suzanne

by the book, 1/1

2008-09-04T01:03:45Z

Title: By the Book
Fandom: Harry Potter next-gen
Rating: PG-13 for teenage erections, rampant faux-Briticisms, casual alcoholism, and an ice sculpture that may not be suitable for children
Word count: ~12,200
Summary: Scorpius Malfoy was thirteen when his parents divorced. He’d always known it would happen someday, but he didn’t expect it to be so bloody loud.
Notes: Written for crumbfreebread as part of the inaugural the_ass_fest, spring 2008. On a personal note? An awesome triumph for me, as this represents the first story I've seen through, from beginning to end, since I finished grad school in May 2007. Wiiiiiiin!

By the Book, 1/1

spn drabble!

2007-07-18T01:30:38Z

Untitled (gasp) drabble -- 388 words, Supernatural. Sam, Dean, gen. PG for language.

“Come on, Psychic Boy. Not even a little bit?”

“Don’t call me that, and no, not even a little bit.” Sam Winchester slouched down in his nylon camp chair and glared at his brother. “You can wait like everyone else.”

“You’re not waiting,” Dean replied, shifting in his own chair and unsuccessfully trying to refocus his attention on the thick hardcover in his hands. “Bitch.”

“Jerk. And I am too waiting,” Sam said with an all-too-superior smirk. “Unlike some people, I understand that good things come to those who wait.”

Dean looked up from the book, turning it upside-down over his thigh to mark his place. “No way, dude.”

“Yeah way.”

“Not even you have that kind of willpower.”

“Yeah, I do,” Sam said, grabbing the book from his brother’s lap. “And you’re going to screw up the binding if you do that. Use a bookmark like civilized people.”

“Dude.” Dean snorted. “You pulled this thing out of a burning building, threw it at a colony of imps, spilled an entire bottle of Jack on it, and you’re worried about the binding? Priorities, Sammy.”

“Priorities? I’m not the one who treats them like they’re real.”

Dean sniffed. “Taught you how to deal with redcaps, didn’t they?”

“Shut up,” Sam said. “And please tell me you didn’t bring a gun.”

Dean shifted. “So what if I did?”

“Dean. It’s a book release. We’re surrounded by innocent children and overenthusiastic nerd-girls. Color me completely unafraid.”

“It’s not for the people in line,” Dean said darkly, “it’s for anyone who tries to spoil it for me.”

“You were just trying to get me to tell you the ending!”

“Yeah, well, that’s different,” Dean said defensively. “If I want the ending, that’s one thing, but if someone just gives it to me, that’s a whole ‘nother bag of bones. Plus, you’d actually make me work for it, and then I’d have earned it, y’know? It’s all in the chase, Sammy, it’s all in the chase.”

“By the way, rocks fall and everyone dies.”

“Bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam replied affectionately, turning his attention back to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. “Bet you ten bucks a Weasley bites it.”

“There’s about a billion of them, dude. Not even a question.” Dean shook his head. “Twenty bucks on Dumbledore being alive?”

Sam smiled. “You’re on."

extra, extra (read all about it)

2007-06-20T00:12:59Z

Title: Extra, Extra (Read All About It)
Author: sarcasticpixie (linked to writing journal, astoldbysuzanne)
Fandom: Supernatural RPS
Rating: PG-13 for language and sexual situations
Word Count: 2545
Spoilers: Through SPN 2x22
Summary: A network season in the lives of our two Noble Heroes, told epistolary/scrapbook-style.
Disclaimer: I'm putting the "fic" back in "fictional," baby.

(for douxquemiel, she-who-is-to-blame.)

From Entertainment Weekly, “What to Watch,” 24 September 2007:

Supernatural (Thursday, 9 p.m., CW) – The surprisingly good tale of two ghostbusting brothers returns for its third season this week. Don’t look for it to overtake timeslot rivals Grey’s, The Office, or CSI anytime soon, but did we mention that the two leads (Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki) are smokin’ hot?

#

From Pajiba.com’s “TV Whore” feature, 1 October 2007:

…and believe it or not, I’ll be jumping on the Supernatural bandwagon this season, so all you angry fangirls? Can stop e-mailing me. I’ve never had any particular affection for Grey’s Anatomy, but ratings necessitated that I keep up with it – however, SPN’s season premiere last week was enough to drag me over to the dark side. The writing’s more solid than ever before, the showrunners have assured us that they know where they’re going, Ackles is becoming the leading man he’s always been meant to be, and Padalecki’s finally managed to erase the spectre of New York Minute from my mind. As for the relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester? You can’t buy that kind of chemistry, folks.

#

From “Time Warp: One Tree Hill Fast Forwards,” TV Guide, 8 October 2007:

While much has been made of the split between Bush and Murray, not all CW break-ups are acrimonious. Take the recent parting of ways between OTH player Danneel Harris, 28, and 29-year-old Supernatural star Jensen Ackles.

“It was mutual,” she said. “He’s in Canada all the time while I’m down here, and I’m still getting on my feet. We’re going in different places, both literally and metaphorically. We’re friends, though… his career’s really going to take off soon.”

#

From the voicemail of Jared Padalecki, 17 October 2007:

“Hey, you’ve got Jared. I’m not here right now, so leave a message. If it’s urgent, try Jensen’s cell.”

#

From online gossip aggregator OhNoTheyDidnt, 20 October 2007:

“Supernatural star Jensen Ackles was back in his hometown of Richardson this weekend, promoting his show’s tie-in comic book series at Dallas Comic Con 10. Photos behind the cut!”

LJ User free__paris, 20-10-2007 3:10 UTC: omg so hot. where was jared?
(Reply) LJ user winchestette, 20-10-2007 6:37 UTC: i was there!! he was so nice and patient and he signed my s2 DVD set…… i asked him where jared was and he said he was meeting with studio people about promoting his movie. he looked all sad about it too…….
(Reply) (Reply) LJ user free__paris, 21-10-2007 1:03 UTC: THEY SHOULD JUST GET MARRIED ALRAEDY

#

From TV.com, “This Week in Ratings,” 12 November 2007:

CW drama Supernatural continues to surprise both critics and viewers eight weeks into what’s shaping up to be an incredibly strong third season. “Beyond the Pale,” last week’s episode, garnered more viewers than a new episode of Kitchen Nightmares in FOX and a repeat of NBC’s The Office, catapulting it into third place for the first time since it began airing in the competitive 9 p.m. Thursday timeslot.

#

From E! Online’s “The Awful Truth,” 28 November 2007:

Petey Pouty’s known ‘round H-Wood for being the quiet type, and with those perfecto features, it’s an effin’ shame! The boy is mattress-worthy and everyone from Canucksville to Hell-Ay knows it – but we didn’t know which way he swung, until this past weekend at Element. Petey got cozy in a trés private booth with a fellow piece of small-time network beefcake, and my sources tell me that Petey and Sammy Sasquatch canoodled in the back until early in the ay-em. Wanna be the meat in that sandwich? Get in line, gals!

AND IT AIN’T: Wentworth Miller, Chris Lowell, Tom Welling

#

From Variety, “Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage Comes to Life,” 10 December 2007:

Q: You’ve done some supporting work in movies, but this is really your first lead role in a film. How was the filming experience, knowing that?

A: It was a little weird, to be honest. I’ve been in ensembles in movies and there have always been other people in the same place I am, professionally, and the last few years it’s just been me and Jensen [Ackles, Padalecki’s Supernatural co-star and close friend], so it was a lot different from what I’m used to. Peter O’Toole is an amazing actor and I’m so grateful that I got to learn from him, but I don’t think he’d be too thrilled if I stuck his cell phone in a jar of peanut butter, you know?

Q: I hear you actually took time off from filming this movie to catch a performance of your co-star’s play. (Ackles starred in a production of A Few Good Men this past June at the Casa Mañana Theatre in Ft. Worth, Texas.)

A: Yep! I mean, in a lot of ways, what he was doing was way more impressive than what I was doing. There’s a difference between playing the lead in a movie and getting to re-shoot scenes and not having to worry about getting a line perfect on the first try, and doing live theatre and having to nail everything each time. And he was just amazing, man. The guy hadn’t been on a stage since high school, and he’s got all this West Wing-type dialogue, and I can’t think of a single person who could have done it better. So that was time well spent. He didn’t know I was coming, and the look on his face, man. Priceless.

#

From People.com, “Star Tracks,” 17 December 2007:

While The Christmas Cottage has been getting lukewarm reviews from critics, star Jared Padalecki was all smiles at the film’s New York and Los Angeles premieres last week. Padalecki and longtime girlfriend Sandra McCoy went their separate ways in September, but no matter: he brought his Supernatural co-star Jensen Ackles to both events instead.

“It’s hiatus, so what the hell? I had nothing else to do,” Ackles cracked.

#

From a greeting card found on the desk of Sera Gamble, 22 December 2007:

Happy Holidays!
(Jared wanted to say “Merry Christmas,” but we decided to be nondenominational about it.)
Best wishes,
Jared, Jensen, Harley, and Sadie

#

From E! Online’s “The Awful Truth,” 18 January 2008:

Petey Pouty and Sammy Sasquatch are at it again – this time, north of the border! How internationale! The two dee-lish small-screen stars were seen cuddling early in the ay-em at a posh breakfast bistro in ‘Couver, and with not a mimosa in sight, no one can blame this on the alkie! They were keeping company with fellow telly-boys Baby Blue and Dave the Shave – these cool kids ordered enough bacon ‘n eggs to feed Paris’s entourage for a year! Oh, boys. Room for one more at that table?

AND IT AIN’T: John Krasinski, Jesse Spencer, Milo Ventimiglia

#

From Entertainment Weekly, “What to Watch,” 28 January 2008:

Supernatural (Thursday, 9 p.m., CW) – With CSI growing stale in its eighth season and Grey’s still struggling to recover from the loss of Kate Walsh’s Addison, Supernatural, along with NBC’s The Office, is fast becoming the ruler of Thursday night programming. This week, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) find themselves in Salem, hot on the trail of a witches’ coven. But when one young sorceress (Big Love’s Tina Majorino) tells the boys that she can keep Dean from dying, they stop in their tracks.

#

From TelevisionWithoutPity.com user YellowEyedFangirl, 9 February 2008:

Um… you guys…

I live in Bellingham, WA, so we go up to Vancouver a lot. (Stupid US drinking laws.) Anyway, my friends and I were at Sonar (great urb club) last night, and…

isawjaredandjensenkissing.

I’m not lying. I don’t have pics, because I didn’t have my camera on me, but I swear, it was them, and they were making out. Jared was wearing a blue button-down and slacks, Jensen was wearing a dark gray t-shirt with nice jeans. They were near the back of everything, by themselves, and I wasn’t sure at first, but then the guy I thought might have been Jared stood up and he was SO TALL. Like, six-four. He got up to get drinks, and he was about eight feet away from me or so, and it was definitely him. And the guy with him was definitely Jen – I’d recognize those eyelashes anywhere.

Believe me or not – your choice. I know what I saw, though. Squee!

#

Text message from Michael Rosenbaum to Jensen Ackles, 13 February 2008:

Every1 on the internet knows u guys r doing it. HA. learn 2 keep a secret jenny.

#

From Fangoria, “Things That Go Bump in the Night: Supernatural creator Eric Kripke,” March 2008:

Obviously, Kripke’s proud of his show; he talks about it like an overzealous parent, noting that he won’t make the same mistakes that Chris Carter made with The X-Files and Damon Lindelof made with LOST. He’ll go on about Sam and Dean for hours, but when the topic of Jared and Jensen arises, he clams up.

“I honestly don’t care,” he says when asked about the rampant rumors that the two co-stars are more than just friends. “They’re great actors, very professional, and I love the guys to death. Whatever they do off the set doesn’t concern me at all. They’re grown men, they can do whatever they want.”

Is that a yes, or a no?

“It’s a ‘that’s nobody’s business except theirs,’” Kripke replies, not unkindly.

#

From TV.com, “This Week in Ratings,” 24 March 2008:

With the rest of the networks taking the month off, the CW’s tactic of airing new episodes during March seems to be working. A first-run episode of Supernatural in the 9 p.m. Thursday slot pulled viewers away from repeats of The Office, CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, and So You Think You Can Dance, giving the CW one of its (very) few first-place ratings finishes in the young network’s history. Look for another new episode of Supernatural next week – if you’re not eating up every crumb of gossip about the show’s stars, that is.

#

From the Boston Globe, “Sorkin drama finds summer home at A.R.T.,” 10 April 2008:

This summer’s production of The Farnsworth Invention boasts not one, but two, television mainstays. Playwright Aaron Sorkin will co-direct with partner Thomas Schlamme, while Jensen Ackles, lately of Supernatural, will take on the part of Philo Farnsworth. Ackles headlined a production of Sorkin’s A Few Good Men in Texas last summer, and Sorkin loves the way the 30-year-old TV veteran handles his dialogue.

“I caught him as Kaffee last year, and it blew me away,” Sorkin said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll bring the same passion to the role of Farnsworth.”

#

From The Advocate, “More Than Brothers: Supernatural Co-Stars Open Up,” May 2008:

At six feet, four inches, you have to think that it’s been a while since Jared Padalecki’s been a little anything. But if that’s the case, you haven’t been talking to the man himself lately.

“I’m a little gay,” he says, leaning back into the couch one bright spring day in Vancouver. “I think that’s how to describe it. I like girls and all, and I don’t really know if I find other guys hot, but…” he trails off, and he’s probably not planning on finishing his sentence until his costar-turned-boyfriend, Jensen Ackles, delivers a sharp elbow to his ribs. “Okay, I like him. A lot. And he’s a guy. So I guess that makes me a little bit gay.”

Whether Padalecki’s a “little bit gay” or leading this year’s Pride parade, one thing’s for sure: the two actors, who play brothers Sam and Dean Winchester on the CW’s Supernatural (Thursdays, 9 p.m. ET), have a more-than-brotherly relationship off-screen. After months of dodging rumors and cameras, they’re ready to talk about how they went from best friends to lovers – and how that hasn’t affected their characters’ on-screen relationship.

“It was really sort of organic,” says Ackles, who turned 30 in March. “You hear all this stuff about love at first sight, but that wasn’t it for us. We were both in relationships – ”

“With girls – ” Padalecki, 25, cuts in.

“—yeah, with girls. We definitely clicked right away as friends, that was for sure, but this – ” he waves a hand around the nearly empty Arbutus Ridge condominium they’re moving into – “I mean, it’s hard to say when it happened.”

“You can’t really put a date on it,” Padalecki agrees. “It happened so gradually that I didn’t even notice it. We went from sharing food to sharing a bed over time, and nothing about it felt weird at all. I mean, the actual physical act of sharing a bed was weird, because he kicks in his sleep, but there wasn’t anything weird emotionally.”

“I do not kick,” Ackles says indignantly, looking up from a book of carpet samples (their floor is still bare). “You take that back.”

“You do too kick.” Padalecki pats him on the knee. “I have the bruises to prove it. I’d show you,” he says to me, winking, “but I think the little woman would take offense.”

Ackles rolls his eyes and goes back to the carpet samples. “If you keep saying that I kick you in my sleep, I’m going to leave you and this whole interview business will be entirely moot.”

Padalecki beams. “See? And he’s smart, too.”

…

If Padalecki’s only a little gay, then what about Ackles?

“Well, I’m the one with the book of carpet samples on my lap,” he says, shrugging. “So I guess that makes me gayer than him, at least.”

#

From Entertainment Weekly, “The Hit List,” 12 May 2008:

BIG HIT: Supernatural star Jared Padalecki, whose response to a nosy gossip columnist had us snickering. “This isn’t a rating stunt,” the actor allegedly said to online dirt peddler Perez Hilton when pressed about his romantic relationship with male co-star Jensen Ackles. “I’m not going to dump Jensen after the season finale, and even if I were, I’d go back to women before I got within ten feet of your stank ass.”

#

From TV.com’s “This Week in Ratings,” 26 May 2008:

The CW has finally proven it can play with the big kids. The season finale of Supernatural absolutely destroyed its competition in the 9 p.m. Thursday slot, beating the Grey’s Anatomy season finale by a margin of more than five million viewers. While viewership has undoubtedly increased since series stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki admitted they’ve been romantically involved for the better part of a year, there’s no denying the phenomenal storytelling and the great performances turned in by the two leads. Word on the street is that Eric Kripke’s ghostbusting drama can expect a full-season renewal at the network upfronts later this week.

#

From an invitation found on the desk of Eric Kripke, 11 June 2008:

It’s housewarming time!
Join us as we celebrate officially living in sin.
There’ll be BBQ, beer, and anything else you might want.
Presents not necessary – just bring yourself, your swimmies, and an open mind (we invited Rosenbaum).
June 28, 1 p.m. to whenever. Call for location details.
– J-Squared
P.S. SEASON FOUR, Y’ALL!

fire and rain, 1/1

2006-12-22T05:10:29Z

Title: Fire and Rain, or Richie Soto and the Goblet of Fire
Type: Original fiction
Summary: Requiem and recovery.
Word Count: 1256
Written in: December 2006
Notes: Backtracking a bit. Extensive notes at the end.

For Colin, who needs it.

*

July, 2000

The casserole dish is heavy, and Mark McCarthy isn’t entirely sure how to ring the doorbell without using his nose. He doesn’t think that would be very polite, anyway.

“Hello?” he calls, craning his neck to peek in through the front-room window. The curtains are pulled back today for the first time in a week, and he glimpses a smashed-up pillow and quilt on the couch; a large stack of unopened envelopes sits on the side table, spilling onto the carpet. A pink sweater’s draped over the back of an armchair, one sleeve squashed in the cushion. The place looks deserted, and Mark’s ready to turn around and walk the two blocks back to his house and ask his mom if they can eat the casserole for dinner when the door creaks open.

“Hello, Mark,” Johnny Soto says, and there’s a hollow look to his cheeks that’s not present on the vacuum-sealed rookie card Mark’s got in his closet.

“Hi, Mr. Soto,” he says quietly, dropping his head and holding out the casserole. “My mom made this.”

Rich’s dad smiles thinly before taking the dish from Mark’s hands. “Tell her that we appreciate it. Really.”

“I’m – I’m really sorry.”

Mr. Soto nods. “Thank you.” He gestures for Mark to enter and closes the door behind him. “I’ll get the dish back to your mom soon. What kind is it?”

“Chicken with orange juice and rice. It’s my favorite.” Mark shoves his hands in his pockets. “Where’s – ”

“Downstairs.”

“D’you think it’d be okay if I went down there?” It’s a question Mark’s never asked before. “I mean, if he doesn’t – ”

“Go, Mark,” Mr. Soto says, balancing the heavy casserole on the palm of one hand while he cuffs Mark’s shoulder with the other. “It’s a better idea than you think.”

*

Every other time Mark has walked down these stairs, he’s heard video games or the bass of the stereo or a baseball game on TV. But this time, it’s quiet. Rich is curled up in an armchair with a giant green hardcover book resting on his knees, and for a second, Mark wants to flee back up the stairs and into the safety of the setting sun. He reminds himself that Rich helped him with cross-multiplication and asking Casey Sasson to the Spring Fling, and closes the basement door behind him.

“Hey, man – ”

“Hang on a second,” Rich interrupts quietly, not looking up. “Harry’s fighting off the merpeople. I love this part.”

Mark very dearly wants to ask who Harry is and how he’s gotten himself mixed up with merpeople, but he holds his tongue. Tucked between the overstuffed chair and huge book, Rich looks impossibly small.

Mrs. Soto had been buried three days ago in her family’s plot at El Camino Memorial Park. Mark had gone with his parents, leaving his little sisters at home with the babysitter; they’d sat in the third row at the graveside service, and his dad had draped a big arm across the back of his chair when Rich had gotten up and tossed a handful of dirt on his mother’s casket. Mr. Soto stayed very still the entire time, and when Rich sat back down, he’d kept his hands folded in his lap. Music had played while the casket was being lowered into the ground, and Mark had listened to the lyrics:

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I’d see you again

Mr. Soto and Rich had stayed in their seats as everyone got up to leave, and for the first time in seven years, Mark had let his mother hold his hand on the way back to the car.

Now, he crosses the room and climbs onto the couch. “What’s your book about?” he asks tentatively, kicking off his Converse All-Stars and folding his legs underneath him.

“It’s Harry Potter.” Rich licks a finger and turns the page.

“What?”

“Mark, what rock have you been living under?”

The look Rich gives him is full of disdain, but it holds more of his best friend than he’s seen in weeks, so Mark’ll take it. “One that gets ESPN?”

A sliver of a grin sneaks across Rich’s face. “Of course. As if you’d live under anything else.”

“Yeah.” Mark glances at the television, wondering what the score of the Red Sox-Yankees game is, but Rich has his book; the remote will stay on the end table.

Rich reads more books than anyone would ever think. Mark never got much beyond the Goosebumps series himself, and most of the guys they hang out with consider ESPN: The Magazine heavy reading, but Rich has an honest-to-God bookshelf in his room that’s got more books than action figures on it. Mark’s skimmed the titles: Maniac Magee, The Egypt Game, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The House With a Clock in Its Walls, and It’s Like This, Cat have spots of honor on the middle shelf. The Narnia series sits on the bottom, sandwiched between Ender’s Game and Stranger in a Strange Land. The top shelf is Mark’s favorite: Ball Four, Shoeless Joe, The Seventh Game, The Boys of Summer. Rich goes through books like Mark goes through Bazooka gum; the spine of the one in his hands is already cracked, and Mark wonders if he falls asleep at night with his finger marking his place.

“So what happens?” he asks, tucking a pillow behind his head.

Rich purses his lips and looks at him incredulously before putting the book on his lap. “Okay, so at the beginning, Harry and Ron are heading to the Quidditch World Cup – ”

Mark raises an eyebrow. “Um?”

“What, you want me to start with the first book?”

“Yeah, that would be helpful.”

Rich sighs, but Mark’s ensconced himself at the end of the couch, clearly not going anywhere. “Okay. So there’s this kid called Harry, and his parents were wizards. Like, they could do magic. And there was this war going on – ”

Mark listens to Rich as he talks about wizards and Muggles and English boarding schools and someone called Aberforth who behaved inappropriately with a goat; he watches Rich’s eyes go wide at the important parts, whites stark against his tan skin. At some point, it occurs to Mark that Rich had to have been hiding this from him, but then the Weasleys start degnoming their garden and his best friend is actually laughing for the first time in a while.

He joins in.

Eventually, the tiny windows near the ceiling go dark, and Rich’s voice starts to fade as he describes Harry’s duel with Voldemort in the graveyard; when he finishes, he lets loose a deep, broad yawn.

“That’s it, so far,” he says, letting the book slide off his lap and hit the floor face-up. “Now I want the next one to come out. God knows when that’ll be.”

“I don’t think it’ll be too long,” Mark reassures him. “Don’t worry.”

“Yeah, I won’t worry, man.”

Rich babbles some nonsense, and trails off as his eyes close and the book falls shut. Mark doesn’t think either will open again anytime soon. He stays on the couch even though it’s way past both their bedtimes, watching the rise and fall of Rich’s chest until he feels himself drifting off to sleep.

*
Notes: God, I missed my boys. It's short, but half of it's been sitting on my hard drive since August, and I needed to write this more than anything else.

This is the point at which I screw with my own canon, and FC's going to need revision; Rich's mother's clearly not going to be on any business trips, but I think this could work. The woman's never once appeared in this universe, and when I (eventually) get around to exploring the strained-yet-close Rich-Johnny relationship, this is likely going to be the pivot point. Allison and I have been talking about the differences between the different stories in this arc, and one day -- preferably before I hit menopause, but who knows -- I fully intend to turn the interval between the boys' first meeting and the end of FC into a full-blown novel. I'm a big backstory whore when it comes to reading, and apparently, it's going to manifest itself in my writing as well.

The minutae: the song is James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." Rich's five favorite books can be found in similar places of honor on a bookshelf 3,000 miles away from San Diego, currently hidden behind a mound of freshly laundered Old Navy sweaters and Rocket Dog clogs. His favorite HP book, incidentally, is Order of the Phoenix, and his favorite characters are the Weasley twins; he eventually gets Mark to watch the movies.

