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“Big M!”
Marty flips over on his bed, a sudden surge of movement from his previous stillness. He places his hands over his eyes, pressing into them until he sees stars and gritting his teeth at the memory.
Goddamnit, Needles. There isn’t another soul on this planet that knows how to get into his head like this, a bug worming its way into his brain, making its home deep in his sulci. Skittering legs across hemispheres, a spiky sort of tickle that just won’t leave him be.
He replays the argument over and over in his head.
“You ditched, McFly! You can’t take that back!”
“I didn’t ditch, I saw the writing on the wall!”
Ugh… the numbers of infinitely better comebacks swirl around his head, mocking him.
“Still makes you a chicken! Getting out right before it gets risky? Where’s your sense of adventure?!”
“Must have left it at home.”
…“Left it at home”? “Left it at home”?? Marty almost thinks he deserves to be called names for that. That was awful.
If he’d just had a second more to think, he’d have won that argument. Just a moment and he’d have brought up that time Needles literally backed out of the ropes course. The signage for that place has ‘adventure’ in its name. That was such an easy comeback and Marty fumbled.
What was he thinking? “Left it at home”? If he weren’t so angry, he’d be embarrassed. Even when Needles twists and turns the conversation in such a way that Marty is forced to compete against him or do something he doesn’t want to, usually he manages to handle it with grace. “Left it at home”. Not in all the time he’s known Needles has he ever said something so weak, he thinks. Maybe not in his whole life.
For all the years he’s known him, Needles has been nothing but trouble. A nuisance.
Even including…
He lets out a strained sigh and turns out the light beside his bed. No use in stewing over it.
What’s done is done.
“Hey, McFly,”
Needles had started dyeing his hair black in the weeks after he shaved most of it off. Marty wasn’t sure how he felt about it. A patchy, poorly distributed dye job that left the awful haircut looking even worse.
He’d kept it up for years, doing significantly better following his first few attempts, never even letting his lighter brown roots peek through.
But just last week, he’d bleached it all and dyed it blue. It looks ridiculous. He looks like a troll doll. Hopefully he comes to his senses and dyes it black again soon.
“McFly,”
Marty keeps his head down. He and Needles don’t have normal conversations anymore: friends for a day and nothing more. The other seems keen on bothering him, though.
“McFly!”
“What?” Marty finally responds, turning to face the other. Needles, clearly not expecting him to actually respond, startles and goes a little red.
“Uh…”
“Never mind,” Marty dismisses, “jeez, what is it with you?”
“Wait! Wait,” Needles grabs him by the arm, and Marty pulls out of his grip almost immediately. He stands with his arms crossed and waits for Needles to say whatever it is he wants to say.
“Look, I was thinking,” Needles swallows, suddenly looking anywhere but at him, “you know, we’re still kinda friends, right? Just nobody knows?”
That’s a stretch. They were never really friends, not even at the beginning, and Needles’ constant… well, needling, makes it real hard to think of him as anything other than an annoyance.
“Where are you going with this, Needles?”
“We could be something else that nobody knows.”
Marty blinks. “What?!”
“Shhh!” Needles rushes forwards and clamps a hand over his mouth, “Really, McFly? Are you trying to draw attention to us?”
Marty pries his hand off of his mouth. “Are you- what are you implying?”
Needles shrugs, rolling his eyes. “Look, I’m not, you know, gay or anything, but neither of us have a girlfriend right now. So, why not?”
Opening and closing his mouth, shocked speechless, Marty seems to do his best impression of a fish. Needles waves a hand.
“And I don’t like you like that, but, you know,” Needles’s face is full-on beet red, now, and Marty thinks his own is likely much the same, “It’ll be fun! Just messing around, right?”
He punches Marty’s arm. Marty is still at a loss for words,
“Nothing serious,” he assures, and Marty couldn’t tell you why, but his eyes fall to that gap-toothed grin of his, and he finds himself imagining…
“Or are you too chicken?”
