A/N: Thanks so much to those who have left reviews! I love hearing that people are reading this and enjoying it. Only two more chapters after this one.
Life without Gunther was bleaker than Kick could have possibly imagined. He was almost relieved when he got arrested again, this time for nothing more daring than jumping his skateboard through a flaming hula hoop. Since Gunther wasn't speaking to him, Kick had to use his only alternate partner in stunt-doing crime as a coordinator, and it turned out Wacky Jacky wasn't exactly as careful with fire as Gunther. Thusly, a small equipment shed belonging to the Mellowbrook State Park Association, two Bradford pear trees and fifteen azalea bushes were burned to the ground. Apparently there were quite a few industrial grade landscaping tools in that shed, and, all said, there was about fifty thousand dollars worth of damage to state property. Kick was only singed as he went through the hoop, and he hardly looked up from his lawyer's table when the judge sentenced him to three months in juvey.
"If this happens again we'll have no choice but to send you two counties over to the detention center that doesn't have the word 'junior' in it," the judge said, leaning over her bench. "Are you listening to me, Mr. Buttowski?"
"Yes, your honor."
As they cuffed him and took him away to begin his sentence, Kick's only real regret was that his mother and sister were crying. He didn't care that he was going back to juvey, where he had more friends than he did at Mellowbrook High these days, and at least while he was in there he couldn't continue to humiliate himself by trying to get Gunther to speak to him again. Apparently that comment about not taking Gunther to prom was tantamount to a friendship-ending offense, not just a kissing hiatus. Even Kendall was disgusted with Kick when he told her about it, desperate to understand what he'd done wrong.
"From where I'm sitting, I think you almost literally didn't do anything right," Kendall had said, scowling at him.
Kick had tried everything. He'd shown up at Gunther's house in full Viking garb, bearing purple roses and ready to promise Gunther he'd take him to prom and attend every single GSA meeting for the rest of high school, but before he could even get his mouth open, Gunther slammed the door in his face. Gunther had gotten mad at him before, but he'd never refused to communicate. Kick was so lost without him that the drudgery of juvey was welcome. At least he'd be surrounded by plenty of miserable company.
Maybe because life on the outside had gotten so terrible, the long stint in juvey wasn't that bad. Kick's roommate was even smaller than he was, and Kick tried to look out for him when he could, which made them something like friends. His name was Dewey and he was in for trashing his math teacher's car with a baseball bat.
"She made fun of me," Dewey explained. "I didn't get what she meant by a real number. Aren't all numbers real? Aren't they like, the realest thing there is? The opposite of unicorns and stuff? And everybody in class laughed, and she did, too. The teachers aren't supposed to be able to laugh at you, right?"
Dewey was skinny and trembly and had four older brothers who had all dropped out of school. When one of the bigger kids in the exercise yard tried to make Dewey his girlfriend, Kick dashed to his rescue, only to discover that it was unnecessary. Dewey was vicious when angered, and he'd chewed part of the kid's ear off before the guards could tear him away.
"Do you have a real girlfriend?" Dewey asked Kick later, after he'd been returned to the cell with a bruised cheek and a brand new pack of playing cards, the guards' usual consolation prize for having fought off an attack like that. "I mean, on the outside?"
"No," Kick said, thinking of Gunther. They were sitting Indian-style on Kick's bed, playing poker. "I had one, but. She. Broke up with me."
"How come?"
"I wouldn't take her to prom."
"That's lame," Dewey said.
"Yeah, I know. Prom sucks. I hate wearing suits."
"I meant that was lame of you," Dewey said. "If a girl wants to go to a dance, you take her to the dance, or she breaks up with you. Duh. Was she pretty?"
Kick considered this. Gunther had like ten different shades of blue in his eyes, if you looked close enough, and sometimes when he smiled really hard his left canine tooth would show, which made him look sweet and dangerous at the same time. The only thing Kick had liked about going to Gunther's football games was seeing him on the sidelines when he took off his helmet, his hair all sweaty, eye black smudged over his cheeks.
