I'm kind of horrified that I'm posting this, but during a reread, I found it kind of hilarious and nerdy, and I needed to celebrate Bade's reunion somehow, so here... Have a pointless, weirdly lengthy friendship story of undeterminable origins whose end has yet to be decided. You're welcome :)
A few clarifications - this is pre-reunion, probably AU, and my head-canon regarding Tori, based solely off her schlumpy glasses-n-braids appearance in Jade Gets Crushed, etc., is that she's secretly kind of a total loser, albeit endearing and sweet. That's all I can think to add. So. Yeah. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: If I owned it, I'd be too busy crying that it was ending to be productive... OH WAIT I AM
In the end, it was probably the fault of the banana's incompetence. And the Advil. The Advil admittedly played a part in it as well.
Or maybe it was Tori's fault, for having a tendency to get over-sentimental. Or maybe it was L. M. Montgomery's fault, for being such a freaking genius and creating like the coolest fictional heroine of all time.
Or maybe it was the moon's fault.
After all, Tori had occasionally tuned in to her Health teacher's ramblings, enough so to have learned a bit about the lunar cycle and a certain time of the month that was oft accompanied by mood swings and crippling cramps.
And then she'd immediately tuned back out again, as the vaguely-mustachioed woman had then moved on to even more disturbing, embarrassing subjects involving puberty and the splendor of the human body.
But the point is that, really, Tori wasn't to blame.
It was the moon's fault, for giving her cramps. And then both bananas and pain medication - of both chewable and liquid, cherry-flavored and grape - failed her.
In times of such bodily discomfort, the only feasible chance at relief would be to go back to her childhood years - when her life was so much more uncomplicated and her chest a great deal flatter - via an epic, all-encompassing book series.
She fell asleep in the middle of a particularly delicious plight involving accidental underage drinking, feeling slightly less miserable than before - flat on her back, in her dowdiest bum clothes and glasses, with the book open on her stomach and the taste of bananas ripe on her breath - and awoke to just about the worst imaginable scene that her over-emotional, temporarily unstable mind could concoct.
Jade West, barefoot, clad in an over-sized sweatshirt and skimpy pajama shorts, was climbing through her window.
Tori fumbled wildly for her glasses, knocking the well-worn paperback from the bed, as she wondered if this was possibly the result of the rather haphazard cocktail of pain medication and tropical fruit she had downed so recklessly earlier.
She kind of doubted it, though, because her subconscious, even in its most frenzied days, was not at all likely to conjure this particular scenario - Jade, in her room, in pajamas, with grass stains on her ankles and mascara streaks beneath her ice blue eyes.
"Um. Hi."
Jade, crossing her arms and leaning back against the wall beside the open window, nodded casually. "Vega."
Tori opened her mouth and promptly closed it again. She creaked into a sitting position and was relieved to find the multitude of pain meds seemed to have finally kicked in, as very little pain accompanied her movement.
Silence. A cricket, outside the window, began to chirp appropriately.
"Um. You're in my room," Tori said finally, cocking her head and wondering what was going on. Maybe she'd contracted some rare tropical disease from all those bananas…
"Yep." Jade popped the 'p' with some relish, but soon resumed looking contemplative and slightly troubled.
Tori waited for more, cracking her toes one by one to kill time and fill the silence. Her left big toe was stubbornly inflexible, and she had to wriggle it for a bit before it finally gave in and cracked. Then she tried again.
"Any particular reason?"
Jade breathed out through her nose, fluttering a strand of dark hair that had escaped the confines of the hair elastic. Tori noted vaguely that she didn't think she'd ever seen Jade's hair pulled back so completely before.
"I- I was home alone," the dark-haired imposter began finally, shoving her hands, white in the darkness, into the cavernous depths of her sweatshirt pocket and staring determinedly at the floor. "And I was listening to some country music station on the radio - which is bad enough as it is, a freaking embarrassment, really - and some stupid, whiney Taylor Swift song came on."