And for the record, chicken with orange juice and rice is my nana's best casserole.

family first, 1/1

2006-08-29T03:46:43Z

Title: Family First, 1/1
Author: sarcasticpixie (linked to writing journal, astoldbysuzanne)
Rating: C, for “cracked-out” or, alternately, “crossover”; PG-13, likely
Word Count: 2007
Characters: Duncan Kane, Seth Cohen, George Michael Bluth, Sam Winchester
Spoilers: Vague ones through Veronica Mars 1x21, with allusions to events that happen during the first seasons of The O.C., Arrested Development, and Supernatural
Summary: “Meets Thursday afternoons with refreshments to follow.”
Disclaimer: Pretty clearly not mine, or else this would have been a spectacular ratings stunt some time ago.

The first time he saw the ad, he’d blown it off.

He’d been reading online reviews of Les Cousins Dangereux (all of which were in French, but he was getting the general idea) when it had appeared on his computer screen. Convinced that someone knew why he was trying to figure out what “un chef d'oeuvre érotique a rempli avec désir maladroit” meant, he quickly closed the window and backed away from the computer.

“What are you doing?” Maeby had asked, looking up from something called Gangee II: This Time, She’s Pissed Off.

“Nothing!” George Michael had said quickly, backing towards the door. “Just – you know – those viruses, they mean business, right? Don’t want to catch anything. Yeah.”

Maeby raised an eyebrow. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m late for work,” George Michael had replied before fleeing for the privacy of the attic.

*

The second time he saw the ad, he figured it meant something.

“Zip me up,” his grandmother said from across the room. “Since your Uncle Buster’s too good for zip-up these days.”

“He’s only across the hall,” George Michael had said before dutifully crossing the room and pulling up his grandmother’s zipper as quickly as possible. “I’m sure he’d be happy to – ”

“No, leave him to his BITCH.” Lucille turned around and strode towards her bedroom, glaring at the wall the whole way.

“Yikes,” George Michael had said under his breath before collapsing on the couch and picking up a copy of the Balboa Bay Window and flipping through it.

And there it was, on page 36, sitting between an article on something called Motherboy XXIX and a casting notice for the Blue Man Group.

Lucille was too busy shouting at her neighbor to notice when George Michael ripped the page from the magazine and slipped out the door.

*

He told Uncle GOB he needed Pop-Pop’s car to pick up a girl for a date; his uncle had muttered something about tyrannical women and adjusted the collar of his lemon-yellow sweater before handing over the keys. He got on the highway and drove south, turning off just before the military base and parking at a nondescript office building in San Clemente.

“This is the place,” he said to himself before pushing open the door.

*

“I really couldn’t help myself,” the guy next to him was saying. He was tall and broad, thick around the middle. “I didn’t want to break up with her, you know? She’s perfect. And the only reason we’re over is…” he gestured vaguely around the room. “I didn’t tell her why, I just ended it.”

“At least you had her,” a curly-haired boy interjected moodily. “I’ve never even – ”

“Seth, let Duncan finish,” the group leader said. “You can speak next, if you’d like.”

“As I was saying,” Duncan continued pointedly, “She didn’t know why I broke up with her. So I assumed she still had feelings for me, right? And everything was perfect, right then, and my drink was probably fucked up and…”

“Go on, Duncan, you can say it,” their leader said. “The Southern California Incest Support Group is a safe place.”

“I had sex with my sister!” Duncan blurted. “And it was awesome. I think.”

“I thought your sister was dead,” the curly-haired boy – Seth – said.

“Seth – ”

“Different sister,” Duncan replied, hunching over. “My dad had an affair with her mom, and my mom says she’s my sister. Or half-sister, anyway.”

“But how would your mom know that?” Seth said, oblivious to the cold glare the group leader was shooting him. “Maybe she’s making it up. Like, this one time, when I wanted Cocoa Puffs before dinner, my mom told me that if I ate any sugar my teeth would rot and fall out that night. Which, you know, really convincing to an eight-year-old, right? But they didn’t, so she was totally lying. So maybe your mom’s just making that up, dude. Like, was she there? Totally possible.”

“We’re not here to judge,” the leader said. “Duncan needs to air his feelings – ”

“Your sister’s dead?”

The latest question came from a big kid – young man, actually – sprawled on the outskirts of the room. His legs – all fifty thousand feet of them – were kicked out on the chair in front of him, and he looked like he could roll out of bed and wake up cool. George Michael thought that he’d pull off a leather jacket, no problem.

“Yeah,” Duncan said ruefully, cocking his head to look at the guy. “Last October. It was all over the news.”

“I don’t follow the news.” He shrugged apologetically, and his hair fell over his eyes; he looked a little bit like Steve Holt, come to think of it. “What happened?”

“I don’t really think those are appropriate questions,” the leader interrupted. “Duncan has been through a lot this year.”

“Sorry,” the guy said, slouching down further. “It’s just – my girlfriend, she – yeah, same thing, and we haven’t caught what – whoever did it, so…”

Duncan’s lip curled. “I don’t think I can help, man, I’m sorry. The guy who killed my sister’s on death row, now. Unless your dad pissed this guy off as much as mine did, I don’t think there’s a link.”

“Oh, my dad’s pissed plenty of things off,” the guy muttered, just as Seth said, “Wait, so you’ve got two sisters? And one is dead? And you had sex with the other one? Dude.”

Duncan looked pained, and while their group leader turned to chew Seth out, George Michael didn’t miss the motion as Duncan pulled a pill from his pocket and practically threw it down his throat.

“Since he can’t seem to stay quiet, Seth will speak now,” the leader said, settling back. “There will be a fifteen-minute time limit, Seth.”

“Yeah, yeah, cool,” Seth said, sitting forward in his chair. He rested his elbows on his knees. “So there’s this guy, right? And he just shows up at my house one day, and apparently he stole a car, but he’s sitting in my living room and playing video games. So I’m like, the hell? And apparently, my dad was representing him and took him home since his mom’s all Flaky McCrazy, and his actual brother was set to do hard time, like don’t-drop-the-soap time, and he had nowhere to go. So I’m all, awesome. And he’s so hot, and that’s so minty, but he is. And I thought I was all about this girl who hasn’t talked to me, like, ever, but I think I might kinda sorta maybe want to make out with Ryan. But then, my parents had to go and adopt him. So he’s my brother now, and this sucks, because I don’t want him to be my brother, I just wanna do freaky things with him. And he’s got our poolhouse, so my parents wouldn’t even have to know, but it’ll be weird because now he’s totally a Cohen and I warned him about the crippling self-doubt but I don’t know if he listened. And I think everyone except him knows, which is retarded because now the water-polo team’s going to piss in my shoes again, but then Ryan will beat them up and it’ll be okay but I still want to make out with him.”

George Michael thought Seth might have said all that without taking a breath. “So Ryan’s not really your brother?” he ventured. “Like, biologically?”

“No, dude,” Seth said, “just on paper only. So not only do I have to go through this whole sexual identity crisis thing, I have to work around the fact that I want to do stuff with a guy who’s now my brother. My life is pain, man, total and complete pain. I mean, at least Duncan slept with his sister, not his brother.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Duncan said. “I have a Logan, though.”

“What’s a Logan?” Seth asked.

“My best friend.” He shook his head. “Never mind. Don’t even get me started on that guy.”

“But you’ve never slept with him,” Seth said, and Duncan nodded. “So no sexual identity crisis for you.” He dramatically fell back in his chair. “I am so, so alone.”

“Not really,” the tall guy said unexpectedly. “I want to make out with my brother, too.”

“Your real brother?” Seth asked.

The guy nodded. “And trust me, he’s my real brother. We spend a lot of time together, and – ”

“Have you ever done the nasty with him?” Seth asked, leaning forward again.

“No!” the guy yelped, before blushing eighteen shades of red. “I mean, no. I don’t think he’s like that. I mean, about brothers or about siblings. And I like girls, too. Girls who aren’t related to me. But…”

“It’s okay,” the group leader said. “You can say whatever’s on your mind…”

“Sam. It’s Sam.” The guy took a deep breath. “It’s really emotional. He’s the only person I see every day, you know? And I’ve kinda… fallen out of contact with my friends. I’m taking some time off from college. Our dad’s not really around, either, and our mom…” he shrugged. “She died when we were little. So it’s a thing.”

“A thing,” Seth repeated.

“Yeah, a thing.” Sam crossed one ankle over the other. “And I just have to live with it, I guess. I saw this ad in some magazine – ”

“The Balboa Bay Window?” George Michael asked suddenly.

“No,” Sam said, raising an eyebrow. “Something at a rest stop. So I figured I’d check it out. Maybe get some of this off my chest.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” the leader said, smiling at Sam before turning. “Now, how about you?”

“Me?” George Michael asked, pointing at himself and looking around frantically. “Don’t you want to talk to someone else? I mean, Seth probably has more to say.”

The leader shook her head. “No, it’s your turn. We’re here to help.”

“I’m here for the refreshments,” Seth added unhelpfully.

“And to help,” their leader continued. “Go ahead.”

George Michael sighed. “Well, I have this cousin…”

*

“So Maeby might not really be your cousin,” Duncan asked as the four boys exited the meeting.

George Michael shook his head. “I’m not sure. My grandmother said something about her being made in a cup, but my dad says not to believe a word that comes out of her mouth, so I’ve got no idea. It’s all messed up.”

“We’re all messed up,” Seth said cheerfully. “Some of the most messed-up boys living in Southern California today. Right, my man?”

Sam shrugged off Seth’s hand. “Not me, dude. Passing through,” he said, pointing at a classic-looking black car across the lot. “My brother and I are doing some… research down here, but we’re done. Heading over to New Mexico tonight.”

“Roswell?” Seth asked, laughing.

“Something like that,” Sam said mysteriously, turning from the group. “Good luck, you guys.”

As Sam walked away, Seth let out a low whistle. “Why can’t I have a sexual identity crisis with that dude? I’d love my sexual identity crisis. I’d have little sexual identity crisis babies with it and make it pancakes the next morning, for serious.”

Duncan blinked. “Has anyone ever told you that you kinda overshare, Seth?”

“Yeah, but I’m okay with it,” Seth said breezily, holding up a set of keys and pressing a button. The headlights of a Range Rover blinked. “My chariot awaits, guys. Same time, next week?”

“Maybe,” Duncan said as George Michael waved. “If I can get away from soccer practice.” He started walking towards the cars. “And student council. And Model UN. And FBLA. And – you get the idea, right?”

“Yeah,” George Michael said, falling into step alongside him. “I get it.”

“Coming back?” Duncan asked, stopping next to a Mercedes SUV. “Sam’s not, obviously, but Seth is. I might. How about you?”

“Yeah, I think so.” George Michael laughed. “I mean, family first, right?”

*

Nota bene for those unfamiliar with certain of the presented: George Michael Bluth is an awkward high-school student; Seth Cohen is the same; Duncan Kane used to be the King of Neptune High and made epilepsy boring; Sam Winchester hunts demons and other nasty stuff. George-Michael does have a documented crush on his cousin Maeby, and Duncan did sleep with Veronica Mars while he thought she was his sister. (Turned out that she wasn’t, though. Close call, DK.) Seth – Season One Seth, that is, not this impostor Adam Brody seems to be playing these days – has always been a little fixated on his adopted brother Ryan Atwood, and much has been made of the close relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester. However, this could have a lot to do with the fact that Jensen Ackles has explosive sexual chemistry with everything in a thirty-foot radius, up to and including furniture. Maybe I’ll write Dean/chaise lounge next.

My timelines are likely skewed in places, but I’ve tried to write each character as if they’re somewhere in the middle of their first season on their respective shows. So Maeby really shouldn't be reviewing film scripts just yet, but I couldn't resist.

Roughly translated, “un chef d'oeuvre érotique a rempli avec désir maladroit” means “an erotic masterpiece filled with awkward desire.” However, my French is terrible, so something is likely buggery with that. I apologize to those of you who are French language purists, really.

I promise to put the characters back where I found them, and thanks for reading! Rants, raves, and constructive criticism are all strongly encouraged; flames will be used to heat up my Four-Cheese Pizza Hot Pockets.

suffocating in vero beach, 1/1

2006-08-08T04:09:32Z

Title: Suffocating in Vero Beach
Type: Original fiction
Summary: Mark McCarthy heads to spring training and forgets how to breathe.
Word Count: 1841
Written in: August 2006 (four-hour exercise)
Notes: Same universe, different style. Follow-up to both Fielder's Choice and Tagging Up.

Mark McCarthy gets to Florida late on a Tuesday morning and immediately thinks he’s having an asthma attack.

“Breathe,” his father instructs him halfway through his coughing fit, clapping him on the back with enough force to bruise. Mark drops his carry-on and inhales as much thick air as he can, doubling over and bracing his hands on his knees.

They haven’t even left the tarmac.

*

The Los Angeles Dodgers conduct spring training in Vero Beach and have done so since they were the Brooklyn Dodgers, back when Harry Truman was in office and the Cleveland Indians ruled the baseball world. Mark’s father’s aunt used to keep a house in St. Lucie, twenty minutes away, and some well-meaning relative sent Mark the key at the beginning of February; now, he turns it in the lock and is assaulted by more hot, terrible air. He expects steam to rise from the floorboards.

“Let’s get a move on,” Dave McCarthy says from behind him; he’s got a five o’clock plane to catch back to San Diego. Mark knows his mother is the one responsible for his father’s eight-hour cross-country jaunt. He is twenty-one years old and should be able to move across the country by himself at this point, but Florida makes Mark grateful. “The house won’t collapse, I promise.”

Mark doesn’t believe him, but he steps inside and begins to open every window in sight. The house sits low to the ground, and overgrown weeds crowd across the windowsills as he airs out each room; he tests the water and finds that it runs clear. He plugs in the refrigerator and pokes at the ancient-looking toaster oven, only half-listening to his father’s grunts as he brings his son’s luggage inside.

“Thanks for all your help, Mark,” Dave finally says in a voice as dry as the air is wet, setting a television down on the dusty coffee table.

“No problem,” Mark replies vaguely before turning his attention to a rusty air conditioner.

*

Twelve hours after his plane lands, Rich Soto calls him and bitches loudly about his favorite t-shirt having gone missing. Mark swears on a stack of Bibles that he doesn’t know where it is, then puts it on after he hangs up the phone.

*

He’s there before the rest of the position players, but no one seems to mind too much. The fans and the press are happy that America’s most highly touted prospect seems eager to start the season, while the pitchers and catchers are glad the rookie’s not going to stroll in late and cocky like some can’t-miss youngsters do. Mark doesn’t bother correcting any of the wire stories the reporters send out about his enthusiasm for spring training; muttered quotes turn into cheerful proclamations on their laptops, and he figures he owes the media gods something after the events of his 21st-birthday party went unnoticed. His agent sends him e-mails: Keep it up, kid, they’re falling in love with you.

Mark talks to the fans more than any player on the team, staying long after the daily workouts are done, taking photos and letting genuine smiles show through. He listens to old men as they talk about Pee Wee Reese and Bill Russell, blocks out the whispers of words like phenom and superstar and tries not to think about Fernando Valenzuela too much. He signs autographs for kids in Eric Gagne jerseys and almost passes out the first time he sees “MCCARTHY #8” stenciled across someone’s back.

It’s the end of February in Florida; the air is too heavy and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s living someone else’s life.

*

“It’s nice having all the Cocoa Puffs to myself,” Rich remarks; Mark can hear him crunching away. It’s not even past six in the morning in L.A., and Mark thinks he might still be on West Coast time.

“Don’t get used to it,” he says absentmindedly as he toes his way into one Converse All-Star.

Rich goes on about cereal and his probability project and the new Spoon CD, and Mark doesn’t tell him that he thinks he’s going to suffocate in Vero Beach.

*

On his tenth day in Florida, he finally gets up the nerve to go out to a bar along Route 1; the bouncer stares at his California driver’s license for fifteen minutes before Andre Ethier shows up and convinces the guy to let him in. He orders Heineken and munches on peanuts while SportsCenter plays footage of himself running sprints that morning, then loses three straight games of pool to Chad Billingsley before wandering outside and sitting down on the curb.

Florida at night is only slightly less hot than Florida during the day, and Mark’s never lived in a place like this; A-ball in the Mojave, Double-A in Wichita, Triple-A in Omaha, and humidity’s a foreign concept to a boy born and raised on the California coast. It’s thick as hell and he still can’t breathe, not even after midnight along a stretch of road without streetlights.

He turns his baseball cap backwards and drops his head into his hands, sucking in lungfuls of air through calloused fingers.

*

He can’t sleep that well down here.

The bedroom smells like the talcum powder his great-aunt used to wear, and the air conditioner craps out every other night; Mark’s almost completely relocated to the den, sinking into the worn leather couch and staring at the textured ceiling until he finally drops off way later than he should. He’s downing Red Bull and coffee like it’s going out of style, makes jokes to his dad that he should be getting endorsement offers from Starbucks by now.

“You shouldn’t be drinking that much caffeine,” Dave McCarthy tells his only son over the phone.

Three thousand miles away, Mark takes another gulp.

*

In his first-ever big-league spring training game, Mark goes 4-for-5 with a home run and three RBIs. He gets so many bear-hugs and shoulder-pats that he thinks he might explode if he takes his hat off, like a shaken-up bottle of Coke.

Later that night, he gets a text message from Rich – who sends longer text messages than most people send emails – about nothing in particular that makes him want to blush and cry at the same time. Instead, he buys a six-pack and sits on the creaky back porch, staring into the leafy wilderness and counting his breaths in between drinks.

*

“I don’t understand why you’re in Florida,” Rich says; the nature of the background noise tells Mark he’s at Trojan Grounds. “Shouldn’t you guys be in the Cactus League?”

Mark mutes 24 and stretches out on the couch. “Dodgertown,” he says, yawning.

“In English, dude.”

“Dodgertown’s the name of the training complex,” Mark explains. “The team’s been coming down here since they were playing in Brooklyn. 1948, I think. East Coast thing. It’s tradition.”

“Oh,” Rich says, and then falls silent. Mark smiles, because it’s not often he gets to tell Rich something he doesn’t already know.

*

In his second-ever big-league spring training game, Mark goes 0-for-4 with four strikeouts. He still gets some back-pats from guys who started playing before he could even walk, and the fans still crowd the fence when he walks by on his way home, but he grabs a 12-pack from the liquor store this time and doesn’t bother counting anything on the back porch that night.

The next morning, on his way out, there’s an overnight FedEx package sitting on his doorstep. Mark drops his duffel bag and rips open the package with his car keys; inside is a cheap Tijuana souvenir sombrero, thoughtfully spray-painted gold.

The return address reads West Hollywood, CA, and Mark grins before chugging another Red Bull and heading to the ballpark.

*

“Your sister called.”

“She called you?” Mark asks, putting down a forkful of kung pao chicken. “She doesn’t even call me.”

Rich snickers. “She wanted to know if I’d go to the prom with her.”

“She did not!” Mark yells into the phone, shocked and appalled even though Mercedes has had a crush on Rich since she was six and he gave her a piggyback ride around the playground. “You’re a fucking liar, dude.”

“Call her yourself,” Rich says; Mark hears a horn honk, and he knows Rich just cut someone off on the PCH. “She says I have to wear a red cummerbund and stuff.”

“You’re such a bitch,” Mark mutters, shoving a huge bite of food into his mouth.

Rich laughs, sounding much younger than he actually is. “What, you’d rather have her go to the prom with some skeezy dude who might do… you know, whatever it is skeezy dudes do to other people’s little sisters?”

Mark chews and swallows, thinking about how hard Mercedes would freak if she knew everything about Rich. “Okay, true. But you’re gonna look like a magician, just so you know.”

“I’ve worn worse,” Rich replies, and Mark can see him drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as dry California air wafts through the driver’s-side window.

*

In his third-ever big league spring training game, Mark goes hitless until the bottom of the ninth, when he deposits a weak Cory Lidle fastball over the center-field fence and clears the loaded bases to give the Dodgers the win. Somewhere between second and third, he thinks of David Ortiz, and remembers to take his helmet off before making his way into the clump of teammates around home plate.

He thinks he’s probably going to be the lead segment on Baseball Tonight, but he falls asleep as soon as he gets home, listening to the rhythm of fan blades cutting through the dense Florida atmosphere.

*

Mark’s at the airport a full two hours before the flight from LAX to Melbourne International is scheduled to arrive, but it’s an off-day and he’s allowed to do this. He can’t stop himself from breaking into a goofy grin when Rich exits the gate, wearing a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt that Mark thinks might be his own and which probably looks about a thousand times better on himself.

“Spring Break with the geriatric set, man,” Rich says to Mark as he approaches, duffel slung over his shoulder. “Doesn’t get any better than this. We gonna play shuffleboard or something?”

Mark doesn’t say anything; he just pulls Rich into a hug that lasts longer than it should, airport patrons be damned. He can feel his best friend’s muscles tense and relax, clenching and releasing as they pat each other on the back.

“You okay, dude?” Rich says, the words muffled by Mark’s t-shirt.

Mark smiles down into a thatch of black hair. God, Rich needs a haircut. Maybe the barber’s, first, after they go to the house. Then lunch, with plenty of beer. Then shuffleboard, just to show Rich exactly where being a smart-ass gets him. Then –

“Yeah,” he says, taking the first real breath he’s taken in weeks. “I’m okay.”

endnotes

I seriously don't know where this came from; I'm working on the monstrous third part of this epic, and this flew at me outta left field. I liked taking a break from second-person, and if Mark's voice surprises you -- well, it surprises me, too. But I like this.

The gold-painted sombrero is a reference to the "Golden Sombrero," which a player is said to get if he strikes out four times in one game. Five gets you platinum.

For Allison, who posted an unexpected review of Tagging Up in her LJ that was very complimentary and which commanded me to write. Since the last time she asked me to write something, it took me six freaking months to get through, I think my turnaround time was much better. :P

draco malfoy and the garage sale of pure and abiding evil, 1/1

2006-07-04T21:07:11Z

Title: Draco Malfoy and the Garage Sale of Pure and Abiding Evil
Type: Harry Potter
Summary: Being poor is bollocks. Draco Malfoy, Narcissa Malfoy, Ron Weasley.
Word Count: 3118
Written in: June 2006 (one-week project)
Notes: I used to write HP fic all the time when I was 14. It sucked. This is the first HP I've done in six years, as a present to Allison; I'm pretty pleased with it, since it's unadulterated humor. Writing the Malfoys like they're the Bluths from Arrested Development will never, ever get old.

“This is so embarrassing,” Draco Malfoy moaned as he dragged a rather large cardboard crate out the front door of Malfoy Mansion and into the miserable, wet world outside. “Mother, I can’t bloody believe you.”

“Do shut up, Draco,” barked Narcissa Malfoy. “Now get that box of shrunken heads out here this instant, or so help me Merlin, I’ll turn you into a toad.”

“Being a toad might be better than this,” Draco mumbled, but he did as he was told. “Bet you wouldn’t make a toad do all this stupid heavy lifting.”

Narcissa took a deep breath and looked to the darkening sky as if it held the secret to dealing with her only son. She exhaled and vaguely wondered how much she could get for his intestines on the Dark Arts black market (not that there was any other kind of Dark Arts market). She decided against disemboweling him, but only because she didn’t fancy being by herself for very long. “Don’t be silly, of course I would. Toads have to do their share. Hand me that stack of labels, would you?”

Draco threw the labels at his mother, sighed, and sat down on the muddy ground with a petulant squish. “I still don’t understand why we have to do this.”

Narcissa didn’t look up from her stack of labels, which she was now affixing to the bottoms of the shrunken heads. “Do you want to be the poorest boy at school? Do you want new robes, since you’re just going to roll around and get those all dirty? Or would you like me to start knitting you sweaters like that dreadful Weasley woman?”

“Mother, you can’t knit.”

“No,” Narcissa said thoughtfully. “I can’t. But unless you want me to start, you’ll get back in the house and bring out the books from your father’s library so we can sell them and get money and stop worrying about taking out an ad in I’m Poor! Magazine.”

Draco grumbled as he stood up and went back inside. “Being poor is bollocks.”

