She gets to nine when Beck opens Tori's front door looking just as stunned as she feels. For a second – Christ, it was longer than that, for nine seconds – she'd thought that he didn't – well, it doesn't matter. He's here now, though, but barely. One step backwards and they could pretend this never happened.
She eyes him warningly. He must know that she'd felt his hesitation in the silence between the loud noises of a struggle and the slow creak of the hinges.
He looks disheveled and resentful. His voice, asking her where she wants to go, sounds too distant for having just traveled this small space.
It's tempting to shove him back over the threshold and yell that she doesn't want him like this.
Suddenly there's a blinding glare from a porch light – or headlights? – on her, making her blink very hard. No, it's a spotlight, coming from above. She turns to scold one of the geeky Sinjin clones from the tech crew to turn it off.
Sikowitz shouts acting notes from behind her, nestled in a large potted plant. He barks at her to not lose her focus, to look more wistful, more hurt. Also, be nicer. Don't be a gank, he says. Cut out the line about the ultimatum too, he says.
They've been through this a hundred times without getting anywhere. She whips around to argue back at him. Why doesn't Beck get any notes? She doesn't want to carry this show on her own.
A cow wearing nerdy glasses ambles over to chew on the foliage surrounding her improv teacher, followed by a bright red dog that yips at Jade in greeting.
She wakes up with a jolt.
.
At school that day, Sikowitz performs an interpretive dance that serves as a lecture on body language. He twirls around the whole room and thwacks Robbie in the head with his arm not once but twice. It seems surreal and makes Jade question if she is fully removed from her dream yet.
She stalks out of the room once the end-of-first-period bell rings, with Cat on her heels, giddily shouting about how inspiring class was. When Jade almost breaks Cat's nose yanking open her locker door, Cat calms down enough to ask why Jade's so cranky this morning.
"I had a weird dream," Jade grumbles, voice low.
Cat brightens when Jade offers up this conversational topic. "That's okay. I have weird ones all the time! Yesterday, in math, I dreamt I found a zipper on my back and when I unzipped myself, I turned out to be Oprah Winfrey! What was yours about?"
Huh, figures. This is consistent with all the times Jade's caught Cat with a bit of dried drool on the side of her mouth after she leaves that class. "Um, I don't know," Jade replies, which is the truth. She remembers how she felt afterwards, but not the details anymore. From the time since she got out of bed, it's been reduced to just a few disjointed, fuzzy images, but Cat's proof that you can't read into these things too much. "Beck was a hobo. It was unimportant."
"You had a dream about Beck!?" announces Cat to the whole entire world.
"You had a dream about me?" says the well-groomed, real-life Beck who happens to be conveniently approaching them from the staircase.
Cat waggles her eyebrows and says, "Byeee!" in an annoying, suggestive tone. She skips off, ignoring the two holes that Jade's stare is currently burning into the back of her head.
Then Beck is at Jade's side, saying her name to get her attention again.
"What?" she snaps. He frowns and she relents because she can't keep getting mad at him over what her imagination conjures up.
"I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor."
"Why would you wonder that?" she asks flatly, concentrated on fitting her textbooks in her locker.
Her flimsy, crumpled script from the last play gets dislodged and falls to the floor. Beck picks it up for her, fiddles with it while saying, "Because we're friends?"
He's sort of right, but that's her fault. In the parking lot of Nozu three days ago, he'd asked if they were. The food had put her in a satisfied, less alert mood, so she must have said yes without thinking about how this might actually be kind of hard.
She slams her locker door shut. Someone flinches in her periphery vision, but Beck keeps looking at her earnestly. She gives in: "So what do you want?"
And basically that's how she ends up driving him to the dentist's office. He'd scheduled his wisdom teeth removal today in the afternoon, he'd explained, and this morning his father had told him that something had come up at work, so now Beck doesn't have a ride home.
She loves dentists' offices, so she agrees on the condition that Beck shows her his extracted teeth. They go after school lets out. It's daylight, which obviously isn't ideal, but Beck is being quite stoic and unobtrusive in the passenger seat, so he isn't annoying her, though she does grow suspicious.