"Yeah, she was really pretty," Kick said. "But she hates me now."
"Just 'cause of prom?"
"Sort of. Prom became symbolic. I don't want to talk about it."
"I wish I had a girlfriend," Dewey said, mumbling. "I'm too skinny. The only people who want to date me are guys who want to treat me like a girl."
"That's not true," Kick said. "That's just juvey. Nice partial ear detachment, by the way."
"Thanks. They transferred him to the real prison. So, one down."
They gave each other a sarcastic high five.
Kick got visitors: his parents, Brianna, even Brad, and Wacky Jacky, who brought him a notebook full of love letters that she'd written while he'd been away and a big box of chocolates that got confiscated because some of them were filled with cherry liquor.
"How's Gunther doing?" Kick asked during Jacky's visit. They were in the bleak visiting room with its florescent lights and high windows, sitting across from each other at a picnic table that had been painted blue. Kick was in his pale gray juvey jumpsuit, helmet-less. Jacky was wearing hot pants and a tube top. She had filled out around eighth grade, lost the glasses and braces, and she was very popular with the boys at Mellowbrook High, though she'd always ditch whoever she was hooking up with at the moment for Kick, for reasons he still couldn't really understand.
"Gunther's okay," Jacky said. "He has this boyfriend now."
"He has what?"
"Yeah, Gunther's gay, apparently. Which I guess explains why he was only interested in me back when I still kinda looked like a boy. But anyway, he started going out with this kid, Laurence Grob—"
"Laurence Grob? Who the hell is that?"
"Some – sophomore – Kick, are you okay?"
"Yes." Kick grit his teeth and clawed his hands around the edge of the picnic table. "Why wouldn't I be okay?"
"I dunno, you just sort of look like you're about to vault over the table and strangle me? Anyway, it was a big thing on the football team, some of the guys wanted him to quit, but he wouldn't do it! You'd be proud of him. He's actually standing up for himself these days."
Kick realized that his ass had left the bench and he was in fact leaning toward Jacky like he was going to murder her. He made himself sit down again, still stiff with rage.
"Standing up for himself, huh?" he said, seething. "I guess it was Laurence's good influence. What does he look like?"
"Laurence? I dunno, he's just sort of tall and skinny. Not that cute."
"Tall?"
"Yeah, super tall. Almost as tall as Gunther. Anyway – Kick! The reason I came to visit, well, other than to give you my letters, was I had a great idea for your homecoming stunt!"
Kick pretended to listen as Jacky detailed a stunt involving her mother's boyfriend's motorcycle, the engine from her Mustang, the high school football stadium and a portable ramp that they could wheel to the stadium on game night. Kick stared the pendant on Jacky's silver necklace, a flaming tire that she'd had custom made based on her own design. He drowned out her ravings and tried to picture Gunther with some lanky sophomore who would hold his hand in the hallways, co-chair feelings-sharing meetings with him, comfort him when his teammates gave him a hard time and kiss him after his games. Gunther was kissing someone else, possibly at that very moment. Kick shouted when he felt a sudden pain in one of his fingers, and he looked down to see that he'd clawed his hands into the picnic table so tightly that he'd bent one of his nails back.
"Are you sure you're okay?" Jacky asked. She leaned over the table. "Are people in here, ah, giving you a hard time?"
"No," Kick said. Every time he got of juvey she questioned him in a particular way that made him wonder if she didn't get off on the idea that someone might have made him his girlfriend. She did always like seeing Kick get hurt. "I gotta go," Kick said. "Thanks for the – letters."
"But what do you think about my idea?" Jacky asked, bouncing on the bench. "For your homecoming stunt? Get it, because it'll be the homecoming football game, and Kick Buttowski's homecoming!"
Kick opened his mouth to tell her that she was out of her mind, that a stunt like that wouldn't only get him sent back to jail, it might actually kill him. He closed his mouth again when he realized that he didn't really care if either of those things happened, not if Gunther had moved on for good. What did he have left for him in Mellowbrook without Gunther? Jacky and her persistent offers to let him do whatever he wanted to her? He stood from the picnic table, his head bent.