*

While no one was ever sure what exactly it was that Lucius Malfoy did for a living – Draco had always thought that he’d just sort of hung about and scared people into giving him money, like Crabbe had done in primary school – he had always managed to provide for his family, allowing his wife to sit around the house and drink elf-made wine all day while his only son fretted about his hair and blew up expensive things for the hell of it. But now Lucius was in prison – “bloody stupid man,” Narcissa had said when she’d found out – and the bills were starting to add up. Narcissa had already forced Draco to cancel his subscription to Quidditch World Weekly, and she’d switched from elf-made wine to something Draco strongly suspected was prepared with shoe polish. They’d given all the house-elves clothes, and the mansion was starting to smell quite strongly of mold and cheap gin. Narcissa had taken to turning off the heat to save gas, and Draco had begun wearing all those stupid fur hats of his father’s just so he wouldn’t freeze to death at night. Or during the day, really. His mother had become astonishingly frugal since his father’s arrest. He would have suspected that a Polyjuice-swigging intruder had replaced his mother if it weren’t for the continued alcoholism and nasty temperament.

They’d been dining on porridge – it was the only thing his mother could make, and she wasn’t even very good at that – one evening when Narcissa had looked at her son and announced that they’d be having a garage sale the next weekend. Draco had promptly fallen out of his chair.

“But Mother,” he’d said as soon as he’d sat up, “we don’t even have a garage. We have a carriage house full of old broomsticks and the bodies of people who crossed Father.”

“It’s a figure of speech, Draco,” Narcissa had said, taking another swig from her mysterious mug. Something hissed inside of it. “We are going to sell everything we don’t need, and that includes those silly hats.”

Draco’s hand had flown to the silly hat in question. This one had real bear’s ears on and he quite fancied it, in the way that people often fancy the stupidest things imaginable simply because they’re stupid. “What will Father say about this?”

Narcissa had shrugged. “I’d be more inclined to care if he hadn’t gotten himself caught in the middle of a blasted Death Eater battle and thrown into prison. The Death Eaters’ Wives’ Fund doesn’t cover loss of income caused by foolishness, you know.”

“Father isn’t foolish, Mother.”

“Oh, yes, he is,” Narcissa had said, tossing back another gulp of whatever the hell it was she was drinking. She burped delicately. “And that’s why he’s in prison, and that’s why we’re having a garage sale.”

Draco had groaned and taken another halfhearted bite of terrible porridge. He’d gotten hold of his father at Azkaban that night, but apparently, Lucius was less concerned about his family’s slide into genteel poverty than he was about his cellblock’s poker game.

“Oh, Draco, it’s so much better here without the Dementors,” Lucius had said through the fire. He was wearing some sort of strange orange jumpsuit, and his hair had been twisted up underneath a bandanna. He looked happier and healthier than he had in years, which Draco resented, as any boy who had dined on porridge for three straight weeks would.

“I can see that, Father.”

“We have recreation time now, you know. They let us play Quadpot.”

“Yes, Father, that’s great, but Mother is – ”

“I’m sure your mother knows exactly what she’s doing,” Lucius had said, glancing over his shoulder. “Oy, Three-Fingers, keep your damned hands away from my cards!”

“But, Father – ”

“Draco, do you want Father to lose the game and have to take bottom bunk in Fisty McRapesalot’s cell?” Lucius had asked sharply.

Draco sulked. “No.”

“Then listen to your mother. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, after I TAKE THIS MAN FOR EVERYTHING HE’S WORTH,” Lucius had yelled as his face disappeared.

Draco had stared into the fire for a long moment before dousing it (“Firewood costs money, Draco, and so does connecting to Azkaban, that’s a bloody long-distance call”). Then he’d let out some sort of agonized moan and fell back against the carpet, not noticing how hard the floor really was.

“This is all Potter’s fault,” he’d muttered, readjusting that day’s fur hat. It had a raccoon’s tail hanging from the back of it. “Bloody. Stupid. Potter. His fault, all of it.”

“No, it’s not,” said the mirror on the wall, and it would have followed up on this had Draco not hurled a brick at it.

“I was going to sell that!” Narcissa had shrieked from the next room.

*

The garage sale had started, and that did nothing to improve Draco’s mood.

“Father wouldn’t want you to sell that, Mother,” he complained as Narcissa affixed a price tag to a large mahogany desk chair. It had serpent-heads for arms and had been in the family for generations; legend went that Great-Grandfather Abraxas had gotten it from the Devil himself. If that were true, Draco thought, the Devil himself had terrible taste in furniture and could do with a serious crash course in modern minimalism.

But it was the principle of the thing, really.

Narcissa stood up and flipped her long, blonde hair over one shoulder. “If your father didn’t want me to sell off ugly family heirlooms, he should have tried a little bit harder to evade capture by the authorities.” She unscrewed the top of her hip flask and took a sip. “Now go be a good son and try to flag down the passerby.”

“Excuse me, what?”

“Draco, no one can see us from here. Go be a dear and stand at the end of the drive, would you?” Narcissa said, sitting down in the hideous chair and taking another drink.

“Mother, that’s servants’ work,” Draco whined. “And it’s raining. And I can’t cast Impervious, it’s not school-year yet.”

Narcissa smiled sweetly and handed him an umbrella. It was old, and worn, and the handle looked like it had once been someone’s femur. “We don’t have servants anymore, Draco, you must have noticed. Now make Mummy happy and find us some customers.”

Draco glanced at the umbrella unhappily. “Being poor is bollocks.”

*

“Er. Garage sale up that drive, you hear? All the evil artifacts – uh, family heirlooms – you can imagine, all on sale up thataways!”

Draco may have hated begging, but he enjoyed yelling at people even more than he hated begging. It warmed him up, first of all, and his umbrella had turned out to have a hole in it. It seemed to be working, as much as it could – people on broomsticks were turning and flying up the Malfoys’ drive at a fairly rapid pace. Draco smiled to himself, pleased, until he was hit in the face with what felt like a handful of mud.

“POTTER!” he yelled reflexively, getting angrier and angrier until he realized that Potter was miles away in Little Whinging and couldn’t possibly be responsible for this. He cleared the mud from his eyes and saw a plump child on the other side of the street, wiping a fat hand on his coverall.

“You look funny,” said the child, whose tricycle was hovering a few inches above the ground. “And my mummy says you’re all a bunch of inbreds.”

“I’ll inbred you, you little – ”

But the magical tricycle was already speeding away.

Draco looked at the sky through the hole in his umbrella and sighed. “Being poor is bollocks,” he said, trudging up the drive.

*

A few moments later, Draco was enumerating his many woes to his mother, who was counting a stack of Galleons on an increasingly empty table.

“And a child threw mud at me, and my umbrella’s broken, and this is awful, and – ”

“Will you stop complaining for five seconds?”

“ – it’s cold, and it’s raining, and people can see me, and my hair is frizzing, and I might be getting diptheria – ”

“Draco,” Narcissa said wearily, “I’ll tell you what. If you sell one thing to one person, you can go inside. How’s that?”

Draco paused. “One thing?”

“Yes, Draco. One thing. Anything. Can you manage that?”

“Fine, I’ll take it. But you do realize that none of these people here are fit to be touching our things, Mother.”

A woman browsing through Lucius’ collection of whips and chains looked up. “Oy!” she said indignantly.

“Excuse him,” Narcissa said to the woman. “He’s just upset that I’m selling his Marvin the Mad Muggle playset.”

“I am not!” Draco protested. “It’s just… it’s collectible, is all.”

Narcissa tipped her head towards the woman. “Found him playing with it last week. Made the ‘vroom, vroom’ noises with the Muggle car, too.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. “They never do like to grow up, do they?”

“ARGH,” said Draco, who had really just been testing it to see if it still worked all right because you could never be sure about that sort of thing, and stalked off towards a table full of old books. A plump witch in brightly colored robes was flipping through the volumes, looking puzzled.

“Er, what are you looking for?” asked Draco, hoping he could get rid of something so he could go inside.

The witch looked up from The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter. “Do you have any Gilderoy Lockhart?”

“Gilderoy Lockhart is for uneducated plebians,” Draco replied automatically, wrinkling his nose. “Really, you’d be better off stuffing your mind with something else. He’s just crap.”

The witch’s eyes narrowed. “Uneducated plebians, eh? I’ll take my business elsewhere, then,” she said, walking away.

“Oh? And what other evil families are having garage sales this weekend?” Draco called after her, quite pleased with himself for thinking of such a clever retort.

The woman turned around. “The Averys and the Notts are having estate sales, since you asked, and I’m sure that Prunella Avery has exactly what I’m looking for.”

“Oh,” said Draco, no longer quite so pleased with himself. “Well.”

As the woman walked down the driveway, Draco noticed an even more unwelcome sight making its way up towards the lawn. It was tall, and freckled, and had the sort of red hair that God gives to the eternally unfortunate in an attempt to make up for their eternal misfortune.

And in terms of eternal misfortune, Draco couldn’t think of anything worse than a Weasley witnessing his downfall.

“Oy, Malfoy!” yelled the Weasel, far more cheerfully than Draco ever would have expected. “Who’s poor now?”

“Shut up, Weasley,” Draco replied, gritting his teeth as the Weasel drew closer. He was tucked into one of those absurd sweaters his fat mother was always making, and his umbrella looked big enough to cover his whole family. They can probably only afford the one, Draco thought, looking up at the hole in his own. “What are you even doing here?”

“Gloating, mostly,” Weasley said, shaking his umbrella so that a shower of droplets fell onto Draco’s face. “But Mum always says that the best junk is rich junk, so I’m just going to have a look around, if you don’t mind, and I don’t think you’re in any position to object.”

Draco seethed. “Your foul hands aren’t fit to touch any of the belongings of the Noble House of Malfoy, you prick.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Weasley, examining a black bundle. “What the hell is this?”

“Ceremonial dress robes, Weasel,” said Draco, “not that you’d know what such a thing looked like.”

“Oh, do you use this when you all gather ‘round and kiss You-Know-Who’s feet?” asked Weasley, looking nonplussed.

“Don’t be an ass, Weasley, the Dark Lord’s feet are manky and disgusting,” Draco sniffed. “Only Fenrir Greyback goes near them, and that’s because he’s bloody sick.”

“It looks girly,” said Weasley.

“Says the prat who went to the Yule Ball in a bloody dress.”

“Oh, shut up.” Weasley picked up a Chudley Cannons pennant that Draco would have never let his mother put out for sale if she hadn’t waved her wand menacingly. “I’ve moved past that. And you looked like a vicar.”

“Better a vicar than a girl.”

“Eh. I quite like this, now,” Weasley said cheerily, turning the pennant over in his hands. “Signed by the entire team, eh? Did Daddy pull some strings to get this, Malfoy?”

“No,” said Draco grumpily; Lucius hadn’t pulled strings as much as he had gently tugged on them and attached a few Galleons to the ends. “And I quite like it, too, but Mother is making me sell it.”

Weasley clucked, sounding disturbingly like his own mother. “How much would you want for it?”

“More money than you’ve ever seen in your pathetic life, Weasel,” Draco said menacingly. A fairly fat raindrop fell through the hole in his umbrella and landed on his nose. “So just put it down, will you?”

“Now, Malfoy, is that any way to treat a customer?” Weasley replied, looking stupidly snug in his thick sweater. “I think we should haggle.”

“I don’t know what that is, and I don’t want to find out.”

“It’s when I name a price, and we argue, and then you give up and let me have it,” said Weasley, ignoring Draco. The heavy rain rolled right off of his umbrella. “I’ll pay you 15 Knuts.”

“Preposterous!” said Draco, shivering. “I won’t let it go for less than three Galleons.”

“That’s ridiculous, I could get them to sign one myself for three Galleons.” Weasley ran one long, poverty-addled finger along the edge of the pennant. “Four Sickles, then.”

“One Galleon,” said Draco, looking at the house. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine it was quite warm. And there were a few fur hats he hadn’t tried on yet.

“Ten Sickles.”

“Five.” The rain was coming down harder.

“Two.”

“Fine! Fine!” yelled Draco, hopping up and down. The mud was making its way into his worn-out Italian leather shoes. “Just give me the bloody money and leave me alone!”

Weasley grinned and pulled two Sickles out of his pocket. “Pleasure doing business with you, Malfoy.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Draco, shoving the Sickles in his own pocket and turning around. “MOTHER! I SOLD SOMETHING TO SOMEONE! MAY I GO INSIDE NOW?”

“Don’t yell, Draco, I’m right here,” Narcissa said from five feet away. “And I don’t know if a Weasley counts as a ‘person,’ technically.”

Weasley scowled and walked down the drive, presumably back to whichever rock he’d crawled out from underneath.

“But I sold him my pennant, Mother, for two Sickles. I haggled,” Draco said proudly, glancing at the front door of the mansion in much the same way a lion glances at a lame antelope that the rest of the pack has abandoned in a corner from which there is no escape. “And now I want to go inside, like you said I could.”

Narcissa shifted uncomfortably, fingering her flask. “Well… you can’t.”

Draco would have stamped his foot had he not been sixteen and clearly above such behavior. He stamped both feet instead. “Why the bloody hell not?”

“Because I sold you to that gentleman over there for six Galleons and a bottle of elf-made wine,” Narcissa said quickly, gesturing to a shifty-looking man in a big black hat. Human ears dangled from the hat’s brim.

“WHAT?”

“He’s a salesman at Borgin and Burkes,” Narcissa said, crossing her arms. “He says that if your intestines don’t go for much on the market, he’ll train you up to run the register in the shop. He’ll pay you a wage and everything. You can come home for the nights and keep Mummy company. Gave me an ear as a promise.” She held the appendage up like it was a trophy. It still had an earring in the lobe.

A hailstone hit Draco’s umbrella and poked another giant hole right through it. “I hate you, Mother.”

“Oh, you say that now,” Narcissa said, finally unscrewing the cap of her flask. “But you’ll thank me later, when you’re the best shop boy Knockturn Alley’s ever seen!”

Draco glanced at the man in the ear-brimmed hat. Garage sales were one thing; being a common shop boy was quite another. He’d have to go in every day, and be polite to people, and work for his money, and –

“Being poor is bollocks,” he moaned, trudging away.

two points for honesty, 1/1

2006-07-04T21:03:08Z

Title: Two Points for Honesty
Type: Veronica Mars
Summary: Post-2x22. Mac, Dean, Cassidy. The hell? Why is there a ghost in this story?
Word Count: 3584
Written in: May 2006 (five-hour project)
Notes: My second public attempt at the VM-verse. I kinda like this one. And that's good, because I seriously wrote this because I couldn't deal with the events of the season 2 finale. God, I overidentify with Mac like whoa.

It’s a pretty familiar thing, at this point. She smiles at Dean when he drops her off in front of Shields, licks her lips before he leans in for a good-night kiss. Her heart flips, just a little bit, when he pulls back and she can see how clear and hopeful his eyes are. Mac waves as he sets off down the sidewalk, a lunch date at the Commons all set for Saturday afternoon, and lets out a deep breath she never realizes she’s holding as she opens the doors to her dormitory and waits for the elevator.

She’d met Dean through the orientation office and had found him almost irritatingly perky at first; it wasn’t until later, when she realized that his constant offers of dining-hall tours and emails about humanities seminars were pleas for almost-dates, that she warmed up to the kid, let him in a little bit.

“My ex-girlfriend said I was too clingy,” he’d said one night, after they’d left an astonishingly boring frat party. They’d both been a little drunk when they’d fallen down on the grass of the quad, and she’d smiled when he’d taken hold of her hand. “She didn’t like me calling her and telling her what I was up to, I guess.” He paused. “I just thought, you know, that she’d want to know that stuff, so she’d know I was a good guy.”

“You are a good guy,” she’d said honestly, liking the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled.

“I’d like to think so.” He’d sighed. “She was sleeping with her poli sci professor. Like, how gross is that?”

She’d rolled onto her side, biting her lip and leaning in closer. “My ex-boyfriend blew up a busful of people and raped my best friend. Except it was before we were friends. And we weren’t dating when he blew up the bus, either.” She snorted. “So I guess that’s good. And then he tried to kill my friend, and her boy-thing, and he totally thought he killed her dad, and he did kill the mayor, but I guess that’s okay because the mayor totally molested him when he was a kid.” Dean’s eyes kept getting wider, and she’d liked how they looked, so she’d continued. “And he left me in a hotel room and took all my clothes after not sleeping with me, and I had to sit around in a shower curtain for, like, ever, and then he jumped off the roof of the hotel and it took, like, half the sheriff’s department to get him off of some poor guy’s car.”

Dean had looked surprised, but not as surprised as she’d been expecting. “You knew that kid?”

“I went out with that kid. I tried to lose my virginity to that kid, but that didn’t work.” She glanced down at where their hands had been entwined, wet with sweat and midnight dew. “Pretty fucked up, huh?”

He’d just sighed, traced little patterns against her palm. “I don’t think I can top that.” He’d smiled then, an attempt to be devious. “But I did have a crush on my cousin when I was in high school. Like, it was huge. And I tried to make out with her, but then the house fell down. It’s a long story.”

She’d laughed. “That’s fucked up, too.”

“So we should work?”

She’d grinned. “Yeah, we should work.”

He’d smiled and kissed her then, soft and sweet, and he’d brought her back to the dorm and hadn’t said anything when she’d stopped to throw up in a trash can on their way back.

Dean always calls when he says he’ll call, and he’s smart in a dumb sort of way; he can solve quadruple-digit math problems in his head, but he’s always one step behind Veronica’s zingers. The word “fuck” sounds a little weird coming out of his mouth, but she likes that about him. He’s got no pretensions. She knows everything there is to know about him, from how many cars his father sells per quarter to the fact that there haven’t been any mysterious deaths or capital crimes in his vicinity for the last ten years. She likes that he smells like basic bar soap, not Acqua di Gio or professionally laundered sweaters, and she hears upbeat Top 40 songs in her head whenever he sits next to her in third-semester Spanish. He’d taken her to Macworld for her birthday, and had smiled indulgently when she’d had a complete freakout over the new Cougar OS. The only inner demon he has is his complete inability to handle his alcohol, and she likes being around him because he’s as close to normal as anyone she knows will ever get.

She likes that he’s not pushing her, that he never asks to come up to her room; but she can feel how much he wants her to invite him up there, and she’s relieved about that.

However, if he ever does make it up to her room, she thinks, there might be a little bit of a problem. She pads down the hallway in her sneakers and unlocks the door to her single, and she’s not at all surprised to see that her dead ex-boyfriend beat her home tonight. As usual.

Cassidy looks up, brushing the hair out of his eyes and straightening his collar. “Hey, honey, you’re home.”

She closes the door, sighing, and kicks off her shoes. “You do realize that this is all your fault.”

He’s sitting where he always sits when she first sees him, at her computer. He’s reading her LiveJournal, which is mostly an experiment to see if Feelings Journals really work (Logan will never admit it, but he does keep one; Mac found it when she helped him move his stuff from the Grand to an apartment near the campus and they’d bonded over their mutual obsession with Final Cut Pro and God, that’s a weird friendship), and she drops her purse on the floor as she flops onto the bed.

“What’s my fault?” he asks absentmindedly, hitting the ‘down’ arrow on the keyboard. “And your angsty poetry isn’t very good.”

“It’s satire, dorkwad,” she snaps, and why can’t her ex-boyfriend just run off to Mexico with his illegitimate child like Veronica’s did? No, hers has to be dead, and he has to feel all unjust about it even though he was a gigantic bastard and anyway, it was totally his decision to take that swan-dive off the roof. And now he thinks that being all ghostly means that he can show up unannounced and whine about stuff. Like her poetry. And the fact that she’s trying to move on with her life and not mope about him being fucked-up and dead.

Cassidy shakes his head. (She’s still surprised that he shows up intact; she’d always assumed that she’d be stuck looking at his gross, crumpled corpse if he ever did decide to come back. But no, he’s just plain old Cassidy, in jeans and a polo shirt, except he looks like he would have if he ever got a good night’s sleep in the seventeen years he spent corporeally on this planet.) “No, Mac. There have been, like, five good pieces of satire written in the entire history of the world. This is not one of those.” He turns to face her, and she’s only mildly thrown off by the fact that he’s vaguely translucent. “And as long as you’re accusing me of stuff, I’d like an explanation.”

“Fine,” she says. “It’s your fault I can’t have a functional sexual relationship with a perfectly nice guy because I’m afraid he’s going to turn out to be a serial killer-slash rapist-slash sociopath.”

He frowns. “I was a mass murderer, not a serial killer. I blew up a bus, it was a one-time thing. It wasn’t like I ran around collecting hair and nail clippings and keeping them in a big trash bag under my bed. And I only did the rape thing, like, once.”

“And Lee Harvey Oswald only shot JFK once, but you don’t see history letting him off the hook,” she retorts. “You are a despicable human being.”

“Was. I was a despicable human being.”

“Fine, you were a despicable human being. Why are you even still here?”

He shrugs. “Afterlife isn’t as fun as you’d think. The only people I know there are Lilly Kane, who spends all her time trying to get into the pants of that kid from Seaquest DSV; Aaron Echolls, who thinks he’s still alive and gets pissed when he can’t watch himself on TV; the kids I kinda blew up, who aren’t really pleased with me; and Woody Goodman, and you can imagine how much I want to talk to him. And I don’t make friends easily.” He gets up and sits at her feet, playing with her shoelaces. “So I bother you. You’re the only person who still wants to see me, anyway.”

She sits up. “I got through freshman orientation while undergoing some serious therapy, thanks. You should be able to find your way around the freaking afterlife.”

He shakes his head, reaching over and grabbing her PowerBook. “Afterlife sucks. But the alternative was a small padded cell, and at least I still get to move around.”

The first time he’d shown up, the day after she’d moved into her new room, she’d screamed and he’d immediately disappeared. She’d managed to convince herself that she was hallucinating, just another adjustment problem, when she heard his voice coming from nowhere in particular.

“Uh, Mac?”

Her head had shot up from her pillow. “Go away!”

“Can I come back? Please?”

“No! You’re dead! This isn’t real!”

She’d heard a sigh. “Yes, I’m dead, but yes, this is real. Are you going to scream again?”

“Probably not,” she’d muttered grudgingly, and when she’d sat up, Cassidy had been sitting cross-legged at the end of her bed. He’d looked at her curiously, and she’d backed up as far as she possibly could.

“Why are you here?” she’d demanded.

He’d shrugged. “I kind of wanted to say that I’m sorry.”

She’d groaned and dropped her head into her hands. “You know, Cassidy, even after three months of therapy, I can think of about eight million other people you should be apologizing to right now.”

“All of whom would try to throw lamps through my head.” He’d paused. “I never really broke up with you, did I?”

“You know, when you threw yourself off the roof of the Neptune Grand, I sorta figured that was the end of our… relationship.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I figured I owed you a formal break-up.” He’d cleared his throat, which Mac had thought was kinda ridiculous, because what was he trying to get out of it? Ectoplasm? “So, yeah. I’m psycho and really fucked-up and I don’t think we should see each other anymore. Is that okay?”

Mac had relaxed, then; he was real enough for a ghost, all right, but her imagination had something to do with all of this, and that meant she’d be dealing with her Cassidy. You know, the one who just wanted to stuff his face with pizza and hold her hand all the time, not the one who blew people up and raped Veronica and bit it on the roof of a Ford. They’d set rules, then; Mac could deal with the whole mass-murderer thing if she didn’t think about it too much, but the rape thing was a little harder to swallow, so they didn’t talk about Veronica. They didn’t talk about why Cassidy had turned out the way he did; the good thing about being dead, Mac had guessed, was that psychology and nature/nurture crap just went straight out the window, and Cassidy could finally stop being fucked up in the afterlife. They didn’t talk about Dick, because Dick had drunk his way through his grief and still hadn’t graduated; they didn’t talk about his funeral, which seven people had attended and at which Mac had fallen to her knees in tears. He’d only shown up once a week, at first; but now that her relationship with Dean was finally getting off the ground, he was hanging around her room every night. She’d considered charging him rent.

Mac was beginning to wonder how many other college freshmen had to deal with this. Even the ones whose ex-boyfriends were sociopaths probably didn’t have to put up with haunting; and even the ones who had to deal with haunting probably didn’t have to listen to Cassidy’s whining.

“It’s like you’ve just forgotten about me,” he was saying, opening a new browser window. “There’s no more wailing, no more screaming, no more waking up in the middle of the night and thinking I’m lying next to you. Mac, that really hurts a guy, you know.”

“Okay, Cassidy, I wailed and screamed once in the middle of the night, and that was a really long time ago. And most of the time, you’re not lying next to me, you’re sitting at my desk checking Television Without Pity and criticizing my LJ,” she says. “I don’t have to worry about missing you, because you won’t go away.”

He sniffs. “I feel neglected. You wrote this crappy poem, like, two weeks ago. No word on your angst and horror ever since.”

