He called me up on a Monday night, which was more than a little surprising. He was the sort who didn't deign to call ordinary mortals; ordinary mortals had to call him.

Having been in his inner circle (of one) for a solid two years by then, I realized that this could not be good news.

"Hello, Caroline," he said smoothly.

"Yeah?" I said, pinning the phone to my shoulder with the side of my head as I opened my Chemistry book. Unlike my super-genius friend, I was right on track as far as classes went.

"I need your help with something."

"Really?" I snapped. "The invincible Jonny Crane asking me for help?"

"It won't take you very long," he said. "I just need you to help me do some cleanup."

"What kind of cleanup?" I asked, suspicious. I shoved my textbook away from me and pressed the phone closer to my ear, as if that would make him talk faster.

"Some... uh... well, I can't really explain it right now," he said. It was the first and only time I'd ever heard him sound unsettled.

"What did you do?" I asked. I was more than used to his shenanigans by then.

"I, er... I need your help disposing of a body."

"A body?" I said. "You're kidding." Skinny, dorky Jonathan Crane, kill a guy? No way. "Surely, you must be kidding."

"I'm not kidding," he said. "And don't call me Shirley," he added after a pause.

"Ah, I knew I could make you laugh," I said. "Be right over."

Of course, I didn't have a car at the time. But super-genius that he was, he'd somehow arranged it so that he was living on his own in an apartment near GU, where he was actually attending classes. I had no idea if he ever slept.

And GU was right near my house, and I had a driver's license. So I took the family car (which was mine, though it allegedly belonged to my younger sister) and drove over.

He opened the door after I banged on it twice, and I just stared at him.

"Jesus Christ," I said.

"Just come in," he said.

I did.

"You're fucking covered in blood, did you notice?"

"Yeah, I noticed," he said, dropping the charming façade that had many of the girls at school secretly lusting after him. Except they couldn't tell if he was faculty or a student, so no one openly lusted after him. And then the ones who would have anyway were discouraged by the fact that I was always with him. Protection. Like a five foot three skinny girl was going to afford much protection.

"What do you need me for?" I asked, even though it was becoming obvious.

He led me into his "lab", which was really just the apartment proper. There was a cot in the corner and it looked like he'd been cooking ramen over a Bunsen burner.

I didn't ask what he was up to -- with Jonathan, you never did, because more likely than not he'd go off on a rant about His Work and you'd be stuck there for hours on end. I just took a look around.

The problem became immediately obvious. There was a body on the floor. And blood had sprayed everywhere.

"Unexpected, uh, results," Jonathan said from his position near my elbow.

"I don't need to hear about it," I said. "If you don't tell me anything, I can't tell the court anything."

"Right," he said. "Of course."

"And you didn't get any of the blood on you, did you?"

"Only on my skin," he said, obviously understanding that I was getting at if he'd gotten any of it on his clothing. Blood is a bitch to wash out of clothes.

"Obviously," I said. "How thick do you think I am? Go wash up."

He did, somehow finding it necessary to take off his shirt in the process. Where most of the girls would have been salivating over this, I didn't care. I had a corpse and many large blood splatters to deal with.

"Fuck," I muttered. "I had no idea people had this much blood in them."

"Neither did I," he admitted from where he was standing by the sink -- or, more accurately, from where he was sitting on the counter by the sink.

"Any of it yours?" I asked, squatting down on my heels next to the stiff.

"A little," he said. "But I've already sterilized it and bandaged it."

Which, in Jonathan-speak, meant that he had just about cut his goddamn arm off somehow, but since he had managed to make it stop bleeding, everything was fine. Sometimes I really hated him. Or at least I hated his habits.

"What am I contracting if I clean this up?"

"Nothing," he said. "He had nothing bloodborne, I'd already checked that out."

Remember I mentioned never asking what he was doing? That was practically rule number one of being buds with Jonathan. Never ask what he's doing.

"Well, good," I said. "Where do you keep the gloves again?"

"One cabinet up," he said, and promptly started dozing against the wall. I envied his ability to sleep on command, but I didn't envy his choice of sleeping position -- he'd be in a world of hurt once he woke up.

I grabbed two pairs out of the jumbo-size box (which made me wonder a little about what the hell he was doing), snapped them on, and donned a pair of his spare goggles.

