Title: My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada
Pairings: Axel/Roxas, others
Disclaimer: The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.
Summary: Roxas has a pretend girlfriend.
A/N: This chapter would have come out sooner, except for the part where I made the tragic realization that complaining about schoolwork is, in fact, not exactly the same thing as doing school work. The awesomeness of your reviews humbles me, guys, I don't even know what to say. Also, if anyone is interested in doing illustration arts for this story, know that I will pay premium dollars or at least premium groveling for that kind of amazing :3
Quick revision provided by my beloved wifey, Empatheia, without whom I shudder to think.
III.
In Roxas's freshman year of high school, one of his then-classmates had presented him with a t-shirt in obnoxious lime green, on the front of which ugly white block-letters had written out the words: BAD COMMUNICATION! JUST ANOTHER ALL-AMERICAN FAMILY TRADITION. If at fourteen he had possessed the grim, fatalistic sense of humor he had since developed, Roxas figured he probably wouldn't have split his knuckles on Russell Moore's overlarge front teeth.
And in any case, the present situation would have made his point pretty hard to refute.
"Um," Roxas said, and drummed his finger on the desktop. "So… how's art school?"
On screen, his sister raised a thin eyebrow at him. She tugged at the striped tie around her collar, pulling it loose, and shrugged off her scarlet uniform blazer with a fluid shoulder roll. Apparently, she, too, had just been released from class.
"Artsy," she answered, in a tone he imagined was just this side of tart—with Naminé it was kind of hard to tell. "Is that all I'm going to get after nearly a month of radio silence?"
"It's not my fault your school's network system blew up," Roxas said defensively. "Clearly, you should have anticipated these things when you went and picked a school in Albany—the armpit of America."
"I thought that was New Jersey," Naminé said.
"You were told wrong," Roxas explained.
That cracked a smile from her, but unfortunately not the sweetly relenting one he'd been hoping for. "The webcam is not in fact the only medium of modern communication, Roxas. You never call, you never write—I'm starting to think you don't even have my number."
"You're speed dial two," Roxas offered feebly.
"Dad calls me," Naminé went on breezily. "Every week. Dad doesn't treat his cell phone like it's an instrument of the Devil, and he's forty-two."
"Dad also thinks you're going to be the next Frida Kahlo or something," Roxas argued, feeling his jawline grow hot as the flush spread down his face.
Naminé's expression wilted momentarily. "Does he still worry I'm going to pick up exhibitionist lesbianism and public bra-burning from the environment?" she asked in a mournful voice. "He's so negative about all girls boarding schools."
"Just a tip," said Roxas. "Inviting us to a Valentines' Day event concert involving recreations of Polynesian fertility rituals complete with painted faces and the waxing poetic about women menstruating? Likely didn't bolster Dad's feeling of security much."
And there it was. Nothing big, just a fond quirk to the lips, corners pulled back to reveal a sliver of teeth, easy as easy. Since they were just eleven months apart and had similar colorings to a certain extent, Roxas had gotten used to the fact that most people spent a lot of time telling him that he and Naminé could pass for twins, not the least because they had the same smile. Of course, he would much prefer if they also didn't keep following up with the addendum that it looked better on his sister, since she didn't have to wrestle her jaw muscles out of a premature scowl-line or anything.
"Speaking of Dad," said Naminé. "Is he still in Boston?"
"Yeah," said Roxas, firing up a Word Document beneath the iChat window where he planned to compose a new blog entry containing very abrasive opinions about cell phones, schoolgirl feminism, and possibly Frida Kahlo. "That'll be the second trip this month. He's supposed to get back tonight."
Naminé gave a small sigh, and Roxas felt a frown pull automatically at his brows when her smile flickered and disappeared. "He's still exercising his new regime of benign neglect, I see. How are you holding up?"
"Christ, Nam. It's not like I'm five," Roxas muttered, slightly irritated. "I can function on my own for a few days while Dad's out of town without causing the whole world to crumble all around me. You're starting to sound like Dr. Bernstein."
"God, I hope not," Naminé whispered, sounding scandalized. "I wouldn't want you to come after me and vandalize my office."
"Okay, seriously, this has to stop," Roxas said, not pouting. "For the last time, I didn't vandalize his office. I was gesturing to make a point, and that book just… slipped out of my hand, alright? That vase probably wasn't real antique anyway."
Naminé's eyes were mischievous. "I wasn't criticizing you," she said simply.