“I’m trying to move on. Dean doesn’t make me want to write about angst and horror.” She pulls the elastics out of her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders. “Dean, if you haven’t guessed, is not a despicable human being. Unlike some little dead boys I know.”

He blinks innocently. “Who, me?”

“Okay, that’s just creepy.” She rolls her eyes. The Cassidy that shows up to talk to her is a nice, innocent boy; he’s hers, after all. But they both know what he did, and that’s not going to change. “What’s going to happen if I try to bring him up here, Cassidy? Are you going to throw a sheet over your head and run around saying ‘Boo’ the whole time?”

He shrugs. “Only if you want me to.”

“Shut up.” She leans forward to slap his shoulder; she feels faint resistance before her hand passes right through him. He can touch objects, which she supposes might be useful someday, but he can’t touch her. Being dead must be quirky like that. “I told him about you, you know. So I haven’t freaking forgotten you.”

“What did you say?”

“That you did a whole bunch of bad shit and that it took half the sheriff’s department to scrape you off the hood of a car.”

“It wasn’t half the sheriff’s department,” Cassidy protests. “It was Lamb and this one dude with a seriously skeevy mustache, and they kept saying how good it was that I hadn’t landed on the Mercedes in front because my brains kept taking paint chips with them.”

She shudders. “Ew, Cassidy, that’s gross.” She tucks her legs underneath her. “You couldn’t have come up with a more romantic way of killing yourself, could you?”

“Like what, strangling myself with your bra? No, actually, I was sort of out of options at that point.” He turns to fully face her, mimicking her position. “Figured that a Beaver Pancake was the only way to go.”

“Beaver.” She snickers. “I heard about that ‘My name is Cassidy’ thing, by the way. God, you’re a fucking drama queen, you know that?”

“Should have known Veronica wouldn’t keep her mouth shut about that.”

“You’re not allowed to talk about Veronica, remember? And it was Logan, anyway.”

“I can’t believe you guys are friends now. That’s practically sacrilegious.”

“He knows his way around a computer. And he watches Battlestar Galactica when he thinks no one’s looking. Oh, also, he kept Veronica from blowing your head off, and I’d say you should be grateful for that if you hadn’t immediately gone and screwed that up by jumping off the roof. Ass.”

Okay, sometimes she screws up and mentions Veronica. Whatever, she’s the one who’s still human.

He shrugs, closing the lid of her computer and putting it back on her desk. “Whatever.”

She rolls her eyes again and hops off the bed, unbuttoning her shirt and hearing him gulp as her fingers move lower. She’ll only admit it in the darkest recesses of her mind, but she likes torturing him like this. One of the things she’d realized first about the ghost of the boy whose sexual dysfunction was more epic than a Robert Jordan novel was that being dead had effectively cured him; he was just like any other dead seventeen-year-old boy now, all full of hormones and completely unable to do anything about it.

“I never would have suspected you were this much of a bitchy tease,” he remarks mildly as she unhooks her bra and pulls on a tank top. “That other kid has no idea what he’s in for.”

She smirks. “Don’t you wish you’d killed yourself after having sex with me?”

He shakes his head, eyes following her as she sits on the bed again. “It would have been awful. I promise. We both would have cried afterwards.”

“Too bad you’re minus one body, huh?”

He starts to nod, but stops himself. “Actually, being dead is kind of okay, in that aspect.”

“How?”

“Well, we can’t really touch each other, so the sex thing is out of the question. And now you know everything about me, so there aren’t any more secrets.” He gives her a half-smile. “We can just… talk. We didn’t get to do this when I was… not, you know, un-alive. It’s nice.”

She sighs. “Yeah, for the dead kid, not for the girl who’s trying to get on with her life, Cassidy.”

“If you really wanted to get on with your life, you wouldn’t be with me right now. You’d be with that other guy, Derek – ”

“His name’s Dean – ”

“Okay, Dean, whatever. You’d be with him instead,” he says. “I’m not the one holding you back. I am a manifestation of your own doubt and restraint.”

“Who have you been hanging out with? Sigmund Freud?”

“No, I got bored and floated around your psych class this morning. Which you slept through, which sucks since you really could have used the info. Ask the guy behind you for notes, though, his are really meticulous.”

“You’re not a manifestation of whatever. You need this as much as I do.”

“Shut up. No way.”

“What are you going to do? Blow me up? Sorry, boy, you’re pretty much out of options. You could always disappear,” she says meaningfully.

He glares at her.

“And you do too need this,” Mac continues. “You need to feel like you dying meant something. You want to know that someone misses you, so you’re going to keep showing up and annoy me into missing you.”

“Do you? You know, do you miss me?”

“How can I miss you? You’re still here.”

“Be honest.”

She purses her lips, thinking. “Yes,” she says decisively. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t, I don’t think. I miss what I thought you were, though. I mean, you were kind of a bastard, so intellectually, I’m glad you’re dead. Oh, don’t give me that look.”

He glares at her resentfully. “I feel entitled.”

“Cassidy, you killed people! The world is a better place without you!”

“Is your world a better place without me?” he says, letting the ensuing silence hang in the air like heavy fog.

Mac thinks, and then she thinks some more. She thinks of Cassidy showing up during business meetings and job interviews and Dean and sex and weddings and funerals and she shudders, but then she thinks about coming back to an empty room and waiting for a boy who might never come by again, because she’s never going to know when she really has to say goodbye.

She can’t decide which option is worse, and that might make her as crazy as the boy sitting next to her used to be.

“It will be,” she finally says. “Someday. Someday soon, I hope.” She pauses. “It’ll be better without you the day that I can bring Dean up here and not worry about you popping up in the middle of everything. It’ll be better without you when I’m over it. Everything. And I really, really want to be over everything.”

“Suuuure you do.” He snickers, but not unkindly. “Let’s face it, Mac. You’re the only one I want to see, but you’re also the only one who wants to see me. You might be stuck with me for a while.”

Mac knows this, and she’s not sure how she feels about it. Cassidy Casablancas was a murderous, psychotic bastard, but then again, her version of him isn’t so bad.

“I’m staying tonight, you know,” he says conversationally, grabbing the remote control and flipping on the TV. “I don’t want to go back there. Not tonight, at least. Not right now. I think there was a poker tournament and no one wanted to invite me.”

Mac takes the remote from him, glancing into his sad eyes for a moment before turning her attention elsewhere. “Fine. But I’m picking the movie.”

And as she sits back on her dorm-room bed and leans into the spectre of her dead ex-boyfriend, she wonders when, if ever, this is going to get any more normal.

repair, 1/1

2006-07-04T20:59:01Z

Title: Repair
Type: Veronica Mars
Summary: Post-2x21, featuring Mac, Cassidy, and Weevil.
Word Count: 1681
Written in: May 2006 (three-hour project)
Notes: My first venture into VM fic... and I'm not that crazy about it. It had to be done, though, so here it is.

Title: Repair
Author: suzie strikes back / sarcasticpixie
Pairing/Character: Mac/Cassidy with a side of Weevil
Word Count: 1681
Rating: PG-13
Summary: A much-needed conversation in an unlikely locale.
Spoilers: Up to 2x21, with some extremely minor speculation about 2x22. Potentially spoilery notes lie beyond that cut down there, but if you've seen up to 2x21 and you've thought about this season even a baby bit, you should be fine.
Warnings: Um, the demented ramblings of a woman relieved to be done with undergrad coursework lie ahead? Dirty language and some serious mackage, y'all.

Long-time writer, first time writing for VM. Such is the cute factor of Mac and Cassidy. Cross-posted to mac_cassidy.

Notes: I had to get this out before the season finale. If anything happens to Mac/Cassidy in said finale, I might have to drive a bus off a cliff myself.

This is also very weird for me because up until right now, most of my het fic was written a) for the Harry Potter fandom and b) when I was 14. Since then, it’s been all hot boy athletes making out with other hot boy athletes. Buenos dias, drastic change of pace.

“Trustafarian” is tm Megan McCafferty. I feel entitled to rip this off because last time I checked, no one was paying me $500k to think up my own shit, KAAVYA.

*

It’s nearly eight o’clock by the time Weevil fully understands polynomial multiplication, and when he breezes out of the classroom in a haze of Brut and badassery, you really have to wonder why you bothered. Okay, so Weevil will graduate, how very Good Samaritan of you and all, but let’s be honest, here. You offered to smarten up the local criminal element to help out the ex-boyfriend who unceremoniously dumped you like week-old tater tots, your own final exams be damned, and abovementioned ex-boyfriend couldn’t even be bothered to stick around until the end of the bizarro-world tutoring session.

Gotta go, he’d said half an hour ago, and that had been that, smirky half-truce or no smirky half-truce.

Weevil had offered to cut his brakes for you, but you shook your head no, distracted and annoyed and, somehow, completely unsurprised. Cassidy, as you should very well know by now, runs from anything and everything like he’s training for the Boston Marathon. And as much as the idea of The Boy Who Fled being unable to stop a speeding car appeals to your dark side, you’d probably be a little sad if he died.

Okay, maybe not a little.

Unless it was from massive blood loss, the result of you twisting a fist into his chest and ripping out his heart like he ripped out yours. That would be poetic, although with your luck, the computer labs in prison would still be running Windows 98.

You shake your head, running a hand through your hair. It’s late, for a school night, and you’ve got a math final tomorrow yourself. Not like you’re going to fail BC Calc or anything, but it might be nice to review your notes at night instead of thinking about evil, terrible boys with bright eyes and sharp jawlines who dump you in the middle of lunch and SERIOUSLY WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT.

It’s not hard to gather up your effects, pencils and bits of paper and a tiny doodle of a beaver caught in a meat grinder that Weevil did to make you feel better, and you shut the door behind you, locking it with a key from Veronica’s infamous keychain. Two days left at Neptune High, and God be damned if those aren’t two days too many.

You’re halfway down the hall when a hand fists in your sleeve and pulls you roughly to the side. Somewhere, a door clicks shut, and everything goes dark.

You think you’ve blacked out for a few scary seconds, sandwiched between flashes of kidnapping and ransom notes and one really weird thought about the womb, until you realize that you’re fully conscious and, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, probably in no danger whatsoever.

“Hey, Mac.”

Okay, so maybe you’re in danger of killing your ex-boyfriend.

“Cassidy, what the hell are you doing?”

A switch flicks and the small space is filled with dreary half-light. A cleaning bucket and a vacuum take up one corner, but beyond that, it’s just you and Cassidy Casablancas in a janitor’s closet, like some sick cosmic joke.

“Um, trying to explain something?”

He’s leaning against the opposite wall, the collar of his blue polo shirt flipped up and brushing his jawline; he’s got his arms and ankles crossed, playing it cool, but the tone of his voice gives him away.

“And we couldn’t have done this over coffee?”

“Well, Weevil did say we should work out our issues in a closet somewhere.”

“You heard that? I thought your Human-to-Trustafarian translator was on the fritz, what with all the talk of, you know, spark plugs and all.”

He pauses, and you feel bad, but seriously, he dumped you at lunch. “I deserved that.”

“Yeah, you did. And for the record, this – ” You gesture to the closet – “scared the shit out of me.”

He uncrosses his arms. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

You shake your head. “Somehow, Cassidy, that’s not really going to cut it for me right now.”

He sighs, running a hand through his short, spiky hair. “Well, I knew you weren’t going to agree to talk to me anywhere else, alone, voluntarily, so… I figured this was as good as anywhere else.”

“You could have asked. We could have done coffee. Really.” You put your bag down, leaning against your own wall. “You’re the one who dumped me – ”

“Yeah, but – ”

“ – you’re the one who’s been avoiding me – ”

“ – okay, but – ”

“ – and do you seriously think I would have helped Weevil out with math to fix your stupid car if I didn’t, you know, care? A little bit?”

He groans. “Okay, fine. I’m an idiot. You’re smarter than me. But since we’re here, can we please just… talk?”

“Fine.” You bite your lip. “You have a very limited amount of time in which to explain why you’ve been such a shithead.”

“Okay.” He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and stares at you.

“Any time now, Cassidy.”

“I’m…” he pauses, playing with the hem of his shirt. “I’m going through some stuff right now, is all. It’s not you, really, I swear. You just – ”

“You could have told me.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Really.” He sounds desperate. “I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it, you know? And it’s not something I want to put on you, anyway. If I can’t deal with it, I’m not going to ask you to do that.”

“I could have dealt with it.”

He shakes his head, dropping his eyes to the ground. “No, no, trust me when I say you couldn’t. I’m working on it, I swear, but you really don’t want to deal with it. You know, maybe someday, you could, I could tell you, whatever, yeah. But… for now, it’s not gonna be fair for me to ask you to deal with me and my… baggage.”

“And dumping me like that was fair how?”

He glances up, and when his eyes meet yours, he looks like such a lost little boy that you can barely stand it. “I fucked up something bad there. I know. And I know I don’t have an excuse for it. Yeah, okay, issues, baggage, whatever, but…”

He steps forward, and when he takes your hands in his, you don’t try to stop him.

“I shouldn’t have done that. God, Cindy, I’m so sorry. That was kind of inexcusably dumb and insensitive and I’m not going to blame you if you decide to throw me through the door and step on me on your way out.”

Okay, he’s groveling and pouring his heart out, but you have to giggle. “Throw you through the door? Cassidy, I’m not the Hulk.”

He cracks a smile, dropping your right hand and twisting a lock of hair around his index finger. “But this is green, Mac. What am I supposed to think?”

“That green is so my color?” you say, shuffling closer.

“Everything is so your color,” he says quietly, and when he dips his head to kiss you, it’s not entirely unexpected.

It’s soft at first, and you can feel him trembling as he takes your face in his hands, but it’s different, somehow. He still tastes like Cassidy – mint toothpaste and vanilla-bean lattes, with a hint of artificial strawberry something-or-other – but he’s not kissing like he used to. It’s more aggressive, you think as he moves his hands to your waist, and he’s the one tracing the seam of your lips with his tongue, not the other way around. You open your mouth, allowing him access, and something explodes.

You hear more than feel your back hit the wall as he crushes you up against it, plundering your mouth as he wraps his arms around you and presses your bodies together. You lock your arms around his neck and angle your head for better access, teeth clashing and tongues battling for supremacy, and this is all so different from before, when it was all tentative touches and nervous conversation. He draws back slightly to catch his breath, and you take advantage of the situation, nibbling on his full bottom lip like you’ve been thinking about doing since you first laid eyes on the boy.

He lets out a noise, strangled and almost inhuman, and resumes his assault on your mouth. He drops his arms lower and lower and suddenly, your feet aren’t touching the ground anymore, and you’ve got your legs wrapped around his waist and Cassidy Casablancas is the only thing keeping you from falling.

“I’ve been working on my issues,” he says in between kisses, sucking in a sharp breath when you tug lightly at his earlobe with your teeth. “I’m not going to be scared, Cindy.”

“Okay,” you reply, carefully stroking his hair. “But we’re going to have to talk about this. Not now, but someday.”

“I know. Someday. But someday doesn’t have to be for a while, right?”

As he moves his mouth to your neck and you feel his eyelashes brush the soft flesh under your ear, you think that whatever is wrong with this boy is not something you can fix, like a busted optical drive or a chipped nail. He’s fragile and cracked, like forgotten heirloom china, and it’s going to take a lot of work to put him back together. You can’t do it; he’s going to have to do it himself.

He makes his way back up to your lips and kisses you long and soft, and you let him slide one hand under the back of your t-shirt. His fingers trace light, indistinguishable patterns along your skin as he pulls back and rests his forehead against yours, and you know he’s not running anymore.

“I might be a little bit in love with you, just so you know.”

You smile, threading your fingers through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” you say before drawing him back in.

Okay, so he’s broken. But you’re pretty sure he’s not beyond repair.

tagging up, 2/2

2006-07-04T20:53:05Z

Title: Tagging Up, 2/2

*

When you step outside, the sharp night air hits you like you’re a weak fastball thrown down the middle of the plate. It’s Los Angeles-cold, that fake, dull chill that slides up your sleeves and around your ankles, and you tug the hood of your sweatshirt over your head and jog down the walkway to the street. The lights of downtown L.A. smear to your left, and you instinctively turn the other way; it’s been forever since you’ve been to the beach, and you wildly think of fighting your way back inside, taking Mark and making a run for it, insane and half-drunk and racing each other to Santa Monica. The pier’s miles away, but you could make it, you think, you’re both young and strong and if Mark McCarthy can’t do it, then it probably can’t be done.

“Party’s in there, Soto.”

You turn around and Kyle’s walking towards you, a lit cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He’s got the collar of his jacket popped, blocking out the breeze, and it’s a truth universally acknowledged that no boy raised in San Diego can handle temperatures below 60 regardless of how badass he might be otherwise.

“Gotta take a breather,” you say, shoving your hands into your kangaroo pocket. “Apartment’s not supposed to have that many people in it anyway. I’m breaking about a million fire codes right now.”

Kyle nods perfunctorily and stops next to you, knocking you in the arm with his beer bottle. “Did you invite them all?”

“Fuck, no.” Half of them are your friends, a quarter of them are part of Lisa’s omnipresent entourage, and the rest of them are neighbors you asked over so they wouldn’t call the cops. “I don’t know that many people, man. And Mark knows barely anyone here, yet.”

“Yeah. Mark.” Kyle takes a sip of his beer and sighs. “How long have you been gay for him, anyway?”

You nearly bite off your own tongue. “What?”

“You heard me.” Kyle’s looking at you now, one eyebrow raised and you’d swear to God that the fucker looks amused. “’Splain, Lucy.”

“I’m not...” you start, before realizing that whatever comes out of your mouth is going to be bullshit and you’re a terrible liar. “Was there, like, a convention or something? Did you and Lisa rent out the Staples Center and hang up a banner? Did you sell Mark and Rich bobbleheads all weekend?”

“No.” Kyle laughs. “I just know.”

“You just know?”

“Of course I just know,” Kyle says, taking a long drag from his cigarette. “Everyone just knows. You guys live in fucking West Hollywood, for God’s sake.”

You look down the street, at clean buildings and cement sidewalks and streetlamp lights bouncing off the tops of expensive cars. “It’s a nice apartment!”

“In West Hollywood.”

“On the border.”

“Of West Hollywood.” Kyle rolls his eyes and readjusts his so-hip-it-hurts newsboy cap. “Shut up, Soto. You’re hilariously gay for him and the entire world’s on notice.” He says this last part while doing an all-too-fey shuffle-step.

“I really, really fucking hate you.”

“On the bright side, he’s pretty in love with you, too, if that helps.”

“Did you miss the part where I fucking hate you?”

“I’m not lying!” Kyle says, finishing his cigarette entirely too fast and grinding it into the sidewalk with the toe of one combat boot. “He always looks at you like, I don’t know, like you just fell out of the sky and he can’t believe his own good luck to have your dumb ass kicking around.”

“Shut up.”

“I know these things.” He ignores you and speaks with the conviction of someone who’s known you and Mark for almost as long as you’ve known each other, second grade and tripping across the pavement in too-big sneakers at recess. “You fuckers are totally in love with each other, but only one of you knows it.”

You sigh, watching your breath form faint clouds in the air, believing him halfway but knowing it’s probably not true. “Well, if that’s the case, I always was the smart one.”

“Spoken like a true Trojan.” Kyle lights another cigarette. “Arrogant, condescending, and completely fucking hopeless.”

“Shove it up your ass.”

Kyle grins. “Dude, there are so many different things I could say to that right about now. Do not go there.”

You stop dead for a minute, cold fear seeping into your heart, what if he tells someone, what if it gets out, oh holy fuck; but then you remember that this is Kyle Noriega, who paired up with you in life science that week Mark had chicken pox and who loaned you dollar after quarter after nickel and who drove you home from school during the terrible, dark time that you and Mark had fought and who was the only person you knew in L.A. when you first moved here, two and a half long-ass years ago. You know Kyle Noriega too well, and Kyle Noriega won’t tell a soul.

“Whatever, dude. Just remember who wins the Rose Bowl and who never goes,” you say, turning back towards the apartment building. “How d’ya like them apples?”

You hear Kyle snicker around his cigarette as you walk back through the front door.

*

“Dude, Rich. I so love you.”

One in the morning, and your vision is fuzzing around the edges; the words don’t freak you out anymore, and you grin up at your best friend. Mark collapses into the chair next to yours, and you brace yourself for a fatal creak that doesn’t come. He’s carrying a bottle of something gold, and he struggles with the cap for a few seconds before it pops off.

“I know, man,” you say, catching the top. “I love you, too.”

“No, f’reals.” Mark coughs, with a head-shake that’s more like a twitch. “Like, you threw me a fucking awesome party, and you helped me pass statistics, and you moved in with me so I wouldn’t be all by myself, and, and, you always buy me Cocoa Puffs, and you didn’t tell my dad when I broke the side mirror off his car, and you have cool hair, and you’re... you’re just awesome.” He draws out the last word before nudging a shot glass in your direction. “Like, you rule. And I love you.”

You nod, letting your hair fall over your eyes as you watch Mark’s fingers toy with the glass, reddish light catching on the rim and bouncing away. “Totally, dude.”

He grabs at the bottle and pours you each a shot with a surprisingly minimal amount of spillage. “Best bros for life, man.”

You don’t say anything, but the two of you knock your glasses together before downing the liquor. Whatever it is, it draws a line of fire down your throat, and you grab your beer and chase the shot with a long gulp of Heineken. Alcohol poisoning is most decidedly in your immediate future.

Mark picks up a slice of cold pizza and pokes at a pepperoni before shoving it in his mouth. “I’m changing this CD,” he says, getting up. “Why in the fuck are we listening to this shit?”

“It’s Modest Mouse, for the record, and Isaac Brock is cooler than you,” you yell at Mark’s retreating back, but it’s too late; Mark’s jabbing at the eject button and haphazardly shoving a CD into the player.

And of course it would be fucking Metallica.

*

Minutes pass, the music continues to suck out loud, and Mark is hanging halfway out of the picture window now. You can imagine the headlines: Dodgers shortstop falls to death; roommate implicated. “Fucking hell, dude,” you yell, pushing your way through the throng and crouching next to him. “You okay?”

He shakes his head, clutching the sill. “No. Not okay.”

“No?”

Mark groans, painful and urgent. “Dude, I think I’m going to – ”

You grimace as he retches and five hours’ worth of alcohol splatters onto the pavement below.

“Christ,” you say aloud, as his abdomen buckles and his sneakers lose traction. You grab a paper towel from the table next to you – you haven’t progressed to using actual napkins yet – and slide your torso out the window alongside Mark’s, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and positioning yourself so that neither of you can fall.

“Mark?”

“Fuck,” he replies, short and raspy, before coughing and throwing up again.

“It’s okay, you’re okay,” you murmur, tracing patterns on his back and pushing short strands of brown hair off his forehead. It’s a clear night, and you imagine that you can smell the soft marine salt of the Pacific, dozens of blocks away, as the wind passes you by. Mark snuffles wetly, and you silently drag the paper towel across his face, wondering what the people below are thinking.

*

You remember the first time the two of you got drunk, sixteen and stupid, busting into your dad’s Johnnie Walker Blue on some December night when he was out of town and you guys had nothing else to do. The two of you’d always been pretty insular, kids like Kyle floating around the edges but never really getting near the middle; MarkandRich didn’t split up, not back then, and no one else really mattered.

It had been the week of Kelly Enbom’s birthday party, to which she’d invited Mark and not you; all the girls in your class were hot for Mark, predictably, but Kelly had found out that you’d said that her nose entered a room ten minutes before she did and had made this big point of handing out invitations to everyone in fourth-period chemistry except you.

“Coming?” she’d asked Mark, bending over his desk and showing as much cleavage as she possibly could. “Everyone else is.”

Mark had cocked his head to the side, unimpressed, and raised an eyebrow. “Is Rich invited?”

“Uh, no,” she’d said, sneering at you.

You’d rolled your eyes. “I wouldn’t want to show up without the perfect present, anyway, and rhinoplasty is a little out of my reach right now,” you’d snarked loudly, shooting a glance at Mark out of the corner of your eye.

“So I take it you’re not going,” he’d said.

“Yeah, doesn’t look like it.”

“Then I’m not going.” Mark had gone back to drawing ears and a tongue on a diagram of the water molecule, and Kelly had stalked off with a dirty look in your direction. You’d just stared at Mark for a few seconds, disbelieving, until he looked up. He’d given you a half-smile before asking if he could copy your homework, and you’d handed it over wordlessly, grateful that Mark McCarthy was your best friend because any other guy you knew would have run off with Kelly Enbom and her push-up bra in a heartbeat, gigantic nose or not.

