A/N: hey hey hey. I'm very tired, but the chapter is ready, and I'm calling that a win. thanks to all this story's new followers. I appreciate every single one of you!

my friend who is a boy

Anna is fifteen

"I can't invite Ethan to the bunker," Anna said. She closed her locker and turned around to face Kate. "The only reason you can come over is because you already know what my family does. What do you think Ethan would do if he saw that giant sword in the library?"

Kate made a face like she was considering. "I think he would make a penis joke.

That reply stole a laugh out of Anna. "He would. But then he'd realize it's weird that I have that in my house."

"Yeah, I guess. But, I don't know, I don't even think about it most of the time. Most of the stuff could probably be explained, right? As long as we stay in the same places we usually hang out. There's nothing weird about your kitchen. Or your bedroom."

"Yeah, except the fact that my bedroom is in a hallway of identical bedrooms, because I live in a bunker."

"You make a good point," Kate admitted. She pulled her phone out of her pocket when it buzzed, but the notification didn't interest her, so she looked back at Anna. They started walking toward the cafeteria to get lunch. "I don't know what to do. We can't go to my house. My mom has her house appraisal thing this weekend."

Anna sighed heavily. "Well, we can't go to the bunker."

Kate nudged her with an elbow and said, "Ethan said we could go to his house-"

Anna interrupted her with a long groan. "I can't."

"Why not?"

"'Cause then I have to introduce him to Sam and Dean."

"So?"

"So? So he's Ethan."

Kate gave her a strange look. Again, more emphatically this time, she said, "So?"

Anna groaned again even though she knew she was being beyond dramatic. "I'm gonna get teased."

"Seriously?"

"Yes! I've never had a male friend before. And you know exactly where their minds are gonna go."

"I forgot your family was so straight."

"It's easy to forget," Anna allowed. "Point is, if Dean even takes a second to ask any questions instead of instantly trying to murder our dear friend, I'm gonna get teased. Mercilessly."

"We've hung out with Ethan before. Have you really never even said his name?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Yes, really," Anna repeated, frustrated. "Can't we just meet at the café or something?"

"I'm broke."

"I'll beg twenty bucks off Dean."

"It's that easy?"

Anna shrugged. "Probably. He usually doesn't bat an eye when I ask for money."

Kate squinted as they stepped into the cafeteria. Immediately, they were immersed in noise and movement. "Isn't it bat an eyelash? Not bat an eye?"

Anna gave her a dull look. "Isn't it inconsequential? Since we were having a conversation?"

Kate snickered, "Sor-ry," she said, raising her hands in surrender. They weaved their way past a group of jocks. "I really think you should just suck it up and go to Ethan's house. He keeps telling me to tell you that his family is really cool and his Dad is such a good cook and stuff. He doesn't get why you won't come over. You're gonna give him, like, a full-on complex."

"Come on, I'm the least of Ethan's worries." She pursed her lips when Kate's elbow dug into her side momentarily. "If I go, I have to ask. It's gonna be a whole thing."

"Okay, I get that," Kate said, "but if you don't plan on ghosting Ethan, you're gonna have to mention his existence to your family sooner or later. I don't see any point in putting it off."

"Let's see..." Anna drawled, a flicker of mischief entering her eyes. "Tell Dean I have a friend who's a boy, or ghost Ethan," she moved her hands up and down as if weighing the two options. "I'm ghosting Ethan, all the way. I don't have to live in fear of the number sixty-nine anymore."

Kate laughed. "If I didn't know you really liked Ethan, I'd think you were an asshole."

"She is an asshole," Ethan's voice suddenly said from behind them.

Anna turned around with an indignant smirk and an eyeroll. She and Kate made room for Ethan to walk between them. None of them entered an actual lunchline. They always just got chips and pre-made sandwiches or salads. It was easier. "You're a fine one to talk," Anna quipped sarcastically, "considering you changed my text tone to baby shark and then spent all of math class sending me one-letter texts."

Kate looked over at Ethan, mouth forming an 'o' of shock. "That's pure evil."

"It was funny," he defended.

"She almost called my brother!" Anna retorted. She tugged open the door to one of the many coolers lined up along the far wall of the cafeteria and pulled out a sandwich for each of them.

"Come on. She wasn't really going to."

"Probably not. But still. It was cruel. You didn't have to keep going even after she took my phone."

Ethan opened his mouth, but Kate spoke first. "Did your teacher not check who was texting you?"

"That's the whole reason I did it," Ethan said smugly. He and Anna exchanged a look of understanding that left Anna making another sour face, though she secretly did think his bit had been kinda funny.