She'd thought that they were better than the awkward-exes stage of not speaking and instead were muddling through the stage where they could interact if necessary but would still find the other inexplicably grating. One day they'd reach the promise land, the point where nothing he did could affect her anymore.
A yellow light turns red faster than she'd anticipated. She slams on the breaks, hard, and then taps her fingers on the wheel impatiently. She hadn't wanted to be the first to talk, but she can't help but break the silence. "Do you think they'd let me watch?"
Beck's face slips into one of his four expressions, the one that looks the most upset.
"Dude, are you worried or something?"
He drums his fingers on the arm rest. "No," he replies hoarsely.
"It's not going to be that horrible," she says, amused now.
A chuckle that he lets out under his breath surprises her. Momentarily distracted (by nothing at all it seems to her), he relaxes.
"What?" she asks, but it's less of a question and more of a threat.
He doesn't pick up on the hint. "You say the word horrible weirdly." When Jade makes a confused face at her windshield, Beck elaborates, "You pronounce it, like, horrible."
"How do you pronounce it?"
"Horrible."
The light turns green. She presses on the gas pedal and forces a scoff to mask a smile. It only would have been to laugh at him, but he can't be getting the wrong idea here, that this favor is anything but a burden. "You're delusional."
"Also the word hammer," he says out the window happily, sort of musing to himself, destination forgotten. She is babysitting a child; that is what she is doing.
He tells her, "It's cute, though," and when he turns to give her his slow half-smile thing that he does, he looks years younger. The nostalgia tugs hesitantly on her heart, wanting to be let in.
Jade West's heart does not stand for such things, however, and she shrugs it off. Pointless, this conversation is pointless. She doesn't want to indulge him anymore, nor does she need anyone to pick out her non-existent idiosyncrasies. The last thing she says to him for a while is to stop jiggling his knee, which comes out rather harshly and without warning. It startles Beck, who stays completely still until she finds a parking space and unlocks the doors.
They take an elevator to the sixth floor of the building where he greets the receptionist kindly and a young, pretty blonde decked in green scrubs comes in a bit later to call his name and lead him away but not before fluttering her monstrous eyelashes at him.
Beck puts on a brave face with his mouth set in a grim line like he's about to head to the front line and is contemplating everything that he is thankful for. Jade rolls her eyes because he is a giant dork and the swooning epileptic ostrich in green over there just doesn't know it yet. She tells him she'll be in the waiting room for support and then later decides to actually stay there because why not.
While she waits, she leafs through various tabloids for embarrassing paparazzi captures of the leathery faces of actresses without makeup and Photoshop. Feeling particularly artistic today, she removes the scissors she keeps in her boot to cut out a "Before" picture of a mouth with diseased teeth and shriveled gums from a free dental pamphlet, and places it on a headshot of Cameron Diaz. She takes a picture to sends to Cat. Cat texts her back pretty quickly.
- Cant talk :-( toris making me do meth :-((((((
Her Pearphone chimes again.
- Oopsies ahahahaha I mean math
Disturbing. She doesn't want to picture Cat on drugs.
Cat had brought up her poor math grade at lunch earlier, and Tori had swooped in to be the hero again. Jade's just interested in seeing how far she gets without being able solve the problem with a song or costume. But knowing the two of them, that might happen anyway, and they'll be a new Slap video posted soon called, Algebra I: The Musical.
Beck emerges from the dentist's office a bit disoriented from the laughing gas. The dental assistant gives him information about the after care, the gauze, the salt water rinses and the prescribed painkillers, and Jade watches it go over Beck's head. She shakes her head at his unfocused gaze and makes a note to remind him later.
She leads him to the car afterwards and warns him not to get any mouth blood anywhere because while mouth blood is cool, mouth blood stains are punishable by death.
When she brings him home, she naturally follows him into his RV before she realizes what she's doing. Beck doesn't protest, so she invites herself to stay and grabs a soda from his fridge. He flops over immediately onto his bed. "Ankshshay," he mumbles.