That Friday night, when everyone else you knew was hooking up in Kelly’s basement, the two of you had camped out in your den with shot glasses and alcohol that cost more than anything you’d ever bought in your entire life. You’d sat around watching Blazing Saddles because seriously, best movie ever, and after your sixth shot, you’d sprawled out on the carpet and started whining.

“Dude, why do chicks like you so much?” you’d grumbled, looking up at an upside-down Mark. “It’s like, ooooh, let’s invite Mark to everything, and everyone just looks at me like, I don’t know, like I’m the Hunchback of Notre Fucking Dame or something.”

“I thought they were the Fighting Irish,” Mark had said blankly, collapsing next to you.

You’d tilted your head to the side. “Never mind. The point is... the point is, I am never. Ever. Ever. Going to get a girlfriend, at this rate. Like, all the girls in our class hate me. A lot. Not that I care, but it doesn’t mean good things for the future, like, when I meet girls who don’t suck.”

“It would probably help if you stopped insulting them,” Mark had said, forgoing the shot glass and pouring the alcohol straight down his throat. “I don’t know, I just... I just don’t say the same stuff to them that you do.”

“Listen, it’s not like I’m jealous,” you’d said quickly, because you weren’t; if there were cool girls at Torrey Pines High School, you had yet to find them. “I mean, I totally get it. You’re, like, the hottest guy, like, ever. But it would just be nice, if for once, someone would say I was hot. Like, ‘Hey, that Rich Soto? He’s mad hot.’ That’s all I want, you know?” You’d grabbed the bottle and taken a big gulp, every mouthful burning less and less. “I do just as many crunches as you do.”

Mark had rolled over and blinked, eyes glossy and unfocused. “I’m really the hottest guy ever?”

“Of course you are,” you’d said unevenly, taking another swig and passing the bottle over to him. “You’re, like, sooooo dreamy, you know.”

He’d snickered. “Fuck off.”

“Fiiiiine,” you’d said. On screen, Bart and Jim were running from the KKK, and you’d both laughed; you were piss-drunk on the floor with your best friend in the whole world, Christmas lights were blinking outside, and even though you hadn’t seen a baseball game in two months, you didn’t think life could actually get any better.

“Rich?” Mark had said, and you’d turned to face him; he’d spilled Scotch on what you were pretty sure was your Puma sweatshirt, but he was smiling, so you let it slide. “Richie?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you’re mad hot,” he says innocently, batting his eyelashes and barely suppressing a snort.

“Now you fuck off,” you’d yelled, kicking him with his own Converse sneaker as he began convulsing with laughter. You’d set your mouth in a firm line, determined not to smile; but Mark kept laughing, tears trickling from the corners of his eyes, and when he finally did snort, you couldn’t help but join in. You’d rolled around on the floor, kicking at each other like seven-year-old girls and howling with glee until you were both winded; on the TV, Mel Brooks had just broken the fourth wall, and Mark’s gasps settled into deep, even breaths as he rolled next to you again.

“Richie?”

“Yes, Mark.”

He yawns, shifting his weight and resting his jaw on your shoulder. “You’re fucking awesome.”

“Well, duh,” you’d said, secretly pleased, and when Mark fell asleep a few minutes later, you were quick to follow. Your dad had given you both hell the next morning, how the fuck did you two manage to go through a bottle of two-hundred-dollar Scotch in one night, but when Mark had shot you that megawatt smile, you figured that it had probably been worth the two weeks’ grounding you were sure to get.

*

Now, Mark sucks in a mouthful of air and hauls himself back inside, twisting around and propping himself up against the wall underneath the window. He pulls his knees up to his chest and rests his head against the plaster wall, wiping a hand across his eyes and smearing the tears that had been forced out by muscle strain across his temples. “Fuck,” he says quietly, letting out a long breath.

“Hey.” You tuck yourself in next to him, an inch of space separating the two of you, and cross your legs Indian-style. “You okay?”

He nods, sliding down the wall until his head is somewhere around your shoulder. “Think so.”

“Good.” You wiggle your toe through a hole in your worn-out sneaker. “Want anything?”

“Not yet,” he says faintly, leaning into you and dropping his head somewhere near the crook of your neck. You take a deep breath, his weight hitting you heavy and deep, and you can feel the muscles in your neck tense as he sighs into your sweatshirt.

Mark was never bigger than you, when you think about it. The two of you grew at the same pace for years, matching each other growth spurt for growth spurt, and you’d stolen each other’s jeans and t-shirts so often that you couldn’t tell where one closet stopped and the other began. Now, though, he’s got a good two inches and at least twenty pounds on you; the symmetry is gone. You’re not kids anymore.

Mark is good and pure, with a face made for baseball cards and a low, flat, unaccented voice that’s instantly recognizable. He’s bright enough, but he’s not a great thinker; you don’t get to be a number-one draft pick by thinking about the game, not when you have pure instinct and undiluted talent running through your bloodstream. The short brush of brown hair on his head fits perfectly under a baseball cap, his pale blue eyes can pick up a fastball’s location as soon as it leaves the pitcher’s hand, and you’d swear to God that his shoulders get broader every day.

You, on the other hand, are shorter and slimmer, a few inches here and a few pounds there, and you’re not a varsity starter anymore. Sure, you still go to the gym when you get a chance and you could probably still beat half the USC starters in a flat footrace, but you’re not an athlete by definition these days. There are equations to differentiate, regression analyses to run, problem sets to finish; you’re a math student by trade now, slamming down Starbucks lattes at Trojan Grounds and pulling all-nighters with ESPN on low in the background. You’ve always thought too much, but these days, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You haven’t been to the barber in a while, glossy black hair falling all over the place, and you’re darker than he is in every way possible – sharper, more acidic, eyes constantly rolling.

Mark listens to Metallica and Nine Inch Nails and other crashes of noise masquerading as music, stuff he can lift weights to; you like Wilco and The 88 and Snow Patrol and no, you don’t know when you turned into Seth Cohen from The O.C. and anyway, you totally don’t tear up halfway through Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism,” if anyone happens to ask. He watches wrestling and History Channel specials about Vietnam and 24, while you TiVo Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Veronica Mars and Entourage; the only stuff you agree on is Lost and Conan.

You used to be twins, almost, both just shy of six feet and layered with lean muscle; your old Torrey Pines uniforms were almost interchangeable, except he wore #16 for your dad and you wore #8 for Yaz and Ripken. You went to all the same concerts, bought tickets to all the same movies, wore all the same clothes, and had all the same priorities. But Mark went to the pros and you went to college and you both grew up, unfolding and becoming different people, no longer the 15-year-old infielders who could switch uniforms and positions and get away with it until someone asked why the shortstop was playing left-handed. He’s not naïve anymore, and you’re not nearly as mad at your dad as you used to be. What it all comes down to is that Mark has spent the last two and a half years developing into the best shortstop anyone’s seen in a decade, while you’ve spent that same period developing a well-tuned sense of irony and the ability to figure out whether or not a band sucks five minutes into a set.

But you both love baseball, and in the end, that’s what matters; that’s what has always mattered. You met on a baseball field, you grew up on a baseball field, and your friendship has always had the easy rhythm of a 6-4-3 double play; you’ve got the romance in your heart, Mark’s got the talent in his genes, and the game will always lie at the core. On that, there will never be an argument. Ted Williams was better than Joe DiMaggio. Roger Clemens should have hung it up after 2005. Pete Rose should be in the Hall, Barry Bonds shouldn’t be anywhere near the Hall, and Alex Rodriguez should be shot in the face. There’s nothing wrong with the designated hitter, but you can’t beat National League strategy. The 2004 ALCS is the most exciting playoff series in recent memory, the 2001 World Series a close second. Mike Schmidt is underrated, Don Mattingly is overrated, Albert Pujols is from Mars, no one talks about Travis Hafner half as much as they should, and there’s nothing better than the smack of bat against ball on a hot summer night. As long as you both continue to recognize these fundamental truths, you’ll be friends.

As long as the game doesn’t fail you, you’ll never fail each other, you think as Mark mumbles something into your shoulder.

“What?”

Mark looks up; his eyes are heavy, half-hidden behind pale lids. “Do you remember when we met?”

“Yeah,” you say, dropping your chin and leaning closer to him. “We were real little kids, like, seven, or something.”

“August 21, 1995,” he says, grinning crookedly. “Around noon, I’m pretty sure.”

You’re dumbstruck for a second, staring down at his pale face, and maybe there’s more going on in Mark’s brain than anyone gives him credit for. “Mark, how in the hell do you remember that?”

“It was a week after I moved to San Diego,” he says, picking at a loose thread on his jeans. “That was August 14. I remember, because it was my best friend’s birthday, up there, and I couldn’t go to the party because our flight was real early in the morning.”

“Best friend?” you ask cautiously; it’s never really occurred to you that Mark had a life, albeit a fairly unexciting one, before the two of you met on a high school baseball field. On August 21, 1995, apparently. Of course, you knew in the back of your mind that Mark didn’t just spring into existence at the age of seven; cerebrally, it makes sense, of course Mark was Mark before the two of you were MarkandRich. But you don’t remember much of your own life before then, bits and pieces of T-ball games and going to Houston with your dad and watching cartoons and that’s really it; nothing in your memory stands out in Technicolor detail until around the time Mark showed up, and you always assumed that the phenomenon was reciprocal. The idea that Mark might have had a best friend that wasn’t you at some point is practically anathema.

“Yeah. Dave... Dave something. Little kid. Lots of sisters.”

Somehow, you’re comforted by the fact that Mark can’t remember this guy’s last name. Dave could be halfway across the globe, or he could be somewhere in this room; it doesn’t matter, you think fuzzily, because you’re the one Mark’s pressed against from temple to toe.

You look down, drawing your bottom lip between your teeth. “Do you ever wonder?”

“Wonder what?”

“Like, what your life would have been like if you hadn’t moved. If you’d stayed in San Jose.”

“Oh, man. Wow.” Mark’s stare trails off into the distance. “Um, I guess a lot different, yeah. Probably would have had a bigger garage and wouldn’t have knocked the mirror off my dad’s car. Would have seen my mom’s family a lot more. Wouldn’t have had the best friend in, like, the whole fucking world.”

“I am?”

Mark gives you a lopsided grin. “Of course you are.”

“For what it’s worth, you are, too.”

“Thanks, dude.”

You’re both quiet for a while, and it’s a few minutes before you realize you’re counting Mark’s breaths. “Dude, talk to me.”

“Why?”

“I gotta know you’re still awake.”

“Okay,” Mark says, sinking deeper against your side. “I am. I promise.”

“Good.”

He looks up, mouth hanging slightly open and eyes half-closed. “You really are the best friend ever, you know.”

You open your mouth to respond, something lame like well, no shit or of course I am, you ass or dude, you’re so emotional when you’re drunk, but when Mark lurches forward and presses his lips against yours, you know it’s time to stop thinking.

It’s simultaneously awesome and disgusting. Mark tastes like sour tequila vomit and his face is wet with tears and saliva and sweat; you’re going to need a tube of toothpaste each when this is done. His elbow is digging into your thigh, sharp and painful, and you hear the neck of your sweatshirt rip as his hand scrambles for purchase. The floor is sticky with spilled beer and tomato sauce, and your favorite jeans will never be the same again.

But none of that matters, really, because when Mark drags his teeth across your bottom lip and laps at your tongue with his own, you can’t think of anything else you’d rather be doing. He pulls himself level with you, ruining your sweatshirt in the process, and you’re just a tangle of arms and legs and hands and lips when he grips your shoulders and pushes you flat on the floor. Your back protests, but Mark McCarthy is finally kissing you, so your back can just fuck the hell off right now. You let your hand run up the back of his neck and into his short, neat hair, and your sneakers knock against each other as you try to figure out the mechanics of this thing. One of his hands slips from your shoulder to the floor next to your head, and you shiver as his fingers lightly brush your neck.

He pulls back, panting, eyes glossy and cheeks flushed. “Awesome,” he says, a smile slashing across his face.

You grin back, flicking thick black hair out of your eyes. “Totally awesome,” you reply, and when he ducks down and seals your mouths together again, you keep right on smiling as one of his thighs slides between yours.

That’s when you realize that this party just got awful quiet, and you can’t believe you were worried about that damn sombrero making it onto Deadspin.

*

You’re going to have to deep-clean the apartment tomorrow if you don’t want the L.A. County Board of Health knocking down your door, but that’s not until morning, when the sun hits the edge of the continent and light sluices through the crooked Venetian blinds. Right now, it’s still dark outside, and you’re spread out on the floor of your bathroom, clutching a bottle of water with one hand and the back of Mark’s t-shirt with the other. There’s nothing left for him to throw up, you don’t think, but if he wants to spend the rest of the night bent over the toilet, there’s no sense in stopping him.

“Never. Drinking. Again,” he croaks, coughing. “Just fucking... no.”

“You say that now,” you reply, rubbing small circles into his back. “It’ll be a different story tomorrow.”

Mark lifts up slightly, just enough to cock his head sideways and look at you incredulously. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is drawn, skin paper-white. A bruise is forming along his temple, and you can see where his knuckles have made indents on his cheeks. You’re probably in love with him and have been since practically the beginning of time, but that doesn’t mean that he looks like anything less than complete and total shit.

“Okay, maybe not tomorrow,” you say quickly. “But next week, maybe.”

He turns back, dry-heaving air into the toilet. “If you ever throw me a party again, I will fucking murder you in your sleep,” he says, tired voice echoing off the porcelain.

“I thought I was the best friend a guy could ask for,” you say, putting down the water bottle and sitting upright.

“Yeah, well, that was when I was still drunk,” Mark groans. “Right now, I just want to hurt you. Like, a lot.”

“What are you going to do, puke on me?” You trace the grout with your free hand, wondering if it’s something you’re supposed to clean or if that’s too middle-aged housewife, even for you. “You already wasted the fuck out of that option.”

Mark growls, hands scrabbling on the back of the toilet seat. “Hate you, Richie.”

You scratch his back lightly through his t-shirt, enjoying the way he curves into your touch. “Hate you too, Mark.”

It’s quiet for a while – Mark’s apparently given up on heaving altogether and has progressed to making petulant noises into the toilet bowl, the half-whimpers of the vaguely ill. You lean back against the cabinets below the sink, where it smells like shaving cream and Mark’s subtly obnoxious cologne, and listen as the noises get fewer and farther between. Finally, Mark looks up at you and lets loose a heavy sigh.

“Okay, I think I’m done,” he says, bracing his hands on the cheap imitation Spanish tile and pushing himself up. He stumbles and you pull on his t-shirt, steadying him and handing him the bottle of water.

“Drink,” you say.

He nods and tips the bottle back, water trickling out the sides of his mouth and down his jaw; you watch the bobbing of his Adam’s apple as he polishes off the water in less than a minute.

“Thanks,” he says, voice rough and low, before tossing the bottle into the trash can and reaching for the medicine cabinet. He pulls out two toothbrushes and hands yours over, fumbling behind the mirror before finding the tube of toothpaste.

As you brush away the beer and the tequila and the pizza sauce and your best friend’s spit, you wonder when, exactly, Mark is going to cut and run. First he was drunk, now he’s sick and exhausted; tomorrow morning he’ll be hungover as hell, but the smoke’s going to clear sometime tomorrow afternoon and he’s going to realize that the two of you made out on the floor of your apartment in front of about fifty people. First, he’ll have to call Barry, get him ready to do damage control; if even one of those fifty people had a camera, the press will find out, the story will break like floodwaters over a dam, and Mark’s rookie season will be on par with Jackie Robinson’s.

And Mark? Mark won’t know how to deal with it, you think. Mark is The Natural; everything comes easily, and the most difficult thing he faces on a daily bases is the prospect of a bad-hop grounder to short. Mark is not built to be a pioneer, because he’s never had to work all that hard for anything. He will freeze like a wild animal under that particular spotlight; he’s not even gay, really. He’s just going to want to play baseball, and you know already that no one will leave it at that.

Even after he realizes what this could do to his career, though, even after he figures out that no one’s gonna give a damn how talented he is if they find out that he’s kissed a dude, Mark’s going to have the freak-out to end all freak-outs when it occurs to him that the guy he was kissing was you. You’ve been down this road before, silence and anger and tension and not being there for each other on the most important days of your lives. And this time, you have no excuse. Three years ago, you had a draft’s worth of jealousy and a lifetime’s worth of resentment to fall back on; you never talked about it, but you know Mark writes it off in his head as That Time Rich Went A Little Bit Nuts. Now, though, you’ve got nothing. You’re well-adjusted. You don’t fight anymore. You’ve found yourself, as Oprah as that might sound, and Mark’s fully aware of all that. It’s desire and lust, pure and simple, and he’ll know it; his bags will be packed and he’ll be on a bus to San Diego before dinnertime tomorrow. You’ll be alone in your disgusting apartment with a redemption center’s worth of bottles and the knowledge that you drove away the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

But when you glance over at Mark, you don’t see any of that. You don’t see disgust. You don’t see revulsion. You just see a tired kid, dark circles under his eyes and hatch marks on his cheeks, someone who just needs to go to bed and sleep for a million years. He catches you looking, returns your stare through half-closed eyes, and smiles around the toothbrush.

It’s bizarrely domestic, you think as you spit into the sink in tandem and Mark turns on the faucet. You could get used to it, if by some miracle Mark doesn’t realize how very bizarre and threatening this whole situation is, and you’re working like hell to resist all sorts of terrible urges to touch him and fuck this up even more when he walks past you to the bathroom door.

“Night, dude,” he says easily, leaning against the doorframe.

“Good night,” you say, formal and stiff and nervous as hell, wondering if you should hold out your hand for him to shake.

His smile fades, retreating into his face like the rest of his tired features. “You okay, Richie?”

You nod, turning away and putting your toothbrush back into the medicine cabinet. “I’m fine, Mark.”

“Okay,” he says uncertainly, rubbing at his eyes and stepping backwards. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” you say into the mirror, blinking at your reflection as Mark walks down the hall. Two seconds after you hear the door to his room shut, you throw up all over the sink.

*

You stumble back to your bedroom in the half-light, slamming the door and pulling off your jeans before yanking on a pair of sweats. Your PowerMac hums in the corner, and you know you should probably check your email or something, but you don’t feel like answering drunk messages about how you shoved your tongue down Mark’s throat right now. You cross the room and stand in front of the full-length mirror that was already there when you moved in, taking in your red-rimmed eyes and wrinkled sweatshirt. The dark of your room folds in on you, creasing your silhouette and creating shadows that slant across your face like warpaint.

You look like shit.

You kissed your best friend and ruined his career in one fell swoop.

Even if he did kiss you first.

You should know better.

And on his birthday.

This can’t get any worse.

Except the door is creaking open and Mark is padding into your bedroom, backlit by the lamp in the hallway like the moon during an eclipse. He’s wearing flannel pajama pants with a t-shirt, and you think of twelve-year-old sleepovers and Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis, sprawling all over the pullout couch and falling asleep to the sound of your best friend’s breathing.

“Hey,” he says quietly, closing the door behind him.

“Hey,” you say back, not daring to move. “Yeah?”

He’s crossing the room quickly, the cuffs of his pajama pants trailing on the carpet, and when he stops behind you and looks over your shoulder, you swear you feel the earth shift beneath your feet.

“Hey,” he says to the mirror, scratching the back of his head. His t-shirt rides up and you catch a glimpse of flat, pale stomach before his arm falls back to his side.

You laugh, quiet and muffled in the dark. “You already said that.”

“I know.” He drops his head to your shoulder, his chin digging into you, and sighs. “What are we doing?”

“I have no idea,” you answer honestly. “Mark, I have absolutely no fucking idea.”

You watch as his reflection tugs one lip between his teeth, pulling at the soft flesh before speaking. “Are we fucked-up?” he asks.

You run a hand through your hair, watching as it ruffles beneath your fingers. “I don’t know, man. I think it depends on your definition of ‘fucked-up.’”

“I don’t think we are. I mean, I know what being fucked-up feels like,” he says. “For example. Like, when you go weeks without getting an extra-base hit. You feel like everything’s all wrong.”

“Like the world’s been thrown off-balance.”

“Yeah.” He nods, and you feel the motion breaking in waves over your skin. “Fucked-up is when nothing’s working right. Fucked-up is feeling like it’s never going to be good again. It’s being helpless. I don’t feel... I don’t feel like any of that, man.”

You turn away from Mark’s reflection and towards Mark himself. “What do you feel like?”

He’s quiet for a moment. The color’s returning to his cheeks now; he looks alive, and you can see the tiniest hint of a smile playing around the corners of his lips. “I don’t actually know. I can’t put words to it, yeah? But it’s good. It’s not fucked-up.”

“No?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “You never make me feel fucked-up.”

You feel something rising in your chest, something warm and thick, and no, it’s not fucked-up at all. Fucked-up is what you were in high school, bitter and resentful and boiling with anger. Fucked-up was when you’d tried to hurt him. Fucked-up was when you didn’t know who you were, didn’t know what you wanted, when you thought you were a future major leaguer and totally straight. Mark – he’s always known himself, known what he wants without effort. Mark’s never been totally fucked-up, and with any luck, he never will be. You’ve got this perfect, unshakeable faith in him, a faith he unconsciously mimics; he will be nothing less than the best player baseball’s ever seen, shattering records and baffling fans and keeping his head on straight the whole time.

And if neither of you are fucked-up, nothing about this is fucked-up, either.

“You’re in?”

“Yeah, I’m in,” he says, just before he leans forward and covers your mouth with his.

This time, it’s slow and almost sweet, but not really, because you’re guys. Your hands find his shoulders while his find your hips, and you both take your time, exploring mouths and flesh that you’ve known forever, somehow, but that you’ve never known like this. You feel him smile against your neck, and when he comes up, he’s snickering.

“We could have been doing this, like, the entire time,” he says, hooking his fingers in the waistband of your sweats. “Seriously, how much more fun would high school have been?”

“Dude, I tried,” you protest, idly playing with the tag of his t-shirt. “And you, like, flipped out and didn’t talk to me for an entire fucking summer. That blew ass. So don’t blame me, because I figured out my part of this a long time ago.”

He shrugs. “You’re smarter than me, that’s for definites,” he says before kissing you again, harder and more insistent this time.

It’s never going to be the same again, you think as the backs of your knees hit the edge of the bed and you sit down hard, taking Mark with you. Just like it was never going to be the same again after Mark got traded, after Lisa showed up, after your first day of college, after the draft, after that tortilla-chip kiss came flying outta left field, after high school and Little League and after you were a seven-year-old kid on a baseball field who realized you’d just met someone so abso-fucking-lutely amazing that shit just couldn’t help but change.

It took you long enough, but fuck if it didn’t work out after all, you think before Mark fists a hand in your hair and starts sucking on your tongue, and you really have to find out which girl taught him to kiss like this and send her a bouquet of flowers and a nice big box of chocolates and hell, you’ll give her whatever she wants, come to think of it. He’s straddling your lap, his thighs framing yours, and you run your hands along them, feeling the muscles underneath the skin. When you break apart, you’re both completely out of breath; you inhale sharply before feeling his fingers under your chin, tilting your head up until you’re meeting his gaze straight-on.

“Dude,” Mark says, eyes eerily clear, “you know I totally love you, right? No joke?”

Yeah, you think, shrugging your way out of your sweatshirt and throwing it somewhere near the closet. You lean back and smile as he follows, bracing his hands alongside your shoulders, and when you look up and fist a hand in the collar of Mark’s t-shirt, you know that there’s nothing in the whole damn universe that can fuck with what you’ve got.

“Thank God,” you reply, and you can’t help but laugh when Mark accidentally kicks over the bedside lamp and the room goes black.

tagging up, 1/2

2006-07-04T20:52:11Z

Title: Tagging Up, 1/2
Type: Original fiction, sequel to Fielder's Choice
Summary: In vino veritas.
Word Count: 12,149
Written in: Summer 2006 (May-June, six-week project)
Notes: Rich Soto wasn't done with my brain yet, and probably won't be until I write the rubber match of this three-story series. I'd like to think that my style is more refined than it was in Fielder's; it was fun to write Rich while he wasn't under emotional distress, for once.

“Richie, get your ass the fuck in the kitchen!”

“Mark, I am not your fucking wife.”