"What?" Kate asked, wanting in on the joke.

"She made my nickname in her phone Pretzel God."

"Which is funny," Anna said over him before he could continue.

Kate was laughing, but she looked more confused than anything. "Where do you even get that idea?" she asked Anna, who shrugged.

"I don't know," she said and shrugged but proceeded to explain exactly how it had come about. "Last night, we were talking about carnival food or something, and Ethan said he was an absolute deity when it came to choosing the perfect combination of pretzel toppings. Which is a really stupid thing to be proud of. So I made it his nickname in my phone. And I'm not changing it," she said stubbornly, tossing Ethan a sandwich.

"Keep it," Ethan smirked. "I don't care. I got sufficient revenge."

"Ew, who says sufficient colloquially?"

"Who says colloquially colloquially?"

"Okay, guys. Case in point?" Kate interrupted before they could go further with the tangent. They all sat down at their usual table in the back corner of the cafeteria. All three of the tables immediately next to them had only a couple people sitting at them, so they could easily hear each other despite how noisy the rest of the cafeteria was.

"Case in point, Mrs Drew asked Anna who Pretzel God was, and literally the whole class laughed for five minutes straight."

"Yeah, but she didn't think it was funny," Anna grumbled.

"She totally thought it was a little funny. She just wasn't gonna, like, admit that in front of her class of tenth graders."

"Wouldn't have mattered if she called Dean."

"He would've thought it was funny," Ethan asserted.

Anna rolled her eyes. "You don't even know him. You don't know if he would've thought it was funny."

"Come on. With every story you've told about him, he's obviously cool. He would've thought it was funny."

"You don't know that," Anna repeated.

Kate rolled her eyes. "He would've thought it was funny," she said, ending their argument officially. "And anyway, you're probably gonna get to meet Dean soon, right, Anna?"

"Dude, I told you, I'm not doing it."

"What?" Ethan asked.

Kate looked over at him, "I told Anna we're hanging out at your house this weekend."

"Hell yeah. My dad's making sushi."

Anna paused halfway through unwrapping her sandwich. "Your dad knows how to make sushi?" Ethan nodded, clearly thrilled to know that this was an enticing detail for her. Anna was surprised to see in his expression that he genuinely wanted her to go to his house, meet his family, and just hang out. Maybe Kate hadn't been exaggerating about the whole thing. "I'll ask my brothers," she mumbled.

The thought of the oncoming conversation with Dean and Sam was still enough to make her want to groan dramatically. But she did think spending Saturday at Ethan's house with her only two real friends and eating homemade sushi... sounded pretty amazing. Maybe it would be worth the effort. Any which way she looked at it, she had to admit that Ethan's practical joke from math class had been hysterical. She liked hanging out with him as much as Kate, even if there was a lot she told Kate that she couldn't tell Ethan. Whether or not Saturday would be worth whatever teasing she got, she knew for a fact that Ethan was worth it. They were gonna be friends for a long time. She just had a feeling.

()()()

After school, Anna wasted no time dropping her request. She sat down in the passenger seat, set her bag down at her feet, closed the car door, and said, "Can I go to a friend's house Saturday?" There. Now there was no chance of her losing her nerve.

Dean gave her a slightly surprised look that quickly transformed into an exasperated smile. "I missed you too, Rugrat," he scoffed.

Anna smiled a little. She probably should have led with a hey or something, at least. She leaned over and gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, then sat back in her seat again. "I'm sorry. Hi. Can I?"

Dean released another exasperated laugh. He didn't make her wait much longer, though, before he said, "Are we talkin' about Kate?"

"No." Things were quiet for a second, but Anna didn't elaborate.

Dean's expression grew a little more bewildered with every extra second she sat without explaining before he finally broke the silence. "Well, can I ask who?" he asked impatiently.

Anna shrugged. "Just a friend."

"Alright, you know what? No. I'm not doing cryptic friend games right now. If you're hangin' out with a drug dealer or something, I swear to-"

"What?! No! That's not where this was going at all."

"Well, then, tell me who this friend is."

"He's just a kid from school."

Dean's expression melted into understanding. "Oh, I get it," he said, then turned the key over, and the car roared to life under and around them. "No. You're not spending Saturday night with a boy."

"He's just a friend!" Anna argued.

"Well, then, why didn't you want to tell me who it was?"

Anna grimaced. She'd really bitten herself in the ass on this one. "His name is Ethan, and he's a complete loser. In a good way. He's nerdy and sober and all that crap. But he's also funny. There. You know everything about him."

