A/N: My first Recess story! I actually had this typed out months ago and never got around to posting it. But I figured it was time to share it. I'm not expecting too many reviews, since this section of the site isn't that active. Still, I'm pleased with how this first chapter came out, and I figure if only a few people read it, then that's fine with me.

Oh, and they are 17 in this story, which means it takes place in 2005, assuming that the gang were nine in 1997, when the show premiered. Enjoy!

T.J. watched the red numbers on the digital clock change from 1:59 to 2:00. He yawned and felt his eyelids droop again. Before he could change his mind, he grabbed his thermos full of coffee and chugged it down.

He hated the bitter liquid, but had been alternating between it and cans of Monster to keep himself awake on this early Monday morning. T.J. was usually a night owl and had no trouble staying up late, but he'd had little sleep over the weekend thanks to his busy social life. He had remembered a few hours ago that he had a history essay due tomorrow morning. The essay had actually been assigned over two weeks ago, but in typical T.J. fashion, he had forgotten about it the moment he walked out of the classroom.

T.J. had to do well on this paper; there was only a week left in the school year, and a decent grade on this assignment would hopefully bump him up to a C in the class. After his last report card, a C was practically a miracle.

The high school junior put down his drink and continued typing on his laptop.

"Come on, Teej," he whispered as he checked the word count on the corner of the computer screen. "Less than two-hundred words to go. You can do this."

T.J. was in the middle of a sentence about the Civil War when something outside his window caught his eye. He immediately stood up and leaned in for a closer look. His heart started pounding when he saw a shadowy figure tip toeing around his yard.

Panic set in and his mind began to whirl; should he get his parents or call the cops first?

"Cops," T.J. decided, trying to remember where he had put his cell phone. However, looking out the window, he noticed how small the figure was. He realized the stranger was a female. She was headed for the old tree house that T.J.'s parents had planned to take down a few months ago but T.J. convinced them not to. There were just too many memories in that little house; even as a 17-year-old, T.J. had no shame in preserving it.

He closed the blinds, but peeked through them to watch the intruder make her way through the yard. The duffel bag she was carrying looked like it weighed more than she did. When the girl made it to the tree, she looked around to make sure no one was watching. When she did this, the light from the full moon caught her face and T.J. knew exactly who this mystery girl was:

Ashley Spinelli. He would know that face from anywhere.

"What the hell?" T.J. muttered to himself as he watched Spinelli climb the tree. He was baffled, but his heart rate had slowed down dramatically. At least he knew he wouldn't get robbed.

Well, come to think of it, he wasn't so sure about that.

Despite being best friends with her in elementary school, T.J. hadn't spoken to Spinelli in years. Things changed during seventh grade. Spinelli started acting weird; she would always come up with excuses so she didn't have to hang out with T.J. and their other friends. And when she did hang out with them, she would seem bored. Eventually she started hanging around more with Conrad Mundy, Greg Skeens, Sue Bob Murphy, and the other "bad kids," and by the end of September of their seventh grade year, Spinelli was avoiding T.J. and the others entirely.

T.J. had been concerned; as soon as she started hanging out with her new "friends," Spinelli began skipping school, not doing her school work, and getting sent to the principal's office for bullying. T.J. did everything he could to get Spinelli to stop. He tried talking to her, setting up an intervention, even talking to her parents. Nothing worked. Spinelli would just get angry and throw one of her oh-so-charming temper tantrums.

Staring at the dark tree house out the window, T.J. couldn't help but remember the last time he had spoken to former best friend…

T.J. had just gotten released from school after a long detention (he really should start setting his alarm clock earlier; these tardies were starting to add up). He was walking home and had just left the school grounds when he saw Spinelli smoking a cigarette with Mundy, Skeens, Sue Bob, Lazy Kid, and Kurst the Worst.

He was surprised by how much this sight bothered him. It wasn't like he was on a big anti-smoking campaign or something, but the thought his best friend's lungs getting poisoned by all that awful junk was disturbing, even if that friend had been a huge jerk lately.

T.J. took a deep breath and marched over toward the shady group. He couldn't just ignore this.

"Spinelli!" T.J. yelled.

All six kids turn toward him. Everyone scowled when they recognized him, except Lazy Kid; he just looked confused. Maybe he was smoking something other than a cigarette.

"Wow," T.J. said, staring at Spinelli, "you're pretty cool now, smoking and all." Her appearance had certainly changed in the last few weeks, the most obvious differences being the ripped black jeans and cigarette between her lips.

"Get lost, T.J.," Spinelli said, narrowing her eyes, which were outlined in black eyeliner. She looked like a raccoon.