Then I set to work, equipped with a fucking ton of paper towels and a firm sense of what I didn't know not hurting me.

First I had to move the stiff. I shoved him out of the way. Big guy. No wonder Jonathan'd gotten injured. I glanced in his direction -- yep, just as I'd expected, there was duct tape on his forearm. (I didn't doubt there was gauze under it. He said duct tape stuck better. He didn't have much body hair.)

He was kind of cute when he was asleep. When he was awake, I never had the time to notice his looks -- I was too busy composing a verbal comeback. But now that he was asleep, I had the perfect opportunity to stare all I wanted, because I sure as hell didn't want to look at what I was doing.

Wet paper towels in hand, I set to work on the cabinets first, glancing over at Jonathan once in a while.

He had great cheekbones. Well, I wasn't a wonderful judge of them, but he had a fairly striking... bone structure, I guess. Which was probably most of the reason many girls had such big crushes on him -- he was thin, witty, and looked like he was always on the verge of tears. Which he wasn't, ever. I'd never known him to so much as get misty-eyed.

And he had unusually pretty lips. The kind that it's overly easy to make jokes about -- maybe it's Maybelline, maybe he's born with it. (I presumed that either he was born with it or he'd been extremely weird from an early age. Odds were favoring "born with it", because I'd never seen him without those pretty, pretty lips. Even now.)

I swiped at a persistent patch of blood before realizing that it was dried on to the cabinet. And the floor. And the counter. I shuddered. Ew. And I hoped that it hadn't been anything too serious. Much as I occasionally hated him, I didn't want anything bad to happen to him. He was my friend, after all. And he always would be my friend.

Of course, there was still his voice -- if any of his fan girls had ever heard him speak, I'd have had to fight them off with sticks. Smooth, calm, charming... man. But I'd known him since he'd had a comically high-pitched voice, and so the Crane Voice had no effect on me -- which was lucky.

I moved on to the blood puddles on the floor, soaking them up with the paper towels and then wiping away the dregs with more wet paper towels. It was calming in an odd way. I checked my watch. Not late by my standards at all. I almost wished it were. Couldn't say for the life of me why, though.

Perhaps I liked cleaning up puddles of blood on linoleum floors. Now there was a band name. Or perhaps it was more of an album. "Linoleum Floors" by Puddles of Blood. Maybe more of a song title. "Puddles of Blood on Linoleum Floors". Definitely had a ring to it.

I scrubbed merrily away until I had the last vestiges of blood off the floor -- mostly. There were quite a few dried-on splotches, some alarmingly large, but what the hell, I could only do so much with paper towels.

I rocked back on my heels and stood up, wincing as my knees popped. Arthritis ran in my family, and I suspected it was in the mood for a running jump-tackle in my direction sometime in the near future. But whatever. I was still young, and so was the night. And that was why they made painkillers, wasn't it?

Predictably, he woke up right before I pitched the box of gloves at his head. I forgot to mention the eyes, didn't I? Well, they were item number four on the list of things that made girls swoon over him -- pale blue.

"Help me move the dead guy," I said. "Where do you want him?"

He got gloves on and hopped down from the counter, then walked over and took the dead guy by the wrists. "Door," he said.

"You have a garden we're gonna bury him in?" I asked, taking the ankles and lifting on silent cue.

We carried him over to the door and dropped him. He felt recently dead. Probably was -- scratch that, this sucker had been alive this morning. Most likely he'd still been alive two hours ago, just before Jonathan dropped me a line.

Like I said, I didn't think about what he was doing, and I didn't ask. If he got arrested, and anyone found out I'd helped him... okay, who the fuck was I kidding? We'd been partners in crime since before he started shaving.

Dragging the dead guy down the stairs was, surprisingly, not all that hard.

Heaving him into the Dumpster?

Much harder.

And he bled on me.

"Ew! Christ!" I said, jumping backwards from the Dumpster and swatting frantically at my arm, which was splattered with blood. "Gross!"

He laughed at me -- well, he smirked, but that was about as close as he got to an actual laugh, ever.

"You're not the one who just got bled on by a dead guy!" I snarled.

"No, I'm not," he said. "But that doesn't make it any less funny."

"Is there anything else you need for me to do?" I asked, glaring at the Dumpster as if it had wronged me, rather than the laws of physics combined with a dead guy.