The spell is cast and, from there, Marty has little other choice than to say yes.
He grabs Needles by the front of his shirt and yanks him forwards, the kiss something angry and hungry in a way Marty could never imagine doing with a girl.
The initial… Marty’s hesitant to call it a relationship- had lasted longer than either of them expected. A good five months, which is a long time when you can’t stand each other.
Then they- well, they didn’t ‘break up’, because they weren’t really together-together to begin with, but they ended things by crashing and burning spectacularly.
An argument dangerously public, a screaming match nobody but them knew the origins of.
He wouldn’t be so lucky that Needles leaves him alone. He acts every bit like a crazy ex and Marty can’t even talk about it with anyone.
At the very least, they don’t talk about those months. But for maybe two weeks after, they avoided each other like the plague, before being pulled back into each other’s orbits again and their previous rivalry resumed. This time, with more fuel to the fire.
God, Marty wishes he could take it back. Do you know how much ammo it gives someone when they know your preferences, how you kiss, where you like to be grabbed? His only saving grace is the knowledge Needles will never go public about what Marty did with him, because that would invariably ruin them both.
From across the cafeteria, Needles is laughing with some friends of his. Head thrown back, mouth wide open, full body laughing at something that’s probably not that funny at all. Curls of black hair bobbing up and down with each gasp and intake of air, eyes squeezed shut. His profile is crisp and sharp, his jawline-
“Marty?”
Marty jumps, wrenching his eyes away from the boy at the far table on the other end of the room. When he turns his head, sheepishly raising a hand to the back of his neck, Paul raises an eyebrow at him.
“Are you even listening?” he asks, frowning.
Marty hunches in on himself, heat rising to his face. “Of course I am!”
“Dude, you were totally zoned out!” Lee laughs, gesturing in the direction he’d been staring in. “Hey, Needles is over there!”
Fighting to keep calm, he turns his gaze anywhere but where Lee is pointing. Paul squints at him.
“Is everything okay?”
Marty waves him off, “Yeah, yeah, just spaced, like Lee said.”
Humming, Paul seems to accept the answer, for now. “Ohh-kay then. Well, we’re still fine to practice in your garage tonight, right?”
“Huh? Yeah, should be.” Marty’s eyes trail unwittingly back to where Needles is, all the way over at his table.
He likes girls. Really, he does. From what he’s seen, everyone seems to act like it’s one or the other, guys or girls, and if you like guys then you’re gay and if you like girls then you’re normal. But Marty likes both, and he feels pretty normal. He doesn’t know if there’s a word for that, or if that’s even a thing you can be. Lord knows he can’t ask about it.
“You shouldn’t let him get to you like this,” Paul says, staring at Needles, too. “You know he’s nothing but trouble.”
I like a bit of trouble, he doesn’t say. Unfortunately, Lee does.
“Aw, well, trouble’s awesome!” Lee announces, slamming a hand down. Then, at Paul’s look of disapproval, he simmers down a touch. “Within reason, of course. Needles does nothing but bother you and you shouldn’t give him the time of day.”
Lee says that last bit with a nod and an almost rehearsed cadence, parroting what Paul has said on numerous occasions.
See, though, the thing is, Marty doesn’t want to give him the time of day. But Needles is the needle in the haystack of his brain, impossible to find, impossible to remove, here to stay.
After lunch, Marty corners Needles outside the band room. He drags him inside, and away from prying eyes, they revisit old times, ending only with the empty promises of ‘never again’.
Marty thinks he might be in love with Jennifer Parker.
Alright, alright, okay. Yes, he’s only spoken to her once. No, he doesn’t know her any more than he knows the other girls in his class. But she’s drop-dead gorgeous and what he’s heard of her speaking, she’s kind and smart and… Marty wants to get to know her more.
So maybe not in love-in love. She’s an aspiration, an acquaintance not yet made, a connection not yet formed. He wants to know everything about her: her favorite color, her favorite songs, how her face scrunches when she laughs…
He wants to be in love with her, even if he isn’t yet.
