A/N: Sorry for being gone so long! I hit a stumbling block on this fic where I needed to rewrite two chapters and I hadn't gotten around to fully completing that rewrite. I don't plan on keeping this on a set schedule (hopefully weekly, though!) but I do fully intend on finishing this fic.


The first day at a new school is all sorts of strange, and it always is for a little kid. It's worse for Andy, because all these new sights and hallways and people, all the new classrooms he wants to go check out and see if they're any different or cooler, just fuel his imagination and spark that wanderlust through the building. Instead of going to homeroom like he's supposed to, and he still isn't even entirely sure what homeroom is, Andy ends up walking down the different, maze-like paths with rows and rows of silver-blue lockers lining the walls. Every few feet there's a door breaking up the lockers on either side of the hallway, dull fluorescents in the ceiling barely illuminating anything and, in the morning light, only heightens that atmosphere of newness.

Andy takes another corner into the seemingly endless labyrinth of corridors before he rounds on a small gathering in the cafeteria. A few kids sit around two tables with their backpacks still on, tapping their feet hurriedly or playing on phones, and most of them are much older than him. Strangely, there's no teacher around but there is a sign with the words Comic Club on it.

Then, Andy sees Ben in the front by a sign-up sheet. Smiling, Andy walks over and greets him but is only met with a dull groan and something about how he can't join their club.

"Your club meets on the first day of school?" Andy asks precociously, picking up the cardboard sign and spinning it in his hands. Nothing cool on the back like Football Club or anything. "That's stupid."

"It's our first meeting after summer break and-" he stops and sighs before speaking again. "Look, why am I even telling you this? Go away, dude. No one wants a little kid around, Andy."

A few people look at Ben, including a girl next to Ben that Andy instantly wants to tell that she's cute, but he just grumbles something and returns to staring down at the table and his phone. Andy just waves at someone in the back for no real reason other than he looked up at him, and then continues his journey through the school. Still wearing his backpack, he ends up walking down the exact right hallway at the exact right time just to look at his schedule for the first time the whole morning and see that the math classroom he needs to be in is right there.

This school's awesome. Except, really, save for seeing Ben and getting to know the school layout Andy's kind-of bored.

But he does meet a little guy, like just tiny and almost as small as April (a thought that bums him out for a second), named Tom. He talks way, way too much and, when Andy sits next to him, the teacher gets so angry that he keeps saying nonsense to Andy that she separates them. It's a great start already, and gets even better when Tom tosses him a straw and, together, they shoot spitballs at the teacher.

Thankfully, they miss every single time and manage to put the straws and paper balls away before they're caught. Andy definitely likes Tom, but he never sees him again that entire day save for lunch.

And, at lunch, he's too busy when the pretty girl from the Comic Club sits across from him and takes out a brown bag and sets it in front of her like this is normal. It gives Andy the chance to see that she's got really curly hair, or at least she looks like she does something so the ends look like that, and he's caught looking at her, staring really, when she laughs and he's broken from his reverie.

"Hey," she says quietly. "I'm Ann."

"Oh, cool," Andy says, still sort-of dumbstruck.

"And you're Andy, right?" she points with the bagged sandwich she pulls from the bag. That reminds Andy to take the little punchcard in his pocket and, after this, go get some food. "I can't believe Ben was so mean to you earlier. Do you know him?"

"Um, yeah," Andy neglects to tell her about April because, as awesome as she is, she also happens to be eight years old. That might, as it turns out, lead her to make fun of him. "Do you like comic books?"

"No," Ann scoffs, unzipping her sandwich with neat, slow motions of her fingers. "It's just an extracurricular thing. Plus, my homeroom sucks."

"What's homeroom? Tom keeps talking about it, but I'm super confused," Andy scrunches up his eyebrows, so unsure what homeroom is. In elementary school he always went to the one room. "Does everyone go to different classrooms all day? What's up with this crappy cafeteria? What are clubs-?"

"You're funny," Ann interrupts, as blunt as his questions were numerous. She smiles, and Andy really wants to tell her she's pretty. "Do you live in Eagleton?"

"No," Andy shrugs. "That's where rich people live."

"Yeah, Leslie says everyone over there is a snob but I'm not sure how she knows because she always says stuff, like, Eagleton's the worst place on Earth and she never wants to go there," Ann says quickly.

