A/N: With apologies to Bulbasaur fans, another chapter. Enjoy!
Emira gets to school fifteen minutes early, then hangs around by the entrance, trying to look nonchalant. Pretty soon, trying to look nonchalant takes a backseat to trying not to freeze to death, since it's November and a jacket would wreck her entire look. The things she does for Edric.
Eventually, Viney's familiar face shows up in the crowd. She's wearing layers of flannel and scarves, and Emira feels very jealous.
"Hi, Viney!" she calls, and Viney looks up and frowns for a second, before her face smooths out again.
"Hi, Emira," she says, moving closer but not very close.
"How was roller derby?" Emira asks brightly, and she gets a shrug and a "fine" in response. Viney moves past her and into the building, and Emira decides that going inside, where it's a whole four degrees warmer, might be a good decision.
She catches up to Viney outside a classroom, where Viney is starting to painstakingly unwind her scarves.
"Do you need something?" Viney asks without turning around.
"Um, I just, uh –" Emira flails for something to actually say, while Viney pulls off her first jacket – "just wanted to say hi."
Oh, God, she's such a mess.
It isn't technically all her fault, considering that Viney's being spectacularly rude and not doing anything to help this conversation along, she reminds herself. But Viney probably has no friends and thus can't be expected to hold a decent conversation.
"Well, hi," Viney says, and there's a tiny gesture that might be a smile. Her dog (Rain or something) sniffs Emira's hand.
"What class do you have next?" Emira tries, and then gives up completely because talking about school is actually the worst way ever to have a conversation.
"Geometry," Viney says. "I'll, uh, see you later?"
"Yeah, see you at lunch," Emira says, then flees to her own class, face burning. It doesn't dawn on her for a while that she's actually agreed to have lunch with Viney Sohal. What is wrong with her.
All through the morning she's distracted by the ever-present spectre of Viney. Why is she such a bitch, and, more to the point, why is she such a bitch to Emira in particular? Have they even met before Edric's stupid crush on her?
There are vague memories of Viney being somewhere in the crowds during middle school, which makes sense since there's only one middle school in town (two, if you count the Catholic boarding school with the kids who sell weed from out of their plaid pinafore pockets). As far as Emira can remember, they never actually spoke. She was just one of those kids in the background, who never stuck out in any real way.
Maybe Viney knows her family's reputation. Between Amelia blowing up at anyone who dares to look at her, Edric being – well, Edric, and Emira knowing every single piece of gossip the school has to offer, they're a bit of an intimidating crowd.
This is stupid. She could just ask Viney what the big deal is. Except Viney's probably not going to tell her, and then she'll have made things weird, and then they won't even be able to look at each other again.
And why is she even so worried about getting along with Viney? They're only hanging out because of Edric, and his dumb crush on her is going to go away eventually.
Emira heads straight to the library to eat. Viney's already there, and she lifts her head up when she hears Emira's footsteps.
"Hey, it's me, Emira," Emira calls. "Mind if I eat with you?"
"Sure," Viney says, and then keeps eating her sandwich. Emira unpacks the thermos of soup that the cook always packs for them when it's cold, and just watches Viney for a little while.
Viney eats delicately, her stubby nails leaving little crescent-moon shapes in the bread. She gives the crusts to her dog (Puddles, that's his name), who snaps them up eagerly. She's wearing what looks like an actual fishhook through one ear, and it sets off her pointy jawline and grey eyes nicely.
Terrific, she has fashion sense, Emira snarks at herself. Staring at her isn't going to tell you anything about her.
Emira pokes at the soup, decides she's not really hungry, and then realizes that not eating means she has to talk to Viney, so she eats the soup anyway.
"Do you play any sports?" someone asks, and it takes her a second to realize that it's Viney, actually starting a conversation.
"Uh, yeah, volleyball," Emira says hastily, and wishes she didn't keep stumbling over words. Viney probably thinks she's a loser who can't even talk. "You should come watch a game sometime, or, I mean, uh."
Fuck. Now she looks like an insensitive bitch who's completely forgotten that Viney's blind, and the worst part is that she kind of is an insensitive bitch who's completely forgotten that Viney's blind.
"It's okay," Viney says hastily. "I do like going to sports games, even if I can't see the action. I just listen to the commentators, and it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on."
