing by on the street that surrounded the parking lot. Her rabbit necklace glittered above her winter coat. “You doing anything tonight?”
Mikey considered the parking lot, his home, and his shoes for a second. He took another drink. “Not really.”
So he went.
Heather turned out to want him around as a kind of chaperone on the way to the bonfire, so creepy dudes would catcall her less on the train. When they made it to the house and its backyard that opened into a shallow field of wheat and trodden-flat snow, she nodded to Mikey and then peeled off into the crowd alone.
Mikey looked around for a minute, not upset but at a bit of a loss, until someone passing by pointed him to the booze table with a “Enjoy yourself, man.”
There was a lot more beer at the bonfire than there ever was by the Dollar Tree. There was weed, too. Mikey took a joint when it was being passed around. It was, subjectively, pretty good shit. Mikey usually got paranoid if he smoked anywhere that he wasn’t completely comfortable in, the really persistent kind of paranoia that got down deep in your skull, like a migraine. But for once, he didn’t worry that a bunch of cops and his mother were hidden with microphones behind every closed door.
Maybe because they were in a field. He also hadn’t eaten much that day, maybe that had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, pleasant static buzzed in his head, fogging up his worry-bored-worry thoughts.
Mikey made to pass the joint back over in the huddle again, but he missed the next person’s hand. The whole group laughed.
He felt distantly like he should hunch in on himself and hug his sides. Or just bail right then. That’s what he’d normally do. But instead, he’d started pot-laughing right along with them.
Then a miracle happened: the other kids laughed too. Not at him, but with him. They shook their heads knowingly. Someone clapped him on the back, which made him cough out a plume of smoke, like a firedrake, and the others launched into flat-out giggles.
Watching them through slightly foggy eyes, Mikey realized three things very suddenly, like a spotlight knocking over a bunch of dominos in his head. It was easier for him to get along with people when he was pretending to be okay. It was way easier to pretend to be okay when he was drunk. And easier still when he was drunk and a little stoned.
He’d kept laughing, and the party had moved on. He was fine. He felt fine.
It’d been months and months since he’d felt fine.
Two weeks later and seemingly out of the blue, another kid in their illegal drinking group walked up to him. Her name was Beth; Mikey was pretty sure she was a friend of a friend, or he went to church with her cousin. They had talked a few times, but that wasn’t what made Mikey immediately turn to her when she came over to his spot, leaning on the fence.
“Want to go to a concert with me?” She asked.
Hope beating his chest, Mikey said sure.
The concert turned out to be at a house party that featured a living room wreathed with thick sweet-smelling smoke. It was hot enough inside that Mikey had to ditch his warm jacket and gloves on the stoop. He kept his beanie on, for protection.
The contact high from just being in the building was enough to leave Mikey as buzzed as the bonfire had. On top of that, Beth and Mikey each downed a few Styrofoam cups of alcohol before they went into the basement to the show.
He hadn’t been having a particularly good week but by the time Mikey finished his second drink he was feeling pretty good again. It was even better downstairs, surrounded by music and energy and light. Mikey loved it. He might’ve told Beth that he loved her, and he was pretty sure she had said it back, but that didn’t matter, she was as wasted as him.
Mikey felt good; that was the point; and he was so glad he felt good. It was why he’d agreed to show up. Why he’d been waiting since Heather’s invitation to Anthony Kyshenko’s bonfire, not quite comfortable enough to try his own luck with the IDs. He’d figured that if it’d happened once then it was bound to happen at least one more time.
He was glad that Beth had been the one to invite him, though. She was pretty cool.
She was also a decent kisser, which Mikey found out for a while after the band’s second set, as the two of them made out in the corner with their hands up each other’s shirts.
And— it wasn’t a spiritual experience or anything, but it felt kind of close. It was the first time that Mikey had touched anybody like that. Definitely the first time anyone else had touched him. He couldn’t believe it. Mikey was almost seventeen, which was practically ancient as far as getting to first base went. He’d been trying, poorly, to get girls to let him make out with them and feel them up for years. And now it was happening.
This is it, he kept thinking a little dazedly. This was all he’d needed to do, this whole time.
At the end of the night Beth had been laughing into his shoulder. He’d half-carried, half-leaned into her on the way back up the basement stairs. They’d ended up in the crowded kitchen. They had an impromptu nap together on the floor in the corner, half-collapsed onto each other’s shoulders.
