***ALEX***
The first thing I do when I wake up on that futon is check my email (nothing important) and my Instagram. A few random selfies and shit from the stars of my favorite movies, one or two of my favorite authors at some bookish event in New York I only wish I were lucky enough to attend, and then a video mashup Gideon just posted. He's celebrating eight months on testosterone by showcasing how much he's changed since he began transitioning. He's got a nice beard going on; his arms, shoulders, and wings are bigger and more defined; and his voice is at least a full octave lower. He's fighting back tears in the last segment of the video as he says, "I'm still a work in progress, guys...but God, if only you guys could feel the weight coming off me right now." On my screen, he makes a reverse peace sign, and I mirror it with a smile.
Then I realize I'm alone in here. Ty must've gone downstairs already. Maybe the Jacksons are having breakfast?
But I should be getting home all the same.
I go downstairs and find the Jacksons all crowding the small kitchen, doing exactly what I thought they'd be doing. "Oh, hi, Alex!" Mrs. Jackson says, waving a spatula at me. "Good morning! You want a pancake?"
"Or two, or three?" Mr. Jackson laughs. "You can't have just one! It's impossible!"
Am I backing towards the door too quickly? "No thanks, guys," I say with an embarrassed laugh. "No, I'd love to, but...but I was gonna meet someone in Heaven for breakfast today. I, uh, usually do anyway."
There's a surprisingly long pause, then Mrs. Jackson says, in a high-pitched, "letting the air out of the balloon" kind of voice, "Oh? Okay. Okay, forget we...it's all right." She ducks back into the kitchen, blushing furiously.
"Pancakes make her a little overenthusiastic," Mr. Jackson says apologetically.
"I can see why," I say. "They smell delicious. Wish I could try some."
We say our goodbyes, then I head out the door, making my way past the waterfront plaza. Ahead, I see the usual line forming in front of the Bridge - it must be open again. Either that, or it hasn't, and all these visitors are just unaware that it flooded yesterday. Which isn't likely, because I don't see the usual red lights above the entrance signaling that the Bridge is closed-
"Hey, Alex! Wait up!"
I turn around to see Kelly's long legs carrying her up to me at a fast pace. "Hey, what is it?" I ask as she stops next to me, her hands on her knees, panting. "Did I forget something?"
"N-No." She looks up at me, her face on fire. "Sorry you had to see that," she says. "I can swim pretty well - for a land elemental, anyway - but I'm a crap runner."
I let one wing out of my hoodie. "I'm a flying man myself."
"Literally," she says, laughing louder than is necessary.
I turn away from her as Ty's last words to me from last night replay themselves in my head. "So, uh, what's up?" I keep on walking towards the Bridge, and as I expect, she follows me.
"Nothing much," she says. "I just, uh, thought I'd walk with you."
I find my place at the back of the line, and Kelly joins me. "Didn't want your mom's pancakes, huh?"
"I'll let you in on a little secret," she stage-whispers. "My mom can't pancake. Just like I can't run. That's how bad they really are."
"Then why do you eat them?" We both laugh, and she does so loudly enough to attract the attention of the couple holding hands right ahead of us. They turn around, shake their heads, and lean in to kiss each other in almost perfect, creepy-as-fuck unison. And I thought angels were robots sometimes.
I look down and see Kelly reaching tentatively for my hand - what, are we going to be robots too? Crossing my arms, I look up at the sun shining over the mountains for a split second before I have to turn away.
Kelly's no fool, either. "What's wrong?" she asks.
Rattled, I look down at my feet. "I just feel...weird," I say. "'Cause your mom's being so nice to me, pretty much for no reason. Hell, she must think I'm such a screw-up, after what happened yesterday. She must feel really sorry for me."
"Why wouldn't she?" she asks. "I think we all do. And...and my family spent months feeling sorry for me after Fionna died. That's just how they are. They care about people." She mirrors my crossed arms. "I care too," she adds. "I heard directly from you, like, once over the summer, when you said Gabe was dead. After that, nothing. There were times when I thought, I dunno, maybe you'd died too-"
"Hey, don't say that!"
She gasps as she realizes what she's implied. "Oh God. Okay, forget I said that." She swallows a couple of times. "Look, if you need help-"
"I don't-"
"I can be there for you. And I wanna be there for you." Before I can stop her, she grabs my arm and takes my hand.
I don't pull away, but nor do I try to return the gesture. My arm might as well be that of a puppet at this point. "Why?" I ask. "Because you like me?"
She freezes, a look of pure shock on her face. Then she neutralizes her expression and says, "Yes, I do."