"Cool," Emira says, because apparently her entire brain shorts out when Viney talks. "Um, so would you want to come to a game? We're playing a home game next Saturday."
"I'd love to," Viney says, and she smiles, a little crookedly. She has dimples, and Emira stares at her face like a dumb idiot for too long.
"You play roller derby, right?" she says, and Viney starts actually talking, about the game and her disability-friendly team and the whole league. Emira has to prompt her along with questions every other sentence, but Viney's actually talking.
Emira spends at least an hour floating along in a happy haze of she actually talked to me before she realizes that Edric is going to be at the home game next Saturday. And that's even more epic. She's just, sort of accidentally, set up a date between Viney and Edric in ten days' time.
She sends Edric a text between classes, just a quick meet after school. There's been a breakthrough.
He doesn't text back for two hours, until school finally lets out, and when he does, it just says hanging out with Jerbo. TTYL!
Emira should be happy that Ed and Jerbo are getting along so well, but there's a little snit of jealousy somewhere in her brain, that doesn't go away as she heads to her yearbook club meeting. She doesn't care about the yearbook, nobody cares about the yearbook except for maybe that dork freshman Gus, but colleges love the yearbook club and so she spends an hour every Wednesday listening to people bicker about fonts.
Emira doesn't know what a serif is, and she doesn't care, so the usual argument is even less interesting than usual. She pulls Pride and Prejudice out of her bag and keeps trying to figure out why Wickham is such a bad guy, anyway.
…
Jerbo's junior year is shaping up to be the best year of high school yet. He's doubled his total of friends, and, better yet, the second friend is a cool friend. The Blight triplets rule the school, and if he and Viney can get into their circle, they'll never be bullied again.
He texts Viney, asking want me to walk home with you? He doesn't usually have to ask, except he might totally be going out to the old arcade with Edric Blight, and he wants to make sure Viney will be okay.
He gets a text back quickly, saying no, I'll be fine. That's good enough, he guesses. Viney can handle herself fine on a fifteen-minute walk.
Someone tackles him from behind, and Jerbo goes sprawling onto the ground. He tries to roll into a ball to protect himself, while simultaneously driving an elbow into the face of his attacker, and ends up just flailing and doing neither.
"Dude, I'm so sorry, are you okay?" Edric says, rolling off of him. "I was trying to do, you know, a bro tackle, not an actual tackle."
"Don't worry, I'm fine," Jerbo says. He takes Edric's offered hand and pulls himself to his feet, wincing a little at the bruise in his side caused by his chemistry textbook. "You just startled me."
He's not even worried about being injured any more, because Edric just said that they're bros. Kind of. Jerbo has a grand total of zero friends who are guys other than Edric, but he's pretty sure that being someone's bro is one of the highest honors bestowable.
"To distract you from your pain, I'll let you win at Galaga," Edric says, and proceeds to drag him out of the school building. Jerbo has to jog to keep up, protesting about how no way, he is the undisputed Galaga champion, he'd like to see Edric even try to beat him, and doesn't realize until they're half a block away that they're still holding hands.
Oh.
Is that what this is?
Do bros just casually hold hands while going to the arcade together? Do bros even go to arcades together like this, just the two of them?
Is this not a bro thing at all?
Edric holds his hand the whole eight blocks to the arcade, sometimes dragging him over to a random tree or trying to gesture with both hands and then giving up. The whole way, he's apparently completely calm and unaffected, like he does this all the time, while Jerbo is a bundle of nerves who can barely focus on the conversation.
Maybe he's misreading this whole thing. Maybe Edric is just casually touchy and doesn't even notice that he's holding Jerbo's hand. But the fact remains that Edric Blight, of all people, sought him out at lunch yesterday, and then invited him to go to the old arcade, and now they're holding hands.
And it's not like Jerbo minds holding hands with Edric. He's as out and proud as it's possible to be, although he doesn't think anyone at school actually knows except Viney because Viney's the only person who talks to him. And there's been the flickery beginnings of a crush in his brain ever since Edric brought up the Matrix. He just never thought Edric was – well, into this. Into him. Whatever.
Maybe he's not. Maybe Jerbo is being stupid and overthinking things. Maybe bros do in fact hold hands.