When Mikey woke up, there was one other person who was passed out on their side by the fridge. The lights were on and buzzing, and absolutely everyone else had left.
Mikey watched the ceiling for a second. “Me, too,” he said to the lights, and then snickered to himself. Buzz, buzz.
Someone came in the through the living room and then stumbled down beside him. It was Beth, but Mikey had to blink a couple of times to get his eyes clear enough to see her. “Hey,” he said, hoping that she’d want to make out again.
“Hey,” she replied. She still sounded a little drunk, too. But she was sitting out of ideal kissing-distance.
Mikey leaned forward to fix that, but Beth shuffled away a little, so he stopped. Was something wrong? He couldn’t tell. She didn’t seem like something was wrong.
“Uh, I just wanted to tell you,” Beth said, mouth shaping the words exaggeratedly. She stared in concern at the other side of the kitchen—someone had left the oven open—before she blinked and then looked back at him. “I just wanted to tell you, that, I have a girlfriend,” she said.
Mikey blinked. A girlfriend. “Wow,” he said.
Beth smiled goofily. “I know, right? She’s—she’s really cool.” She stretched out the ‘ooh’ in cool and then giggled. “Like, we’re not, y’know, dating right now. But we were. And we might, again, later, we always—we always do this. But, I just wanted to let you know.”
“Okay?”
Beth nodded and patted the linoleum floor. “Yeah. Just so, y’know. You’re not offended that I don’t want to date you.”
Oh. Mikey hadn’t really been thinking about dates, before, in the basement with her. Really at all. Maybe he should’ve been. He felt his face heat up and was vaguely ashamed. “Okay,” he repeated. “That’s—yeah, okay. That’s cool.”
Beth smiled again. “You’re pretty cool, Mikey Way,” she said, and then she leaned in to press a smacking kiss to his lips.
It wasn’t like making out, but it was still kissing. Mikey’s heart hummed. He laughed when she pulled away.
“This was a good night,” Beth said, satisfied. She leaned back against the cupboards they’d collapsed against and tilted her head up, closing her eyes like she was basking in the sun.
It was March in Jersey, there wouldn’t be proper sunlight until like nine in the morning. Still, Mikey closed his eyes, too. It had been a good night. He hadn’t had to think, almost at all, and he’d talked to people.
The next day he’d had a hangover so bad his head had rang like a nauseous bell every time he’d moved more than an inch, but that didn’t matter. Not even close.
*
Mikey started asking around school where the parties or scene shows were gonna be. Any time he got an answer, he followed up by showing up at the event.
He wasn’t exactly a kid who looked like he should be told where parties were, but that was an easy fix. He just needed to plan it, like he planned a dungeon crawl.
The first objective was to look better, and have a way to get around without a license that was more reliable than getting a ride in someone else’s car. Easy enough. He stopped eating anything except for coffee and water for a little while, bought a couple better shirts and some Aqua-Net for his hair, and a bus pass. He got a lot of uncomfortable cramps from his empty stomach, and he had to dodge his mom’s concerned glances, and he still had the glasses, but none of that could be helped.
It seemed to work. Every few weekends he would go out, get buzzed, laugh with a group. Be okay. In school’s food chain he was still right above plankton-level, but that turned out to be his advantage. No one knew him at the parties, so no one automatically turned him away for not being cool enough.
Again, Mikey wasn’t stupid. He didn’t party anywhere he wouldn’t walk by himself, and he learned to avoid the places where most of the people were (actually) over twenty-one because those could get ugly really fast. He also avoided the smaller ones that were basically just widely-advertised birthday celebrations, the ones where everyone knew everyone, because he could get turned away at the door.
Mostly Mikey stuck to house parties of the kind that you’d see in like, films about the debauchery of American youth. Unlike in films there weren’t red cups at those parties, which was weirdly disappointing, but they were Styrofoam ones and individual bottles of beer. As long as Mikey could still drink he’d go with it.
He made a couple of friends. Kind-of friends; scene acquaintances. People who’d welcome him inside if they saw him at the door. Just a few.
And then a few more.
Over weeks, he kept showing up places, and more people started recognizing him. People started wanting him there.