Tori waited patiently as she moved on to rolling her ankles and stretching the taut muscles of her sore neck. She only just restrained herself from protesting that Taylor Swift was not whiney at all - rather, she was a talented singer and seemed sincere and had yet to do anything stupid and completely screw over her life and career - because Jade actually looked pretty upset.
"And," she continued, "I was listening to it, and I realized-" a shuddering hitch of breath almost like a tearless sob "-that it was like the freaking story of my life."
Jade broke off with a garbled noise that would have been a snort of disgust, had it not had the wavery hitch of a whimper trailing in its wake, and slid down the wall to slump against it, knees pulled up to her chest, head thudding back to stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Tori abandoned her bizarre contortions as she attempted to crack her stiff back and managed to heave herself out of bed without too much discomfort. She carefully took a seat beside her non-friend, being careful to leave a good couple inches of space between their shoulders.
Up close, she could see violet veins bruising Jade's eyelids, tearless blue eyes and contradictory smudges of dried tears and watery mascara beneath them. She could hear the telltale shiver to Jade's breathing that promised another bout of tears was on the way.
Jade sniffled slightly and shook her head in disgust, her ponytail rustling as it brushed against the wall.
"My entire existence can be accurately summed up in three and a half minutes of self-pitying lyrics and country croonin'," she declared woefully, twisting her lips into something that was one part self-deprecating smile and two parts grimace. "Somebody kill me."
Tori breathed in and tried to summon words. Instead she found the realization that she had to pee - like, really bad. Brushing bodily needs aside, she hesitantly put a hand on Jade's knee, which seemed very pale in contrast to her hand.
"Did you really just use the word 'croonin''?" she found herself asking.
Jade's eye widened slightly and she laughed aloud, startled, before abruptly dropping her face to her hands and bursting into noisy sobs.
Tori's own eyes widened in alarm as she hastily withdrew her hand and surveyed a teardrop, slightly grayed with left-over mascara, in its path from Jade's knee, upon which her cupped hands obscured her face, down to her bare ankle far below.
"I- I mean-"
Jade shook her head and emitted something like an expressive sniffly-snort of mingled mirth and despair, muffled slightly by her hands. "I'm so disgusted with myself. Just, ugh. When did I become the canned, spunky-yet-likeable heroine of a real-life high school drama?"
"I kind of always thought of me as the heroine," Tori offered finally. "You always had the look of an antagonist about you, you know?"
A smile stretched Jade's lips by an nth of an inch before it withered away and died. She lifted her head and surveyed the stick-on, plastic galaxy that arched over their heads and said softly, sardonically, "And I guess this is what you call poetic justice, right?"
"Actually," said Tori, putting her hand on Jade's and squeezing for just an instant before hastily withdrawing, lest her fingers be gnawed off, "I'm pretty sure this is called breaking and entering."
"The window was unlocked."
"Oh."
Both girls fell silent. Tori attempted to shift to a more comfortable sitting position before her feet fell asleep completely, and succeeded in finally, painfully cracking her back, at such a volume that the noise resounded down the hallway and caused both the silent girls to dissolve into slightly strained, hysterical giggles.
The laughter withered and died in the tepid stillness of the air, and Tori leaned back against the wall with a tired sigh. She really had to pee.
"This is about Beck, isn't it?" she said at last.
Jade's eyelashes flicked down and back up again rapidly. "It's about Taylor Swift," she returned sulkily, "and her stupid non-talent at writing lyrics."
Tori opened her mouth to defend the wounded honor of America's Sweetheart, but Jade continued before she could proceed any further.
"And even if was about Beck, it wouldn't matter anyway," Jade concluded bitterly. "The bad guy always loses at the end of the story, remember?"
Tori tried once more to open her mouth and hopefully even say something useful to the conversation, but just then the door was flung open by a bellowing, wild-looking Mr. Vega, who was clad only in a pair of boxer shorts and was carrying his police badge and gun.
"No one move!"
Tori and Jade both screamed. Jade's hand sought out the nearest office supply and flung it viciously. The fluorescent pink stapler soared across the room and imbedded itself, quivering ominously, into the wooden molding of the doorway two inches from Mr. Vega's head.