"It sounds like a great idea," he said. "Get everything ready for me, okay? We'll do it just like you said."
For the remainder of his sentence, Kick had nightmares about crashing a motorcycle into a wall of fire. His only regret, even in the dreams, was that Gunther had to see him die, standing on the sidelines with his football helmet under his arm, his face twisted with horror and grief. When Kick woke up and remembered his rage over Gunther's new boyfriend, he'd think: Good. Maybe Gunther would appreciate him when he was dead. Maybe he would never get over it, and maybe darling Laurence's attempts to console him would be fruitless. Kick would come back as a ghost just so he could hear Gunther spend the rest of his life begging for forgiveness.
Not that he was bitter or anything.
Dewey was released before Kick, and Kick spent the last two weeks in juvey with no roommate. He was bored and antsy, and sometimes he fell asleep in the middle of playing solitaire on his mattress, waking up to cards that he'd scattered in his sleep, his eyes getting wet when he thought about Gunther's flashcards, how he would wake up and pull the word TREPIDATION from the waistband of his underwear.
Kick's parents both came to pick him up on the day he got released, and they were quiet on the drive back to Mellowbrook. Usually they were bursting with instructions for him after he got out of juvey, making him promise never to do that to them again, but they seemed to have realized that their threats and warnings weren't being heard. Kick told himself he should be relieved that they'd given up, but he spent the whole ride home chewing on the tip of his tongue, telling himself to get a grip, be a man, and stop letting the sobs that were forming in his gut get almost far up enough his throat to be heard. He swallowed them all down successfully and went to his room as soon as they were home, shutting the door behind him. It was no use: Brianna was already there, sitting on his bed, waiting for him.
"Welcome home, you dumb shit," she said, and then she started crying hard. Kick groaned, but he was grateful to her, because somehow her tears had erased the threat of his own. He went to the bed and hugged her, letting her cry on his shoulder for awhile.
"You're too skinny," he said, because he could feel her ribs.
"Oh, shut up." She sat back and wiped at her face, sniffling. "Kick, everything's horrible. Mom and Dad fight all the time."
"About me?"
"I don't know," she said, and he could tell she was lying. Of course they fought about Kick; he'd heard it before. Dad blamed Mom for letting this go on for as long as she had. The stunts, the recklessness, the delusions of grandeur. She blamed him for putting an end to her own reckless days.
"Jacky told me about Gunther," Kick said, because he had to talk to someone, and he was in no mood for Kendall. Brianna shook her head.
"She shouldn't have done that."
"Well, she didn't know – you haven't told anyone, have you?"
"Kick, you're still worried about that?" Brianna groaned and stood from the bed. "No, I haven't told anyone. Your precious reputation is intact. In fact, you're the most popular kid in school. Everyone's been talking about how you're turning into a hardened criminal."
"Really?" Kick said, and Brianna glowered at him when his eyes lit up at the thought.
"Congratulations," she said. "I guess you got everything you ever wanted. You're notorious, and Gunther has someone else to kiss. He won't bother you anymore."
"Gunther can do whatever he wants," Kick said, though he didn't actually think that should be allowed at all, because Gunther belonged to him back when the world made sense, and did everything Kick wanted. "I just wish he'd be my friend again. I don't know what to do, Brianna. I tried apologizing, I dressed up in a fucking Viking costume –"
"That's ridiculous, Kick!" Brianna said, throwing her arms out. "He doesn't want you to make a fool of yourself – you just think that's what he wants! And until you figure that out, he's not going to want to get anywhere near you."
"Have you been talking to him?" Kick asked, aghast.