"Is that a thing?" I'm trying not to sound pissed about it, but my voice is doing that thing where it turns nasally when I start to get keyed up. "Is that a thing, for people to fall in love with someone just from what someone else tells them about that someone?"
"What are you talking about?"
"That's what Fionna told me once," I say. "Gabe would always talk about me, and she fell in love with me. Or, better yet, his construct of me."
"I know that." She tightens her grip on my hand. "But I'm not in love with you, Alex. I like you. There's a difference."
"One I know too well," I mutter to myself. More directly to her, I say, "I like you too. But look, my girlfriend and I, we're not doing so hot. I don't wanna jinx that, okay?"
Kelly blinks, looking seriously hurt. "Don't tell me you don't even wanna be friends with me. You'd just be lying to yourself."
"No, no, no, I do!" I pull away from her hand, the better to make sweeping gestures. "I just...I don't know."
"Hey, this isn't something you can be 'ooh, I dunno, I'm so oblivious' about," she says, briefly switching to a deep voice. "You're not that kind of cute."
"Yeah, I'm not exactly a caveman."
It's our turn to go through the glass doors, so we have the guard swipe our IDs one by one through his machine as he buzzes us in. On the other side, Kelly says, "Seriously, though, I wanna be your friend."
Is that all? I think.
"I heard that."
Goddammit.
"That too, but swearing doesn't offend me."
I slump, allowing my head to get closer to her level. She's tall, but so am I - and I'm more gawky than I'd care to admit, but that's because I haven't been working out as much. I should fix that.
"Stop flashing me those 'kiss me' eyes," Kelly snickers. "You're sending me mixed signals." She backs away just a bit, then holds out her hand, pinky extended. "Friends?"
I feel foolish shaking pinkies with her, but because I'm imagining her having done the same with Fionna and Gabe once upon a time, I don't see why not. "Friends."
Stepping up to the breach, I stretch out my hand, expecting to hit Plexiglas. Nope - the Bridge is completely open. I cross through to the other side with Kelly right behind me. It's still pretty wet here, but at least it's not raining anymore. Although there's debris all over the place, most of which is, I think, junk carried down the mountain. And I thought the people upstream would be better about keeping Coldfire Creek clean. Maybe in Hell, they are.
I'm about to suggest we get some coffee at Smythe and Darknell's when the door to that place opens. "Hey, what do you know?" I say to Kelly. "Lana Smythe's rolling out the red-" Speak of the Devil, there she is - striding purposefully out the door and flinging a plastic bin full of stuff into the water below. "...carpet?" I finish in a small voice before approaching the door and craning my neck around it. "Mrs. Smythe?"
She jumps as she recognizes me. "Oh, Alex," she says, her hand over her heart and the bin at her feet. "That looked so bad just now, didn't it? But look, see..." She points behind the counter. "Thanks to last night's flood, our plumbing's infested with bugs."
Kelly spots them first. "Ew, gross!" she laughs, running up to get a closer look. "What the hell are these things? They look like little gray rock lobsters!"
"They're nowhere near as delicious," Mrs. Smythe gripes. "They're Pine Mountain water lice. A fluke of evolution if ever there was one." She turns on the tap, and after a few seconds of gurgling, more bugs spill out, trailing silvery-gray slime from the faucet. "Normally, we're pretty good at keeping them out of the plumbing," she continues, "but the flood overloaded the system. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build businesses on a bridge..." She shuts the tap off, and good thing too - the bugs are starting to reek. "Robert and Aron are supposed to be downstairs with the Darknells trying to purge the lice, but I think they're just taking smoke breaks."
"Even Aron?" I scoff.
"You'd be surprised," says Mrs. Smythe. "I caught him trying to sneak a pack into the house last month. He's been grounded ever since. When he's home, anyway."
"That doesn't sound like Aron."
"You're telling me." Mrs. Smythe sighs, looking like she's aged ten years over the summer. If so, I wouldn't be surprised. "If only...hey, would you two be able to help me out?"
"Me too?" Kelly asks, pointing to herself.
"Sure, why not? Kelly, right?" Mrs. Smythe bends down behind the counter and picks up two pairs of rubber gloves. "They might be a little big for you, Kelly. We have 'em in the largest size they sell, so Robert and Paul..." She stops short for a second, but quickly recovers herself. "So Robert and Paul could wear them if needed. They should be just fine for your hands, Alex."
Kelly and I each take a pair. "Gotta get this café ready for business, huh, Mrs. Smythe?"
