Monday

"Reality is a lovely place but I wouldn't wanna live there"

Ever since his little sister Sarah had had her friend Jimmy over and played music that was so loud he had heard it down to his room in the basement, he hadn't been able to get that quote out of his head. It was quite possibly the quote that summed up his entire life.

He had been called a whole dictionary of words so far in his life; slow, dim, stupid, lumpish, retarded, and so on. The thing people never knew was that none of those words were really ever true. The thing was, Ed didn't like life. Not in a killing himself-way, no; he just felt that it was all so terribly boring. Get up in the morning, go to school, go to work after school, get home, indulge in his hobbies if he had any strength left after the day, eat somewhere in between all this and go to sleep; wash, rinse, repeat. What kind of a life is that? Where's the adventure in that?

Something he'd always secretly wanted- he guess it was a sort of secret since he had never really talked about it with anyone, not that anyone would believe him at first anyway since most people thought he was about nothing more than Sci-fi flicks and monster movies- is to have lived in back in the Wild West. Back then, a job actually seemed to mean something and you were important to the town you lived in. Like a blacksmith; who else could fit your horse with new shoes? Sure weren't no Footlockers around. In modern times however, most people without jobs thought their lives sucked because they didn't have them and most of the ones with jobs thought their lives sucked because they really wanted another one. People made too big of a deal about jobs anyway, he figured; everyone was being raised with the idea that a job was the single most important thing in the world for their survival and it'd gotten to the point where it had come true, where they lived in societies that required them to work hard and deal with feeling like absolute shit in their own time, however little that may end up being. Along the way since the old West, they got kinda spoiled and started to hate the idea that they would do this one job for the rest of their lives, that they were meant for something so much more. Ed sure did.

See? He could certainly pull it off when he wanted to; he wasn't anywhere near dumb when he put his mind to it. Mind that this was only a thought he'd managed to stumble onto halfway through breakfast.

"ED!" His aforementioned sister Sarah, who was probably the cause of why he had begun to choose not to listen to a word what people say, threw the cereal box at his head in an attempt to get his attention.

"What?" Ed looked up from his piece of toast to acknowledge her, trying to leave the heated debate he had engaged himself in over why he found his job useless. Though taller and more physically developed, he realized she couldn't have changed much personally when she gritted her teeth in frustration as a vein popped up on her forehead.

"MOM, Ed's not listening again!" When he turned fifteen, their mother had decided, with the help of a lovely psychologist named Peter she had been seeing, that maybe it was about time to cut the poor boy some slack since living in constant fear of being tattled on seemingly isolated him from both his family and the things he found natural to do. So a later curfew was set, he started to receive a bigger allowance; all the perks of being the oldest child who wasn't really as bad as the youngest made him out to be. Never did stop Sarah from trying to get him into trouble though, most probably to keep covering up her own bad behavior.

"Sarah, don't tattle on your brother. Ed, you don't listen enough." Their mother, Mrs. Firefly, finished the dishes she had been occupied with and began packing their lunches; something she never really took the time to do when they had been kids but had begun doing once she realized that Ed had but a year left of high school, wanting to bond with her children as much as possible before they sodded off into the real world. Sarah just grumbled and went back to shoveling cereal into her frowning mouth.

"Sorry, Mom, but I can't really help it; my mind just drifts off and I'm just... Not here anymore."

"Hippie." Sarah muttered between the spoonfuls, loud enough for Ed to hear but not for Mrs. Firefly to.

"Oh, I know, Ed; your father has always been the same. Infuriating habit from an infuriating man." With an annoyed sound, something similar to a sigh and not too distantly related to a grunt, Mrs. Firefly put a bag in front of Sarah, a bag in front of Ed and patted them both on their heads. "So do try."

"I will, Mom." Ed took another bite of his toast and deemed the conversation all good and over so he dove right back into his thoughts.