"You didn't want to follow that with 'and he's so cute?" Dean mocked in his best Valley Girl voice. He let his face go neutral again. "You're not going, Anna."

"Kate'll be there too." She caught the confused look that crossed briefly over her brother's face. "I told you, Ethan is the furthest thing from... that. He's just our friend."

Dean made a thoughtful face as he turned the car out of the parking lot and onto the road toward home. "I still want to meet him. And his parents."

"Why?" Anna groaned and slouched in her seat. She didn't want to go to school tomorrow and tell Ethan that her brother was a giant overprotective worrywart and wanted to meet his parents. Talk about embarrassing. She wasn't a five year old, and she didn't need this crap.

"Because," Dean matched her tone, drawing the word out as she had. Anna gave him a bitchface, and when he turned to smirk at her, he caught the look she was wearing, and his smirk became a sigh. "Look, let me meet them, and, assuming neither of them is an axe murderer or a demon, you can go."

Anna knew he wanted her to smile at that, but she was caught up on another detail to what he'd said. "You're not gonna spill holy water on them, are you?"

"Well, I'll be a little more discreet than that." Anna tossed her head back in frustration, and felt Dean's hand settle on her head to ruffle her hair. Normally, when she copped this much attitude, he got mad at her, but he must have been feeling especially patient today, because he kept his cool one hundred percent. "Sorry, Rugrat. This is a non-negotiable."

"They're not demons!"

"You're probably right," Dean allowed. Anna almost sighed in relief. "We're still testing them." She slouched even lower in her seat. "It's just to be safe," he reminded her. "They probably won't even notice."

"Yeah, 'cause you're known for your subtlety."

"Anna, enough."

Practicing her own ability to be subtle, Anna snuck a look over at him. She wanted to gauge how serious he was, whether she could take another stab at getting him to back down. But he looked like he was finally starting to lose his patience, and it made her wonder whether he'd maybe not been feeling so patient all along. He'd just been trying to keep his cool for her sake. She stayed quiet but crossed her arms over her chest. She couldn't change this, but that didn't mean she had to be happy about it.

She wondered if she could get Sam on her side.

()()()

She couldn't get Sam on her side. Worse, Sam decided he wanted to meet her new friend and the kid's parents. And even worse, he started interrogating her the second he found out the friend was a boy, something she'd expected from Dean but had hoped Sam wouldn't do.

"How old is he?"

Anna rolled her eyes so hard toward the ceiling she almost made herself dizzy. Her back was to Sam, but she knew he would be able to tell how annoyed she was even without seeing her face. "Why does it matter?"

"Is he older than you?"

"No! He's my age." She turned around to face him, and Sam seemed mollified. "It doesn't matter," she reminded him in frustration. "We're just friends."

"I'm just wondering, Ladybug."

"You're 'just wondering' because you're convinced I'm going on a date on Saturday, and I'm not."

"No, if we thought it was a date, you wouldn't be going." The words sounded so much like something Dean would say that Anna almost couldn't believe they were coming out of Sam's mouth. "Not til you're-"

"Sixteen," Anna snapped. "I've heard."

She'd always known Dean was gonna be a little anal whenever she started dating- though she still didn't have much interest in actually dating yet and was content to just hang out with friends for now- but she'd thought Sam would be more chill. This reaction- on both their parts- to her simply having a male friend was making her worry about what it would look like when she actually found a boyfriend... or girlfriend- she had no clue whether she was straight or not yet. She wondered vaguely whether the boys would be as protective if she did date a girl.

"Anyway, how do you know him?"

"School," Anna answered tersely. "How else?"

"Class?"

"Yes," she said and followed it up with a short sigh. "I've known him since last year, okay? We weren't really friends til this year, though, and then I didn't mention him 'cause I knew you were gonna do this," she griped, gesturing to him. Her face went sour, "Well, actually, I knew Dean was gonna do this. I expected better from you."

Sam let out a little sigh of a laugh. "I'm sorry, Ladybug. You've just never had a boy friend before."

"He's not my boyfriend!"

"That's not- I mean, boy space friend," he said. "Two words."

Anna pursed her lips at him. She didn't yet feel confident that he wasn't about to start teasing her or further interrogating her. "I don't care. He's not my boyfriend or my boy space friend. He's my friend who is a boy. That's it." She realized that her face was warm, and that realization was enough to make her feel that much more embarrassed, making her blush even more.

Sam just smiled at her.