Roxas sighed tiredly, and put his face on his hand. Dr. Michael S. Bernstein of 43 Lexington had an office in shades of gold and brown, filled with scarred leather furniture and children's toys and a strange quality of light that melted into the room through gauzy lampshades, sienna and diffuse. The general effect was ambient and soothing, which Roxas counted as a blessing, as Mike Bernstein himself was anything but. He and Naminé had spent most of their joint therapy sessions last year in a state of profound bafflement at their psychologist's near freakish ability to be simultaneously arrogant and verbally provocative while still maintaining an air of Upper East Side snootiness, all at a retainer rate of 150 an hour.
Had their professional relationship continued any further, vases might not have been the only things getting broken in that room.
"I especially loved the way he would raise that threaded eyebrow and announce—and I quote!—that my 'inability to deal with loss in a non-egocentric manner likely has its roots in feelings of childhood abandonment'," Roxas said. He might be having another rage blackout just from the recollection, he couldn't be sure. "And then he'd ask if I'd ever looked at you with 'untoward yearnings'!"
"We've had this discussion before," Naminé said dryly. "You shouldn't let him get to you. It's not like Bernstein wants to maim modern psychology, just maybe hurt it a little."
"All the same, I think the most important qualification for a grief counselor is that the person should, in fact, have a heartbeat and not, you know, questionably be a killer robot," Roxas pointed out. "There was a reason Dad never showed up for any of the appointments."
He waited for a retort, and was surprised when none came—at least until he looked up and saw the all too familiar expression on Naminé, mouth pinched, eyes wide and almost opaque, more grey than blue. She was frowning, and even with the pixilation, the shadows between her eyebrows seemed to mimic the creases on another face, an imperfect imitation in flesh, and damn, damn if he didn't know that look.
Roxas paused in the middle of his MS Doc diatribe against cellular phones, their creators, and the very ground on which they polluted, and leveled his sister with a stinging glare, almost mean. "Please, not this again."
Instead of addressing his preemptive strike, Naminé just turned away from the webcam, tilting her head sideways to send her platinum hair sliding down one shoulder. When she spoke, her voice sounded as though it were coming through to him from across an open field:
"It's been nearly a year. We all went through it. Why don't the two of you want to talk about Mom?"
"I don't have a problem talking about Mom," Roxas said blithely, and stared hard at the blinking cursor beside the last word he'd typed until his eyes ached from it. "But I'm not about to bring it up if he's the one that doesn't want to talk about her."
o0o
The night of Roxas's sixteenth birthday, he was sitting at the back of the family's sedan with his sister on the seat beside him and their father white-knuckled at the wheel. Bob Dylan was singing on the static-filled radio, and it was pouring down rain in New York as their car slouched tortuously toward Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
o0o
From the first doctor's visit to treatment therapy to shutting off the respirators, they had lost over half a year to that goddamn hospital, to chemo, radiation, the works. Over half a year of waiting rooms and taxi cabs, white walls, disinfectants, injections, IV drips and catheters. Naminé going into the center with shaking shoulders but a determined face, one freezing Tuesday afternoon in February, Dad's brown hand grasping her thin, pale one like they were locked in a mutual prayer. No use. The bone marrow transplant failed, all of Mom's hair fell out, the cancer was in her blood, in her bones. The seemingly endless cycle of remission, relapse, remission.
Relapse.
But the night the DNR agreement was put into effect, it was like all that time had not passed at all, or else had diminished, tapered to a pinpoint and vanished like the last traces of a good dream fading into the morning glare. All of a sudden, the only thing Roxas could remember was the feeling of nothing. How fitting, that after half a year of frustration and ceaseless worry and nauseating anger—so much anger at the unfairness of it all that at times he'd had to sit and hold his head in his hands because it'd felt like the black storm between his ears had been ready to burst at any moment—how fitting that he was now suddenly struck dumb by the utter lack of motions. He didn't know what to do, but apparently other people did because they were going to turn off the machines that breathed for his mom and they were going to do it tonight, and how did you even begin to accept that?
It wasn't that things had lessened in importance to him; it was just that Roxas had reached the point where anger and subsequently the implication of having enough energy to be angry didn't even come into play anymore. That didn't stop him from being the guy sitting in the back of the car that night as they—their small family, soon to be smaller still—skidded away down the rain-slick highway toward the hospital that he had come to hate, or would, if he still had the strength to hate. He was just so tired now.