"Actually, I was thinking about hanging out with you guys for a while," T.J. said lightly. He leaned against the graffiti-covered wall next to Lazy Kid, who looked like he was falling asleep. "I mean, you guys are so cool and you're having such a fun time being all rebellious and whatnot."

"Get outta here, Detweiler," Mundy snarled.

"Yeah, before we make you leave," Kurst added. T.J. notice that she was the only one in the group who wasn't smoking. It was a lollipop stick hanging out of her mouth.

T.J. shrugged. "Well if you guys and Spinelli are hanging out, I figure I better hang out with you too. After all, Spinelli is one of my best friends, and any friend of Spinelli's is a friend of mine."

Mundy, Skeens, and the others exchanged glances and snickered. Spinelli, however, just rolled her eyes and stomped out her cigarette with much more force than she needed to.

"Detweiler, your hat's on too tight," Skeens said between laughs. "There's no way we're letting you hang out with us."

"Well I- Ow!" T.J. felt someone grab his arm and yank him away. He turned to see Spinelli looking madder than he had ever seen her look.

T.J. didn't put up a fight; he let Spinelli drag him, listening to her mutter curse words under her breath the whole way. He knew he was in for an earful. But this was his plan. He had to get her alone somehow. She let go of him at the edge of the elementary playground.

"Ah, Old Rusty," he said, admiring the old jungle gym with a smile. "This is where we met in kindergarten, remember? Well, sort of. They rebuilt it, so…"

"Cut the crap, Teej!" Spinelli spat. Her face was almost purple. "What the hell was that back there? Are you trying to embarrass me or something? 'Cause if you were, it worked!"

Now it was T.J.'s turn to roll his eyes. "Come on, Spinelli. This," he gestured at her midriff baring tank top, "isn't you. I mean, smoking? Really, Spin? Weren't you the one who got your mom to stop smoking after watching that video in health class back in fifth grade?"

Spinelli continued to glare at him, her chest rising and falling with each angry breath. She looked annoyed, but at least she was listening. He decided to press his luck and continue.

"Look, just tell me why you're doing this," T.J. said gently. "Did one of our friends do something wrong? Are you mad at someone? Is it stress? Just tell me, and we can—"

"I'm fine," Spinelli said through clenched teeth. "No one did anything, and the only thing that's stressing me out is you being on my case all the time!"

"Well I'm worried about you, Spin!" T.J. heard his voice get louder. "You're twelve years old and smoking! You're cutting school! You're always getting sent to the principal's office!"

Spinelli let out a humorless laugh. "Ha! Like you should be the one giving me lectures over getting sent to the office."

"Pranks are one thing, Spinelli," T.J. pointed out. "Throwing kids in trash cans is another story."

She snorted. "Yeah, and I'll bet Saint T.J. here has never skipped school."

"I didn't say I was perfect," T.J. crossed his arms. "But what exactly are you doing when you cut class, Spin? 'Cause I have a feeling you're not watching cartoons on the couch."

T.J. watched Spinelli's dark eyes narrow into slits. After a few seconds, rolled her eyes and shook her head.

"I don't need this," she said. She turned to walk away, but T.J. grabbed her.

"Let go!" she yelled, trying to yank her arm from him.

T.J. only tightened his grip. "Spinelli, please. You don't have to do this. Mundy, Kurst… they're nothing but trouble. Come back to me and Gretchen and Vince and the others. We're your real friends. We care about you."

Spinelli stopped struggling for release. She inhaled deeply through her nose and looked T.J. in the eyes.

"You really care about me?" she asked. Her voice was suddenly eerily calm.

"Of course," he answered without hesitation. "We all do."

Spinelli nodded, and T.J. let go of her arm. This was it. Spinelli was going to ditch those losers and remember who her real friends were.

"If you really care about me," Spinelli said slowly, "you'll let me do what I want."

T.J. blinked. He hadn't been expecting that.

"So you want to end up in jail in a few years?" T.J. asked. "Because that's where you'll end up if you keep hanging out with these losers."

"Hey!" Spinelli shouted. "These are my friends now. And you," Spinelli jabbed her index finger at T.J.'s chest, "aren't."

He felt like someone had punched him in the stomach.

"But Spinelli—"

"T.J.," she said in a low voice, "if you really care about me, you'll leave me alone."

T.J. swallowed hard. This wasn't happening. All those years of friendship couldn't end like this.

"You don't mean that," he managed to say.

"I do!" Spinelli threw her hands in the air. "I do mean it! How many times do I have to say it before you get it through your thick skull? Leave. Me. Alone!"

"Can we please just talk about this? Tell me why you don't want to be friends. Was it something I did? Just tell me!"

Spinelli had already started backing up. "Seriously T.J., just get out of my life, okay?"