"By the way, Ed; while we're here on the subject- Oh, heavens me!" Mrs. Firefly quickly flunked the subject when she threw a quick glance at the clock and rushed out of the kitchen in a huff, realizing just how little time she had before she needed to leave for work.

"She probably wanna know why you haven't grown up yet." Sarah said in a lowered voice, leaning in towards her brother and interrupting a rather nice reflection he was having on the planet Mars and its two moons. He once again looked away from his breakfast and was met by her self-satisfied smirk. One of his two best friends Double-D had once said in a fit of anger that Sarah could put on a one-woman show of 'Wicked' by herself; Ed wasn't all too sure what his friend had meant by that but she sure managed to look quite wicked in that moment.

"Sarah?" Somewhere along the way, he realized that maybe standing up for oneself, especially against a sibling, wasn't such a bad thing really. All you really had to think about was parents not hearing it if you decided to get rather explicit in your language.

"Yeah, Dumb-Dumb?" She perked up from her breakfast with an expression saying she was already bored with the conversation.

"Don't be upset-"

"Why would I?"

"- but I really didn't hear a fucking word that you just said."

Tuesday

He had always been an airhead, never really paying attention to what was going on around him; especially when he was a kid. When he and his two best friends weren't having great adventures themselves, he would make them up in his mind; often finding them a whole lot more fun than reality around him. So he simply began sprouting ridiculous answers to question to cover up the fact that he was never listening and from there just assumed that everyone took it for what it was: "You know, Ed, he's kinda special that way but we love him anyway." He didn't really mind.

This, of course, made everything take a turn for the worse when he started high school and instantly fell behind in everything, not for a lack of trying though. One trip to the school counselor sent him in the right direction though as this led to him being diagnosed with Dyslexia and from there helped him receive the help he so desperately needed when it came to schoolwork. A lot of support also came from Double-D, who had been running a study group since the early days of their freshman year and had helped motivate and inspire Ed in many ways the day-dreaming boy hadn't even thought possible. The group had started out small with only a handful of people, all of them from the Cul-de-Sac where he lived and its surrounding areas, so their meetings were always intimate and understanding when it came to learning difficulties. He loved it; it never really felt like homework, more like some friends who got together to solve some problems and talk shit over them.

Of course, some days they worked better than others. He belonged to something of a little crew consisting of three people inside of the group who sometimes managed to make their time in the meeting about something completely different than the subject at hand. It had all started rather simple really. Ed had been sitting through all of his classes that sophomore day with a complete lack of interest for anything, just one of those days everybody has now and then. Once time for the study group, he had managed to doodle down the covers of all his exercise books completely and while the others went on with whatever homework they were supposed to be doing, he continued with a detailed drawing of a hoverboard that covered most of one book's back cover. In the midst of finishing it up, the person in the neighboring seat caught on to what he was doing and began showing great interest. This person was May Kanker.

Their history had always been complicated. She and her sisters had pursued him and his two best friends with romantic intent in some very creepy ways throughout the years the Kankers had lived in Peach Creek. The Eds suffered torment unbearable at their hands and even though this ill-executed show of affection ended somewhere before their freshman year, the scars remained. This was the reason Ed had torn the door to the study room clean off its hinges running away afraid for his life on the first day when coming in and laying eyes on May sitting there. It took a while to remedy the situation with the counselling of Double-D and Jonny, the third member of their future crew disconnected from reality, who both tried to convince him that she was neither soul-sucking nor a succubus. So the second time Ed walked into the study group, he instantly chose the seat in the far back and moved it into the even further back corner of the room. It took about forty-two or so meetings before he could even consider the possibility of maybe sort of sitting next to her in the circle they held at the start of the hour where everyone shared their thoughts and vented about the homework they currently had.