He didn't remember much about that night beyond the car ride, only a select percentage of the before, certainly nothing from the after. (The heart rate monitor finally falling silent; the nurses quietly leaving the room, their heads hung low...) As if time outside of his dad's Ford Taurus was just negative time, not real time, slices of thinly suspended motion in film-grade. What he did remember, he remembered bit-sized details from dinner—macaroni and cheese, which he had burnt—and at some point during the meal Dad had looked up and allowed their eyes to catch briefly over the kitchen table. Roxas didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but the first traces of grief already spiderwebbing over his father's stoic face had horrified him so much that he remembered nearly being surprised into speech.
But the silence had just been going into its third month then, cold and mean and surging up like an invisible wall, and so he didn't, just stopped rearranging the soggy, blackened pieces of noodle on his plate with his fork and got up from his chair, slammed out of the kitchen. Happy birthday, he thought, older already.
Later, when he and his sister were piling into the back of the car, soaked from the short sprint from their house out into the driveway, he tried again to catch a glimpse of his dad's face, and was unspeakably relieved to see that it was blue-eyed and well-composed again. What that meant was a promise that no one was going to go to pieces.
"Wet out tonight," Dad had said quietly, "Just let me concentrate on the road, okay?" as if either of them were intending on chatting and being rowdy. Now or ever again.
Naminé certainly didn't. She wore her white coat, the one with the baby-soft wool and high collars muffled up to her chin. The whole world was dark, melting luminous blue through the car windows, bone-rattling thunder, and as rain lulled to tears along the glass and Bob Dylan told them about crazy patterns and empty-handed painters, Roxas couldn't help but stare at the row of buttons on the cuff of her right sleeve where it rested next to him on the seat, the gold twinkling dully in the shadow.
He told himself that it was a way of avoiding looking at his sister's face. Naminé had never been very expressive with her emotions, but he could always read her like a book—wayward punctuations, the detached relationship between words and sentences—and something told him that if he looked at her face right now, it'd be wearing an expression that meant her heart was breaking, and even though he could quote Chaucer and give shots and care for a chemotherapy patient, he didn't know how to deal with that. Your broken heart was your own to bear and bury.
Even so, she took the hand that he reached over, and they nearly broke each other's fingers when the rough, sandpaper voice on the radio crackled out the last, "And it's all over now, baby blue."
o0o
Life went on. Nothing was ever lost. Even your loss became a part of you; Roxas knew that, just as he knew that a part of him would always be sitting in the back of that silver Ford Taurus, counting particles in his jeans as a dark ocean poured its endless grief over the world, and if he sometimes wondered about that, felt awash and unanchored and motion-drunk whenever lightning flashed in distance and the sky turned gray and gaunt and bruised, lead-colored clouds gathering like schoolyard bullies… well, it never became a matter of much consequence. He was so over acting out.
Since coming to Massachusetts, he'd only mentioned that night once. It'd been the end of April, sultry and humid, the night pressing down on the nape of his neck. What had he been talking about then—something about rainstorms, his hatred of them, and the words had come out before he could stop himself.
But that time, Axel had blinked coolly and reached over, shaking Roxas's hand as he said, "Welcome to the Dead Moms Club."
Roxas jerked his hand away as though he'd been electrocuted. "Is this a joke to you?" he snarled, hands already clawing into fists. He didn't use to be like this, all wired up and always ready to strike. That was something else he'd learned, having filed it away next to all the rest of life's critical lessons, like how to breathe and walk upright and rattle off the mechanics of a bone marrow aspiration.
Axel seemed unfazed as he removed the half-smoked cigarette dangling from his mouth and stomped it underfoot. "Cool your jets," he said when he was done, holding up a placating hand. "I wasn't making fun of you. I'm just saying it like it is."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, it is the kind of club you kind of have to be in to be in, isn't it?"
"I," Roxas said abortively, and felt like something had caught in his throat. "How long?"
"Years," Axel answered, shrugging delicately. "Since I was like ten. Doesn't seem to matter much now."
"So it gets easier?" Roxas pressed, following the lurch of nausea that had started up in his stomach. It sounded awful and sick and stupid, but he couldn't help it, as though asking somehow made the person he'd become crawl out of his own head and assume the semblance of a human being again.
"Sure," Axel said lightly. "Time heals all wounds, right?" He ran a hand through his hair, and made a 'tsk' noise. "Look, I don't know what you want me to tell you, but if you're going to be like this then we might as well take you home and tuck you into bed to make the boo-boo go away. So do you want to hug it out first or should I go start up Rosalina now?"
