The Best Laid Plans
Acepilot
AN – This is from the Tertiary universe – set long before Phil met Lor, however, rather, this is about both Susie and Phil's relationship and the beginnings of Angelica and Susie's. It's the first in a series of three, which will all hopefully be out before too long. Thanks to Lord Malachite for his help, as ever.
I'm aware that the writing style in this one is a bit odd compared to my usual - it'll be closer to normal in the next story. This is a piece about feelings and emotions and moods, so resulting in a more urgent, less dialogue driven story. I hope you enjoy it. Please review to let me know what you think.
Disclaimer – eh. It's not mine.
8 - * - * - * - 8
Angelica Pickles had a plan.
A lot of people accused her of being selfish, of living in the moment, of being the biggest flake to ever walk the earth, but she knew better. Yes, she was self-involved, there was no denying it, but this was her youth and if she wasn't self-involved now then when would she ever get the chance? She flaked because she knew that this moment wasn't important. Living in the moment was all part of the plan.
The plan was thus: cruise through high school, part of the popular crowd, beefcake-de-jour on her arm and smiles for all the pretty people in the world. Weekends were to be spent at a mall, Friday nights at wherever the hot social scene was that week, and weekdays to be spent doing the minimum to get by, whatever was needed to get into Cook and take her shot at her business degree.
Then, in college, she would ditch beefy, crack on and study her ass off, maybe seeing some cute accountant-to-be in her minimal free time, graduate with honours and move on with accountant boy into a reasonably impressive house where they would marry, have two-point-five kids and live happily ever after. Her own childhood had taught her enough that only children were more trouble than they were worth.
Note how this plan did not involve Susie Carmichael in any way whatsoever.
The romantic within Angelica Pickles liked to tell herself that whatever it was she felt for Susie had always been there, bubbling under the surface. That if anyone asked her, she would be unable to specify the moment that she saw Susie in this new light – that she always had been something else to Angelica.
But that was a lie – she could remember the exact moment everything changed. It had been a Thursday morning. It had been raining since the afternoon before and was still having a good tilt at it as they arrived for home room. Susie Carmichael – who had never succeeded at breaking a rule in her life, no matter how hard she tried – was late to class, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and looking suspiciously like she had both overslept and stressed out over what to wear that day. She hurriedly took her traditional seat in front of Angelica, to the right of Harold, and Angelica watched her with vague interest. Something was off about Susie Carmichael that morning – something she was unable to put her finger on, but there was definitely something…different about her friend. She was anxious, not paying attention to the droning of school news at the front of the room but playing with a pen against her note book, the quiet tapping probably only audible to Angelica but already driving her crazy.
She kicked Susie's chair leg. "What's up with you?" she hissed.
Susie turned to face Angelica, a blush creeping visibly across her cheeks. "What do you mean, what's up? Why should anything be up? Nothing's up."
Angelica Pickles was not one to tolerate crap stories like that.
"Am I going to have to tip you or are you going to spill on your own?" she asked, pitting Susie with a withering stare.
Susie withered on cue. "Later. I'll tell you later. Promise." She threw a thousand-watt smile at Angelica and turned back to facing the front of her class, slumping in her seat a little and giving off a loud – well, not actually loud, but loud enough for Angelica to hear – sigh.
After they escaped home-room she shoved her best friend into a bathroom. "Alright, Carmichael. You were in a pretty deep funk yesterday and you now look stoned."
Hmm.
"You're not, are you?" Angelica asked, aware it was pretty ridiculous but then so was any other explanation she could come up with for Susie Carmichael's sudden mood-swing.
"No!" Susie protested, slapping her arm. "God, what kind of idiot do you take me for?"
Angelica wisely didn't say anything. She had only done it, once, at a party. She had watched Groundhog Day and gotten into a complicated discussion about forms of torture while eating pizza Shapes. It was not a night she cared to remember and had rather put her off the experience.
"Can you seriously promise to keep a secret? Not your usual secret keeping ability, either. A real, best-friend-forever only kind of secret."
Angelica was slightly surprised that Susie viewed her in that light but nodded. Susie had very few secrets. Odds were this was something pretty unspectacular, but it would be worth it if only to see what exactly rated on Susie's goss-o-meter.
"Okay," she said.
Susie took a deep breath, leaning against one of the stall-doors. "I had sex."
Had this been any other one of her classmates, she would have laughed at the way Susie had said that. So, she had sex. Who hadn't by now? But this was Susie. There were few things Angelica Pickles was confident of, but one of them had been that Susie was a pure as holy water.
Until now, apparently.
"What?" Angelica heard herself saying before she realised it. "You…with who? When? How? On a school night?"
Susie blushed even deeper and hung her head. "At school. In the Art Cottage."