T.J. clenched his hands at his sides and tried not to think about how much that hurt. "Spinelli—"

"Promise me, Teej," she was practically pleading with him now. "Promise me you'll just leave me alone."

No, no, no. He couldn't give up on her. What kind of friend would he be if he just let her go? But if this was the only way to prove to her that he really cared…

"Fine," he heard the words leave his mouth, but it didn't feel like he was actually saying them. "I promise."

T.J. watched her turn her back and walk away. He found himself counting her steps. One, two, three, four…

Maybe she'll turn around. Maybe she'll come back.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen steps.

Please, T.J. thought. Stop and turn around.

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty…

She wasn't coming back.

"Hey, Spinelli!" he called before he could stop himself. Technically, he had broken his promise already, but there was one last thing he wanted to say.

To his surprise, Spinelli actually stopped walking. She didn't turn around, but she was clearly listening.

"Happy Birthday!" he shouted loud enough so she could hear.

Spinelli would turn thirteen the next Saturday. T.J. never forgot his friends' birthdays.

He watched her, hoping that she'd turn around and smile. She'd always been amused by his ability to never forget birthdays.

But Spinelli didn't turn. Instead, she started walking again, to her new friends. She didn't even look back.

T.J. blinked a few times, trying to snap back to the present.

He'd been trying to block that memory out for so long; he hated everything about it. He hated the fact that the whole thing had been so stupidly dramatic like a lame soap opera. He hated that his plan to win back his friend had completely failed. Most of all, he hated that his best friend made him promise to never speak to her again and he had no idea why.

Things between his old friends had changed since then. Vince LaSalle was the only one of T.J.'s elementary friends who he was still close with, since they played on the same sports teams and went to the same parties. Gus Griswald had moved away the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Gretchen Grundler had started her freshman year of high school going to a boarding school for gifted students, and Mikey Blumberg had been hanging out with the choir and band kids since middle school.

Of course T.J. was a little disappointed that he and a majority of his old crew hadn't remained close into their high school years. He still sent the occasional e-mail to Gretchen and Gus, and he would say hi to Mikey in the hallways at school, but it wasn't the same. But, as much as T.J. would have liked for things to stay the same, he understood why he and most of his friends had gone their separate ways.

Spinelli, however, was a totally different story.

To this day, T.J. still had no idea why Spinelli stopped being his friend. It wasn't like she had a bad home life (that he knew of), and he couldn't think of anything anyone did to make Spinelli mad enough to hang out with the trouble-makers of the school. It just didn't make any sense.

He saw a faint light coming from the tree house, which jerked him back to reality. The girl sitting in his yard was a complete mystery. It was weird; T.J. used to be able to read Spinelli better than anyone else, and out of all his friends, he felt that he knew her the best, even better than Vince. But now she was a total stranger.

T.J. had heard some things about her. Mostly from Butch, who gossiped more than a nosy old lady. As far as T.J. knew, Spinelli had been on-and-off with Greg Skeens the last few years. Apparently when Spinelli was "off" with Skeens, she didn't waste time finding new… um, "acquaintances."

Yes, Spinelli was supposedly a slut now. Just the thought made T.J. feel sick. He had played Ring Around the Rosy with this girl for God's sake! In kindergarten, they would listen to Bonky cassette tapes together after school in T.J.'s room, and even though Spinelli threatened to "punch him in the head" if he ever told anyone, they would sing along and dance to every word. How could that same cute little girl, the one with the pigtails and orange ski cap, end up doing things like… that?

Of course, these were just rumors (although T.J. would be more surprised if they weren't true). He didn't see Spinelli much anymore. He rarely saw her at school (most likely because she just doesn't show up), and despite living a few houses away from her, he never saw Spinelli around the neighborhood. Every now and then he would see her parents, but she was never with them.

The little black vertical line blinked on T.J.'s word document, reminding him to finish his report.

"Damn it," T.J. muttered.

There was no way he could focus on homework anymore. He ran a hand through his messy brown hair and kept his gaze on the old tree house. Why the hell was Spinelli sitting in his tree house? He hadn't said a word to her in over four years, yet there she was, making herself at home. And speaking of home, wasn't Spinelli's a few yards away? Why wasn't she at her own house at this time?

Screw the coffee and energy drinks. T.J. was wide awake now.

He started pacing around his room, wondering what to do. He desperately wanted to know why she was sneaking into his old tree house at two o'clock in the morning. In order to find out, he'd have to talk to her, which would mean breaking his promise, and T.J. took promises very seriously; he always had, and he always will. He was a man of his word.