"Oh, who's Leslie?"

"She just graduated college and teaches U.S. History here and in the high school," Ann nods, smiling brightly. "She is so nice, and I think Ben has a crush on her."

"Woah, really?" Andy chuckles.

"Yeah, he always talks about her at club meetings," Ann grimaces and then dons that same smile Andy's a little smitten by.

"Are you in the same grade as Ben?" Andy asks with a bit of disappointment in his voice. If she was two grades ahead of him like Ben then she wouldn't want anything to do with him, and she was so nice.

"No," she answers, pulling the breath out of Andy as he smiles. "I'm in sixth grade. You're new, right? I've never seen you here before."

Andy looks down at his punchcard, biting the inside of his cheek. "Fifth grade. Just got here," he says quietly.

"You're so tall for a fifth grader!" she exclaims, and it's true. Andy towers over most the kids he passes, and even Ann. She's up to his chin, and yet he's the smallest of his brothers.

Andy just laughs and then shows her the card, walking up to get his lunch. There, he discovers the terrible cheese sandwich, consisting entirely of a hamburger bun and a slice of crappy yellow cheese, and a regular milk are what consists of his lunch. It'll have to do, and when he sits down Ann looks at his plate, her eyes squinting and her mouth doing a little punctuated tightening, before she reaches inside her bag and pulls out a bag of chips.

"You wanna share?" she asks, holding out the bag to him.

Andy bites the inside of his cheek. "Nah, that's your lunch," he shrugs.

"Which is why I said share, dude," Ann says with a laugh. "I never eat them all anyways."

"My mom always says not to waste food," Andy looks at the chips and reaches out for them, brushing his fingers on hers and, if he's not stupid which he sometimes,usually, is, something warm beats in his chest. "So, sure."

After a quiet lunch, Tom focused more on other people than Andy and the weird situation, he walks her over to go toss out the paper bag. It seemed right at the time, and when he sort-of follows her he can only shrug when she asks what he's doing. Ann calls him funny again and, when he takes his plate back up to the lunch line where he can see people doing dishes and gets his little index card punched, he realizes that he really likes her. Not in the same way as April, though. He wanted to be best friends with her, but Ann was cute and funny, and nice, and he wants to keep talking and hanging out with her.

When they regroup at the lunch table, a few minutes left in the period, there's one question that burns more than anything else.

"Seriously, what is homeroom?"


When he gets home, the first thing Andy does is bolt over to April's house. Her dad is gone for the day, apparently something about a work-trip or something that Andy forgets in an instant, so they decide today is the best day to start working on the clubhouse they've been planning and gathering supplies for since the last they talked about it. Andy ripped out planks of wood from his neighbor's crappy little fence, unsure what they'd use them for only knowing that April would figure something out, and he took an old rug in his basement for the same reason.

They set up base camp just outside the little outcropping of trees lining her backyard. Thin trunks with wispy branches flocked together in a tight copse behind her house, none of them fitting for a treehouse, and he wasn't sure he could even be supported on one of them but what does he know, and so they decide to take one of the trees closest the house. That way her dad wouldn't get mad and say he couldn't find her, and they could dress up a tree however they want and just call it their clubhouse.

"That sounds cool," April mumbles.

"Oh I didn't even tell you about school today!" Andy says and April's face falls a little bit, if her face can fall from an even stare to a slightly less-even stare. "It was so fun! There's all these hallways and classrooms, and have you ever heard of homeroom?"

"Cool," she shrugs, ignoring his question, and takes the small bucket of nails Andy stole from his brother Alan's little woodshop in the basement when he took the rug.

"You want help?" he offers, watching her struggle with picking up a board. She really is tiny, he realizes, when she can't even get a plank herself.

April glares at him, and for some reason she seems mad. He doesn't say anything, instead a little bummed about because he actually missed her the whole day. The real scary part of middle school was no recess. It wasn't just that April wasn't there to show him a cool mound of dirt that she built with her hands, stuck twigs into, called Ben and then kicked into rubble, but that when he looked at his schedule again he realized they weren't allowed to go outside unless it was gym class. Which, above everything else, was the real trauma. Why was middle school so different?

