We Fit So Perfectly

Summary: Andi Gentile is more than the girl with the great smile who stole Robert Brewster from Stacey McGill. She swears. At least, she hopes she is.

Rating: Teen, for eventual mild violence, saucy language and adult situations.

Author's Note: Gosh, aren't tertiary characters whose development arc makes little sense fun? From Andi's point of view, this story will begin in the girls' seventh grade and travel, vignette-style, until they are in their early 20s. I promise to sprinkle more familiar characters throughout. Also, giving credit where credit is due: this was inspired by my time at the SHS rpg on Livejournal.

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Smells of Spice and the Open Sea

On the first day of school in the seventh grade, I threw up. Into the bushes. Outside the school. In front of a boy.

It wasn't nerves. If I was going to be nervous, it would have been on the first day of sixth grade, when we were all new to middle school and I had no clue what had changed between my friends and I in this transition between little kid school and almost-grownup school. Didn't we become nearly adults when we hit middle school? After all, the summer before grade six, Jacob Greene kissed me at summer camp after giving me the lollipop he had won for excelling at camp-wide games. So that meant something. Something grownup.

By seventh grade, we were settled. My friends and I, I mean. We knew who we were – and there were nerves still, but the nerves were different. A constant state of instability, but not a fear of the unknown specific to the first day.

We were The Group. Middle school nobility in the most real sense of the world. The boys were good at sports – football, basketball and baseball were the biggies, even then. A sign of what was going to come when we reached the true grownup arena of high school. Track and soccer boys hovered around the edges, unless they had money or something utterly cool – like a leather jacket – about them.

The girls were cheerleaders – like my outrageously bubbly friend Sheila and her bestie Mia– or fun party girls – like my other two dear friends Jacqui and Heather, who always managed to supply the goods to spike the punch at the party. And then there was me. I wasn't a cheerleader, but I was flexible – three nights of dance a week will do that. I think I was maybe there by the sheer virtue of being tight with Sheila MacGregor and Jacqui Grant . I couldn't do Pizza Express after games on Thursday nights because I had contemporary and jazz class, but they had to keep me around, if they wanted to continue getting the entire Group drunk off of a two-six of vodka.

That... and I was pretty. As a teenager, it was insanely obvious that I had modelled as a baby. I was all shiny brown hair, dimples and long legs. Boys loved to lift me up and swing me around to show off their newly burgeoning "man strength". I shrieked, they laughed, we got in trouble for making too much noise in the school library. If the girls – the girls other than my girls – didn't like me, it didn't matter because the boys did.

And then there was my very best friend since the beginning of time – or since our best friend mothers first started forcing us to have "cute" sleepovers at the age of three – Alex Zacharias. Alex was part of the basketball team power block. Him, Robert Brewster, Marty Bukowski and RJ Blaser. He was the nicest boy in The Group, the biggest conscience, the most gentlemanly – at least if you asked me. And being part of the power block made him absolutely indispensible, so it didn't matter if he was a little bit too nice in comparison to the usual attitude of The Group. Robert was always nice too. And it didn't matter if he carried me along with him. The boys always wanted me around too.

It was Alex that I threw up in front of on the first day of school. We were walking to school together, the way we did every day. Alex seemed to have grown six inches over the summer and I was wearing my first pair of strappy heels. Even with my long legs, I was having trouble keeping up with him, but I forced myself to carry on an ongoing conversation, my heels clicking along in accompaniment all the while. I was chattering about how I would absolutely die if I had the same math teacher I had had in grade six, he had always written so small on the blackboard, when my stomach flipped over.

I think I was still getting over a little bit of a summer cold. Or yogurt I had eaten in my cereal was slightly past its prime – I had had to stir it, hadn't I? Either way, I was on my knees in front of the school bushes, narrowly avoiding having my eye poked out by a branch, and gagging before I could fully comprehend what was actually happening. But it wasn't nerves.

And there were strong, surprisingly large hands, pulling my long hair back over my shoulders and out of the way. "Geez, Andi, what'd you eat for breakfast?" a voice chuckled in my ear as the hands slid down to brace my shoulders. "Your puke is purple."

It was then that I remembered Alex was there. My face flushed red – not the usual pretty pink – and I scrambled out of his grasp, finding my way unsteadily to my feet. My legs were still a little bit shaky and I had trouble finding my footing in my heels in the grass, but it was better than being embarrassed and needing Alex to hold me up. "Shut your mouth," I muttered sulkily, averting my gaze from the bush. The last thing I needed was to possibly see splatters of my own vomit on the spindly leaves of the bush and throw up again.

Alex was still trying to control his laughter as he clambered to his feet. "Come on, barf is funny," he protested. The laughter died on his lips as he caught sight of my face. Years later when I admitted to this being the most embarrassing moment of my life, he told me that I was blushing and turning white at the same time.

"Hey, hey," he crooned soothingly, gathering me into his arms and pressing my head against his shoulder maybe a tiny bit clumsily. "You okay?"

As my eyes squeezed shut to avoid getting an eyeful of blue tshirt, I couldn't help but inhale an overwhelming whiff of... Alex. He smelled vaguely of Old Spice and something more organic. I had a brief memory of Alex mowing his lawn in this tshirt while I harassed him from a beach towel on the driveway and read magazines. When had he gotten so strong? When had his shoulders broadened to the point that my face could actually be buried in them? As I pulled away to look up at him – another new sensation – it struck me that this was the first time I was really seeing my very best friend since the beginning of time... as a boy. I had thrown up in the bushes outside of the school in front of Alex. But I had also thrown up in front of a boy.

"I'm fine," I murmured, my voice coming out in a far too small voice as I looked down at my small sandaled feet standing toe to toe with Alex's skate shoes.

Alex heaved a huge sigh, sliding one finger under my chin to force me to look up at him. "Don't be dumb," he grumbled. In a split second he had slung me up over his shoulder and was carrying me fireman style into the school. "If you can't be trusted to not throw up, you can't be trusted to walk."

When had he turned into a boy?