Chapter Text
The basement still has a blown light tube so the whole place feels like a morgue in the middle of the night. They've also got the door propped open for air circulation even though it's fucking freezing, a knife-to-the-face kind of cold and damp like wet socks, bearable only because Gale is freshly thirteen and John had bought some skunk weed off Jimmy next door to celebrate. He’d even tidied up the place the best he could before Gale came over, sweeping and vacuuming and spritzing Febreze onto the couch, but all it did was make them feel nauseated so now they're just lying next to each other on the cold rug, bundled up as if they aren't indoors at all.
"You remember when we first met?" John asks.
"Uh huh."
"Prove it."
"You were wearing that stupid reindeer sweater," Gale says. "It wasn't even Christmas," and John rears back to sock him on the arm but he keeps going: "You pushed Billy Harkness off the swing because he stole it from me and he got his hair caught on the chain and Miss Doherty had to come untangle him."
John put his fist back down at his side, oddly proud for some reason. "You remember all that?"
"Her nails were red," Gale recounts. Soft, like he's actually back there, possessed by his past self. "And pointy. And you were just standing there smiling with a missing tooth."
"Which tooth?" John asks, and he means it as a tease, a question that Gale would never be able to answer, except he says, "Bottom right incisor," and John turns his head to stare. Gale is still gazing up at the ceiling, eyes crackled through with red and lids hanging heavy, less guarded than he ever seems to get. Whenever they manage to sneak bourbon off the kitchen shelf, he mostly just goes hot and angry and that’s not really fun for anyone, except John thinks there has to be something healthy about letting that pressure out so he keeps offering and Gale keeps accepting and that's the way it's always been.
He runs his tongue over the sharp edge of his replacement adult tooth. Jimmy had also taught him how to fashion a DIY ventilator using a dryer sheet and a paper towel tube, except it didn't do shit and the whole room is stinking to high hell and John's mom is gonna kill him later, but all that's in the back of his mind in favor of basking hazily in the glow of Gale beside him.
"What was the weather like?" he asks.
"Sunny. First sunny day in November. Still cold as shit."
"What'd we learn that day in class?"
"How to spell 'fantastic'. And Miss Doherty read The Giving Tree and then we colored our version of the book cover. You gave your tree blue leaves. Couldn't even stay inside the damn lines," Gale answers, so smoothly that John would suspect him of making all this shit up, but it's always obvious when he's pulling something out of his ass. This is him telling the truth. His description pings a foggy image of the Egans' fridge from a decade ago—a messily colored tree that John had signed with his own name in the top corner. "Your mom was late picking us up. Got stuck at work. Night shift nurse had called out."
John gapes at him. "Jesus. You got that photographic memory or something?"
Gale shrugs, shaking back into his usual reticent personality. John only knows the word because he'd spied it on one of Gale's report cards, written in neat teacher cursive. He had looked it up afterward, stepping foot into the school library for the first and only time in his academic career so far.
"Something, I guess," Gale says.
He finally looks at John, a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth, and John smiles back. It feels like he spends half his life waiting for Gale to look at him.
Later, John downplays the whole thing to himself because it's fuckin' embarrassing how happy he'd been at Gale's ability to so clearly recall a memory associated with the two of them. Sometimes he still thinks about it though, at random moments like when he's standing in the kitchen and pouring milk into his Frosted Flakes, or when he's stuck in traffic, or when they're at Paulie's and the lights are turned down into a cheesy glow that makes Gale look like Bambi at a club. By then he knows for sure that Gale is smart. More than just smart and probably something else John might figure out a word for if he could be assed to go back to a library. That he remembers basically everything in history including his own journey out of the womb and what was on McDonald's dollar menu in 1992; that remembering how they met has as much significance to Gale as shit on his shoe, but for a single evening, down in the basement cloaked with the stench of weed that he has no hope of getting rid of before Ma gets home, John feels alight; special that Gale had remembered anything about him at all.