"She wants me to leave her alone," T.J. said in the dark room. Talking to himself, as well as pacing, was an old habit that just wouldn't die. "I told her I'd stay out of her life." He glanced at the tree and frowned. "But she's in my yard. She's coming into my life, right?"

He paced again, but stopped when he got to his bulletin board. Underneath all the clippings of newspaper articles that mentioned his baseball and soccer teams was an old photograph that he couldn't bring himself to remove. He moved aside an article about how his baseball team made it to state last year to reveal a picture from a disposable camera.

The photograph was slightly faded and a corner was torn, but the image was clear; it was T.J. and Spinelli back in fourth grade, one of T.J.'s most memorable years of his life. He and Spinelli had their arms around each other. T.J. was grinning at the camera, while Spinelli was in the middle of laughing at a joke he had just told. T.J. couldn't remember what he had said that was so funny, but he remembered how hard Spinelli had laughed and how satisfied he felt from the fact that he made her happy.

He raised his eyebrows. He hadn't given it much thought, but it was almost as if he'd had feelings for Spinelli when they were younger. It hadn't occurred to T.J. back then that he may have had a crush, but looking back, he realized that he saw Spinelli differently than his other friends. After all, he was good friends with Gretchen, and he never felt like he knew her the same way he knew Spinelli.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she was his first kiss. There was nothing romantic about the kiss, as they had basically been forced into it by their curious classmates. And no one in the group ever brought the kiss up again. But you can't just forget the person who gave you your first kiss, regardless of the circumstances.

Then there was that time that Spinelli's mom let it slip that Spinelli had a crush on him, but Mrs. Spinelli had also called him B.J. (Vince still teased him for that), so he didn't take the accusation that seriously. Then there was the whole Johnny V. thing… T.J. remembered feeling weird about that situation. At the time, he wasn't sure why he felt that way; but looking back on it as a teenager, he had a theory why he did.

T.J. sighed and put the picture back. Why did he have to realize all this now? But he could be wrong. It wasn't like he had ever fantasized about marrying Spinelli or anything; he remembered thinking she looked nice when she was tricked into competing into that beauty pageant in fourth grade, and he thought she looked great in that lavender dress she wore for their elementary graduation ceremony. But he never even considered asking her to be his girlfriend or anything like that; she was just Spinelli, his pal.

"Right," T.J. muttered. "A pal."

Maybe it was time to stop thinking so much about the past. After all, he and Spinelli were juniors in high school, basically adults. They should be able to carry on a mature conversation; T.J. knew he could. Maybe Spinelli would be over the whole "Stay out of my life" crap by now.

Before he could stop himself, T.J. grabbed his hooded jacket from the back of his desk chair and a flashlight from his drawer before leaving his bedroom. He made his way downstairs, not bothering to be quiet. Both of his parents were incredibly heavy sleepers, which made sneaking in and out of his house at unreasonable hours a breeze. It was so easy that it was almost disappointing; he knew he could come up with some amazing exiting and entering plans, but he never needed to do so with Sleeping Beauty and Rip Van Winkle for parents.

After slipping into his too-old sneakers, he exited through the sliding kitchen door and walked across the yard. He shoved his hands in his pockets and gave a little shiver; it got sort of chilly at this hour.

There was a still faint glow coming from the tree house. He cautiously climbed up the ladder, which was made of planks of wood that had seen better days. When he reached the top, he silently lifted up the trap door.

Sitting with her back hunched over a small book was Ashley Spinelli. The dark almond shaped eyes, the button nose, the full lips, the black hair… just like from when they were friends. However, her shoulder length hair was streaked with red and faded purple, there was a small stud in that little nose, and those almond shaped eyes were rimmed in thick black eyeliner. She was also wearing a short, tattered denim skirt and an over-sized black hoodie. At least she was still wearing her old black boots.

It was funny how someone could look so different, yet exactly the same.

Spinelli hadn't seemed to notice T.J., as she was entranced by whatever she was reading. She held her open flip phone close to the pages, the dim blue light revealing a half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew and a can of Pringles next to her.

She almost looked like a homeless person, which didn't make much sense, considering that her home was right down the street. There were so many questions that T.J. wanted answered, and he supposed he'd better get started on them now.

Here goes nothing.

"Hey, Spinelli," he whispered. He didn't want to scare her.

T.J. heard a gasp, and then he was momentarily blinded as Spinelli turned her phone toward him. Damn, that light was brighter than he thought.

"Don't worry," he said, pushing himself up to the wooden floor. "It's just me."

Spinelli lowered her phone. She stared at him for a moment before sighing and rolling her eyes.

"That's what I was afraid of."

Sorry that wasn't the most exciting chapter ever. Things get better in chapter 2 though! Please review to tell me what you think!