“If you don’t get into the fucking kitchen right this fucking minute, I’ma make you my bitch real quick.”

You laugh, high and clear. “You and what incredibly well-funded army?” you ask, darting through the growing crowd of people in your living room and straight to your best friend’s side.

“Army of one, dude. Don’t you watch the commercials?” Mark McCarthy says, snagging the hood of your sweatshirt between nimble fingers and dragging you through the open arch that separates the kitchen from the rest of your apartment. “Tell me where the shot glasses are.”

“Where do you think they are?” you ask, hopping up and sitting on the single square foot of kitchen table that isn’t covered with beer cans and bottles of alcohol.

“Well, you’d think they’d be with the booze.” Mark opens one of the bottom cabinets with an exaggerated sweep of his arm. “But it’s empty. Who owns this place, Mother fucking Hubbard?”

You shouldn’t be laughing. The two of you only moved into this place on the first of the month, most of the stuff’s yours anyway, and no one would ever make the mistake of calling Mark “attentive to detail.” He barely knows how to get to the In-n-Out two blocks over; he shoots you baleful looks whenever you climb into the passenger seat of the truck you’re sharing until he can pry the keys to his beloved Cherokee out of his baby sister’s hands. You shouldn’t expect Mark to notice where the shot glasses are, just like you haven’t been expecting Mark to notice much of anything since the beginning of time; you stifle the laugh when he shifts, white t-shirt catching on a hipbone that could cut through solid steel, and you gesture to some point above his head.

“Mark,” you say patiently, “the shot glasses are in the top cabinet. You know, with the rest of the glasses. Logical, no?”

“No, not logical.” Mark throws open the door and begins pawing through glassware. “Glasses for alcohol should be with the alcohol itself. That’s logical for you.”

You snort, twisting off the cap of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. “Oh, so we’re keeping the rest of the glasses in the fridge now? Or should we start putting the milk and the soda in the cupboards? Give me a tumbler.”

Mark stops and turns around, blue eyes cloudy with confusion. “What the fuck is a tumbler?”

“Short thing in front. Hand it over.”

“God, you are my fucking wife,” Mark grumbles, grabbing a glass and passing it to you. “Why can’t you just call it a ‘short glass’ like everyone else in the world?”

You smirk, pouring the Bombay into the tumbler and adding tonic water. “Because I know it pisses you off.”

“You should be nicer to me.” Mark pulls several shot glasses down from the shelf and lines them up on the counter. Don’t Mess With Texas comes before Screwniversity of Southern California, which goes next to I Got Baked in Ensenada. “It’s my birthday, you know.”

Of course you know it’s his birthday – his 21st, to be specific. You’ve cleaned the apartment, sent out Facebook invitations, called people you haven’t seen in months, hidden everything valuable, made a killer party mix CD, ordered eight pizzas, and cleared out every liquor store in West Hollywood because it’s his birthday. So yeah, it’s probably safe to say that you know.

Mark picks up a bottle of Jose Cuervo and pours a shot’s worth into Behold My Huge, Throbbing Oregon. He knocks it back, grimacing, and gestures to the living room. “Who are these people, anyway?” he asks, bracing his arms on the countertop and pushing himself up.

You shrug. “They came with Lisa.”

“Where’s Lisa?”

“Getting ice.” You kick the edge of the metal tub that will soon act as a cooler. “I forgot to pick some up today. I had that differential exam at noon, totally zonked out after that.”

“You always have differential exams,” Mark says, raising one eyebrow. “Do you do anything besides take tests?”

“Yeah, I spend a month’s worth of grocery money on booze for your party,” you shoot back. “And I act as your personal secretary. Barry called today, by the way.”

Mark looks nonplussed. Barry is his agent; he has a mole on his forehead that might be infected and he’s always stopping by your apartment with weird miscellany left over from his other clients, like the eight-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Olmedo Saenz that’s sitting at the back of Mark’s bedroom closet. He’s fattened up Mark’s bank account, but you’re still freaked out by his comb-over. “What did he say?”

You take a sip of your drink. “Bill Plaschke wants an interview.”

He sighs, broad shoulders hunching. “Do I have to?”

You shrug. “Barry thinks it’ll be good PR.”

You’d asked Barry why baseball’s golden boy needed good PR; Barry had said something about drawing attention away from Mark’s personal life. Mark doesn’t have a personal life, man, you’d said, he just goes to the gym and hangs around our apartment all day. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, said Barry, and then he’d hung up.

Mark slides down from the counter and peers through the arch; the place is starting to fill up. “No one made me do PR when I was with Kansas City.”

You look down into your glass, swirling the liquid around and watching the bubbles rise. “Well, Toto, you’re not with Kansas anymore.”

*

It’s selfish, you know, but you’re never going to stop being absurdly pleased that Mark got traded to L.A. last year. McCourt came to his senses, hired DePodesta back, and re-stocking the Dodgers’ decimated farm system became the first order of business. First came Matt Antonelli, then Daniel Bard (no one could figure out how DePo pulled that one off, and after a while everyone gave up and just blamed Theo Epstein’s flaky 23-year-old personal assistant), and next was Mark McCarthy, the unbelievable kid who was tearing up the Pacific Coast League in Omaha and whose path to shortstop in Kansas City was blocked by Andres Blanco.

Everyone was thrilled except Mark, who was pissed about leaving his Omaha apartment; the rent was low, the previous tenant had never turned off the electricity, and two million-plus in the bank apparently does not a spendthrift make. He moved back in with his parents in San Diego at the end of the season, back into the development where you’d both grown up, and spent a month having his laundry done for him and his dinners prepared by a loving mother with a serious thing for tofu. He poked around Las Vegas rental listings for a while, figuring he’d start off the year at Triple-A Green Valley, before you went on Rotoworld one day in early December and noticed that Rafael Furcal had signed with the Angels.

This leaves the Dodgers with a hole at shortstop, one that will likely be filled by recent acquisition Mark McCarthy. McCarthy, 20, hit .381 with 32 home runs and 104 RBIs for the Kansas City Royals’ AAA affiliate before being traded to Los Angeles for Yhency Brazoban and cash considerations on November 12.

“Dude,” you’d said when Mark picked up his phone on the first ring, “did you know that you’re kind of starting for L.A.?”

“You’re hilarious.”

“Read the news. Furcal went to Los Anafornia or whatever they’re calling it.”

“Whatever. You’re so full of shit,” Mark had said, and hung up. You counted to sixty and weren’t a bit surprised when the phone rang.

“Dude.”

You’d snickered. “Yes, Mark. ‘Dude.’ You’re starting for a major-league baseball team this spring, and your reaction is ‘Dude.’ How eloquent.”

“Shut up, Mr. Big-Words College-Education Bitch-Ass. Do you think it’s for real?”

At that point, Dave Jauss had beeped in on call waiting and informed Mark that yes, he would be starting at shortstop in April at Dodger Stadium, and no, he was not full of shit, and that is not how you talk to your skipper, son, for future reference and all.

Four hours and three ecstatic phone calls from your father later, you opened the door of your grungy studio apartment on Dalton Avenue to find Mark standing in the hall, wearing an old Torrey Pines warm-up shirt and carrying his duffel bag.

“Can we go look for apartments now?” he’d asked, pushing his way in and throwing open the door to the fridge.

You’d blinked and closed the door. “Hello to you, too, Mark.”

*

“I don’t want to do another interview,” Mark complains now, shifting a few bottles and sitting down next to you. “I did one when I first came over here. Isn’t that enough? Dude, this isn’t Boston. I thought L.A. was supposed to be laid-back.”

“It’s only one more interview,” you say, taking another sip and steadfastly ignoring the way Mark’s leg is pressed against yours, uncomfortable heat seeping through two layers of denim. “Give ‘em the party line. You just want to help the team. You’re happy the organization gave you the chance to start. Kansas City was good to you and you’re grateful they drafted you, but you’re happy to be home.”

“Real boring shit, you mean.” Mark swipes the glass from your hand and he’s too busy chugging gin and tonic to notice that you’d flinched when his fingers grazed your wrist. “What if I say I don’t want to talk to the media?”

“Mark, you’re not Manny Ramirez. That won’t end well.”

“Well, that sucks out loud.” Mark stands, arching his back as he stretches, and drops the glass in the sink like a civilized human being. “So we’ll script something out. I’ll call Barry and tell him to set everything up.”

“Dude, don’t call Barry now.” You crack open a beer. “Do you want to piss the guy off?”

Mark shrugs. “It’s Barry. I don’t think he’s allowed to get pissed off at me.”

“Point taken.” Mark’s right; the thought of “Scott Boras client Mark McCarthy” scares Barry and half of MLB already knows it. “But call him tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay, tomorrow.” Mark laughs, turning to fix himself another shot. “Tonight, we party.”

His laugh is loud and full, and you shut your eyes for a moment, not sure if you can handle this; it’s a second before you let your gaze follow the strong contours of his neck as he throws his head back and pours the alcohol down his throat.

*

You don’t remember much of your own 21st birthday party, held last October at some place below Sunset that Lisa’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s roommate swore they could rent a room at for cheap – the Padres had lost to the Blue Jays in Game 6 of the World Series, you know that for sure, and you think you might have stumbled in on Sienna Miller doing a line of coke off the ledge above the bathroom sink, but the rest of the night is hazy memories, captured only in blurry resolution on someone’s digital camera. Mark claims that you left him the best drunk voicemail of all time, but he won’t let you listen to it; it probably doesn’t exist, but he’ll say it does just to be an ass.

It’s a real party now, three hours in, and you know you’re supposed to be having fun; two things are holding you back. For one, Mark gets grabby when he’s drunk, and your blood pressure’s skyrocketing every time he touches your arm or drags you in for increasingly sloppy man-hugs; for another, you’re not Johnny Soto’s kid for nothing, and you’ve got a much better idea than your best friend does of what bad PR can do to even the best baseball career.

And Mark fuckin’ McCarthy – who will be starting at shortstop for the Los Angeles Dodgers in two and a half months, who is the only number-one draft pick in the last five years not currently flaming out, who is being hailed as the second coming of Cal Ripken Jr. – will not climb down from the table. Nor will he take off the sombrero.

“This isn’t happening,” you say to no one in particular, wishing you’d hid anything with which Mark could possibly embarrass himself a long, long time ago. “Please, someone, tell me this isn’t happening.”

“This isn’t happening,” chirps Lisa White of the tremendous entourage, appearing at your elbow. Her dark bob is streaked with orange this week, and she’s toting a margarita. “Except that, you know, it is.”

You sigh heavily, taking a swig from your Heineken. “Go stop him.”

“He’s your roommate,” Lisa retorts.

“He’s your ex-boyfriend.”

“That’s right, ex.” Lisa raises an eyebrow. “Which means I am not at all obligated to keep him from making an ass out of himself.”

“You can help out both of your ex-boyfriends if you get him to stop.”

“Both? I have more than two, thanks.”

“Fine, your favorite ex-boyfriends.”

Lisa looks at you for a long moment before turning her gaze on Mark, who is currently singing “I Wear My Sunglasses at Night” into a bottle of Rolling Rock and whose sombrero has long since slipped halfway off his head. “Remind me again why I dated either of you?”

*

Lisa had been that girl in the front of your freshman economics lecture who raised her hand after every sentence your ancient professor could spit out and asked shit about supply curves and the Federal Reserve Board. You started off just as annoyed with her as everyone else in the room was, but when you figured out that Lisa knew more than the professor did, you started listening to what she said. Then, you started taking notes. And on the day that Lisa raised her hand and asked how, exactly, they were supposed to believe that fiscal responsibility was making a comeback in the world of sports when Kansas City was throwing two-and-a-half million-dollar major-league contracts and signing bonuses at an unproven high school shortstop, you decided that you should probably say hello after class, walking to the front of the room as the rest of the class piled out.

“Hey,” you said. “I’m Rich.”

She looked up, startled. “Lisa. Yeah?”

“About that shortstop...”

She waved one hand around while hoisting her bag over her shoulder with the other. “Okay, listen, I know ESPN’s hyped the shit out of McCarthy, but you can’t believe everything the media tells you, okay? He did okay in A-ball, but – ”

“All right?” you spluttered. “He hit four home runs in one week alone! His OBP was over .500! What are you on?”

Lisa smirked, tucking a lock of pink-streaked hair behind her ear. “Okay, so he’s good, for now. What are you, like, the biggest Royals farm system enthusiast of all time?”

“No,” you said, “I’m Mark McCarthy’s best friend.”

The smirk fell off Lisa’s face, giving way to shock. “No way.”

“Way.” You bit back a smile. “So very, very way.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but do it.”

You sighed. “Fine.” You pushed open the door of the lecture hall and stepped out into the October sun. Red Sox-Mets in the Series tonight. “Mark McCarthy was born on January 21, 1988, in San Jose, California. He graduated 283rd out of 501 students at Torrey Pines High School in San Diego this June and would have been in the bottom third of the class if I hadn’t helped him pass statistics. His favorite color is blue, his favorite TV show is Lost, he still drives a 1998 Jeep Cherokee, and he gave me this scar on my wrist when we were eleven and he closed a garage door on my hand because he’s a little bitch. Oh, and he bought new Converse All-Stars with his bajillion-dollar signing bonus.” You turned to face Lisa. “Happy?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Impressive. But... I’m not convinced.”

You collapsed on a nearby bench in exaggerated frustration. “Okay, seriously, woman, what do you want?”

Lisa sat down next to you, smirk back in place. “Give him my phone number and tell him to call me. Then, I’ll believe you.”

You blinked as she began to scribble on a piece of paper. “You’re kind of the most devious person I’ve ever met, you know that?”

She laughed. “Lisa White. 630-538-6025. Don’t forget.”

“Yeah, I’m really gonna forget the girl who called my best friend overrated.”

“Over-hyped. Slight difference. And tell him to call me.”

You nodded as she stood up and tucked a lock of short brown hair behind her ear. “What if I’m lying, though? What if I never give him your number?”

She was already halfway down the path before she looked over her shoulder. “Then you can call me.”

You had watched her walk away, all short dark bob and big blue eyes, and you’d given her number to Mark that night like the absolute best friend in the world that you were. Mark had grunted and bitched a little about doing fall workouts in Arizona and no, Rich, you do not have to pick up women for me, I can do that myself, but when he arrived at USC a month later to sprawl out on your floor and party like a living legend, he and Lisa had disappeared into the upstairs catacombs of the Theta Eta Phi house and hadn’t reappeared until you were on your third keg stand.

You’d grinned and said, “Dude, I’m such a yenta,” but the grin disappeared behind Mark’s back. You weren’t all that upset that February when Mark went back to Arizona and they’d broken up over something dumb, but Lisa had called him “overrated” and that had cut him pretty deep. You had spent spring break in Phoenix that year, cramped and sore on the couch of Mark’s tiny spring suite, poring over every minor-league rookie statistic you could find on the internet and creating complicated Excel spreadsheets to emphatically show him that no, he was not overrated, yes, he deserved an invite to big-league spring training, and would he please stop whining about becoming the next Billy Beane because that’s not going to happen, last year’s stats are awesome, and anyway, Billy Beane is kind of a rock star these days so it wouldn’t be that bad of a fate to have. When you got back to Los Angeles, you’d told Lisa that she owed you a Xanax prescription and a bottle of bourbon for turning your best friend into a fuckin’ girl.

And that fall, when Lisa had stumbled down the hallway of your sophomore dorm, drunk on whiskey and the pain of another Cubs playoff loss, you hadn’t said no when she’d pinned you to the wall and covered your mouth with hers. She’d tasted terrible and when she pulled at your hair, you wondered if she’d done the same thing to Mark. But it was Lisa, and she was a cute little economics major with a tattoo of a butterfly on her hip and a Mark Prior jersey hanging in her closet, so you’d let her kiss you and hadn’t run away in terror when she sat down next to you in the dining hall the next morning and brushed her lips across your cheek.

You were okay together for exactly three weeks.

You hadn’t really meant to fuck it up, you hadn’t. You were making out in your room, her mouth hot on your neck, and when she nipped at your earlobe you let out a strangled cry.

Lisa sat up and pulled away, her face flushed. “Rich, did you just call me Mark?”

“No!”

“You so did.”

“I did not.”

“Yeah, you did. You called me Mark.”

And when you’d dropped your face into your hands and groaned, Lisa had laughed and patted you reassuringly on the head. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “It explains a lot.”

*

“Because we’re both drop-dead adorable,” you say now, nudging your ex-girlfriend with your elbow. “Come on. Just go up there, take the hat, pull him down. No harm, no foul.”

“You do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” you say shortly, although it’s not going to do you any good; Lisa knows you too well for that, and she snickers as you tighten your grip on your beer. “Don’t even say a word.”

Lisa just smirks. “Don’t worry. I won’t say anything about how you’re obviously turned on beyond all belief.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re so turned on,” she says bemusedly. “You’re afraid to touch him because you might start humping his leg. That’s totally it.”

“Shut up. I would not.”

“God, you so would. And it would be the hottest thing ever,” she replies, taking a sip of her margarita. “Now I’m definitely not helping you. I want to see that happen.”

“You’re such a bitch.”

“And you’re such a fag. Go do a tequila shot off his neck or something, send all the girls home happy.”

You glare at Lisa. “Don’t say that.”

She shrugs. “Whatever, Rich. Stay in denial, if you want.”

You’re not gay. You don’t like guys. But you’re not straight, either, because you don’t like girls. If you’re going to be totally honest about it, the only person on the face of the planet who you can ever imagine yourself being attracted to is Mark McCarthy. Which makes you... what? Markosexual? McCarth-gay? Incredibly fucked-up and in need of serious psychiatric treatment because seriously, there’s no one else you want except your very straight best friend?

You’d thought you were over it after you got to USC. There was Lisa, of course, but before her came Jackie from the track team, Beth from the women’s chorus, Amy from the floor below yours, Mara from the lacrosse squad, Allison from the foreign-language center, and – if you’re going to be perfectly honest with yourself and own up to being pretty damn sober that night – Colin from Modern Geometry. Like, you totally win at hooking up with girls and guys. And being gay wouldn’t bother you. Yeah, there would be that whole part where you’d have to explain it to your dad and then be ignored for a few months – or years – while he deals with it in the only way Johnny Soto knows how to deal with anything, but it wouldn’t be the first time you’d disappointed your father and you know damn well it wouldn’t be the last. Except you’re not gay; except for that tall aerospace-engineer indiscretion from freshman year, you really don’t like dudes. You’ve tried, just like you’ve tried to like girls. It’s Mark, it’s only Mark, and you think you’d rather deal with anything but the reality of the situation in front of you.

Kyle Noriega, your high-school catcher who’d wound up at UCLA and who’d dropped baseball in favor of political action committees and door-knocker campaigns because he’s clearly fucking off-his-rocker insane, interrupts your train of self-indulgent thought when he finally pulls the sombrero off of Mark’s head and tosses it over to you.

“Soto, hide it,” he says unnecessarily, since you’re already on your way to the hallway closet and you will be goddamned if Mark finds it again, because the last thing anyone needs is that shit showing up on Deadspin tomorrow morning. You throw the thing into the back, behind warm-up sweatshirts and the old stacks of Baseball America that you’ve been lugging around for years, and slam the door; but when you turn around to go back to the main room, there’s a very drunk girl in a Mariners t-shirt wobbling in your path. You think she might have been in your writing seminar during first semester, or maybe it was organic chemistry during third; she’s probably a friend of Lisa’s, but none of that matters because right now, she’s standing about five inches away from you and she’s breathing screwdriver fumes straight into your face.

“This is your apartment, right?” she giggles.

“Yeah,” you say, trying to maneuver around her and failing.

“And that’s your roommate.” She points down the hall to where Mark is yelling something that sounds like, “Do chicks really dig the long ball? Give me an answer, ladies!” at a group of confused-looking girls. “Him, over there.”

“Yeah.”

She cocks her head to the side. “He’s hot.”

“I know,” you say, exasperated. “Could you move, please?”

“Fine,” the girl says loudly, rolling her eyes. “Hey, does he have a girlfriend?”

“No,” you say quickly.

She grins, blue-shadowed lids dropping to half-mast. “Does he have a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” you reply flatly, wishing you were rude enough to just knock her out of the way. “Me.”

“You?”

“We’ve been happy together for years now. We’re getting married next week. We’ve already got the china patterns picked out and everything. I would have invited you, but I don’t exactly know who you are, so I’m really sorry about that.”

“Ohmygod.” She titters, covering her mouth. You think her name might be Kerry, but it might be Rosalind, too; either way, she’s pissing you off. “Are you serious?”

“Of course not, you stupid bitch,” you mutter, but she’s already collapsed against the wall in a fit of laughter. You take the opportunity to slide by her and back into the main room, where Mark is waving a bottle around in an attempt to get everyone’s attention. Finally, he just stands there, stock-still and silent as the grave, until everyone else falls quiet and all eyes are on the kid standing on a table.

“Man, you guys.” His face is flushed; he’s pink to his hairline. “Thanks, guys, so much for coming out tonight. This is seriously awesome.” He swallows half of his beer and continues. “So, I hope everyone’s having a rockin’ time – if you aren’t, it’s so your own fault at this point – and I just gotta shout out to the guy who made this all happen.”

“Back up, you’re going to fall off the table,” yells Kyle.

“Fuck off,” Mark says cheerfully. “Where’s Richie fucking Soto?”

Oh, fuck, no. You try to shrink back, all six feet of you curling in, slinking away from the table and the lights and your best friend, drunk on four hundred dollars’ worth of alcohol and sweating clean through his t-shirt. Your eyes dart back and forth as Mark continues to chant your name, loud and unsteady and out of tune, and when he gasps triumphantly, you know you’ve been caught.

“Seriously, you guys,” Mark says, stopping to take another swig and you’re not following the clean line of his throat at all, “Rich put everything together, and he was willing to let all of you wreck the shit out of our place, and he just... he just rules, you guys.” He grins at you, a thousand miles wide, and holds out his hand. “Get the fuck up here, dude!”

Oh, no fucking way.

You open your mouth to protest, catching Lisa’s smirk and Kyle’s raised eyebrow, but Mark is looking straight at you, his lips slightly parted, beer forgotten by his side, come on, dude, come with me, and you’re gone. Knocked clear outta sight, and in this sliver of a moment you can believe that you’re the only thing he wants to see, and you know you’ve lost whatever fucked-up battle you were trying to fight.

You make your way to the kitchen table and let Mark pull you up, and you try not to watch the mechanics of his biceps when he does it and you try not to think about his hand on yours and you stare straight ahead into a red party lantern, wire-lace patterns burning into your eyes and straight through the back of your head. You stand, Mark giving you that fucking smile of his all the way, and you’re both too tall to be up here but what-the-fuck-ever. He throws an arm around your shoulder and drags you in until you’re pressed flush to the hip; you smell beer and tortilla chips and his laundry detergent, and your arm tentatively finds its way around his back. You can feel the concave arc where his sweat has pooled, dipping low along his spine, and you’re glad that he’s too drunk to feel you shiver.

Mark holds up his beer with his free hand.

“Rich Soto, guys,” he says, beaming drunk-bright. “Best fucking friend a guy could ask for, everyone.”

He takes a swig from his bottle and then holds it to your lips; you try not to think a thousand different and completely wrong thoughts when you tilt your head back and let Mark pour the rest of his beer down your throat.

You know how the two of you must look, center of attention and hot as all fuck; Mark’s hand is steady on the back of your neck and your fingers clutch in his t-shirt, bunching it up and revealing those fucking hipbones of his. You can feel his breath on your face as you swallow, opening your throat like a champion porn star and shuddering when his hand drops slightly and his fingers scramble in your hair. It’s bizarrely erotic, you can’t open your eyes, and you know in that moment that you are so, so beyond fucked.

After it’s all gone, you angle your head and wipe off your mouth on Mark’s shoulder, clandestinely inhaling his scent while you’re there because once you’re screwed, might as well go all the way, right?

Right?

When he glances down at you, you make an effort to look drunker than you really are.

“Gotta get you your own beer, dude,” Mark says good-naturedly, snapping his fingers at Lisa down in front. “Woman! We require more ale!”

“What do you say, fucker?” Lisa yells back.

Mark pauses. “Um, now?”

“Fuck off,” Lisa replies, but she heads towards the cooler anyway and returns with two fresh bottles.

“Excellent,” Mark says, popping off the caps in one smooth motion. “Bottoms up!”