If quickly returning to and summarizing the hoverboard incident, Double-D found Ed, May and Jonny sitting around a desk at the end of the hour, feverishly debating and drawing up plans for a skateboard lacking wheels which could travel over land and water through harnessing the power of the Earth's magnetic field. This was the first of many times the three of them would huddle up and imagine the most outlandish things that could either improve the world or do for a great adventure on a boring Saturday afternoon. It was all in good fun and sometimes that was to prefer over writing an essay on a city ravaged by the devastating nuclear meltdown that occurred in Ukraine, 1986.

Why was all this occupying his mind now then? Sitting in his favorite coffeehouse slash diner, depending on whether or not you'd actually tasted their blatantly horrid food, sketching away on his next sculpting project? Well, even though he had ventured there for the better part of his junior year, which was soon coming to a close, he had never actually known that May Kanker waitressed there until he'd seen her through the front window a couple of weeks back, at which point he began to temporarily stop going there. What was the reason? Something as simple, or nothing of the kind, as emotions.

At some period during the years they had spent in the study group, Ed had let bygones be bygones and bonded with May on a platonic level. Most of the time they spent outside of school consisted solely of studying, something they found worked quite well if they both locked themselves away from the outside world and distractions which Ed's room proved perfect for, but it did occur that they simply met and hung out; watched movies, talked shit about this and that or laid back in the grass and gazed up at the clouds, trying to find contours of fantastic beasts. Very rarely did they discuss the unpleasant past they shared and even then, Ed just swatted it away like a fly; he was the sort of easy-going person who couldn't let old grudges spoil the fun of the moment. So somewhere in all this pleasantness, Ed found that he might have ended up being infatuated with his new found friend. This scared him. Emotions of this sort scared him. She scared him a little too, but he figured that was just good on some level. But he wasn't really sure; was it the sort of caring he had for all of his friends or was it the sort of caring he had once carried for Nazz?

This led to him avoiding her for the greater part of two months. Always making sure to be busy when she suggested a study date, dodging whatever call of hers came through or texts she might've sent. He didn't like it, and he figured she didn't either, but he told himself that he was protecting himself. May seemed to have grown so much since the days of old when she was just another head of the vicious hydra that was the Kanker sisters so he couldn't possibly know if his feelings would be reciprocated. It was all a confusing mess. Or at least it had been until his other best friend Eddy McGee came up and punched him in the stomach as a result of Eddy having been punched similarly in the stomach by May's sister Lee with the explicit order to fix whatever Ed's major malfunction was. It turned out that May had sulked around in the Kankers' trailer for the better part of those two months because she thought Ed didn't want her as a friend anymore, which couldn't have been further from the truth in his eyes.

Things were by now back to relatively normal terms, though Ed still felt somewhat tense whenever May got a little too close physically. Like there and then when he was once again sitting at his usual table, wobbling violently like it always, sketching away after yet another school day when she showed up out of seemingly nowhere with his order, pulling him out of his wandering thoughts. Taking off his headphones, which provided him with inspirational music, he smiled up at her.

"Hi again, May!"

"Hi again, Ed; here's your order! I still don't understand why you always get the breakfast platter when it's the middle of the afternoon."

"Tell you the truth, I don't either."

Wednesday

No matter how much he ate or gargled whatever he drank, he never managed to get the taste of the coffeehouse's coffee out of his mouth until he brushed his teeth furiously in the evening. Never could he figure out just how they managed to mistreat both food and drinks to point where it was barely edible. Why go there then? Well, he liked to imagine that he made them go around by showing up there every afternoon and paying an overpriced 5.95 for a late breakfast. There was also the fact that he received the same creative solitude there that he did in his room at home without actually having to sit at home all night. It was nice just to get out every now and then.

"Hey, Bubbleboy!" A snap mere inches away from his nose heaved him back into reality and noticed that the bar's manager, Greg, was standing on the other side of the counter with a bemused look on his face. "Ground control to Major Tom; you've been cleaning that same glass for fifteen minutes now."