It was legitimately surprising to him when it started falling into place. “Falling into place” was what Frank had called it when Mikey had told him and Ray, like it was this big, elaborate plan that Mikey known about all along but hadn’t spilled to anybody. But that wasn’t true at all. It had just happened.
Nothing outside this weird little bubble in his life had really changed. His job was still mediocre. He still had three real friends, maximum (although Ray had started inviting this new kid, Alex, to the games, so maybe he’d have four someday). He never drank in his house. His mom thought he was going to Ray’s all the time. No one slipped him answers to tests or asked him out to see a movie or offered to get coffee with him. No one new signed up to his D&D group poster he’d carefully stenciled out and taped to the walls by the front doors of school.
But one day, someone stopped him in the hall to tell him there was a party over in the big house on Elm street that night. He hadn't even asked them.
And then, dotted along the next few weeks, more people came up to him until they were almost a steady stream. Until he was going out every weekend and sometimes on Thursdays.
The kids who talked to him weren’t the party-hard sports team guys or their varsity girlfriends, at first. They were the normal kids. Under-radar, mid-seventies average, Walmart-shoes-wearing types.
And then a couple of the richer baby-rock types talked to him, the ones with their ironic Beatles t-shirts and sweeping hair.
Then some of the richer stoner kids. Then some senior stoners (grade twelves, not old people).
Then some grade twelve white-car-driving rich kids who wouldn’t lend people a pencil if they lived in another neighbourhood. They all wanted him to know, there was a bash they were throwing this weekend, tonight, for a friend’s little sister’s birthday’s going away end of exams celebration present get-together concert. Was he in?
Mikey couldn’t believe it.
Somehow, against all precedents, he was popular. At least in this one weird piece of his life. (While reading Lord of the Flies in English he learned it was called a ‘microcosm’.) He felt like Batman. Him as Bruce Wayne was the one never breaking out of moods, walking home with his two friends and working at Barnes And Noble for minimum wage.
Otherwise, he could be this. The guy rich kids talked to, invited to their houses for booze and good times.
Fuck yeah he was in.
*
Even more surprising to Mikey than people he didn’t know actively inviting him to parties was that, at the parties, there were people who actively wanted to have sex with him.
Him, Mikey Way. The guy with a V-card stapled to his forehead. People wanted to do stuff from making out with him (like Beth in the corner of that first basement show) to actually having actual, laying-down sex.
It was, as Mikey found out, kind of weird, and an entirely separate enterprise than jerking off. But amazing. Never in his life had Mikey dreamed—well, no. He’d dreamed of it plenty. Never in his life had he thought it’d actually happen. Not like this.
He lost his virginity in April, on the floor of a bathroom in one of the richest houses he’d ever been in. Later he’d lose the girl’s name, the address of the house, and who invited him to the party to begin with. He would mostly remember the way everything looked: the two-fridged kitchen his whole living room could’ve fit in; the cabanas by the heated pool outside; the heated pool that people were swimming in despite the 26*F air; and one of the bathrooms which had marble everything, varnished dark wood floor instead of linoleum tiles, and throw-rugs that looked like they belonged in the 70s. He was pretty sure the rug he laid on while a girl from another school rode him was made of actual unicorn hair, it was so soft.
Mikey didn’t know which school the girl went too, or if she was beautiful or not. He was pretty sure that they’d used a condom. He didn’t know if he was good. Probably not.
But she’d felt good. After they’d stumbled into the bathroom, both of them drunk and high-giggling, she’d shucked her shoes and leggings but kept her skirt on. She’d stripped off her tank top and let him fumble around with her bra and hike her skirt up. Her underwear had been light purple. Not lace or anything, just regular cotton panties like he’d always seen in plastic four-for-six packs when he passed the Ladies Clothing section in Walmart. That’d surprised him for some reason. Then she’d taken them off too, and Mikey’s brain had disengaged.
He’d fumbled his jeans and underwear down, and the boner he’d been sporting for about ten minutes made its presence known. They’d laid down on the 70s-unicorn rug. Her breasts had felt full and soft under his hands. Her stomach pouched out in a little roll above her skirt when she leaned forward, and it was soft too.