Angelica's jaw dropped open. Angelica was not one for hanging out at the Art Cottage herself, but she knew that it was the favoured hang-out of musicians and painters and photographers and all those people with way too much time on their hands. Susie had been there a bit that year, she knew – playing piano and hanging with a different crowd from Angelica's other friends. Angelica had missed her. But she understood her problems with the more traditional, popular crowd at high school. Sometimes Angelica looked at her friends herself and wondered what the hell she was hanging out with them for.
"My god, Carmichael. Bold move. Floor?"
Susie rolled her eyes. "There's a couch in there."
The image of Susie, naked on a couch in the small, dingy cottage on the far south border of the campus flashed through her mind. For a very brief instant.
"So, who was it?"
She looked up and grinned. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
Angelica ran through a short roll call of the people she knew might hang out at the cottage, but came up pretty short. "The only person I can think of who hangs out there with you is – "
"It was Phil," she whispered.
"DeVille?" Angelica gasped, quite loudly.
"Shh!" Susie insisted. "Not so loud."
Angelica looked at her friend, who was glowing so bright she might attract moths. Hard to believe that Phil DeVille was capable of putting that look on a girl's face. Who knew he had it in him?
"And it was…good?"
"It had its moments," Susie agreed, looking ready to float off the ground. "I've never…you know, I've never done…this. Before. I mean, I have now, obviously. So I have very little to compare it to. And it wasn't perfect, I mean, it hurt. The first time. But he was really sweet and funny and he…well, he made sure I wasn't left…behind, you know?"
Angelica felt this was altogether far, far too much information. Normally she would have been clamouring for these kinds of details from any of her other friends, but not so much from Susie. And not about Phil.
The first time?
Who knew he had it in him indeed.
After that day Phil and Susie began having lunch together, which led to Susie having lunch with the sophomores and Chuckie again. She would occasionally catch herself looking over at their table, unsure if Susie was losing her cool-quotient or raising that of Phil's table, and see them having fun, and wonder why, as she looked at the vapid minds on display at her table where she held court over the school, beefy-football-player-of-the-week hanging off her every word, she wasn't having any fun.
"Angelica?" Samantha called, waving a hand in front of her face to get her attention. "Are you alright?"
She turned away from her fixation. "Yeah, of course."
"Good. So, I think Tamara needs to be put…on notice. She keeps saying that she hasn't been spying on me. But she keeps coming to school wearing the same pants."
It was dawning on her quickly exactly why she wasn't having any fun.
Angelica decided to try sitting with her childhood friends. They looked at her as if she had grown a second head, but she explained she missed getting to sit with her best friend at lunch, and after all, hadn't they once been friends?
Lil gave her a look suggesting this was news, but no-one stopped her from sitting down. She took that as the victory it was and enjoyed her lunch. They talked about movies and music and school. She wondered briefly if Lil ever worried about Kimi wearing the same pants. It struck her as unlikely.
Then Phil told a joke that Susie laughed at. Everyone laughed at it, really, but Phil pulled Susie to him and gave her a kiss, a simple little peck, really, and they sat a little bit closer together after that.
Angelica felt put off her lunch.
Susie would tell her about their dates, hushed conversations in the back of class that felt the wrong way around. In the past she had been the one to tell Susie about the miserable dates football players took her on, or the nicer ones that the occasional rich boy would treat her to. Now it was Susie, telling her about picnics and cafes and painting – he painted her. Nude, she had wondered aloud, before Susie whacked her on the hand with a book.
They were all ideas of dates that would have Angelica rolling her eyes if someone tried them on her but seemed to make Susie so happy. A lot of things about Phil seemed to make Susie happy.
Angelica began to recognise the little knot of envy building up in her stomach.
She wondered what was missing from her life to leave her feeling this way. She was not generally an unhappy person. She had her plan, she had her status, she had her friends. Well, she more or less had her friends. She wasn't entirely sure, these days, exactly how much she had Susie, who, like most people in a happy relationship, was spending a good degree of her time with Phil. It wasn't like they hung out all the time, and Susie, she supposed, still had plenty of time for her, but she used to have a lot more, and she found herself missing that.
She briefly contemplated the idea that she was jealous of Susie for landing Phil, this supposedly perfect boyfriend. One afternoon she was at the Java Lava, the only customer on Phil's shift. She decided to experiment.
"So, Phil," she said, leaning against the counter and smiling at him winningly.
"So, Angelica," he returned, cleaning a glass and looking at her with a baffled expression on his face.
She ran an assortment of starters through her head before deciding she'd gotten herself in to something she rather wanted out of at this point.
"More strawberry in the smoothie next time," she told him, putting her glass down on the counter and retreating from optimum flirting position.
So, she definitely wasn't attracted to Phil.
Maybe she just wanted the kind of relationship they had. It was definitely not like any relationship she'd ever had before. It wasn't really the kind of relationship she'd thought she'd have until she was older.
