"Hey, you okay?" Preston flicked Cary in the ear as he sat on the curb, waiting for his mom to pick him up from school.
"What?" Cary looked up. "Oh, yeah, totally great. Why?"
"You had this funny look on your face." Preston shrugged. "Not very becoming, but then again, what do I know?"
"Not much," Cary teased.
"Harsh." Preston sat down next to him. "So…high school."
"Yeah." Cary sighed. "I thought it was going to be, well, I thought we'd be starting with a film festival award under our belt for a kickass zombie movie." He bit his lip. "I didn't expect Joey to have a girlfriend, and I definitely didn't expect any of us to have dealt with a fuckin' science fiction monster."
"It wasn't science fiction," Preston stated.
"Don't remind me." Cary rolled his eyes.
"Okay…but still, I know what you mean. Things are definitely not going to be the same, I mean, I still want to make movies, but not about that kind of stuff. It's too weird now."
"Very, very weird," Cary admitted.
"Hey, at least everyone thinks you're a hero." Preston nudged him. "I mean, yeah, Joe gets most of the credit since he's the one that the alien actually grabbed, and Alice is the one that got kidnapped, but you were down there too, and that hasn't been lost on people."
"I know." Cary shrugged. "But I always wanted to be known for acting and for pyrotechnics, not for doing something as stupid as diving into an alien's lair to save some blonde that my best friend wanted to get with."
"Harsh words." Preston frowned, sensing a clear difference in his best friend. Cary had been so carefree, so goofy before all of this, and now he seemed different, and while that was expected, it bothered Preston that Cary wasn't admitting it.
"Sorry, I shouldn't have said that." He gulped. "I just felt like I was so caught up in the moment that I really didn't think about how real that danger was."
"And if you had focused, you wouldn't have gone down, right?" Preston asked, tilting his head to the side.
"Right."
"And then Joe would have gone by himself, right?"
"Probably. He has no common sense."
"Okay, well then Joe would have gone, and without your explosives, he never would have gotten the distraction he needed to save everyone, and all of those people, plus Joe and Alice would have been killed."
"Your point?" Cary frowned, trying to figure out what, exactly, Preston was trying to say.
"My point is that if you had been focusing fully and all that shit, you wouldn't have done what you needed to do to save the day." He smiled. "Maybe everyone's praising Joe for his bravery, but you're a hero too." He stood as his mother's car pulled up and nudged Cary playfully. "Don't forget that."
"Won't." Cary sighed as Preston got into the car and drove away. Maybe some of the girls at school had noticed him, girls that probably wouldn't if they didn't know what he had done that day, but he was still the short freshman with the buck teeth and the braces. He was Joe's sidekick, and while that shouldn't bother him, it did; not because he wasn't getting any of the recognition and fame, but because people didn't understand that he had been scared too, that he still had nightmares every night, that he saw things down there that couldn't be unseen, things that haunted him day and night.
"You alright, hon?"
"Oh, yeah, fine." Cary nodded as he got into the car with his mother.
"How was your first day?"
"You know." He shrugged, putting on a smile. "That whole alien thing put me on the map, a sophomore cheerleader asked me to sign her notebook."
"That's great!" His mother grinned.
"Yeah." Cary sighed, leaning his head against the window of the car. Really great, he thought to himself. Just have to fork over my sanity and sense of security for a shot at some cheerleader who wouldn't look at me twice if none of this had happened. Totally worth it.
A/N: Thanks for reading. Cary was my favorite character, and he also seemed to be the most terrified (of the three that actually went into the cave) so I thought he deserved some validation...in fanfiction form. :) PietasterSkeletone