Tori screamed again, this time in fear for her father's safety, as well as to signal how absolutely appalled she was at her father's apparel… or lack thereof.
Then a door banged open down the hall and Trina came running down the hallway shrieking her queries as to what was going on. She promptly stumbled over her own feet, shod impractically in floofy rainbow slippers, and tumbled in a crashing heap at her father's feet.
She looked up. Mr. Vega looked down. Jade's fingers closed around a pair of industrial-sized scissors and Tori only just seized her wrist in time to prevent the unfortunate, untimely demise of her father.
Mrs. Vega slept blissfully on.
That night, once affairs had been settled, pants had been donned, staplers had been removed from the wall, and Tori had finally relieved her poor bladder, the tanner of the two girls in the queen-sized bed found herself unable to sleep.
Beside her, Jade was very still. Had it not been for her irregular breathing, Tori might have even thought her asleep.
She thought about what Jade had said before, and then her sappy, hormone- and Anne of Green Gables-induced brain began to churn.
Eventually, a handful of words came to her, and she said them before her mind could emerge from its banana-induced fog. "You don't have to be the antagonist, if you don't want to be, you know."
Jade considered this, shifting with a quiet rustle of sheets. "Yeah," she conceded at last, "but then I probably wouldn't be allowed to carry weapons."
Cat was wearing the most obscenely bright pair of pants that Tori had ever seen in her entire life, even in her adventurous perusals of Trina's eclectic wardrobe. They were electrically pink, very tight, and studded with a surplus of various rhinestones.
Tori found she was unable to do anything but stare. The pants were so bright that her eyes began to water after a few prolonged seconds of gaping.
Andre wordlessly handed her a pair of sunglasses.
Tori donned them immediately, disregarding the fact that they weren't exactly the most feminine accessory a girl could have, and then attempted to voice some sort of an observation.
"Um. Cat. Wow. Those are-"
"-Awesome, right?" Cat enthused, bouncing up and down with remarkable agility, considering the sheer height of her heeled boots.
"They're very… bright." Tori offered lamely.
Cat generously took this as a compliment and beamed all the wider. "I know, right? I got them yesterday, and I stared at them the whole way home from the mall, and then-" she interrupted herself here with a handful of high-pitched giggles "-I walked into a door because I couldn't see anything! Isn't that hilarious?"
"Ha," Andre emitted a rather stale attempt at a laugh as Cat dissolved once more into ferociously sweet, high-pitched laughter. "Yeah."
"Were you okay?"
The redhead sobered abruptly. "No. I fell down the porch steps and skinned my elbow. See?"
Robbie, unfortunately toting his much-smaller counterpart, strolled up just as Cat had unfastened her Band-Aid - emblazoned cheerfully with several of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - to display a nasty-looking gash on her elbow.
"Oh, no! What happened?" he cried with far too much concern to be convincingly platonic.
"I fell," Cat explained mournfully.
Rex cackled and gestured at the girl's over-bright pants with a wooden hand. "Into a vat of toxic waste?"
She shook her head. "No. Onto a naked garden gnome."
"Why do you have a naked garden gnome-" Tori began.
"Where do you buy naked ornamental statuettes?" Andre posed at the same time, looking intrigued.
Cat rolled her eyes. "It wasn't naked when we bought it, obviously."
Rex nodded sagely. "I feel you."
"Want me to kiss your elbow for you?" Robbie offered eagerly, already puckering his lips. "To make it feel better?"
Cat drew back, brows furrowing. "That's okay. I don't want it to get infected."
"Good move," Rex put in approvingly. "You don't know where those lips have been!"
"Rex!"
"Whoa," Jade's deadpan joined the vocal havoc as she strode up, coffee in hand, serenely ignoring the urgent looks Tori immediately commenced to send her way. "I think I just lost vision in my left eye."
Andre held up three fingers in front of the girl's ice blue eyes, wiggling them obnoxiously. "Don't worry, miss. Doctor 'Dre is in the house. How many fingers am I holding up?"