So when he’s trying to shoot his shot, and Needles of all people shows up and spoils the moment, he finds his blood boiling.
Jennifer walks off, moment missed, and Marty can see the alignment they’d had thrown off. Not gone completely, but knocked askew.
Marty was going to go to Doc’s after he asked Jennifer out… he stalks off to find where Needles drove off to instead; Doc can wait a little while more.
His red 4x4 is parked a few blocks down, near town square. The rest of his usual gang is with him, shoving each other and chuckling at something or the other. Needles’ back is to him.
“Douglas!” Marty calls, stomping over. Needles turns, scowl forming on his face, but it lifts into a smirk the instant he spots Marty.
“McFly! What brings you here?” he smiles, and Marty wants to wipe that smug look off his face. “Did you come all this way just to see little ol’ me?”
One of Needles’ friends, Ricky, starts laughing, until another one elbows him in the stomach and Ricky cuts himself off with a pained moan.
“That was messed up,” Marty starts, suddenly finding his words failing now he’s here in front of Needles, “what you did back there. Why even do that, you don’t even like Jennifer!”
The grin on his rival’s face falters, and his eyes shadow ever so slightly. He steps forwards, into Marty’s space, breathing his air.
“How’d you figure that?” he asks, and Marty can smell the faint tang of tobacco on his breath, “I could like her plenty.”
There’s challenge there, in his eyes. A dare, unspoken, say it. Ruin us both. No insult attached, no guarantee.
Just between them.
Each passing moment in each other’s space sends his head spinning with déjà vu. Every second more he spends staring into the other’s piercing blue eyes, he is pinned further in place.
Needles’ eyes dart over to the alley beside The Third Eye.
Marty can feel himself backsliding in real time.
Needles tosses a glance over his shoulder at his friends and waves them away. They look at each other, shrug, and start leaving.
“Meet us by the ‘bookstore’,” Chris says, walking backwards, “we’ll wait for you before we try to sneak in!”
Needles nods, and then he and Marty are alone and following each other to the alley. They have to push through where someone with bolt cutters has cut through the chain-link fence, and then they are concealed.
The alley is as grimy as it’s always been, but it’s sequestered away and there’s a dumpster further in they can use to hide them further from sight. It smells pretty rank, but that’s the least of Marty’s concerns right now.
“I thought you liked the girl,” Needles accuses once they’re all the way in, rest of the world distant and irrelevant.
“I do,” he replies, “I want to get to know her.”
“Suppose this really will be the last time then, huh?”
Marty licks his lips. He should say no. He should turn tail and walk back out of the alley right now.
“Suppose it will.”
He pushes Needles against the brick wall, and doesn’t care for the scuffing it will no doubt leave on the other’s leather jacket. Something tells him Needles won’t mind.
Marty leans in. All he can smell now is Needles, an overwhelmingly rich and woody scent with undertones of whatever flowery laundry detergent he uses.
“That’s just your style, though,” Marty notes, running his hand over Needles’ chest. “One more time to end things off, going out with a bang.”
One hand sneaking under Needles’ shirt, and his breath stutters. Marty snakes the other hand around the back of his head. At the tips of his fingers, they just about reach that mop of a haircut, threading into the brown-black curls.
The shadows of the afternoon light turn their tips near-blue.
“You gonna do it or not, McFly?”
Nothing serious.
Their lips meet in a blaze of glory and finality. Marty closes his eyes and sees sparks behind his eyelids, fire rekindled for one last burn.
When Marty pulls away for breath, he bites at Needles’ lip, looking up at him.
“You don’t let things go quietly,” he mumbles, and pulls Needles in for more.
The bug in his brain, the knot he can never quite untie. Needles may forever be in his future, even if they never dare mention this portion of their lives again.
Even if Marty moves on, that kid he showed around school in 1979 will never go away. A buzzing fly, whizzing around his head, infuriating, taunting.
He just can’t cut him loose.