Casually, Roxas flipped him one.
Axel laughed, dropping to his knees to fiddle some more with the wood nozzle. "Yeah, that's more like it. You don't want to miss this anyway. It's gonna be wild, just watch."
Roxas, who had sustained two splinters in his left thumb climbing down from his bedroom window and was still bitter about it, rolled his eyes and said, "I'd say that's pretty much all that comes to mind when someone says 'homemade fireworks'. I can't believe I let you talk me into this."
"My text messages have persuasive wiles, I know," said Axel, smiling distractedly as he bent down to check the fuse of the enormous mounted rocket. This was disturbingly disarming, so Roxas looked away and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, scowling, until he heard, "Okay, okay, here she goes, get out of the way!" and found himself being tackled into the ground.
There was a confusing second when the world tumbled backward and he felt the wind knocked out of him, dewy grass pricking at the back of his neck. But just as he was pushing himself up and about to give Axel a good shove to the shoulder for kneeing him in the ribs, there was a loud hissing sound, and the rocket came to life, flared into the dark velvet sky, trailing blue smoke. It rose in a high, reaching arch, spun quickly in the air once, twice, before exploding in a shower of light, patches of blue and red and white shooting through the night air.
"Fucking ace!" he heard Axel shout at the edge of his awareness, and felt a weight lift from his chest, where he hadn't realized Axel had flung his arm upon contact, let it press against Roxas's collarbone, warm through his t-shirt. He followed the movement with his eyes instinctively, saw Axel roll away and into a sitting position, arms pillared behind him, head tilted to watch the show. "Not bad for a first try—I should buy more gun powder next time. Worth crawling out of bed, huh?"
"Freak," Roxas said, and dropped back onto the ground. He flung an arm over his face, but mostly to hide the smile that for no discernible reasons had started creeping across his lips. Axel gave him a weird sideways look that involved dramatic eyebrow acrobatics, which Roxas pretended not to see. The dying sparks fell through the sky slowly, ghostly against its dark blue, and then the night was dark and foreign again, muggy for late April.
The universe swirled around him, majestic and unconcerned, and he felt slightly humbled by it.
Maybe it did get easier, and maybe it didn't. All he knew was that it was good, at this particular moment, and that moments like this were coming more often these days. He couldn't do anything but give it time.
o0o
"Give it time," Roxas muttered, and watched as Naminé blinked wordlessly though the camera. Behind her, he could make out a half-finished canvas, not quite blocked from view by the rise of her shoulder. It was her sophomore year project, and the last time he'd visited her school, it had just been haphazard splashes of paint streaked across premium Cranach canvas—but that had still been such a deviation from her usual style of random scribbling in crayon that he had felt the need to comment at the time. It was probably a testament to the living history between them that he had gotten away with that.
The chaotic splashes had evidently agreed on a theme since last he'd seen them, however, and currently swirled open in an outward fan, blazing patterns like dancing Bohemian cloth, one end smoothing gracefully into a soft, flesh-colored patch: the proud, slim arch of a woman's neck.
It gave the silence between them significance, a tangible texture.
"Olette is crushing my will to live," Roxas said, following an impulse he hoped to God would never, ever resurface. But that was how they navigated the dark channels that had seeped in to fill their life: by keeping up this bright unfocused chatter, airy pauses and carefully chosen topics. Stepping around the muted spaces where the water was wide.
It seemed to work, though, as Naminé made a schoolmarmish face and said, "Somehow, I find that hard to believe. I like Olette, I hope you're not going to scare her off like you did the girls from your old school."
"Yeah, I'm a real terror," Roxas said darkly. "It's all so clear to me now. This is why you get to stay at the pretension-immersed school for idiot savants and I had the US public school system inflicted upon me, I'll carry this wrong against me to my grave."
"Amherst isn't all bad," Naminé chided, but gently. "In fact, it's perfect for someone who wants to pen the next great American novel. You know, Emily Dickinson lived there in obscurity most of her life."
"I'm going to take this time to point out," Roxas said, "that I deeply resent being referred to as the next Emily Dickinson."
"And I'm going to point out that the students at my school aren't actually idiot savants," Naminé said tartly. "Even if we are pretension-immersed."
Roxas smiled, and it was genuine. He pretended to flick her nose through the screen, and said, "I know."
He was just on the point of closing the chat window when Naminé said, "Oh Roxas, before I forget, I saw Liam this weekend."