"Yeah, whatever. As long as I don't have to massage your gums." She takes a long sip of her drink and enjoys the burning sensation from all the bubbles.
Being here again feels like coming back from a long vacation and thinking your home will be a stranger so you'll have to get used to it a second time, but having it be the opposite. It's always too easy to lapse into your familiar routine and forget that you weren't here yesterday.
Beck finds a more comfortable position lying on his side and stares somewhere beyond her. He mumbles some more nonsense, a cluster of syllables that sounds like a wobbly "I've missed you."
She turns on the TV for him, finding a channel that's playing some mindless soap opera before lowering the volume. He watches the walls and lies there for the rest of the evening while she gets some of her homework out of the way. Her assigned reading for history class eventually pulls her into a nap during which she dreams again. She's on a staircase, but the staircase is very narrow, barely the width of one person, and the railings have disappeared. She's so high up that nothing below her is discernible. Just thinking about lifting her foot to take another step makes her feel dizzy and off-balance, so she just sits down and puts her head on her knees.
Tori makes Beck mashed potatoes for lunch over the next three days. She coddles him like a lonely aunt who ever only has cats to care for. He'd looked extremely grateful on the first day, but that's fizzled out by now.
"Beck, I tried extra hard to make them not lumpy," she says, concerned when she sees him taking the smallest spoonfuls. (Jade has this mental picture here of Tori with her twig arms showing the potato chunks no mercy.)
Sitting across from her at the table, Andre chips in, "You know you can over-mash them, right? Makes them all sticky."
Then Robbie looks up from his frantic search in his backpack for something to start backing Andre up by talking about starches while Tori deflates and looks at Beck apologetically.
It isn't too bad having Tori around when she's willing to do everything Jade won't, like sitting through grade ten Algebra again, or how she squealed over Cat's new scented nail polish this morning, saving Jade from having stubby fingers shoved under her nose until she mustered up enough fake excitement about it.
Jade happily eats a hard shell taco in front of Beck. He looks longingly in her direction, ridiculous chipmunk cheeks sagging as he pouts.
Since his tooth extraction, other girls have been giving Beck disgusted looks. His hair can't shield him from the deterioration of his appearance caused by the inflated lower half of his face. Trina cried a little bit when she saw him the first time. "It's temporary! Jeez!" he shouts at everyone, but no one can take him seriously when he looks like the way he does now.
But other than that, Beck isn't too fazed by it. He just cares about Jade's attention, trying to milk some sympathy from her probably.
Jade is in a good mood today, though. She makes Cat peel her clementines for her while she teases Robbie and enjoys life. "Aw, poor baby, your mother didn't pack you a lunch this morning?"
Robbie ignores her but his bottom lip juts out ever so slightly.
Beck points to the mashed potatoes and raises his eyebrows, some gesture indicating that he wants to share the burden of eating them with Robbie, but Robbie politely declines, choosing instead to amble over to The Grub Truck and take his chances with that. Festus doesn't sell those lawn burgers, so he comes back with a salad.
Cat chirps that her math test on Wednesday went really well after Tori had helped her. She'd taken a picture of her mark with her Pearphone as proof and holds it up to Jade's face so she can believe in the magical powers of Tori. And, hey, Cat's nails do smell nice. Fruity, and not just from the clementines. She wonders if there's black nail polish and what its scent is before scowling and telling Cat that she did most of the work, so don't give Tori too much credit.
Tori and Cat suggest a group study session tomorrow afternoon. Beck, Robbie and Andre are supportive of the idea immediately, but Jade frowns and mulls it over for a bit longer.
Cat pouts and widens her eyes and makes her eyebrows go into those straight slopes.
"Don't make that face at me. What have I told you? Use your words, Cat," Jade snaps.
"Please?" Cat whines. The slopes become even steeper.
Jade huffs and says okay with great effort, like she's been asked to carry the weight of the world. To her right, she sees Beck looking happy for the first time that day, despite having just swallowed another mouthful of gooey potato.