"Oh." Looking down confirmed the fact that Ed had a glass in his hands so clean that you could pass it off as pure crystal. "Sorry, boss; I must've been somewhere else."

"I'll say! Look, we open in half an hour and you haven't even mopped yet! And- What the-" Greg tried to lift the hand he had rested on the bar counter in an attempt to raise a lecturing finger but found it completely glued down. "You haven't even gotten around to sweeping the bar! Look at this; how the hell do you think people are gonna be able to sit here?!"

"Well, it should attract some barflies pretty good now." This quip, which Ed found himself rather proud of, made a vein in the manager's forehead pop, something which reminded him of Sarah.

"And now you're making quips? Let me tell you what this place looks like then: Hell, boy! How do you expect us to get customers if you just-" Ed often wondered how someone like Greg, who had been a stockbroker or businessman or something of the sorts back in his native Australia, ended up running a bar smack down on the border between Peach Creek and Lemon Brook. Maybe it'd been a lifelong dream of his, maybe it had all been on impulse following a bad breakup. Who knew? Greg often seemed pretty miserable about things so he doubted it was the dream alternative.

Would that happen if he and May broke up? Or, well, if they got together and broke up? Maybe. Would the other side of the world really be enough distance to mend a broken heart? He didn't know. He certainly didn't know if he would be able to cope in a foreign country with a currently strange lot to one day call friends, without Eddy or Double-D to cheer him up except for over the phone. Probably better to just move to the next town over if he were to even move at all in that scenario. Then again, who was to say they would even break up?

What if they grew old together? They could have millions of little mini-Eds and mini-Mays running around the yard of a picket fenced house while they stood proudly in the doorway, watching the mayhem happen. Still taking walks around the block to share their imaginative thoughts; he with a walker, she with a cane. A big church wedding where all their friends and family could gather and share in their happiness. Thanksgiving rotating between theirs, Double-D's and Eddy's families. That all sounded sort of awesome.

All of this wouldn't of course happen if they didn't get together in the first place. Should he ask her out like they always did in the shows on TV then? Or the old school way of slipping her a note, asking her to be his boyfriend? Or should he just kiss her out of nowhere? Hell if he knew; he'd be terrified of the answer whichever way he did it.

He just felt that they... Fit. Same sort of stupid humor over the small things, appreciative of the things and people they had, enjoying life for what it was at the moment and both probably had a thousand different answer for one image of an ink blot test. He could be himself completely with her and he felt that she could do the same. Wasn't that essentially the same things important in a relationship? Apart from trust, of course; his mom always used to shout that at his dad whenever he answered "Out." at the question "Where have you been?". Maybe their marriage wasn't the best case to gather romance tips from.

So, yeah, he would try to make his emotions show somehow. He just didn't know how yet.

"Hey!" A finger snap once again brought him back to the current moment where Greg was still stuck to the countertop by the hand and looking absolutely furious. In the blink of an eye, everything Ed hated about his job there rushed over him. The fact that he never had time to go to the coffeehouse after school on workdays because he needed to make the bus. The more seasoned drinkers who would beg to borrow some money for a beer until they received their next paycheck and then tried to steal one when he wasn't looking. How he was usually the sole worker, apart from Greg, working there and therefore doing most, if not all, of the labor; at minimum wage at that. His damned, spotty beard Greg insisted he'd grow to look older. Greg might've been angry over a sticky counter but Ed had all the more reasons to be angry over his entire situation.

Sure, he was working there to prove to his parents that he was a responsible young man who could handle the heavy burden of going to college, and earning whatever little money he got, but there was a limit to how much even he could take.

"Don't be upset."

"Don't be upset?! I've been standing here for five bloody minutes and you haven't even-"

"But I really didn't hear a fucking word that just said."