Roxas felt his fingers stiffen around the mouse, clenching tight.
"I was in the city on Saturday, over at Aunt Gertrude's, and he was in the neighborhood," Naminé went on persistently, in a voice that was maybe a bit too knowing, just shy of probing. It wouldn't surprise him, shared history and all. "He asked about you."
"Yeah?" Roxas snapped, staring at the mouse pad purposefully. "That's really weird, seeing as we haven't talked in six months. We're not really friends like we used to be, Nam."
Outside the window, a gust of wind began rustling the branches of trees, throwing dark, swaying patterns against the blind.
Naminé was quiet for a long time before she said, "I didn't know you felt that way," and closed the chat window from her end. The moment it flickered and went dark, Roxas felt all the accumulated good feelings sap out of his body. Tiredly, he put his face in his hand.
o0o
At seven thirty-four, just as Roxas was settling down on the living room sofa and pretending to do his math homework, he heard a car come up the driveway. Minutes later, the front door opened and heavy footsteps sounded in the hall.
"Amazingly enough, business luncheons can make even New England clam chowder taste bad," his dad announced, running a large, brown hand through his sandy hair as he stepped into the living room, and dropped his suitcase at the foot of the couch, where the noise of its landing made a dull thud on the hardwood flooring. "Hey sports," he said, smiling wearily. "Had dinner yet?"
"Yeah," Roxas said, returning the grin as he looked up from his textbook. "I'm becoming surprisingly adept at macaroni and cheese."
"Sorry I got in so late," his dad said, shucking out of his black loafers and kicking them aside disdainfully. "Got stuck in traffic. Everything alright while I was gone?"
Roxas shrugged. "I guess. I'd tell you I threw a huge party and nearly trashed the house, but you wouldn't believe me, would you?"
His dad laughed. "What's that you're working on?" he asked, leaning over the back of the couch for a look. He quirked an eyebrow. "I hope you're not copying formulas into your Texas Instrument instead of learning trigonometry the proper, honest way."
"Because English majors are truly valued for their mathematic skills, right?" Roxas said reasonably.
"That's a terrible way of thinking," his father said, but not sternly. "Aren't you going to take your SATs this summer?"
"I live and breathe Princeton Review," Roxas answered faithfully. He was actually using the steaming pile of crap that was Ten Real SATs as a placeholder for his bookcase, but no one needed to know that.
"Glad that's working out for you," his dad said, weirdly upbeat, a little wild around the eyes. For a brief moment, it seemed as though he was going to reach over and ruffle Roxas's hair—in fact, his hand started moving in that direction, only to stop short. It dangled purposelessly in the air for an impossibly long second before quietly dropping away. Roxas kept his eyes on his book throughout the entire sequence.
For a long time, Roxas had thought he might never get used to this new, unhinged element in all of their interactions, but one way or another, it definitely beat the arctic glances and ridiculously polite phase of earlier days that had made the both of them oddly subdued, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He had his own—what he felt were very good—reasons not to instigate changes.
It's never going to be like it was in New York, he reflected, remembering their 1927 Brownstone with the paper-thin walls, gold-fringed afternoons walking down cracked sidewalks coming home from school—ages ago, veritable centuries ago. But that was alright, because Amherst was boring and normal and nicely pastel-colored. In Amherst, his dad wasn't around much, but when he was, he filled out their boring, normal, pastel-colored town house, and they could talk and have a lot of moments that were good.
Roxas realized he was gripping his pencil so tightly that his fingers were beginning to go numb, and became politely fascinated with the intriguing principle of cosines instead.
He was still mulling these mathematical intricacies over in his head when his father came back into the room, wearing his pant suit and a fresh button-down, rolling up the sleeves as he walked. He also seemed to have washed his face and run his wet fingers through his hair at some point, because it was spiking up in all sorts of random directions.
"I got to talking with Nam over the phone while I was sitting in traffic," his dad said, cracking his neck loudly. "She's very concerned about you. Apparently, you told her you were having girl problems."
"Uh, that totally never happened," Roxas said quickly, promising horrible fates for his sister for her evil, tattling ways. "Naminé hallucinated that. You know inhaling all that paint fumes makes her high."
"Right," his dad said knowingly. He pulled out a piece of paper from his pant pocket, and began appraising it carefully. "I just thought it was a strange coincidence, considering your school just sent me this notice about some Junior Prom or other."