She tried to envision some football player taking her for a picnic in the park. Or to a cafe after a movie like The Road to discuss the themes and impact, rather than to the backseat of his car after a movie like Bring it On to discuss and act upon the themes and impact. It didn't strike her as likely. She was more intelligent than she liked to let on, because status meant…well, not everything, but certainly a lot to her, and talking about arthouse movies with the circle she hung in was not a great way to make conversation. But she also knew that most of the girls she knew would become trophy wives, would struggle to make it in the real world, while she had loftier ambitions for herself.
It would be kind of funny if they were all really geniuses who thought they'd be ostracised for their intelligence. Which would, of course, make them bigger idiots than they pretended to be.
The gossip grapevine at school had found the relationship between Susie and Phil more amusing than anything else. Susie, the golden child – well known and well-liked in spite of being an overachiever and goody two shoes – was seeing Phil DeVille – a sophomore artist, a notorious slacker and joker. Some of the juniors had a book running on how long the relationship would last, with a month being offered at the outside, but Angelica had a worrying feeling that this relationship would stick. She had never seen Susie so happy at a time when it had seemed like her life was spiralling downwards. She had been getting so lost in her schoolwork and the expectations that her parents had heaped upon her, only to suddenly turn it all around.
Angelica wished she'd been able to help Susie.
She found herself watching them at a party. Susie never used to come to these parties, but since she had Phil she was frequently present, dancing together (something Phil did bravely but was honestly not much cop at), laughing at the 'popularness' of it all (a made up word she was dead certain was meant to be an insult). Alysha (or Alley-shar as she preferred to be called, no matter what her parents said) stood next to her.
"Do you have, like, a crush on Susie's boyfriend?"
Angelica snorted. "No. Even if I did, when you've seen someone do some of the things I've seen DeVille do, the romance would just go right out of it."
Alley-shar shrugged. "Well, you know, you've been staring at them for ten minutes now. If you don't have a crush on him…"
She trails off and looks dead serious for a moment before finally breaking down into hysterical giggles. As if the possibility that she might have a crush on Susie Carmichael was simply the funniest joke she had ever heard.
Angelica laughed along. Outside, at least.
Angelica had never contemplated the question of her sexuality before. There were a number of reasons for this – she didn't really know any gay people growing up, for whatever reason, and – perhaps most importantly – there were no gay people at high school. Oh, sure, there were gay people at high school, but outing yourself (or, worse, being outed) was not the way to survive in that kind of vicious social environment. So the gay people remained in the closet while people like Savannah and Samantha and the people she, with increasing shame, called her friends tried to find out who they were so they could embarrass them.
Angelica had always liked boys. That was all she had ever known, all she had ever thought. But how much did she really like boys? She thought the football players were idiots, really, not worthy of her time but necessary for her social standing. The 'cool' rich guys were arrogant toe-rags by and large. She had always gone out with them, she had fooled around with a few and, sadly, slept with two of them. But there was never really anything there. Dating boys was something one did. She had never questioned it.
Maybe she should have.
Susie Carmichael was pretty, albeit moreso when she didn't care about her appearance than when she did – she possessed something of a natural beauty. She suspected that Phil shared this opinion as since they had started going out Susie seemed to be spending less time on her appearance and was coming to school without so much make-up, less accessories. She knew that she found boys attractive – they were nice to look at, if nothing else – but she also knew that she found Susie beautiful, and that complicated matters.
Susie Carmichael was one of the few people in the world who put up with her…difficult, to say the least, ways. Susie was always there for her, even when she was being a pain – especially when she was being a pain, because it was always Susie who would knock her back into line. She didn't take any of her crap, and that was a necessary part of her life. When everyone else would cow to her or ignore her, Susie would put her in her place and that, Angelica knew, made her a better person. The refusal to bless the ground on which Angelica walked made Susie one of the few people she could stand to be around all the time, who she never tired of seeing, because, really, all those suck-ups got old after a while.
So, she liked spending time with her. She thought she was pretty. And she was suffering from severe envy over her relationship with Phil DeVille.
Yeah, she had a crush on Susie Carmichael.
Angelica largely suffered through this in silence, however. She dated boys, though it never went anywhere, and she watched as Phil and Susie made each other happy, burning away with envy but refusing to stick her neck out over this. She knew it was incredibly out of character for her to hold back from taking something she so obviously wanted, but she also knew that this wasn't the time or place.
Phil accompanied Susie to prom, where she watched in a vague sense of amusement as Susie guided Phil through some rudimentary dance steps. He was not entirely without rhythm but it clearly wasn't his thing, but they were laughing and smiling and having a great time nonetheless. Which made it all the more surprising when Phil sat down next to Angelica and her date with a broad grin on his face.
"I feel so completely out of place," he confessed to Angelica, taking a sip from somebody's glass of water and almost immediately spitting it out, drawing back and looking at it suspiciously.