Even while it was happening he couldn’t believe it was actually happening. Even after he was done, and he was kissing the girl and feeling her up while she did her own thing with her hands (he honestly wasn’t sure what she was doing, he’d never fingered someone before), he couldn’t believe it. The endorphins rushed around his head so much it felt like a waterfall. He was almost giddy, would’ve been over the goddamn moon without the dampening of the vodka cooler and quarter of a brownie he’d had.
The girl left at some point after she’d came. She put her shirt and underwear back on and took her shoes and leggings with her.
Mikey had stayed there on the floor with his pants around his knees, dizzy and a little in awe of… something. Himself. Or maybe the universe. He didn’t think about anything at all.
Drunk was good and high was better, and sex was the best of the three.
Mikey started experimenting more, mixing different drinks and different highs with different people. The second and third together without the first. The third alone, several times in close consecutive events. Adding rock and roll into the mix just to fulfill the stereotype.
When he was younger he would’ve thought it’d go terribly wrong at some point, that he’d overdose or wake up naked with a new tattoo in front of his mom. But that didn’t happen. Mostly it went well, for him. He’d heard enough about most of the stuff he took to not overdo it at a time, and he never went near anything with needles because—well—just because. (Even the thought of it was like cold lead in his entire circulatory system for reasons he didn’t, wouldn’t think about.) He only went to parties of kids he knew, too, so it wasn’t like people were pulling out garbage bags full of cocaine.
The worst that happened to him wasn’t even so bad, it was kind of funny: one night he drank a bunch of iced tea that turned out to have been iced mushroom tea. He hadn’t been expecting it—who the fuck makes mushroom tea in Jersey? —so he hadn’t even known he was high, but it’d taken him three hours to make a twenty-minute trip back to Frank’s house after the party was done. He’d threaded down to the shore and then back again, detouring through a ragged strip of woods leftover from an optimistic city planner’s attempt at a woodland park. All he’d had to do was cross the street from the party house and continue left.
His Joy Division tape had made a damn fine soundtrack to his long walk, at least. He’d had his Walkman on but had been too blasted to recognize the headphones against his ears, so he’d looked up at the stars spinning gently through the city smog and thanked Ian Curtis for guiding him.
It wasn't like he was obsessed with it, either. Mikey did other stuff besides party. He talked to his friends too sometimes, and not just weekend-partying friends; his actual friends, who sat with him during lunch at school and gamed with him and knew his mom.
The guys were doing alright. Ray was just as stressed as him, academically, because of the tests and pressure and shit, but he was working super hard and getting through it. Frank, the lucky bastard, still had another year before he hit the PSATs, so he wasn’t much worried about anything. Neither of them had been having such a strange, miraculous year so far as Mikey had, but that was okay.
He told Frank and Ray all about it. Bragged about it, really. It seemed only fair to tell them, since they couldn’t live it with him.
In the school’s darkroom he wondered out loud what he was now that he wasn’t a virgin. (Other than a real man, and whatever).
Frank had suggested ‘virgout’, and Ray seconded the term with all the solemnity such a thing required. Mikey had laughed.
He still noticed their lingering stares when they thought he wasn’t watching. He didn’t know if they were jealous, or worried, or what. He couldn’t remember how long it’d been since they’d properly hung out outside of D&D. It felt bad, a little, like disappointment and hollowness, but Mikey figured they’d tell him if something was wrong.
At home his mom was starting to get concerned with how much he was out of the house. That was easier to deal with than his friends' dissapointment. Mikey just lied and said that Frankie had gotten a job at the theatre so he got them in for free a lot, and she eased up.
Lying to his mom outright usually felt bad. This time it didn’t bother him so much. Mikey wasn’t doing anything dangerous when he went out, not really. He was just having fun.
It was still fun by the middle of June. But the fun was different; it had gotten to be kind of a blur. Bodies in the dark.
Mikey dated a little that year. Nothing that lasted very long, certainly nothing he was planning a wedding over like some of his classmates apparently were.
Mostly he just hooked up. A lot. Maybe he lost count on how many girls, exactly, “a lot” was. It got to the point when he could show up in a party in Jersey where people his age had the hairspray ‘Rebel Rebel’ look going on and he’d have slept with at least a quarter of the girls there in one capacity or another.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, or if he was supposed to feel anything except proud. If he’d been a girl sleeping with dudes he would’ve been a slut, but instead if you asked anybody he was just “that guy who knows people, you know?”
