Title:
You Can't Choose the One You Love (Or Whatever)
Rating:
PG
Characters: Brian (light Angela with mentions of Sharon
and Jordan)
Summary: Brian and Angela have never really
been friends.
Author's Note: Just a short introspective
Brian piece. I apologize for any extreme punctuation abuse. Or
typos.
Brian and Angela have never really been friends.
They've known each other since pretty much forever (or, well, sometimes it feels like forever, but, really, Brian had just turned five when she moved in next door), and he always thought they'd be something like those neighbors you read about in books, maybe, where they're friends from, like, always, and late at night they stretch tin can phones across the space between their houses and learn morse code or whatever, so they can communicate with flashlights. And then, when they're all grown up, they secretly pine for each other, until one of them gets up the nerve to confess his (or her) secret passion.
But his room looks into Danielle's, anyway, so it's not like that could ever actually, like, happen. Or whatever.
They weren't friends, but they always sorta knew each other. Sometimes their parents would, like, set up play-dates and Sharon Cherski and Angela would dress him up in their clothes and make him do fashion shows through their living rooms. This one time Angela put his hair up in messy pigtails and the feeling of her hands on his scalp was pretty much the greatest thing ever.
That was when he fell in love with Angela Chase.
He totally blames his parents for this, too, because if they hadn't like, forced their clinical, Freudian whatever on him since, like, forever, he wouldn't be so introspective or whatever, and he wouldn't have cared that Angela Chase had really nice fingers. So it's totally not his fault that he can't control his feelings for her.
Her total abuse of those feelings started in elementary school. They had mostly the same teachers and when she asked him to help her with the spelling homework he couldn't, like, say no. Even if that did mean he ended up making up most of her sentences. Or whatever.
In middle school they sat next to each other on the school bus and sometimes, when the bus driver took really sharp turns (which happened, like, a lot, because he wasn't a very good driver, and there were a lot of turns on the way to school), she would get pressed up close to him and he'd be able to feel her, like, body heat or whatever. It was kinda nice, especially in warmer weather when they weren't wearing jackets and there was almost nothing separating them.
Usually she didn't talk to him, though, because Sharon Cherski would be sitting right across the aisle, but, sometimes, if Sharon was out sick or something, she'd talk to him about the weather or how tough the math homework was or whatever he brought up. And this one time, right at the end of eighth grade, she asked him if he knew anything about Jordan Catalano.
He doesn't like Angela very much. She's, like, really self-centered and she has pretty much no respect for other people. Especially teachers and other authority figures. Sometimes, after his parents have a fight, his dad will come up to his room and they'll have, like, a "talk" about how fighting is a part of life or whatever, and then his dad will always say "you can't choose the one you love," and he thinks maybe that makes sense, because he didn't choose to love Angela Chase, and his life would be so much easier if he could get out of it.
But sometimes Angela will look at him in this way like...like she really knows him...and loving her...it doesn't suck quite so much. But whatever, she's probably just thinking about someone else, anyway.