He didn't bother to think about that for the rest of the day, but he did remark how weird it was not waving goodbye to April at the end of school every time. Picking up the plank for her, he smiles wide at her but gets nothing in response. Lifting it up to the tree, he watches her fumble with a nail and stick it a little in the plank before leaning down, one hand holding the nail in place, to grab the hammer Andy also stole.

She focuses on the end of the nail, squinting one eye and sticking out her tongue like she's concentrating. Lifting the hammer back, she slammed it down, hard, intent on hitting the nail. Instead, she hits her thumb with a sickening thud and it takes, at most, one second before her eyes go wide, then shut, and her mouth opens into a wail of pain.

"Oh crap!" Andy exclaims, dropping the board to the ground when she falls down and holds her hand in agony. "Are you okay? You're okay. You're okay!"

No matter what he says, April keeps howling and, when he looks again, tears are streaming down her face. Frozen with indecision, Andy stands stock still and looks around, unsure what to do. April cries out again and it's tiniest, most pitiful sound ever and all Andy wants to do is make it stop and let her know she's okay.

Instead, he just keeps standing until the back door of their house opens up. Ben sprints, as best he can, across the field to April and gives him a deadly glare before looking down at his sister.

"You okay, sis? What'd you-?" he looks at her purple thumb and the discolored fingernail once, her face stained with tears, frowns and looks back at Andy.

"What should I-?"

"You should go home!" Ben interrupts.

He screams it at Andy, violently, and if he wasn't a gangly little boy Andy was sure Ben would pick her up but instead takes her free hand that April isn't holding close to her mouth, the one with the hurt thumb, and walks her inside the house. The door slams shut and Andy looks back at the things they took for their clubhouse. It was supposed to be fun, and then he went and brought something that hurt her and let her do it herself. He kept slapping himself every time he picked up another thing his brother and mother would yell at him for taking, and now he was going to get in trouble for this.

But that wasn't it. Something else was bothering him. April seemed so mad at him, despite always hanging out, when he mentioned how much he liked school and, now, he isn't sure what that means but Andy does know something is up. His face falls, a creeping, eerie sadness suddenly there, and he walks back home with a satchel full of stolen supplies. And, just like he guessed, he does get yelled at and grounded from going over to April's house for a week.

It doesn't matter. She doesn't want to be his friend anymore, Andy decides. The thought alone makes him so sad that he eats his peanut butter sandwich supper with zero complaints whatsoever, just confusion about why she had to go do that and why he let her.


When a week passes, April has a huge bandage on her thumb and he wants to say sorry but the first thing she does is hug him and give him a box of crayons. Just like that, she sort-of forgives him. Maybe she doesn't say anything, and Andy isn't even sure what she's supposed to be forgiving him for, but Andy knows he made her hurt her thumb somehow.

"Let's go draw in my room," she offers, a small smile on her face. "It was boring with you gone."

"Um, sorry for… uh," he points at her hand with the crayons and shrugs.

"No, it's super cool," she waves it around and stares. "It's really creepy and Ben says it looks gross."

Andy expects her to say that she hates him, but instead runs to the edge of the staircase and looks at him. She beckons with the gnarly looking hand and Andy, relieved, books up the stairs after her and overtakes her in a moment of huge strides over her. They laugh their way into the bedroom, stumbling down on the floor, opening her coloring books, and going to work.

Relieved is really the best way to describe himself there: relieved that she isn't mad; and that she still wants to be his friend; and that she isn't seriously hurt. More than anything, though, it's the latter. Even if she hated him, if April had broken her thumb or anything worse, Andy would have been so mad at himself he would forget to talk to Ann at school or cook up goofs with Tom before math class.

So, yeah, he's infinitely comforted in the, admittedly creepy just like she said, lump of her finger.


A/N2: Let me give you some advice: I understand that you mean well when you say something like "please update" but, at the same time, it's also forgetting that I write these fics. It takes time. Please understand that takes time and, sometimes, even if life doesn't get in the way (it usually does) it's difficult getting back on track.

I like to make the fics good and enjoyable. Just updating them would be a terrible idea, and I hope you realize that! Don't get me wrong though, I love that you like the story so much that you want to see more of it, but I am also a little disappointed in seeing messages such as that.