Title: Nights in White Satin
Summary: The summer of 1981 was weird for all of them, but nobody felt it the way Nick did.
Pairing: As-of-yet-unrequited Nick/Lindsay. But we'll see.
Disclaimer: Freaks and Geeks belongs to Paul Feig and Judd Apatow, and these characters belong to their respective actors. I'm just playing with them.
Notes: This'll be a total of 3 chapters, not including the prologue and epilogue.
prologue - she broke my heart but i love her the same
Nick was okay at basketball. Basketball was something that came naturally to him, sort of, a little bit. It was one of those things that he didn't need to practice to be all right at, even though he probably had to practice to be great at. It wasn't like dancing, which was hard as shit, no matter how much he put into it, no matter how great Sara told him he was.
Maybe that was why he ambled around in his front yard shooting hoops when he needed to relax. He knew he wasn't that good, not anymore, not that he ever really was, so he didn't need to worry about keeping score like he did when he was drumming. Can you keep score, drumming? How would that work? And at the same time, he was good enough that he could get the ball into the net, just naturally. It was like a perfect balance.
His dad didn't seem one way or the other about basketball. He'd been maybe half there when Nick used to play for school, showing up for the end of practice to give him a ride home but not showing up before a game to give him encouragement. It had to be better than the drums. Nick didn't need Geddy Lee's voice to drown out the silence of his house when he was playing basketball. He was outside anyway. He let the occasional passing car be his soundtrack, and his dad couldn't find a reason to complain.
Actually, that could've been why he took up drums in the first place.
No, that was just stupid. He took up drums because he took up Led Zeppelin, and John Bonham told him he had to, told him it was a way of life. Nick Mason and Keith Moon and Neil goddamn Peart were some good teachers, wouldn't kick him off the team if he started getting blazed on a regular basis. See, there was a lot more freedom in drumming than in playing basketball.
Oh, that Buddy Rich guy Mr. Weir had played for him had been pretty sweet, too.
He tried not to think about that now, though, playing basketball in the yard by himself, the July sun heavy on his neck as he bent down to roll up the legs of his jeans. Mr. Weir was great, Mr. Weir had scored him drum lessons and even gotten him half a job. If Nick quit his lessons, he still wouldn't have to quit working at A1, and he could actually earn some money. Spend it on pot, or something else or whatever. Mr. Weir was a great guy. He could see why Lindsay had turned out the way she had, growing up with a dad like that.
And there, his stream of consciousness had come full circle, because the reason he'd picked up the basketball in the first place instead of going to Raiders of the Lost Ark with Sara like they'd half-planned last Saturday was to get Lindsay off his mind. Geez, you'd think he was obsessed or something. It'd only been like ten minutes. Nick wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, then stood there, swaying on his feet, the ball forgotten on the ground beside him. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine Lindsay standing there next to him, straining her neck to look at him face to face, or on her tiptoes trying to beat Nick at a game that she wasn't going to win, because of his height if nothing else, or shrugging out of her big green jacket for better mobility and looking small and strange without it, or smiling, just smiling because there was no reason not to, smiling because she liked when other people did things and she could just be there to watch them do things and there didn't even need to be a real reason.
Only when he closed his eyes, though, and it was only for maybe a second anyway.
No, Lindsay was off at her Academic Summit (were there capitals in that? It sounded formal enough to warrant capitals, he thought), probably outperforming all of them the way Kim and Ken and Daniel had mumblingly told Nick she had at her mathletes competition, probably looking like starlight next to some people that maybe weren't as ordinary as Nick but were still pretty ordinary against Lindsay Weir. She might have even been winning awards and shit, scholarships to colleges in New York and Massachusetts and other places people from Chippewa didn't go. Nick didn't really know how it worked, didn't really know what a summit was, but he knew how Lindsay worked, how she could one day seem like your friend, like someone you could talk to about how you were never gonna make it in the real world and you really didn't want to think about that, ever, and then turn around and say something so brilliant that you'd just be dumbfounded and wonder how anyone could have a foot in two different worlds like they were standing on that bridge between Oregon and Washington. Another place Nick was never going.
He kicked the ball feebly across his yard, turned and headed back inside. This wasn't working the way he'd hoped it would. Maybe he could call Sara and they could go see Raiders like he'd told her they would.
Yeah.