A year ago Mikey wouldn’t’ve thought anybody other than his friends would recognize his name if you asked them. Except maybe, like, the staff of the comic book store. Certainly not most of the older kids in his school.
He could live with being the guy who knew people.
*
What with the underage drinking, smoking, sex, long buses home or waking up hungover in an unfamiliar bathroom (or field or community centre or basement); and then school, work, gaming, buying CDs, practicing bass, watching Wheel Of Fortune, the gears in his brain, not hanging out with his friends… with all of that, the year seemed to go by quickly.
Then suddenly it was the last day and Mikey’s report card was being pressed into his hands.
Mikey was still a little stoned from the weed that Benjamin Hartford had shared with him at lunch, the kind of stoned where you lose bits of time in between doing things. He didn’t remember walking up to the front of the class, but then his homeroom teacher was right in front of him. He blinked at her. She raised her eyebrows until he took the hint and nodded, holding onto the envelope with both hands. Mikey managed to smile in a way he hoped seemed polite and then scurried to the back corner of the class, where his seat was.
You were supposed to bring your report card home and open it with your parents, but literally no one ever did. The prospect was terrifying enough without waiting until you got the whole way home. All around him kids were clutching their desks, or each other, holding their breaths as they stared at their own envelopes like they were rattlesnakes. Or, more specifically, like the envelopes were altars for the Future that they’d sacrificed to, which would now tell them what was going to happen.
Mikey decided to do his quick, like a bandaid. He took in a deep breath, ripped the top flap of the envelope open from the corner, and slid his doom out onto the desk.
A second later he exhaled shakily. Somehow, damn near miraculously, he’d finished enough of his assignments to pass. It wasn’t pretty but he hadn’t failed out.
While he was still staring at “Total Average: 67%”, the final bell buzzed loudly. A split-second later cheers and the thuds of thrown books exploded all around him.
The kids in his classroom were laughing and yelling too, some of them tossing their loose papers in the air. Mikey ducked past all of the fallout and rushed into the hallway, clutching his report card under his arm and his backpack in his other hand, suddenly eager to get the hell out. He shot a passable imitation of a happy face to Mr. Collins, who nodded back from where he was watching over everybody as they streamed down the stairwell.
Mikey realized when he was halfway down the stairs that he’d forgotten to pick up his yearbook, but that was alright. He never really used those things anyway.
On the front lawn of the school there was a huge herd of seniors that must have gathered out there before the bell, probably to count down the final seconds of their high school careers. They were standing close together, throwing books and loose papers, pencils, calculators, probably some tests, and their report cards up into the air in celebration; they weren’t transcripts that you used for university, so there really wasn’t any point to keeping them once the year was over. Some of the seniors were hugging, some were crying, most were cheering. All of them were acting like they were the only people in the whole world.
That would be him next year. It was bizarre. Mikey stopped outside the doors and watched them for a minute, before he had to move forwards or be knocked over by the exodus behind him.
It was hot as fuck out, and Mikey hadn’t cleaned his glasses in a while. He squinted at the sunlight. There were Frank and Ray-shaped smudges waving at him from the end of the sidewalk.
Mikey hurried up to them. When their faces finally cleared in his vision, he smiled for real.
“Another one down,” Frank called out, throwing his skinny arm around Mikey as soon as he’d joined their huddle. He made a victory V with both hands.
Mikey swiped at his friend’s arms. “You’re going to get fucking shot, man, put those away!” Frankie just cackled.
“What’d you get, dude?” Ray asked, also coming in for a hug on Mikey’s other side.
Mikey managed to wriggle free of Frank’s clutches to side-hug Ray, keeping his report card’s blank side up where it was pressed under his left arm. After he’d pulled back he shrugged. “Same old,” he said, which was a lie, he usually got around 72% as an average. But he didn’t want or need the guys to be worried about him. “You?” He asked quickly.
Ray grinned. “Seventy-four.”
“Eighty-one, motherfuckers!” Frank crowed.
“Shut up, Frank, your classes are easier and you can read better because you're closer to the ground,” Mikey sniped, but he didn’t mean it and all three of them knew it.
The three of them walked together, talking and joking and jostling each other’s shoulders, getting quieter only when screeching cars full of graduated seniors passed by.