"None of your business," Brianna said, and she stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
So now even his sister was on Gunther's side. Kick leaned down onto his stomach and hid his face in his pillow, moaning. At least he had his helmet back, snug on his head and blocking out the world while he lay face down in bed. He had his helmet, and he had Jacky, he supposed, if he wanted her. He decided he'd better figure out how to, because Brianna was wrong. His only chance of getting Gunther back would be to make him jealous.
When he returned to school, Kick walked the halls feeling like everyone was staring at him, something he used to enjoy. Now he had to wonder if they were staring because he'd spent the whole summer in juvey or if Gunther had told his friends in the GSA that Kick used to kiss him after school. Kick didn't think he would do that, but he still felt stripped whenever he heard girls giggling at their lockers, sure that they were talking about his not stunt-related exploits.
He didn't actually set eyes on Gunther and the famous Laurence Grob until his third day back at school. They were down by the vending machines when Kick was on his way to the boys' locker room to dress out for gym. At first, Kick hardly recognized Gunther: he looked taller, he'd cut his hair short, and his arms were suddenly the size of tree trunks, as if he'd done nothing but lift weights since Kick got incarcerated. Since all the football team did during the summer was train, Kick supposed that probably wasn't far from the truth. Laurence, meanwhile, was unimpressive, though he was indeed tall. He was also a little stooped, had the sort of light brown hair that almost looked gray, and his nose was sort of big. Staring at them, fuming, Kick recalled now many times Gunther had kissed Kick's nose and told him how little and cute it was. Kick used to snarl at him for that, but he would do anything to hear Gunther call him cute now.
Gunther was smiling at Laurence, his hand cupped around Laurence's bony shoulder, fingers drumming against it. Kick was staring in a not subtle manner, something that he'd gotten accustomed to doing in juvey, where being able to stare openly meant things about your toughness. When Gunther looked up, Kick stumbled backward, lanced through the heart by the sight of Gunther's eyes. He hadn't forgotten them, but he'd forgotten how they had this ability to blast him backward and pull him close at the same time. He knew Gunther had seen him, and pretended not to hear his name when Gunther called out to him. Vision tunneling, Kick barreled out into the school's outer courtyard, which was empty, the warning bell ringing inside. He hoped Gunther wouldn't follow him, didn't know what he would possibly say to him now, but when he heard the school door slamming open with Gunther's trademark gusto, he was so relieved that he stopped where he stood, his hands curling into fists and his eyes pinching shut. He wasn't going to cry or anything. No way. He was Kick Buttowski, survivor of juvenile hall, fearless daredevil, and he had no feelings that couldn't be thrashed like pavement and left behind.
"Kick!" Gunther said, and Kick felt like he would shatter with relief when Gunther grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and wholly picked him up off the ground, hugging him hard. Kick let out his breath slowly, trying to keep his emotions in check, his fingers closing tightly around the hem of Gunther's varsity jacket. Gunther's chest was a little firmer than he remembered, but still pillowy.
"I was so worried about you!" Gunther said when he put Kick down. Kick didn't want to be put down, and if they weren't in sight of the school he would have climbed Gunther until he was in his arms again.
"You didn't visit," Kick said. He was still holding on to the hem of Gunther's jacket, and he knew he should let go, but he couldn't seem to make his fingers unclench.
"I didn't think you'd want me to," Gunther said. His eyes were a little wet, his hands heavy on Kick's shoulders. "Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Was it terrible? Jacky said you were fine, but she's crazy, I wasn't sure if I could believe her-"
"You're not mad at me anymore?" Kick asked, reeling. Gunther sniffled and shrugged.
"I guess not," he said. "I mean, I've talked about it a lot with Laurence, and he says I've got to let my anger go, so-"
"You talked about me with Laurence?" Kick said, jumping out of Gunther's grip. Gunther's expression darkened, and he shook his head.
"No, Kick. I talked about the guy who broke my heart. He doesn't know that it was you. Nobody does, except for Bree, and I guess Kendall, since you told her." Gunther huffed and looked down at his feet. "I'd never tell anyone about you without your permission."