"Yeah," she agreed, "you look it too. Susie had to practically drag you around the floor there, DeVille."
Phil shrugged. "I actually meant being the only sophomore here. I think I dance quite well."
Angelica snorted. Her date raised an eyebrow but she wasn't paying attention.
"Oh well," he said, leaning back in the chair and appropriating Angelica's water, too fast for her slapping hands. He took a sip of it cautiously and grinned, downing it in relief. "Good practice for my future, I guess."
"You going to drag Susie back from college next year to do this again?" she asked, thirsty but refusing to touch the remaining water glass after Phil's rejection of it.
"I doubt it," he said, "we broke up this afternoon."
And then Susie was back among them, a grin on her face as she pecked Phil on the cheek, and then they were back on the dance floor, and Angelica was left, stunned, contemplating what, exactly, had just happened.
That summer passed by in a prettily coloured blur – an odd sense of foreboding and hope settling over her, as she and Susie enjoyed the taste of freedom of having finished high school but felt the oppression of tertiary education as they prepared themselves for college. Her 'friends' had scattered to the winds after high school let out, and she found herself spending the summer, largely, with Susie – freshly free from her relationship with Phil and in a stunningly good mood about it. It baffled Angelica to watch them interact without a trace of ill-will, smiling and friendly. Susie explained the break-up had been completely amicable.
"We were both just going in different directions," she told Angelica one day over coffee at the Java Lava, where Phil had just served them. "I'm off to Cook, he's back to high school…we're great friends, and we've been really good for each other. But I think it's time to move on. And he agreed. I mean – as much fun as we have together, we're hardly going to be able to do the long-distance thing very well, are we?"
Angelica nodded vaguely. The jealousy from the relationship was gone. Now there was just an odd sense of longing. The summer was good for at least one thing – away from the status of high school, away from the vapid girls she had called her friends, Angelica felt herself…becoming more and more comfortable with who she was. The mask dropped, for a little while, at least, and she could be herself. And she could try being the version of herself that might have feelings for her best friend.
At some moments, she could have sworn that her feelings were not entirely one-sided. One night, during a movie-marathon while her parents were out of town, she had woken up to find herself tucked under Susie's shoulder, Susie's head resting comfortably atop her own. They had both blushed and moved toward opposite ends of the couch, but if Susie had been a guy she'd have been able to read those signals and come out with the answer she needed.
As it was, she was hopeful.
The night they moved into Cook's dorms, Susie's roommate was still not there yet, and she was a bit intimidated by the idea of being there, all alone, on her first night so far away from home. So Angelica stayed with her, watching movies on the TV, flicking channels before settling on, of all things, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They sang along and laughed and Susie strutted her stuff to Sweet Transvestite, and Angelica was coming back from getting a drink of water when Susie leapt up and twirled her around to Whatever Happened to Saturday Night, causing her to nearly spill the glass before she got it down on the table and joined in properly.
And, in a moment of total weakness, looking at Susie's flushed and smiling face, Angelica kissed her.
She felt Susie's body tense up completely, every muscle going rigid, and she knew she'd pushed too hard – but then, for a second, the other girl relaxed and returned the kiss. Angelica felt a hand sliding up her back and tangling in her hair, and she wrapped her arms around Susie to try and deepen the embrace – but then Susie went tense again and whirled away.
"No, no. Sorry."
Angelica was out of breath and didn't speak.
"No," Susie continued. "I'm...I'm not sure I can…"
Angelica stared at her. "I'm sorry. I thought – "
"I don't know…" Susie told her. "I'm just…"
Angelica sighed. "Well, this is one of the highlights of my life so far," she told Susie. "Thanks for being here to witness it."
Susie groaned. "Look, Angelica, I'm sorry. I just…I had no idea."
"Well, join the club."
They sat back down on the couch, and it was a small couch, but Angelica could suddenly feel this gulf, this distance between them, and she knew that she had been too forward, too hasty, that all the ideas she had built up over the summer about how she might win Susie over, how she might ease them from friendship to relationship were out the window now. In a moment of weakness she had kissed her best friend, and it wouldn't be hard for Susie to work out where this was leading.
Susie didn't allow herself to fall asleep on the couch with Angelica, this time. She crept across to her bed and slumped down into it, wishing Angelica good night, before turning out the lights.
Angelica didn't leave, because she didn't want Susie to be alone. But she was gone before the other girl woke up, having not slept a wink. She'd screwed up, she knew it, but the time and place were right now. This was what she wanted, and she was Angelica Pickles. She got what she wanted. Partly because she was stubborn. Partly because she knew how people worked.
But mostly because she had a plan.
And this time, her plan most definitely involved Susie Carmichael.
8 - * - * - * - * 8
To be continued in "The Gruen Transfer". Please review in the meantime – let me know what you think about this storyline.