Roxas could not keep the blanched horror from his face. "You're not thinking of chaperoning, are you?"
"Would I ruin your life like that?" his dad asked, his tone implying that, under unspecified circumstances, he really, really would. "I was just going to ask you who you'd like to take as a date."
"Oh my God," Roxas muttered, burying his face in his hand. "I think I may have a fever, I can't be hearing this right. We're not having this conversation."
"You know you can talk to me about anything," his dad said encouragingly. "When I was your age, I was really popular with the fairer sex." There was a sly glint in his dark blue eyes. Was this kind of thing genetic?
"Seriously, I think I might be ill here," Roxas protested, pretending to thrash around in deathlike throes.
"Maybe you could take your friend Olette," his father suggested, laughter rumbling underneath his voice. "She seems nice."
Roxas couldn't seem to find it in himself to explain to his father that Olette's taste in men ran exclusively to large, brawny Neanderthals who liked to get sweaty and be bashed about the head by other large, brawny Neanderthals as they all ran around a large field in the hot sun, promoting stereotypes popular in certain gay pornography of which he had no knowledge. He was saved from having to come up with an answer, because at that exact moment, the doorbell rang, and he flung himself from the sofa, post-haste.
"I'll get it!"
o0o
The moment he opened the door, Pence immediately launched into speech, "Olette called my house no less than five times. She said to come over and talk to you about your girlfriend, Anna. She said that I had a better chance at getting a straight answer out of you, since we are—and I quote—both guys and share that trademark moronic way of thinking. She also said to use force if necessary."
"Okay," Roxas said bewilderedly. "Are you here to do—uh, any of that?"
"Of course not," Pence said. He held up a VHS tape. "That's why I brought Back To Future III."
Roxas grinned, and stepped aside from the entrance. "Rec room's in the basement. Give me a sec to clear it with my dad."
He poked his head back into the living room to find that his father had taken over the spot on the sofa that he had recently vacated, eating Doritos out of the bag and reading the business section. The History Channel was running in the background, and his Blackberry was sitting on the coffee table, looking deceptively docile. He looked settled down for the night.
Sometimes, Roxas found it difficult to believe his dad spent his days making wizened legal secretaries cry.
"Hey Dad," Roxas began, scooping up his scattered books. "Pence just came over. We're gonna go hang out in the rec room and watch a video, okay?"
"Have you finished your homework?" his dad asked, peering questioningly at Roxas through his tortoiseshell reading glasses.
"Uh, not yet," Roxas said, trying not to sound sheepish. "But it's just math left, and I'm going to get Pence to help me with it. You know he actually finds this stuff cool?"
"Unthinkable," his father said dryly. "Go ahead, have fun. Just don't stay up too late. It's a school night."
Roxas gave his father a once-over, saw that the line of his shoulder was acceptably lax, and left the room.
By the time he had grabbed a new bag of Doritos and made his way down to their basement rec room, it was just in time to catch the tail end of Pence's evidently heated phone conversation, which went thusly, "…yes, use force if necessary. I haven't forgotten since the last time you reminded me, which was, oh, ten minutes ago. Just relax and leave it up to me, alright?"
He hung up, and gave Roxas a bleak, what-can-you-do sort of shrug before turning off his cell phone and slipping it into his jeans pocket.
"Dude, you're totally going to regret that tomorrow morning," Roxas warned, throwing himself down on his favorite, lime-colored beanbag.
"If Olette strangles me with her book bag, you're the first person I'm coming back to haunt," Pence informed him breezily. "So, your dad's home?"
"Yeah," said Roxas. "He just got back tonight. By the way, if anyone asks, you've been helping me with math." He paused, and added, "Seriously, I can't believe Olette bought that crap you said about ditching Junior Prom for the trig final. I can't believe you did so badly on your PSATs either. What happened, were you having an off-day or something?"
"Stop imposing your mortal standards on me," Pence said feelingly, sprawling out on the Afghan rug. "Actually, what happened was, I kind of totally forgot about PSATs, right, so I was up half the night before running simulations. Slept through the entire writing section."
He smiled with chagrin, and continued, "As to the J.P. thing, admit it, you're just wishing you'd come up with something half as clever. Maybe then you wouldn't be in this situation."
Roxas threw the bag of Doritos at his head, and went to pop in the tape. "When Olette drives me to a premature, stress-related death, you're the first person I'm coming back to haunt."
- - -
TBC
A/N: In memory of December, 1998.