They took the long way, which was essentially a circle they walked backwards around their neighbourhood from the school, since none of them particularly needed or wanted to be home too quickly. When they hit Ray’s house first they all promised to call each other as soon as possible over vacation, and they waved to his mom and brother who were sitting and talking on the front steps.
Ray beamed at them and then went to see his family, holding out his report card first thing.
Mikey and Frank continued down the street. Mikey used his own report card to blot some sweat from his forehead, hoping it wouldn’t stink it up too much. It was pretty quiet, no one else on the street except them, and mercifully it was quiet in his head too. Their sneakers on the cracked sidewalk sounded like the last survivor's in a Romero movie. Mikey should have a 'Dawn Of The Dead' marathon over the break, he thought.
“You know, Gee’s gonna be done classes now, too,” Frank said suddenly, after a few minutes of companionable walking. He turned so he was facing Mikey perpendicularly, the better to see Mikey with.
Mikey knew that Gee would be done classes, obviously. It’d been on the back of his mind all day. “Yeah, totally,” he said. “I think the university’s actually break in like, April. I don’t think he’s back home yet though.”
“You don’t?” Frank was giving him the fish-eyes.
“No? I mean, I haven’t seen him around, y’know.” Mikey hadn’t called him, either, and he’d done a good job of not thinking about that until Frank had brought it up all of a sudden. Mikey had been feeling pretty good, if too hot; floaty from the weed and happy to be done with school, but now he frowned. “What’s it to you?”
Frank shrugged, still walking sideways like a crab. “You guys were fighting last year,” he said, “I get it. And then, after the… well,” he looked away for a second, and then back. “I mean, dude.”
“Just spit it out already.”
Frank stopped walking and sighed. When he looked up his expression was determined and kind of angry, which, what the hell. “I didn’t think you’d be someone who has a problem with your friend being gay. That’s all.”
Mikey stopped in his tracks, too, although he was farther up the sidewalk than Frank so he had to turn back to look at him. His brain was filled with static. His arm that was holding his report card was stuck rod-straight to his side. “How can you—why the fuck would you even think—”
“How can I not think, Mikey?” Frank snapped. “He tells us and then sure, you go to his graduation and act like everything’s fine, but otherwise you just totally freeze him out. You haven’t talked to him all year! You act like he doesn’t even exist.”
“I wasn’t!” Mikey snapped back. “That’s—I was busy, that’s all. Wait, how do you even know if I’ve talked to him or not?”
“Busy partying, sure,” Frank said, frowning too. “That doesn’t make you too busy to pick up a fucking phone, man. Or at least send him a postcard, or an email or something.” Frank took a step back and spread his hands placatingly. “Look, I just—I think, he was your best friend so you should talk to him. Especially if you’re not avoiding him because of the gay thing. He’s gonna be missing you.”
Sage fucking advice coming from a kid who was wearing a Ninja Turtle backpack and had been holding onto both of the straps while they walked home like he was hiking up a mountain. “Of course I’m not avoiding him because he told us he’s gay, I—” Mikey swallowed, pressing his hand to his eyes. “You don’t get it.”
“Maybe not. You should still call him,” Frankie said more quietly. “Ray thinks so too. Just because you don’t want to hang around us that much anymore doesn’t mean we can’t tell when something’s going on with you, you know. We’re your friends whether you want us to be or not.”
Mikey felt like shit. “I don’t—it’s not that I don’t want to hang around you, man, I just.” He pulled his hand away and fixed his glasses.
“Yeah, we know.”
Frank stared at him for a second, looking sombre. Then he stepped forward quickly and gave Mikey a tight hug, pulling back before Mikey could do much more than huff in surprise. “Look, have a good summer, alright?” He said.
It was only then that Mikey realized they were actually standing outside Frankie’s house. “Oh. Yeah. Uh, you too, man.”
Frank nodded, and then smiled, a little wryly. “You can’t get rid of us that easy,” he told him. “Just so you know. We’re gonna be showing up at your place all the time.”
Mikey wasn’t sure what Frank meant, or what was going on anymore. He was hurt and confused but at least Frank was smiling at him. “Sure,” he said, nodding, rubbing his arm with his right hand. “It’d be good to see you.”
He watched as Frank nodded back, once, and then walked up to his house and closed the door.
-=-=-=-