They go to the arcade, and Edric seems like he's been here many times before, because he grins and waves at the old proprietor and makes a comment about how, "Seriously, man, you should get some games that are less than forty years old". The proprietor rolls his eyes and disappears into the back, and Edric yells, "Everyone would come here if you had Dance Dance Revolution or something!"
He manages to scrape out a victory on Galaga, and Edric makes them go best two out of three, and then best three out of five. Jerbo wins three out of five games by the skin of his teeth, and Edric's face splits into a huge beaming grin, and he seems even happier to lose than Jerbo was to win. Jerbo isn't sure what that means, but he has some suspicions.
They play every game in the arcade, and Edric turns out to be a monster at Street Fighter, and he's just so fun to watch when he furrows his green eyebrows and pouts at the screen that Jerbo pays for four games. He loses every time.
About two hours later, Edric says "I should probably get going," and Jerbo realizes that he's spent like twenty bucks, which might be a problem since he'll have to take the bus home and he has maybe two dollars in change left.
"One more game?" Jerbo asks, and Edric grins and nods. Jerbo scans around the arcade for a suitable last game, and then has a bad idea.
There's a claw machine sitting in one corner, mostly full of stuffed Pokémon, and Jerbo has seen enough movies to know that winning a stuffed animal for a love interest is, like, the most time-honored romance cliché out there. And he still isn't sure if this is or isn't a date, but so far Edric has been doing all the work, and Jerbo wants to send a clear signal.
"Dude. Which one do you want?" he asks, gesturing at the claw machine.
"Um, up at the top. The Bulbasaur," Edric says, after a moment's hesitation, and Jerbo grins, digging through his pockets for change.
"Really, a Bulbasaur?"
"Don't diss the Bulbasaurs, man," Edric says, looking pouty and mortally offended. "They're the coolest."
Jerbo then proceeds to spend every cent he has getting a stuffed toy for a guy who thinks that Bulbasaurs are cool. He starts to think that this might be a problem when Edric beams at him, flings his arms around him, and shouts "thanks for the Pokémon!" as he disappears into the night, and Jerbo's first thought is not I have to walk home in the dark, or how can I be friends with someone who thinks Bulbasaurs are cool, but wow, that was worth it to see him smile.
He sends frantic text messages to Viney the whole way home.
…
Viney turns her phone off when she's doing homework, so she doesn't have distractions, and then she eats dinner with her parents which is a strictly technology-free affair, so she doesn't check her phone until almost eight. That's fine, usually, since the only person who texts her is Jerbo, and Jerbo can't have gotten into too much trouble in a couple hours.
She has thirty-five text messages from Jerbo.
Viney sighs and goes through them in order.
Dude
Viney
Help
Help me
So I think I went on a date with Edric Blight
Except I don't know if it's a date
And I don't know if he knows if it's a date
Years ago, she set her screen-reader to read out all texts from Jerbo in this horrible voice that sounds like Kermit the Frog, because it was kind of funny, and never bothered to change it. Hearing robot-Kermit panic about apparently dating Edric Blight is too much for her, and she ends up in a fit of laughter so intense that she misses the next ten messages. She doesn't bother relistening to them, because all thirty-five are just variations on the same theme.
Dude, relax, she texts him. What even happened?
The next two replies are keysmashes that the screen-reader valiantly struggles through, and then I DON'T KNOW. What is wrong with me
Where to begin? She texts back.
…
"Emira, he is so cool," Edric says. He's now wearing his new stuffed animal as a hat, and hasn't stopped talking about how cool Jerbo is for like an hour. "You have great taste in guys."
"Well, yeah, obviously. But can I get coherent information that will actually help me?"
"Dude, he won me a Bulbasaur. What else do you want?"
Emira inhales, then exhales.
"You're right. What else could I want?" she says, and goes back to Pride and Prejudice again. She can't focus.
She got Viney to actually talk to her. Regardless of whatever weird hangups Viney had about talking to her, they talked, and Viney's going to one of her volleyball games. Viney can be kind, and funny, and she wears weird earrings and has the cutest dimples Emira has ever seen.
And apparently Jerbo and Edric are getting on like a house on fire, so both sides of the plan are going well. She's going to get a boyfriend.