Thursday

It had probably been the wrong thing to say to his boss but it had led to better working hours and a slight pay rise. Sure, it had been after Greg had fired the living daylights out of him and after he had threatened to reveal to the proper authorities that he'd been told to serve alcohol in the establishment when he had been all alone, but it was still a victory for the little man. Greg was a friend of a friend to his dad so it probably wouldn't find its way back to his parents that he'd essentially blackmailed his boss. Still; victory, little man.

He'd even gotten tomorrow night off, something he never got since the bar usually filled up real good on Fridays. Coming home later that night, he was met with the news that his father was going to be dragged away by his mother on a romantic cruise for the weekend. Sarah would probably end up at a friend's or Jimmy's house. He'd most likely be home alone. So he'd decided that maybe all this was a sign that he should spend his Friday night with May. Whichever case, he wanted to do so; it'd been a while since it had been just the two of them hanging out outside of meeting in study group and seeing each other at the coffeehouse. Therefore, he was penning a little note on a torn out page of his exercise book, which also featured dozens of doodles both front and back, which he would place in her locker after lunch as a nice little gesture.

I got tomorrow night off and the house is empty-

Should he mention that the house would be empty? It sounded like an invitation of a more... Sexual nature, if you asked him, which it definitely wasn't. At some point he would certainly hope that it would be, but not now. Another page.

Hey! I got tomorrow night off so I'm free for all-

'Free for all' also sounded dirty. Perhaps another approach would be better suited.

Hey, you wanna come over tomorrow to my house and study? I got the whole night off!

Or could it be insinuating something to say that he got the whole night off?

...

What was it with his sexualization of things today? Seriously, it was just an innocent little note!

I wanna play hide the chicken with you.

Now that was a sexual note!

"Mr. Firefly, dare to share with the class what about 'The Brothers Karamazov' has your mouth smiling so widely?"

"Uhm... Their funny names?" May giggled at this from her three seats away, something which sent a net full of butterflies loose in his stomach.

"... Good lord. Mr. Firefly, Ms. Kanker; I suggest you both exit the classroom and continue this reading matter on your own if you happen to find Slavic naming customs to be such a laugh fest."

Friday

The sky was clear blue sans a few stray clouds, the grass there in his backyard bright green and there wasn't a chilling breeze to be found. It was a perfect day in April, all in all. Or, it would have been if he hadn't been so damn nervous.

"Hey, which group of philosophers did you get?" May lied on her stomach across from him, lazily skimming through her philosophy book while kicking her legs back and forth.

"Ehm..." Ed had somehow managed to have been mesmerized by her legs a few minutes ago, especially the part where the two connected, and had to shake his head to gather his wits. "Nietzsche, Voltaire and Socrates. Which did you get?"

"Confucius, Sun Tzu and Laozi." She made a confused face. "The Slavic aren't the only ones with weird names."

"Think how simple our names have to be to them then." Ed laughed at the thought. "Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, meet Ed Horace Firefly."

"Oh, you're a crack-up!" May let out a guffaw. "Jiang Qing, meet May Kanker."

"The world's a funny place." They laughed at the peculiarity of the world for a moment before sinking back into the silent lull that usually befalls study sessions.

"Oh, right! I forgot!" May suddenly shot up and grabbed her bag, rummaging around the mess to reveal the source of her urgent movement. "The wine!" The liquid inside the jam jar she held sloshed back and forth against the glass.

"The wine!" Ed had to say something so he just repeated the last thing she had said, straining against his urge to point out that it looked an awful lot like an over accomplished urine sample. "I shall get glasses!"

"Okay!" As Ed ran off into the house in his hunt for drinking containers, May took a moment to soak in the beauty of the moment. The sun destined to soon settle below the horizon. The frayed blanket underneath her which tickled her bare legs. The boy who returned excitedly with two wine glasses in hand.

"Mom would ask for my head if she knew I used these, but it's my Friday off; would be nice to drink from one instead of serving them!" He chuckled to himself, knowing that his mom really would ask for his head, or at least his freedom, if she were to find out. She wouldn't though, he hoped.