Lisa looks up at you, familiar smirk already slanting across her face, and tips her own bottle in your direction. “Bottoms up, Rich.”

You flip her off before taking the beer from Mark’s hand. One pull kills half of it.

“Be nicer to my boy here,” Mark says, waggling the neck of his bottle at Lisa. “Richie’s good people.”

“Yeah, I’m good people,” you repeat, vaguely wondering if good people are allowed to lean into their best friends’ bodies the way that you are, if good people think the things about Mark McCarthy that you think when his arm tightens around your shoulders and draws you in closer. Your head is tucked under his ear now, and spikes of his hair tickle your forehead. Fuck, it’s hot in this place right now, and you finish the remainder of your beer with another practiced swig.

“Rich is the best person ever,” Mark declares; his vocal cords vibrate with each syllable and you feel it through your cheek, his words buzzing thickly on the flat of your tongue. “I love him. Like, a lot.”

All the alcohol should be relaxing you by now, but you still seize up when you feel Mark smile; one long step and you’ve pulled away. You nearly jump from the table, knocking into Lisa on your way down; Mark stares at you, glassy-eyed and confused.

“Hot in here,” you yell by way of explanation. “Gotta go out for a sec.”

Satisfied, Mark nods happily and takes another drink. “Cool, dude. Come back.”

Lisa’s sniggering behind her hand, but you don’t bother to say anything; you bolt for the door instead, dropping your empty bottle somewhere in the hallway.

fielder's choice, 1/1

2006-07-04T20:46:03Z

Title: Fielder's Choice
Type: Original fiction
Summary: In the weeks before the 2006 Major League Baseball draft, high school first baseman Rich Soto wonders if he really knows where his life is going -- and if best friend Mark McCarthy has a place in it.
Word Count: 10,090
Written in: October 2005 (two-week project)
Notes: Probably my personal favorite. Every artist has that one great character -- Jane Austen had Elizabeth Bennet, J.D. Salinger had Holden Caulfield, John Updike had Rabbit Angstrom, and with any luck, Suzanne Brown will have Rich Soto. Winner of the 2006 Boston University's Women's Guild Undergraduate Fiction Award, which pretty much rules.

On Mondays, he dives for everything you can hit near him, tearing his knees on the tough infield dirt before flipping the ball to second. On Tuesdays, he stands near the bleachers in center and throws strike after strike to home, and everyone knows his right arm’s getting a little stronger every day. On Wednesdays, he digs in at the plate and reaches for every pitch he sees, but on Thursdays, he only swings at the ones he knows he can pound over the chain-link fence in left.

But it’s four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, which means Mark is running.

It’s sixty yards from one set of bleachers to the corner of the other, and Mark’s crouched along the third-base line, waiting for the signal. You blow the whistle, and he takes off like a shot.

You’ve been doing this for about a million years, but it’s still a little bit amazing each time. He streaks across the outfield grass behind Torrey Pines High School, cutting through the dry air and generating the one damn breeze inland San Diego will feel all day as his cleats throw up fresh clippings from this morning’s mowing. His legs and arms pump in rhythm until he hits the end of the bottom bleacher. You punch the red button on your stopwatch and he slows to a jog, throwing himself on the metal bench in front of you. It’s all over inside of seven seconds.

“Well?” He looks up at you. “Any better?”

“Six-point-eight,” you say, checking the display. “Coach says to break after five sprints.”

“Awesome,” he says, grabbing a bottle of water. A bead of sweat trickles from his hairline and hangs from the curve of his jaw before dropping, a dark blot on the shoulder of his t-shirt.

There’s this big deal in baseball about players who have “five tools.” They can hit for average, hit for power, throw the runner out from anywhere, knock down every hit they see, and run like hell. Some guys have one or two tools – the guy who can throw has a “hose,” and the guy who can run has “wheels.” But these guys? They’re the real valuable ones, the ones who make the scouts salivate, ‘cause they can do it all. Willie Mays was a five-tool guy, as was Mike Schmidt, and Barry Bonds used to be one until he started taking ketamine cocktails or whatever. There haven’t been a lot of true five-tool guys in the majors, but Coach says Mark might be one, and your dad says Mark’s definitely one, and that’s good enough for you.

Mark finishes the water, crunching the plastic bottle in his fist. “Six-point-eight,” he says. “Not bad.”

“Not bad?” you say. “Jackass. I just got down to seven-two last week.”

“You play first base, Rich. Nobody expects your ass to run.” Mark tosses the water bottle into the trash can. A perfect layup. “Seven-two’s not bad.”

Seven-two’s really not that bad. And you’re not a five-tool prospect, either, so it’s no use comparing yourself to the best high school baseball player in southern California. You are what you are – a very good first baseman, although you’d rather be a very good middle infielder. But nobody’s ever heard of a left-handed shortstop, so you’ve been playing first base since the waning years of Little League; they only ever let you touch the left side of the infield ‘cause of your dad, anyway, and you’re not seven years old anymore.

“Dude,” says Mark, and you snap to attention. “Where's your brain at?”

“Nowhere special.” You grab the heavy equipment bag and sling it over your shoulder. “Since nobody expects my ass to run, how about you give me a ride home?”

Of course Mark will give you a ride home. He's given you a ride home every day since he got his driver's license and a hand-me-down Jeep, 'cause your dad refuses to let you take his Corvette out of the garage. But you always ask anyway.

“Whatever. You're gonna have to give me directions.” Mark smirks and picks up his duffel bag. “No idea how to get to your house, man.”

“Short-term memory loss.” You swing open the gate that leads to the parking lot. “Happens when you get beaned in the head one too many times.”

“If my batting practice pitcher had better aim – ”

“Dude.” You stop as Mark unlocks your door. “You want aim, invest in a pitching machine.”

“Nah.” Mark starts the engine. “Too expensive. Plus, the pitching machine wouldn't have my back in a fight.”

“Mark, you apologize when you tag someone out.” You dangle your arm out the window as the Jeep picks up speed. “You're never going to fight anyone.”

Mark looks over at you as he turns onto Del Mar Heights. “But you'd have my back if I did, right?”

You tug on the brim of your Houston Astros cap, shading your eyes against the bright afternoon sun. “Do I even have a choice?”

That night, you're flipping through The Sporting News and drinking a Coke when your dad walks in the door and drops a bag of Chinese takeout on the kitchen table.

“Rangoon and General Tso,” he announces. Standard fare while your mom's away on business trips. Grease is soaking through the side of the bag, and the stain looks a little bit like California.

“Great.”

“How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“How was practice?”

“Fine.”

“How was Mark's workout?”

“Fine.”

Your dad rolls his eyes as he sits down. “Talkative, as usual.” He unfolds a copy of the Union Tribune and opens a Styrofoam container. “What are you reading?”

“Oh.” You drop the magazine to dig through the takeout bag. “Thing on college baseball programs. Texas might win again this year.”

“They should, with their pitching staff.” He turns back to his newspaper. “USC's not that bad, either.”

You pick up the magazine again. You're not reading about college baseball programs, but it's not like you're going to tell him what you're really reading about. You go back to the article.

No one could have seen it coming.

Twenty years ago this June, Johnny Soto made baseball history, hitting in his 46th consecutive game en route to winning the 1986 Most Valuable Player Award for the Houston Astros. Soto, the eighth-overall pick in the 1979 amateur draft, was just starting what was sure to be a Hall-of-Fame career.

A year later, Soto lay in bed at the Texas Medical Center as surgeons patched a completely torn ACL and inserted over 20 pins to heal three separate breaks in his left leg. The third baseman smashed into the left-field stands at the Astrodome while chasing a foul ball in what is still one of the most frightening injuries ever captured on tape. It was a year before he could walk, and he never set foot on a professional baseball field again.

Soto's hitting streak remains the second-longest in history, and everyone wonders: what would have happened if he hadn't –

“I talked to Gary today.”

You look up. Gary's one of your dad's friends from his minor league years, back in the Stone Age. “What'd he say? Anything about me?”

Your dad raises an eyebrow. “Rich, the Astros are going to take you. You know that.”

“But in which round?”

“Do you really care?”

You frown. “Yes. Kinda.”

“Well. It depends.” Your dad grins slightly. “Something like fifteen scouts'll be at your game on Monday. All different teams, too. One last look before the draft.” He spears a piece of chicken with his fork.

“Really?”

“Yes, Rich, really.” He swallows. “Tell Mark to bring his A-game.”

There's a picture of Johnny Soto on the opposite page, probably from when he won Rookie of the Year in 1983; his thick black hair's crammed under a blue Astros cap, and he's smiling for the photographer. His front teeth are still a little crooked, since he spent his signing bonus on a car instead of on braces. He's all of 21 years old and it's like looking into a mirror, except the photo's from the past and it might even forecast the future.

You’re also not smiling.

“Yeah,” you say, getting up and heading for the stairs. “I'll tell him.”

It's last November and everything's weird.

Baseball season's over, first of all; you always spend a few weeks in limbo after the World Series is done and have ever since you were old enough to know what baseball was. You try to get into football but it never works, and your mind folds up like origami with nothing to occupy it. This quiet sort of desperation wells up right behind your eyes and you can't concentrate on much, and those first few weeks in November hurt you more than a line drive to the head ever could.

Everything's running slower than normal and you're confused as hell, so when your guidance counselor brings up the idea of college during a routine schedule meeting, you don't really argue.

“Your grades aren't bad, Rich,” she says, dropping your transcript in front of you. Soto, Richard John. 10-25-1987. “Straight As during a few semesters, even. I can't really say you've challenged yourself much, but – ”

“I took advanced calculus,” you point out. So maybe it's the only really hard class you've taken, but come on. If you had a dollar for every time someone underestimated you, you'd make A-Rod look like a bag lady. “And I got an A.”

“A-minus,” she corrects. “But look at the other guys on the baseball squad. You're the team GPA booster. Your test scores are among the highest in the state. You might not apply yourself, but you're a smart kid.”

You stay quiet, but you're pretty sure it's true. Mark's smart, but it's a different kind of smart; his brain works best on the basepaths and at the plate, with the batting helmet as his thinking cap.

“Have you thought about math as a major?” she presses. “Your coach says you've got a good head for numbers, and there's a lot you can do with math.”

There’s a lot you can do with math, yeah. Batting average, although that doesn't count for much, overall. On-base percentage. Slugging percentage. The effectiveness of swinging at the first pitch. People are easily fooled by a reputation and a good face, but numbers can take the abstract and make it concrete.

“Well, with the draft and everything – ”

“I know you want to play ball, Rich, but you've got to have a backup.”

No, you don't, but you take the University of Southern California brochure and tuck it into your backpack as you walk out.

It's spring again, one of the last games of the season, and the Torrey Pines Falcons are playing the Mount Carmel Sundevils in front of what feels like every baseball scout in existence. The Falcons are good, but the Sundevils are better; Mount Carmel's been turning out major leaguers since the sixties, and they even have their own stadium. Torrey Pines just has a well-kept field, shared with the softball team and the soccer team and an assortment of other tenants, some good, some not.

But even if Mount Carmel's a better team, they don't have Mark McCarthy at shortstop.

It's only the top of the fourth, but Mark's already driven in three runs on one of those effortless homers he's been hitting since forever – although you’d like to point out that it would have only been two runs if you hadn't walked your way onto first base right before Mark came up. You hear the runner on first shuffle a few steps off the bag as your pitcher goes into his windup.

The batter hits a quick roller to Mark. He ranges to his right and tosses the ball to the second baseman, who then throws to you. It's a perfect double play; Mark starts it, you finish it, and this might be one of the last you turn together. Two outs in the inning.

Mark just looks like a baseball player, is the thing. Six feet even, maybe one-eighty; he's been lifting these days, so it might be more. He scuffs his black cleats on the lip of the grass, playing in real close, kicking up specks of dirt as he waits for the pitcher to throw. His maroon socks are pulled up to his knees, tight on his calves, and even the dirt smudge on of his white uniform looks like a badge of pride. He tugs his cap down low over his spiky brown hair as he crouches, waiting for the batter to swing.

That cap's the first thing you see when you come to fifteen minutes later.

“Dude, wake up.” Mark's holding your matching hat in one hand, fanning your face with it. “Come on, Rich.”

You open your eyes, and his face breaks into a relieved smile. “Um. What. Ow.”

“He's awake,” you hear a voice shout. It sounds like your dad's.

Something uncomfortably cold is pressing on the crown of your head, and you move to swat it away. Mark grabs your wrist before you can lift it above your shoulder.

“Dude, it'll hurt worse,” he says, thumb hot on your pulse point. “It's there for a reason.”

You hear a cough from behind your head. The team trainer. “Thank you, Mark, for that expert medical diagnosis.” The cold patch shifts. “Rich, you're going to have to move into the med shed so I can check you out.”

“No,” you groan. “Nice here. Warm.”

“Rich, if we don't move you, this game's not going to happen.” Your dad. “Come on, let's go.”

You reluctantly allow Mark and your dad to pull you up while the trainer holds the ice pack on your head. The ground feels softer than usual under your feet, and you take a couple of halting steps under your own power before everything seems steady again. You drape your left arm around your dad and your right arm around Mark as they steer you towards the trainer's shed.

“It was the weirdest thing,” Mark says. “Alex threw that crappy curveball he's got, the ten-to-four, and the kid smacked it, but not real hard. Dude, you catch that ball ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

“Gotta pay attention, Rich.” Your dad's voice is gruff. “The ball doesn't give you a courtesy call.”

“Know that,” you grunt. “Just – the sun – ”

“Rich,” your dad says quietly, and you look up for the first time, right into the bleachers. Twenty men with little steno pads stare back.

“Oh, shit,” you groan, as your dad gives them a small wave. Mark looks overwhelmed. “Scouts. Tons. Oh, shit, you guys.”

“Just keep walking, Rich,” Mark says, and you feel his nails dig into your skin. You stop short of the trainer's shed.

“Can you take him from here?” your dad asks Mark. “I should – ” He jerks a finger over at the scouts.

“Yeah, Mr. Soto,” says Mark, pushing the door open with his knee. “I've got him. You go do your thing.”

Your head's hurting pretty bad now that the shock's wearing off, and Mark propels you over to the metal examination bed. You manage to climb your way up, tissue paper crinkling under your polyester uniform.

“Dude.” You clamp the ice pack in place with your free hand. “They saw me walk. That was it.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“They saw me walk, and then they saw me get beaned in the head by, like, a 55-mile-an-hour blooper.”

“Rich.” Mark drums his fingers along your heroin veins. “What does it matter?”

You want to tell him why it matters. Because it doesn't look good, first of all, if Johnny Soto's kid can't even catch a goddamn ball. Because you think you want to go high in the draft, and you're on the cusp of being just good enough to do it. Because you don't even know if you want to go to Houston in the first place. Because –

“It doesn't.” With each tap of Mark's hand, your head pounds that much more. “I guess.”

Mark might not believe you, but he doesn’t say anything. “Rich, I gotta – ”

“Yeah.” You idly kick the side of the metal bed, clumps of dirt falling from your cleats. “You gotta go.”

Mark lets go of you, turning towards the door. “Listen, I'll be here right after the game. I swear, okay?”

“You better.” You chuckle weakly. “Don't let the scouts keep you.”

He turns around in the doorway, white uniform brilliant in the afternoon sunlight. “I won't.”

And you're left alone in the trainer's shed, head throbbing like hell and the imprint of Mark's fingers burned into your wrist.

That night, you have trouble sleeping.

It might be the semitraumatic head injury, but there's something else, something undefinable, that keeps you awake, watching thin shadows cross the clean plaster ceiling in time with the taillights of passing cars. You've got one arm slung across the bed and the other resting on your stomach, and your mind won’t slow down, its synapses firing like sniper rifles as you try desperately to shut your eyes.

It's a long time before your breaths even out, and you dream in abstracts, of hands fluttering around your face and forearms stretching. There are heat-driven whispers and soft dark hair, and when you wake up, your skin is scorching to the touch.

The next day, you two are sprawled out on your bedroom floor, studying for finals like normal high-school seniors. You've been putting a little more effort into school since that conversation in the guidance office after the World Series, so you're trying to get an A in calculus II; Mark has done the bare academic minimum since your dad told him he was a sure top-round pick in, like, the seventh grade or something, so he's trying to pass introductory statistics. With your help, that is.

“Okay, so.” Mark taps his pencil on a diagram, kneeing you in the side to get your attention. “This thing. The bell curve?”

“Yeah. Standard normal curve.” You lean over the book, knocking Mark's hand out of the way. “You have a lot of data, right, so when you plot it, it's usually going to look like this.”

“Like, what kind of data?” Mark looks puzzled.

“Um.” You run a hand through your hair. Your head still aches a little bit. “Test scores, yeah? Most people are going to be in the middle. They're going to get Bs and Cs.” You point to the apex of the curve. “That's them, right there. Not a lot of people are going to fail, so the ones who do are at the back, here. And not a lot of people are going to get As, so they're up here.” You trace the shallow incline with your index finger. “Got it? Kinda?”

“I guess.” Mark follows the line with his pencil. “And that's it? It's that easy?”

“Yeah,” you say. Your shoulder bumps into his. “This stuff isn't that hard if you try, dude. Numbers aren't that bad.”

“I know.” Mark tucks one leg under the other and his knee presses against your thigh, a weird little circle of heat where there shouldn't be, and you want to jerk away but that would be even more awkward. “So, it's kinda like this.”

You watch as he carefully sketches two stick figures on the bell curve, one under the hump and one at the far right. The first gets spikes for hair; the second, a shock of smudged graphite. He draws asymmetrical lumps at the end of their arms, and it doesn't make sense until you notice that they're on opposite hands. Baseball gloves. Righty for one, lefty for the other.

Mark, he writes above the first figure before moving to the second. Rich.

Your throat closes up a little bit and you feel the cording of the muscles along your neck, thick and taut, and Mark's watching you for a reaction. Any reaction.

“It's kinda like that, right?” he says, voice quiet. “'Cause I always get Cs, and you always get As.”

You swallow, and his eyes trace the movement of your Adam's apple. “I guess, yeah. If. You know. That's how you want to think about it.”

The patch of heat on your thigh gets hotter as Mark nods, dropping the pencil. It rolls into the crease at the center of the book, and you wonder if this is it.

He clears his throat. “Dude – ”

“Mark! Rich! Dinner!”

You've never been as grateful to your dad as you are at this moment.

When you get downstairs, you notice two things, one ordinary and one not – there's a bag of Chinese food on the table, but your dad is smiling. You and Mark sit down on opposite sides of the table and wordlessly start rummaging through the Styrofoam containers.

Your dad opens a bowl of soup and takes a sip. “The scouts really liked what you did in the Carmel game, Mark.”

After he left you sitting in the trainer's shed, Mark made the last out of the fourth inning by diving for a screaming line drive that was headed for the gap in left. He knocked in four more runs and didn't strike out once as the Falcons beat the Sundevils, 9-3. When your dad relayed all of it to you that night in exuberant tones, you'd asked if Mark had walked on water and healed the sick, too.

“Really?” Mark's mouth is half-full of beef teriyaki. “That's awesome, Mr. Soto.”

Apparently, the scouts had said nothing about you beyond how remarkable it was that you seriously hadn't seen the ball coming.

Your dad nods, pushing his soup aside and leaning in close to Mark.

“Here's the thing,” he says conspiratorially. “Buddy of mine from A-ball, he's a scout with Kansas City these days. They want you, he says. Real bad.”

Your stomach bottoms out.

Mark squints, and his lips fall open like they do when he's trying to solve a math equation. “But that would mean – ”

“Number one,” you say flatly. “First pick overall.”

“They're prepared to put down a lot to sign you.” Your dad claps a hand on Mark's shoulder. “You don't have an agent, but they're still going to go after you every which way they can.”

“Should I get an agent?” Mark asks faintly.

“Do you like having a soul?”

“Rich.” Your dad could cut glass with that glare. “That's enough.”

“Dad, I'm sorry, but if Scott Boras gets ahold of Mark, he'll suck out his soul through his nostrils.”

Mark looks alarmed. “Um. What?”

“Rich is exaggerating. Again.” Your dad rolls his eyes, returning to his won ton soup. “You don't need an agent, Mark.”

“I don't?”

Your dad shakes his head. “I'm looking out for you.”

The bile rises in your throat, but you throw yourself into your ginger chicken with all the energy you've got.

Later that night, after Mark's Jeep has pulled out of the driveway and the taillights have faded away, you turn to your dad and ask, “What about me?”

He folds down his newspaper. “What about you?”

“If Mark's going first – ”

“Houston's going to take you,” he says.

“Oh, yeah? Which round?”

“I didn't ask.”

“So they might not even take me at all.”

“Rich. We've gone over this. You'll be in the instructional league by September, I swear. It's set.” He flips up the paper again. “Don't worry.”

You glance at the table where your dad's awards sit, polished twice-weekly and arranged in chronological order. Johnny Soto – National League Rookie of the Year, 1983. Johnny Soto – Most Valuable Player, All-Star Game, 1984. Johnny Soto – National League Gold Glove, Third Base, 1985. Johnny Soto – National League Most Valuable Player, 1986.

Johnny Soto – broke his leg in three different places and never played again, 1987.

“Do I need an agent?”

“Don't be ridiculous.” He turns the page. “You've got me.”

“Do I?”

And you leave the room before he can answer.

Wednesday afternoons mean that you're on the mound for the day, and as Mark smacks line drive after line drive to the outfield, you wonder why you ever signed up for this in the first place. It's hot out, you already practiced for two hours, and you have no idea how to pitch.

You root around the sunflower seed barrel for another ball, trying to find one that Mark hasn't already scuffed up. You don't sign up to be a best friend, true, but no one ever said you had to stick around.

“Dude,” Mark calls, one hand on his hip, “I would like to be home sometime before dark, please.”

It might be the sun, but your blood runs hot as you grab a reasonably clean ball and stand up straight. You wait for Mark to tap his bat on the plate before you go into your rudimentary windup and throw the same pathetic fastball as usual.

Thwack!

You fall to the ground again for the second time in a week, clutching your leg just below the knee.

“Shit!”

Mark ditches the bat and jogs out to the mound. “Dude, are you okay?”

Images are flickering through your head right now: all those slideshows from anatomy, the leg bone's connected to the thigh bone, wishbones on Thanksgiving and that footage of your dad slamming into the left-field wall that you've seen a thousand times on ESPN Classic, his leg bending backward like Gumby's. You really wish this one had knocked you out instead.

“No, jackass, I'm not okay,” you hiss. “I think you broke my fucking knee.”

Mark drops down beside you, throwing off his glove and prying your hands away from your leg. “You can't break a knee,” he says reasonably, poking at the already-swollen patch of skin. “And it doesn't look broken.”

“How do you know?” you snap, even though you know damn well the bone's not broken; bruised, probably, but you'll live.

“Well, if it were broken, you'd be screaming right now.” Mark covers the hurt area with the palm of his hand, the hem of your practice shorts skimming his knuckles. “Also, you couldn't have thrown that thing harder than 65 miles an hour, dude. If you were a better pitcher, then maybe, but – ”

“Oh, fuck off.” You jerk your leg away and drag yourself up, pain shooting right into your eyes but fuck if you're going to cry. “It's not broken, okay?”

Mark remains silent as you slowly circle the mound, testing your weight and swearing intermittently. Walk it off, your dad would say. Walk it off, Rich. Nothing can ever be that bad.

When your leg feels like it's going to stay attached, you bend down to pick up your glove. Mark clears his throat. “If you want, we can go home.”

Maybe it's the way he says it, or maybe the pain's clouding your brain, or maybe you just don’t like being treated like a child, but for some reason, that just about does it.

“Let’s run,” you say, dropping your glove. “You versus me. Mano a mano.”

Mark blinks, running a hand through his hair. “Running is on Fridays. Also, you just said – ”

“Forget what I just said.” You bend down to tighten a shoelace. “Let's do it. Race me. Right now.”

“Dude, you’re not – ”

“I don’t care.” It’s a demand and a plea all at once. “Just do it, okay?”

Mark bites his lip before sighing and heading for the nearest set of bleachers. “Fine. We’ll run.”

“Good.”

You both crouch at the bottom of the stands, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, toe to toe, breaths murderously soft in the warm afternoon air. The pain in your leg is thumping as hard as your heart, and you almost don’t hear Mark when he says, “So, who’s blowing the whistle?”

You don’t answer. You start running instead.