She cracks a smile, but doesn't ask me to please call her Lana like she usually does. I can't bring myself to call her that, not only out of politeness, but also because I never thought she looked like a Lana. I've associated the name too long with one of the stars of Once Upon a Time, or one of the Wachowski sisters.
For a while, Kelly and I lose ourselves in helping Mrs. Smythe get rid of the water lice. Then Aron comes out of the basement and walks through the store to say, "Mom, the tank's all clean."
"Good," Mrs. Smythe says shortly. "That should be just about the end of these babies...go help Alex and Kelly for a second, all right? I'll go talk to the adults."
Behind his mom's back, Aron rolls his eyes, but then he says, "Okay." When Mrs. Smythe leaves, he comes behind the counter, where Kelly and I are still working, and kneels next to us, picking up imaginary bits of dust and shit (not literal shit, I mean) with his gloved hands. Carefully, I peel off one of my gloves long enough to reach down and ruffle his hair. He responds by backing away, almost landing flat on his ass.
"Hey, Aron." Kelly tries to do the same as I did, to no more success. "You all right?"
"I haven't been 'all right' in a while," he says, still picking up imaginary stuff anywhere he can find it. "But thanks for asking."
"Seems like everyone I know had someone they love die," I say sadly as I put my glove back on and reach into the sink. "Guys, are you sure it's a good idea to just dump these damn lice back in the water?"
"Why not?" Aron mutters. "It's their natural habitat."
I know he wouldn't like it, but I want to hug the guy. I haven't spoken to him pretty much all summer - he's been strictly out of contact, and until we all came back to Balthazar last Sunday, I feared the worst. Like me, he's lost his brother. Unlike me, he was lucky enough to have not witnessed it. Either way, I should have been there for him. And now I think about it, I should have been there for Kelly too. Of course, she was much more Gabe and Fionna's friend than she ever was mine. But I could have easily flown to Coldfire Creek once or twice. Instead, I spent my summer commiserating with Kyle, putting all my energy in helping him move on.
At their expense.
Maybe that's why I'm here right now. I probably would have offered to help Mrs. Smythe even if she didn't ask. My way of attempting to make up for the damage to Aron's psyche in which I'm at least a tiny bit complicit. You can take the boy out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the boy. Catholic guilt is a very real thing.
"After all this, you wanna go up to school or something?" I ask Aron. "Maybe, I dunno, hang out in the woods?"
"Can't." He finally picks up something for real - a stray coffee bean. "Five-second rule's long expired on this baby, huh?" He tosses the bean into the bin along with all the bugs Kelly and I have gathered up. "Let's get that the hell outta here."
Kelly dutifully picks up the bin and carries it out the door. "Sayonara, insects!"
"They're isopods," Aron corrects her quietly. "Not insects. Fourteen legs."
"That's too many for one creature," I say. "Aron, are you sure you can't come back up to school with me after this?"
"Mom says I have to stay home over the weekend," he groans. "I know I shouldn't have gotten those cigarettes from Darknell's desk, but-"
"Darknell smokes?" I ask. "I didn't know that."
"And he doesn't know I took them," Aron says. "I'm surprised my mom never told him...but then we're not exactly big on snitching in this family." He blows his hair out of his face - I don't think he's cut it once since I met him. "Ever since Paul died...I mean, after Gabe died, wouldn't you have done anything to, you know, numb the pain?"
"Not like that." Okay, that's not entirely true. I've smoked once before, and it was disgusting. But I do understand the appeal - some kind of oral-fixation crap, according to my psych textbook (which I really have been skimming through a lot lately.) I think that might explain my own bad habit of holding pens and pencils in my mouth - and, bizarrely enough, holding them like cigarettes. Or joints, even.
And it might explain why I've felt my own cravings for a cigarette or ten throughout the summer. No, seriously. I haven't given in, because I need to keep all my instincts to hurt myself at bay. It's hard work, but I've managed for the last three months or so.
Just like I told Jasmine.
"Hey, but if your parents knew I was with you, I'm sure they wouldn't mind," I say.
"You're probably right," Aron says. "Kelly, do you think he's right?"
"Uh-huh," she says aimlessly as she comes in with an empty bin. "Wait, what are we talking about?"
"He said you were hot," Aron deadpans.
"You-!" I dive after him and try to slap him silly, but he eludes my grasp like the slippery little shit he is. Even Kelly joins in, trying to corner him from one side while I go after him the other way.
Like we're a little family.
Not gonna lie - I need this in my life. A bit of fun and games. It's good for the soul.