"Fancyful!" May undid the lid of the jar enthusiastically and quickly poured a hefty amount of wine in both of the glasses. Taking one from Ed's hand, and accidentally gracing his fingers while doing so, she raised it ceremoniously. "To your Friday night off!"

"Cheerio!" They smiled widely at each other when the two glasses collided with a tiny *clink*.Both of them took a careful sip before making matching faces of disgust.

"Holy shi- It tastes like feet!"

"Moldy feet at that." Ed peered down into his glass, slightly disappointed that the drink hadn't quite lived up to his expectations. "Still. To moldy feet on a Friday!"

"Moldy feet on a Friday!" They smiled and toasted again before downing the entire glasses this time, grimacing even more. "I promise, no wine next time."

"It's not that-" Ed quickly held a hand in front of his mouth when a burp escaped it. "Okay, it's kinda bad."

"Sorry." She tilted her head and smiled apologetically. He found it cute.

"I do have..." His sentence trailed off and he grew quiet as he suddenly experienced a moment. One of those moments of clarity when everything in the whole world somehow makes sense out of seemingly nowhere. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps he had managed to finally think himself into a state of enlightenment. Both of them could fit this newly finished puzzle of his.

"What do you have?" May placed a worried hand on his arm when he didn't continue. Ed looked down at it in surprise, as if this was the first thing in life that he hadn't been expecting, and lifted his head to connect his field of vision with hers.

"It's funny." He snickered and shook his head in disbelief.

"What is?"

"Life. Just in general. My grandmother told me how much I've grown up last time I saw her but I don't see it. I don't know anything about being grown up. I have a job, but I'm always broke. I half-ass school to sit by myself and sketch in a coffeehouse, or diner if you wanna call it that. I walk around and never listen because I'm always thinking of things I wanna sculpt." May retracted her arm, apparently listening intently. "Maybe I'm hopeless. Maybe I always need to borrow money because my job is shit. Maybe I really am disconnected from reality. A lot of maybes."

"Yeah."

"I don't even have the keys to a car yet." The serious look on his face was broken when he smiled brightly and glanced up at the sky above them. "But I got a bag of weed and a sunset." May's eyes widened remarkably at this. "I got great friends, I got a family and... And I got a blanket in my backyard with a girl I sorta like on it." His stomach did somersaults when the words finally left his mouth and continued to do so when her own mouth fell open. Neither said anything for a moment, which in his eyes could be either a good or a bad thing. She closed it and licked her lips, taking a moment to look away at nothing in particular. Then she looked back at him and opened her mouth again.

"Ed."

"Yeah?"

"Don't be upset." His stomach stopped mid-jump in devastating surprise, dropped to somewhere in the vicinity of his socks and damaged itself quite badly.

"Oh." May saw the pain flash across his face for a moment and she smiled cunningly before continuing.

"But I really didn't hear a fucking word that you just said."

Saturday

"HEY, LUMPY!"

"Yeah, Eddy?"

"The hell are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Well, get your head out of your ass and pay some damn attention!"

"Eddy, calm down."

"I'm sitting here, trying to save my failing grade in philosophy with the world's most annoying assignment, and this guy looks like he's on morphine or something!"

"I can't imagine what is so annoying about it; I happen to find philosophy to be quite the intriguing subject."

"Yeah, well, it'd probably be better if you could spell half of the names of these day-dreaming assholes! Look at this; how the hell do they expect me to be able to spell Netch- Niets- Nigel-"

"N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E."

"... That's actually correct, Ed. Good work."

"Thank you, Double-D!"

"Oh, stuff a sock in it, Ed. And wipe that god awful grin off of your face!"

"Okey-doke, Eddy!"

"And don't you dare float away again!"

"I won't, Eddy!"

"He will."

"Don't you think I know that, Sockhead? Now, what about this Sock-rates guy?"