There was a time when you could beat Mark in a flat footrace, and for the first few seconds, you think you might win this one. But you hear heavy steps right behind you, and when he pulls up on your right, you stick your leg out; he falls, hard, to the ground. He manages to grab your foot first, and you go down along with him, the whiplash turning your body backward.

All the air in your chest is pushed out when you hit the turf, and you lie there, panting, as Mark swears extravagantly and picks the grass clippings out of his hair.

“You didn’t have to fucking do that,” he wheezes, nails digging into the soil below.

You grit your teeth and feel sand, and you’re really not that sorry. “Yes, I fucking did.”

Mark looks at you incredulously before pulling himself up, dusting off his kneecaps and the shiny new scrape on his calf. He walks back to the field and gets his stuff, leaving through the gate while you stay sprawled out on the ground, grass poking through your thin t-shirt and dirt caking under your chin.

“You stupid fuck,” you mutter, and you’re not sure who you’re talking about. You haul yourself to your feet and grab your bag, jogging out to the parking lot. The Jeep is in its usual spot. Mark wordlessly opens the door, and you’re silent the entire way home.

It's not until later that night, while trying to find your notebook, that you realize you left your duffel bag in the back.

You're in the middle of practice that Friday when you run out of water, and like hell you're drinking the shit that comes out of the water fountain on the field, so you run back into the school for a refill. You're heading out the front doors when your guidance counselor grabs you by the collar and drags you into her office.

“What's going on?” you ask, water still dripping down your chin as you take a seat.

“We got a package today.” She grins, circling around behind her desk. “From the University of Southern California.”

You got one of those, too, about two months ago. Due to the volume of applications, we could not accept all who were qualified. Good luck with your future plans.

“So?” You slump a little lower in the chair. “I got waitlisted. I'm not that smart, I guess.”

“But you never took your name off the waitlist, did you?” She reaches into her desk and pulls out a thick white envelope. “I know you didn't.”

“I – ”

“Rich, you got in.” She hands you the envelope. “And as a mathematics student, too. Congratulations.”

You cautiously open the flap, and it's all in there – an acceptance letter, notices about registration and housing, even a little Trojan bumper sticker for the car you don't have.

Huh. They're for real.

Your guidance counselor's still smiling. “It's a great school. Lots of kids don't even make it in off the waitlist, Rich. That's pretty special.”

You hear what she's saying, but your brain refuses to process it; the words shoot around like pinballs, and you're still trying to grasp the fact that someone, somewhere, thought you were good enough for something.

It's already five minutes to four when you finally make it back to the field, but Mark's never done his workout alone. Today really shouldn't be any different, but it is regardless, and he's striding towards the gate as you burst through it.

“Dude.” You stop about three feet from him. “What's going on? I told you I’d be back.”

“I did them by myself,” he says tonelessly, glancing up. It’s June in San Diego and there’s not supposed to be a cloud in the sky, but one moves across the sun. “I know how to work a stopwatch.”

“I know that,” you say, hooking your thumbs in your back pockets. “But that’s not how we do it.”

Mark grabs the strap of his duffel and hoists it further along his shoulder, dragging the sleeve of his well-worn t-shirt with it. The skin underneath is paler, more fragile. “Dude, you weren’t here. So I timed myself. You don’t have to stay here all the time, you know.”

Yeah. You know. Maybe your blood’s running a little bit faster, and you feel your throat get hot.

“Let’s go home,” he says, and you both throw your bags into the back of his Jeep, bats and cleats clattering on the corrugated metal floor as Mark hits every back-road rut in sight.

You're a squirmy little bugger when you're seven years old, and you're out of the truck and tripping across the parched August grass before your dad even turns off the ignition. The high-schoolers are practicing today and it's all kinds of awesome; you love watching them, and your dad does, too.

The engine cuts off and the heavy door slams. “Richie!” your dad yells. “Hold on, for God's sake.”

You pull up short of the infield dirt and wait for your dad to catch up. It doesn't take too long – not like last week, when you wanted to go play catch. He couldn't get off the couch, and he just sat there, staring straight ahead while your mom iced down his knee. But today, he even manages to race you to the bleachers; you win, since he always lets you.

“Look, Richie,” he says, handing you your glove and a ball. “We've got company.”

Every other day this week, the two of you have had the stands all to yourselves, but today is different. Another dad and another little kid are sitting on the top bleacher. The kid's got a glove, too, but he doesn't have a baseball like you do.

“Here to watch the boys?” the other dad asks.

The kid's staring at you like you're something he's never seen before. His brown hair's cropped close to his head, and you run a hand through yours real fast; your mom didn't take you to the barber this week, like she usually does.

“Every day, so far,” your dad says back, sitting in the second-highest row. “One of them yours?”

The other dad shakes his head. “Come on! Do I look that old?”

Your dad laughs.

“I'm Dave McCarthy,” the other dad says, patting the boy on the head. “And this, here, is Mark.”

Your dad shakes Dave McCarthy's hand. “John Soto,” he says. “This is Rich.”

Mark McCarthy's jaw drops. “You're Johnny Soto? You're the Johnny Soto?”

Your dad's face gets real tense for a split-second before he smiles. “Well, I suppose I am.”

Dave smiles apologetically. “Mark's a big baseball fan. He played Little League on the local team before we moved.”

Your dad turns to you and gently pries the ball from your hand. “Why don't you guys go play catch down there?” he says, tossing it to Mark. He catches it with the tip of his glove.

You size up the kid, all short hair and blue eyes and tan skin; he's wearing an Oakland A's jersey that looks a little worn around the edges, and now he's looking at your dad like he doesn’t think he’s real.

“Richie.” Your dad leans in close. “He looks like he needs a friend, okay?”

Maybe, maybe not, but you get up and tug on Mark McCarthy's green shirt anyway.

“Follow me.”

The sun's high in the sky as you clomp down the bleacher steps, and the older boys are just starting to warm up on the diamond. You lead the way to a deserted part of the field, where you won't bother anybody, and it's the first time you've played catch over here with someone who's not your dad.

“I play, too,” you say, pointing to the baseball.

Mark grins. “I play real good. Do you?”

Nobody's ever asked you that before, and you dig a little hole in the dirt with the toe of your shoe. “Yeah, I'm real good, too.” You point to the ball again. “Can I have that?”

He hands it over.

You look at the ground. You're wearing the same sneakers, red Velcro straps and all, but his look a lot messier than yours. “How old are you?”

Mark holds up six fingers and squints. “Seven.” He holds up one more. “How old are you?”

“I'm seven, too.”

“Cool.”

You run a stubby finger over the stitching on the ball. “Do you go to my school?”

“What's your school?”

You point to the red-brick building in the distance. “I'm gonna be in second grade next week.”

“Me, too.” Mark's baseball cap is tipped to the side, like he's trying to be cool. “We just moved into our new house a little bit ago.”

“Where was your house before?”

“San Jose.” He snaps his gum.

“Where's that?”

Mark shrugs. “It's far. We took a plane here.” He knocks his glove against yours. “You wanna play?”

“Yeah.” You toss him the ball. “You start, okay?”

You want to see how good this kid is, if he plays like he said he does, so you run way out along the foul line until you hit the pavement in front of the swingsets. Mark's far off in the distance, and you hold your thumb and your forefinger right up in front of your eye and squish his outline between them. “Ready?”

“Ready!” he hollers, and his arm bends back.

The ball leaves his hand and fires straight into the dry air, stitches tumbling end over end, cutting a clean arc across the sky. You back up a step – two – three – and cock your arm right above your shoulder, ready for it, and the ball hits your glove with a sharp thwack.

You're still staring at your mitt in disbelief when your dad clambers down the bleachers as fast as his leg'll let him, rushing over to Mark and kneeling by his side.

“Do you always throw like that?” you hear him ask as you trot towards them.

Mark nods. “I play real good.”

Your dad laughs and ruffles Mark's short hair. “Yes, you do. Oh, you definitely do.”

Mark hands the ball back to you with a small smile, leaning close in, right by your ear. “I told you,” he whispers. “I play real good.”

“Yeah,” you say, clutching the baseball in the webbing of your glove; you like him because he plays real good, but you like him in spite of it, too.

Your dad's never home before seven-thirty, so the house is empty when you and Mark walk in, kicking off your sneakers as soon as you open the front door. Mark makes a beeline for the living room, and you grab a bag of tortilla chips from the kitchen before following him. He's already got the TV on ESPN, and you hesitate before joining him on the couch, plunking the chips down on the table.

You watch in stony, half-angry silence, which gets pretty boring after a while. You start sneaking glances at Mark, watching him blink as he tries to understand what the hell Stuart Scott is saying and counting the bumps along his spine when he reaches over to grab another handful of chips.

You two have been friends for almost twelve years, and even though you're boys and it's not supposed to be like this, you've never gone more than, like, fifteen minutes without speaking. It's weird and more uncomfortable than anything you can imagine, and you can't take it anymore.

“I got into USC,” you blurt.

Mark nods, not taking his eyes off SportsCenter. “Yeah, they’re gonna need a first baseman next year. Your dad says Colorado’s taking Romero in the first round.”

You can’t help it when your jaw drops a little bit, and sure as hell, your throat’s burning up again. “On my own fucking merit, thank you very much for giving a shit.”

“What?”

“I applied, you know, like a regular person. Didn’t say word one about baseball or my dad or anything. I wrote an essay about how I want to be a statistician when I grow up and then I mailed it, and they accepted me.” You exhale sharply. “Is that so fucking hard to believe?”

“I thought you wanted to play baseball.” Mark drops the remote somewhere behind the couch as he turns to face you. “Dude, you said – ”

“Listen, motherfucker, just because it’s the only thing you’ve got doesn’t make it the only thing I’ve got.” You spit out the words out like tobacco juice, pounding your knees with your fists. “I’m never going to run the sixty in six-point-eight, and I’m never going to see the ball as clear as you do, and I’m never going to throw a guy out at home like you do, and I’m never going to do a lot of the shit that you’re going to get paid a hell of a lot of money to do at some point in the very near future, so why the fuck don’t I try something else?”

Mark opens his mouth and then closes it, tucking one leg under the other. There’s a split in the seam of his t-shirt, near that ambiguous spot where shoulder turns to neck, and you reach for it, threading your finger through the hole and touching warm skin. He recoils, but you hang on, curling your knuckle around the soft cotton and to be perfectly honest, he’s not really trying all that hard.

“Is that what you really want?” he asks, tilting his head to watch as you fist your hand in his sleeve.

“What?”

“Do you really want to be a statistician when you grow up?”

“Not really,” you say, and then you kiss him on the mouth.

It’s not as weird as you’d thought it would be; it’s like kissing a girl, except with less lip gloss and more stubble. Mark is surprisingly pliable, and you taste tortilla chips and your best friend’s sweat for a split-fastball of a second before he pulls away. Your finger’s still hooked in his sleeve, and you hear the flat zip of stitches breaking as he scrambles for the other side of the couch.

“What the fuck?” he says, wild-eyed and open-mouthed.

“You started it!” you yelp, even though it’s completely untrue and you’re not seven years old.

“The fuck I did!” he yells back. “What are you on?”

“Nothing!” You scramble up from the couch and knock over the chips. “I didn’t mean to!”

“Seriously, Rich, what the fuck?” Mark stands up, too, and it’s always driven you crazy that he’s a shade taller, especially now, since you’re pretty sure he’s going to kick your ass. “What was that?”

Something hot and uncomfortable is pushing behind your eyes. “Does it even fucking matter?”

Mark blinks, the sleeve of his ruined t-shirt hanging uselessly by a single thread. “No, it doesn’t!”

“So why are we yelling at each other?”

“I don’t know!” You fall back onto the couch.

Mark sits down, and the room goes completely quiet except for the Speed Stick commercial in the background.

“I think I should go home,” he says softly, staring straight ahead.

You nod. “Yeah.”

But the two of you sit there until the Padres game comes on at seven, and Mark doesn’t bolt for the door until the bottom of the third inning.

It's your last week of high school and you should probably be celebrating, but you're a little preoccupied. Mark won't even look at you and you half-understand it, but that doesn't make it any less awkward; he's stopped showing up to the classes you share, and he's getting pretty good at making the throw to first during practice without actually turning his head towards the bag. You know you want to talk to him, and you think you might even need to, but there's no way in hell that's happening anytime soon. He's surrounding himself with the other guys on the team, traveling in their hallway packs and going for another soda when you set your tray down at the lunch table, and everyone just thinks you're being a fuck about the draft when that's only partly true.

He's doing his workouts by himself and you're hitching rides like a hustler, so it's doubly inconvenient when you realize you forgot your glove in your locker after your catcher's already driven you halfway home. You apologize half-heartedly as you push open the car door, and you walk back to school with your cap pushed low over your eyes.

It's quarter past four when you reach the locker room, and you spin your combination lock until the hinge falls open. You grab the mitt, precious thing that it is, and you're ready to leave when the door swings open and Mark walks in.

You freeze, your hand still on your locker. Mark's panting slightly, and you know why: it's Tuesday, a throwing day, and he must have been running between opposite ends of the field since he can't really play catch by himself. He looks at you incredulously, and you're seven years old again, sitting in the bleachers with your dad while this brown-haired kid sizes you up like you're a pitch he hasn't yet learned how to hit.

He starts walking towards you, and you're ready for it: Mark, and I'm sorry, and I promise I'll never do it again, and you've got to come back to me, but he stops short. He's just opening his own locker, and he shoots you an expressionless look.

“Glove.” You wave it around. “Forgot. Yeah. I'm – ”

“Whatever.” Mark turns his hat backwards and shoves his head in among the sneakers and water bottles, probably looking for his car keys. His sweat-soaked t-shirt clings to the butterfly muscles in his back, and you swallow whatever it was you were going to say.

“Yeah.” You bang your locker shut, throwing your glove in your duffel and high-stepping over the bench. You push your way through the door, and you can hear the ring of metal on metal far down the hallway. The sun's still high in the sky when you get outside, and it's a long way from the school to the neighborhood.

The strap of your bag digs across your chest as you trudge down Del Mar Heights, cursing your catcher and Mark and your dad and yourself, and you're about ready to stick your thumb out when a car pulls over alongside you and the driver kills the engine.

“Get in.”

You squint into the Jeep, and Mark squints back. “What?”

“Rich, just get in the fucking car.” He sighs. “It's not like it's out of my way or anything.”

You almost say no, pride and indignance clawing at your chest, but you throw your stuff behind the seat and climb in. Mark starts up the Jeep again and maneuvers it back onto the main drag, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

You sit quietly for a while, half-grateful and half-ashamed, tugging at a loose string on your shorts and looping it around your finger before asking, “Mark?”

“Yeah.” It's short, clipped, gruff in a way you didn't think he was capable of being.

“Um.” The thread gets tighter, your finger more purple. “About the thing, dude, I – ”

“Whatever, dude. We don’t have to talk about it.” He turns onto Sandshore Court, his hands pattering even more.

You cough. “No, I think we do. Mark, I – ”

“We don't.” He stares straight ahead, stomping on the accelerator. “We aren't going to fucking talk about anything.”

“But – ”

He leans forward and cranks up the radio.

You're burning with anger and resentment and something less definable, and when he pulls in front of your house, you yank your bag out of the back and slam the door shut without a word. You walk up the path and through the front door, and when you drop your bag on the floor, you go with it. You rest your head against the cool wood, blinking furiously and wanting Mark to follow you, awaiting the fistfight and the ass-kicking that you both do and don't deserve.

It's not until fifteen minutes later, when you stand up on shaky legs and look out the window, that the Jeep finally pulls away.

Everything would just be so much more fucking convenient if the baseball draft were like the NFL or the NBA. You and Mark would be in the same room, both wearing uncomfortable suits and both ready to vomit, but at least you'd be together, even though you’re pretty sure he’d hit you on sight these days. But no. The MLB draft's done over the phone – the fucking phone, for God's sake – and instead, you're huddled around the computer with your dad, listening to static and waiting for the internet radio broadcast to begin.

“This sucks.”

Your dad throws you that cutter of a glare again. “Are you kidding? I had to wait for a phone call, Rich. At least you get to hear what else is going on.”

You grumble a bit more before sinking back into your chair.

A few streets away, Mark's waiting around a computer, just like you. But he's got both parents there, first of all, and his little sisters, and his aunts and his uncles and his grandparents and a bunch of other relatives who flew down from San Jose just to sit in the McCarthys' living room and wait to hear what everyone already knows, while you're stuck sitting in the den with your dad and his depressing table of useless awards over in the corner.

“You kids are lucky,” your dad continues. “You even know where you’re going, sometimes. We had no idea. I didn’t know Houston was going to take me. But Mark – ”

You hear a voice from the speakers and wave your hand, more to shut him up than out of general interest. “It’s going to start.”

You wait while all the team representatives confirm their presence, and even in the air-conditioned living room, your palms start sweating when you hear the words you’ve been told all your life that you’d hear –

“Kansas City selects McCarthy, Mark. Shortstop. Torrey Pines High School. San Diego, California.”

Your dad hoots. “All right!” he yells, pumping his fist. “Atta boy!”

You blink, a lump rising in your throat. He's going to pocket well over two million dollars in signing bonuses, and Mark McCarthy will have the Hall-of-Fame career that Johnny Soto never finished. “Yeah,” you manage. “Atta. Boy. Yeah.”

Your dad shoots you a look, eyebrow ratcheting up into still-thick black hair. “That’s enthusiasm, right there.”

You scoot back in the chair. “Whatever.”

The rest of the first round goes by without any surprises – Colorado does take Romero, just like your dad told Mark –and the supplemental picks start, all guys you’ve heard of around the dinner table. Their names and statistics are familiar, but you wonder how many of them have spiky brown hair and ear-to-ear grins.

When the second round starts, your dad looks at you tentatively. “Word around the scouts was that you might go this early,” he says.

“Really?”

But you don’t. Not in the second supplemental round, either. Same with the third and the fourth, and by now it’s mid-afternoon and you both need something else to do.

Your dad coughs. “You should call him.”

“I don’t want to call him.”

“Richard John Soto.” Your dad is up and about, pacing in front of the table of awards. He stops right in front of the Gold Glove. “I don’t know what happened between you two, but you have been best friends since before I can even remember, and this is the most important day of his life. You should do something about it.”

In the background, the Houston Astros select some guy named Murphy with their fifth pick. You get out of the chair and walk into the garage, grabbing the keys to the Corvette as you go, and you will be goddamned if anyone is going to keep you from doing whatever the hell you please right now.

You drive around the city for a while, burning valuable gas and breaking about a hundred traffic laws, but you don’t get stopped, not from Imperial Beach to La Jolla to Camp Pendleton. You coast down the old 101 to Solana Beach, pulling the car over on South Sierra Avenue, right by the shoreline. It’s getting close to sunset, and rays of red and orange reflect off the ocean as you get out and sit on the hood. Salt spray tickles your face and you feel like you should cry, but you don’t.

It’s almost dark by the time you pull back into the neighborhood, and the streetlights bounce off your rearview mirror as you pass your street and head straight for Mark’s. It’s a ten-minute walk, a two-minute drive, and you ease the car to a halt in front of his house and stare into the picture window. Which is creepy, and you should really just walk in, but you’re. Not.

It must have died down a little in there, but the whole family is still gathered in the living room, and Mark is at the center of it all on the couch. Someone’s shoved a Kansas City Royals hat on his head, and it looks weird; Mark’s supposed to wear a maroon hat, like you, twin Torrey Pines Falcons. His face is fixed in that huge grin he’s got, and his little sisters are sitting on either side of him, tugging at his polo shirt. You swallow hard as his dad comes up behind him and cuffs him on the shoulder, and Mark’s smiling so hard that it’s absolutely got to hurt.

I’m real proud of you.

You rip your eyes away and start the engine, and the two-minute drive is a thirty-second one this time. You pull into the garage and hang up the keys. Your dad doesn’t say anything about it; he just tells you that you were taken in the sixteenth round by the Houston Astros, and you really don’t care that much.

It's two months later, and early-morning August heat beats down on you as you load every meaningful possession you've got into the back of a shiny maroon pickup. Boxes pile up until the little Trojan bumper sticker is completely obscured, and you secure the black tarp with bungee cords before throwing more junk into the cab, running back and forth between the living room and your long-awaited going-away present.

It's been a weird couple of months. The Astros offered you pennies to sign, which sent your dad into a rage, but it didn’t really matter, either way. You turned down the offer and dropped your postage-paid “I Accept My Acceptance” card in the mailbox within the hour, one day before the deadline to enroll in fall semester classes at the University of Southern California.

You're going to college, which is weird enough on its own, but you've been avoiding your best friend the entire time, which just jacks up the surrealism to unprecedented heights. Your eyes have trouble focusing and you halfway expect to see Mark everywhere, which is probably why you're not really surprised when you come back outside and find him leaning against the side of your truck.

“Hey,” he says quietly, hands pattering on his thighs.

“Hey.” You shift the box you’re holding to your hip and inhale deeply. Your voice feels creaky and unused. “What’s – what’s up?”

He grabs one wrist with the opposite hand, and the fidgeting stops. “Nothing, really. Your dad told me you were heading out today.”

“Yeah?”

Mark nods, pulling his lower lip into his mouth. “Yeah. He told me where you were going, too.”

“Huh.”

His hair’s still matted from his pillow, likely, and you realize he must have gotten out of bed for this, specifically woke up to see you, and that makes you happy, in spite of yourself.

“Yeah. USC.” He scuffs a toe on the pavement, one black Converse sneaker falling apart at the seams, and after all these years, you’re still wearing the same shoes. “Wow, dude. That’s good. Like, really good.”

The box is getting heavy, so you open up the truck and shove it into the cab. You leave the door hanging open and lean against the interior, automatic door locks pressing into your back. “I guess,” you say, running a hand through your hair. “It’s a good school.”

Mark turns towards you. “Damn right it’s a good school. You’re going to be rich – Rich – and you’re going to take care of me when I’m old, right?”

“You’re gonna want me around?”

Mark lowers his eyes, cheeks reddening.

Well, it’s out there.

He swallows hard, and his Adam’s apple strains against the column of his throat. “Yeah. Of course. Why not?”

“I can think of about a thousand different things,” you say, “and those are just from last semester.”

He holds up a hand. “Whatever, dude. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Best friends” means never having to explain yourself, and waves of relief wash over your body as you allow yourself a tiny smile.

“You seriously think I’m gonna have to take care of you? Dude, I know Kansas City’s poor, but they had to give you something.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t last forever.”

“How much?”

“Two and a quarter,” he says quietly. “Million.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.” He stares into the tinted window for a few seconds. “I don’t know what to do with it. Like, I don’t need anything.”

“New shoes.”

“Good point.”

It’s silent for a while, both of you honest and awkward while the birds chirp high up in the trees, and you sneak a glance at your watch.

Mark notices. “Yeah, I should probably get going.”

He moves to leave, but you hold out a hand; forgiving and forgetting might be good enough for other people, but you’re Mark and Rich, something special and unyielding, and you can’t let it end like this.

“You wanna come?”

His eyes drop to the pavement, and you're terrified that he's going to say no.

“Like, to help me move in,” you add quickly. “And maybe get dinner and stuff. You know. You don't have to, if you don't want – ”

“You jackass.” Mark's face splits into an easy grin, stretching from one cheekbone to the other. “Of course I want to.”

You would have thought you'd learned your lesson about sudden physical contact with your best friend, but fuck it; you grab his sleeve and pull him into a hug, clapping him on the back and smiling faintly into the soft red cotton of his shirt.

“For reals?” you mumble into his shoulder.

You practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Yes, Rich, for reals.”

“Aw, man. That's awesome.”

He snorts. “You've got to let go of me, dude. I gotta go back to the house real quick. Cell phone's there. And, more importantly, snacks.”

You release him, still grinning like a jack o' lantern. “Those snacks better be of the nacho variety, my friend.”

He laughs, short and low, before cuffing you on the shoulder. “Like I'd get anything else.”

And even though it’s Monday, Mark is running, past the low stucco houses and down to the corner where the grass pokes through the cracks in the sidewalk, sprinting faster than you've ever been able to imagine. But it's okay, somehow. Mark has always been faster, always will be faster, and you’ve always known you’d never catch him – but now, at least you know he'll come back.

You lean against the door of the truck and watch him disappear over the horizon, a tiny silhouette swallowed by the still-rising sun, and you know that no matter what, it's been worth it.

He’s worth it, in the end.