()()()

The next day after school, Anna and Kate waited for Ethan outside his last class in the science hallway. They had the final period of the day free, so they got there ten minutes early, and Anna convinced Kate to ask out Arya, the cute girl from their English class who she knew her friend had been crushing on since the start of the semester. Kate finally agreed that she was going to do it just before the final bell rang signalling the end of the last class of the day. Ethan was the first person out of the classroom- he hated science- and he bounded over to them immediately.

They wasted no time in heading for the lobby and the front doors, but the building was expansive- it was the entire school- so it took a couple minutes to actually get there.

"I was totally expecting you to retaliate. I mean, perfect opportunity. You had the whole block free, and you knew what classroom I was in," Ethan told Anna.

"You spent the whole class paranoid, didn't you?"

Ethan gave her a somewhat disgruntled smirk. "You're an evil genius."

"I'm still gonna get you back, though," Anna said. "But doing something today? I mean, it would've been too obvious."

"You guys are despicable."

"No, you know who's despicable? My brothers. And they're both outside. And you better not make any penis jokes."

"Dude, chill. I'm not gonna make a dirty joke in front of your family. I know how to be polite. Anyway, my parents are both here too, remember?"

"Right. You know, they didn't both have to come."

"Well, neither did both of your brothers. But, hey, ten minutes from now, there'll be no one left to meet, right?"

"Except your sister," Kate corrected.

"She doesn't count. She's at college."

Kate shrugged. "I like her. I want her to count."

Ethan gave Kate a dull look, and both the girls laughed at him. They stepped outside onto the sidewalk, and Anna grimaced. By some stroke of luck or doom, Ethan's parents and Anna's brothers had already found one another and were leaning against their respective cars, talking casually about who knew what.

"That's wild," Ethan said, the three of them paused in shock just a couple yards from the school's entryway.

Anna hummed an agreement.

"They look happy, though," Kate said. "That's good."

"I don't like it. What if they're talking about us," Ethan complained. They all started walking again. They had to get the whole thing over with.

Kate moved toward her bus, which was parked along the sidewalk. "Good luck at the ceremony," she quipped. "See you guys tomorrow. Well." She looked at Anna and pointed, backing toward the bus as Anna and Ethan backed toward the parking lot. "I better see you tomorrow."

"You will," Anna said, hands raised in surrender. She was long past the stage of avoiding Ethan's get-together. She wanted to go to his house now, meet his family, try his dad's cooking, the works. And she felt pretty confident that she would be doing so with permission. There was simply no reason her family wouldn't love Ethan and his family. Sure, he made a lot of penis jokes and played a lot of pranks, but he was a genuinely good kid too. Anna had called him more than once when she was upset, bored, or pissed, and they'd had fun conversations as well as serious ones. She liked Ethan, and she trusted him, and so would her brothers.

"This is gonna be fine," Anna said, trying to psych them both up as they headed toward the parking lot.

"I know," Ethan agreed, but he had the same tone of dread that she had.

"So why does it feel like we're descending into hell."

Ethan had no clue that she had actual memories related to hell, though she'd never been there herself. She was unsurprised when he just said, "You think they're conspiring against us?"

"I think that's overdramatic, but I'm still a little worried it's true."

Ethan snickered, but then they were officially too close to their respective families to keep talking about it. Sam was the first one to notice them, and he smiled at Anna in a way that told her this conversation had gone well. "Hey, how's the thunderdome?" he asked.

"Still standing." She handed him her backpack when he reached for it. She used to wonder why he and Dean always did that, but now she chalked it up to that Winchester male chivalry she was constantly putting up with.

He slung his right arm over her shoulder which put her between him and Dean, which made her look tiny, which was totally exactly how she wanted to be introduced to her friend's parents. But she didn't shake him off. She didn't want to look rude or moody either, and if she was being honest with herself, it did make her feel more comfortable being able to hide a little bit. She didn't like meeting new people, she just liked knowing people. And she rarely found getting to know people worth the effort.

From there it was a lot of hand-shaking and name exchanging. There were pleasantries and a couple jokes to break the ice. But it wasn't nearly so awkward as Anna had been expecting. Of course, it helped that the boys had already met Mr and Mrs Durest.

"It was nice to meet you all," Mrs. Durest finally said after a good five minutes of small talk had come and gone. "We'll get to know you better on Saturday," she said to Anna with a kind smile.

"Looking forward to it."

"Pretzel God out," Ethan said just to Anna, and they fist bumped with grins on their faces.

"What'd he just say?" she heard Sam ask Dean over her head.

"It's next level humor," she said. "You wouldn't understand."

La Fin