Jade faked excitement, with a smile that was as artificially sweet as a diet Coke, and clapped her hands together happily. "Ooh, I know how to play this game."
Cat gasped audibly and immediately clapped her own hands to obscure her eyes as Jade held up a finger of her own in a gesture that was far from polite.
"Morning!' Beck sing-songed cheerfully, and promptly did a double-take. "Wow. Those pants are, um-"
"-Nauseating?" supplied Jade helpfully.
Beck's mouth quirked a little on the left side, and Tori's eyes flew to Jade's face just in time to see the dark-haired girl's eyes flit hastily away. The blue irises settled on Tori instead and glared icily when she tried once more to communicate that they needed to have a conversation nowwww.
"-bright," Beck finished unconvincingly.
Cat's gushing reply was cut short by the warning bell. Tori hurriedly stooped to swing her bag over one shoulder, handed the borrowed sunglasses back to Andre with a smile of thanks and a cheerful 'see you in homeroom!', then charged full-tilt after Jade and Cat.
The two made an odd pair walking beside each other - Cat in her fluorescent, bedazzled pants with a rainbow of multi-colored ribbons braided through her blood-red hair, Jade in her black bubble skirt over netted tights and combat boots with plum-colored streaks in her black hair - and their conversation, once Tori had reached earshot, was even more bizarre.
"-but he promised that he wouldn't steal your underwear this time as long as I made him pudding!"
"I said no."
"But Jade! You know I get scared when I'm home alone! What if the clown congregation comes back?"
"I thought you said your brother would be there?"
"He's the one who invited the clowns in last time!"
"For the last time, Cat, I would rather have a rash in my retina than ever sleep over at your house ever again, And speaking of retinas, you need to change your pants before you turn everyone blind."
"Hey, guys!"
Tori, out of breath and perspiring slightly, had finally managed to catch up with her bickering friends. Cat turned at her greeting and administered a delighted hug, as if it had been days since they'd last seen each other, rather than minutes.
"Tori! Hi!"
"Does anyone have anything I can gag myself with?" Jade inquired politely.
"Nice to see you, too," Tori shot back sarcastically.
Cat turned to her with puppy-dog brown eyes. "Tori," she began, in a high-pitched baby voice that had Jade grinding her teeth together audibly, "will you stay over at my house tonight? My parents are staying overnight in Canada, and-"
"Ew." Jade wrinkled her nose expressively. "What are they doing there?"
"They're touring a special facility where my brother might be going to live," Cat explained, fingering one of the sparkly key chains hanging from her bag happily as she continued. "It's like college, except there's handcuffs."
"Oh. Kay."
The girls came to a halt in the middle of the hallway where they would all go their separate ways to homeroom. Cat had arrayed her face once more in top pitiful, pleading form.
"Please? Pretty please? Puh-leeeease?"
An idea hit Tori as the hallway filled with the sounds of slamming lockers and kids hurrying to dash into homeroom before the late bell rang. As a smile spread across her face, Jade groaned aloud.
"Oh, god. She's doing that stupid face again."
"Which stupid face?" wondered Cat.
"This is not a stupid face!" Tori protested hotly, gesturing to the face in question for emphasis. "This is the face of someone who just had a brilliant idea that could save the day and preserve my sleep cycle!"
The bell rang.
"Oh, no," said Jade flatly, scrutinizing the black polish of her fingernails with an air of decided disinterest, "we're late."
Tori mentally screamed a little as her dreams of preserving her seat of honor at the top of the 'Perfect Attendance' list withered and died, but persevered. This was for a good cause. Resuscitating the love life of her best enemy would look good on a college application, too, right?
"Okay," she said at last, "meet at my house at four this afternoon. And bring an overnight bag and every last shred of makeup you have in the house. We're going on a girl's night out!"
Please let me know how I should feel about this, because I am at a loss :P
And pretty please, don't follow or favorite (lol yeah right) without leaving me a review! This should be about three or four chapter long. Probably. I don't know :)
Thanks, guys! ~ Styx