"Nothing involving blood," he said.

"Oh, good," I said.

"But I do need your help with something else," he said, and we traipsed back up the stairs to his apartment, where I scrubbed my arm furiously until the skin turned red.

He waited very patiently until I was done washing to pitch a binder at my head; I ducked, and it crashed into one of the cabinets lining the walls.

"Nice catch," he said, showing the side of his personality that was all normal teenage-boy-sarcasm, rather than Crane Sarcasm.

"Bite me," I replied, and opened the binder. It was some sort of English class, arranged very neatly into five categories: homework completed, homework assigned but not completed, handouts, returned assignments, and loose-leaf paper. Very Jonathan. And later it would be a Very Crane thing, organization.

"Write me an essay," he said.

"Which one of these is it?"

"Yellow sheet dated this morning," he said, and I unclipped it from the binder. In keeping with his habits, it was not only dated by day, month, and year, but by time of day.

"Jesus," I said, skimming it. He could have done it blindfolded and half-asleep. A very simple assignment, all told -- in fact, I had done it that afternoon myself. (Though he might have been a supergenius in some areas, English was not one of them. He couldn't stand it. As a result, he was in my level of English, which had resulted in one of his low periods when he had a breakdown in class after the instructor told him that his interpretation of a selection was flat-out wrong. He didn't do well in normal-level classes.)

"And you haven't done it why?"

"You want the truth, or may I lie to you?"

"Truth, please," I answered. He might be a manipulative dick to other people, but I only found that out later, because he never was to me -- I suppose because I was the only "friend" he had. He could have lied to me, manipulated me, all he wanted to, and I would never have stopped him or even tried to, but he didn't need to, because of the way my head worked. Or the way things inside my head worked, to be a little more precise: because he was my friend, and my only friend, I would cheerily have done anything for him. And by that I mean anything. Because I knew he would repay me.

"I need a sample of someone else's writing to compare to mine," he said, chewing on the end of a pen as he stared morosely at the floor. (That was one habit he broke before long -- after the first mouthful of ink, he switched to stress balls.) I could practically see his mood sliding downward; evidently, the bleeding dead guy had been important to His Work, and his deadness impaired his usefulness a great deal.

"I already did this, man," I said. "Can't I just send you mine, or give it to you tomorrow?"

"No," he said. "I have to write an essay comparing the two pieces. Tonight."

"All right, all right," I said. "I'll write it."

This was the way a lot of things went with him; eventually, there was nothing left to do but give up.

So I scribbled down my response to the essay prompt, not making as much perfect sense as I had when I'd written it earlier that day, but getting my point across. I thought I'd done pretty well the second time around, especially given that it was so late, even by my standards.

I'd been writing sitting at one of the counters, and when I stood up, I saw that Jonathan had fallen asleep on the counter again. I had no sympathy for him -- after all, he was the one pushing himself to his limits so often that he fell asleep almost at random. And, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was the only person anywhere who had a license to surprise the hell out of Jonathan Crane without waking up in Heaven.

So I returned the favor and threw the binder at him.

I didn't mean to hit him, and I didn't -- not really, anyway. And for once, he'd actually been asleep, because he made a surprised noise before reaching for the binder and peering at it.

"How many times do I have to tell you you need glasses?" I asked.

He mumbled something that was probably insulting in my direction and skimmed through my paper.

"All right," I said, turning in my chair to face him. "Quid pro quo. Tell me about yourself."

He glared at me, and that was my first experience with the true Crane Death Stare.

I melted.

"Okay, okay," I said. "Obviously it's too late and I'm getting a bit loopy, let's just pretend this never happened, okay?"

He smiled -- not the smirk I was familiar with, but a smile, no lie. (And it wasn't my first clue that this was going to be one hell of a night. The dead guy had been -- well, scratch that. Jonathan calling me had been my first clue.) And combined with the weirdness of getting a smile out of the guy I was most familiar with as always having a smirk on his face, it was a sad smile, and I suddenly understood what people meant when they talked about him always looking like he was on the verge of tears.

I really wanted to give him a hug.

He looked at me, smile fading. "Don't do that," he said. "I hate it when you do that."

He closed his eyes, and added, "That's all. Go home now."

And dammit, I tried.