"I know," Kick said, and he felt terrible for thinking that Gunther might have. He was loyal to a fault, always. "I'm just – this guy – Laurence. A sophomore, Gunther?"
"Who told you he's a sophomore? He's a junior this year, and he's really mature for his age."
"Oh, I'm sure he is. Did you guys spend the whole summer demonstrating your maturity on each other?"
"What does that even mean?" Gunther asked, scowling. "Look, Kick, I knew you'd be jealous, but-"
"Jealous? Jealous, what, of him? Um, no. I just think you could do better. But whatever. It's your business, and frankly I don't want to hear anything about it."
"Well, I wasn't volunteering to tell you anything about it," Gunther said, still frowning. "Though I kind of hoped we could still be friends." His expression softened and his lip shook. "I – I miss you, Kick."
Kick had to turn around, because if he kept looking at Gunther he was going to cry for real. He'd been holding it back since that car ride home from juvey, and it would be a waste to let it go after all that work, his bottom lip raw from being chewed on. He allowed himself one thought about how Gunther would kiss him with extra care if he knew this, moaning with sympathy for Kick's sore lip and licking it in soft little passes of his tongue.
"I missed you, too," Kick said when he regained his voice. He hoped Gunther was still back there, because he'd gone silent and Kick had lost the ability to feel it when he was near, the way the air would become more welcoming to the weight of him, not just oxygen for breathing but a sky that he could fly through. He turned slowly, and Gunther was there, smiling, though he looked sad.
"We can still be friends, then?" Gunther said.
"Yeah," Kick said. He made himself smile, too. "I need someone who knows what he's doing to help me with my stunts. Jacky is a disaster."
"No kidding," Gunther said. He toyed with the wrinkled spot on his jacket where Kick had clutched it. "She said she brought you love letters."
Kick opened his mouth to tell Gunther that she had, and that Kick hadn't even attempted to read them, because Jacky's ravings about him still scared the crap out of him. Then he remembered his plan, and the way Gunther had been smiling at Laurence when Kick saw them by the vending machines.
"Yeah, I decided to finally throw her a bone," Kick said, trying to adopt a strutting posture. "I mean, she's pretty hot now. And I decided, you know. I'm not, uh. I'm not going to join that club with the pink flyer, if you know what I mean."
Gunther nodded, and said nothing for awhile. His new haircut made him look older, and Kick wanted to run his palm over those short blond spikes.
"Why'd you ever kiss me, then?" Gunter asked, staring at the pavement. "I wasn't, I mean – I don't remember it this way, but I didn't force myself on you, did I?"
"Gunther, no!" Kick was devastated by the idea that Gunther worried that he had, and he almost blurted the truth, which was that Kick had lived to kiss him before juvey, that it was like flipping upside down while flying through the air, everything he loved about danger and something else, too, the thing that made him feel warm and safe and small, that thing that scared him way more than the thrill seeking part had.
"I just got confused," Kick said. "We both did. Right?"
"No," Gunther said. He looked up at Kick, showing him everything he was feeling, still unafraid of the things that made Kick want to turn and run. "I wasn't confused, Kick. I was in love with you. Big time. I had been since we were kids."
"Was?" Kick said. He felt like his skin was peeling off, the way it did in the nightmares about fire that he'd been having since the flaming hula hoop incident.
"I gotta go," Gunther said, walking backward. "I'm late for class."
"Gunther, wait," Kick said, but when Gunther stopped walking Kick didn't know what to say next. Why had he said that about Jacky? What the hell was he thinking? Gunther was standing there waiting to hear that Kick was in love with him, too, or that he wasn't. There was really nothing else to say.
"You don't have to tell me, Kick," Gunther said, his voice shaking. "I know. It's okay. I just want to be friends again. I – I gotta go, Kick, I just have to -"
Gunther took off then. Kick had forgotten how fast he could be when he wanted to. The late bell rang, but Kick didn't move, just stood there wondering what Gunther meant by Iknow. He either knew that Kick loved him or thought that he didn't. Kick wasn't even sure which was worse.
