Chapter 2: Popsicle
Vegeta slipped off his t-shirt and lay reading across the boat's sundeck. The roasting sun beat against his skin, which pebbled with sweat that began to trail down his neck and back in small, tickling rivulets. The boys bobbed in the water on the opposite side, and though he couldn't see them from this vantage, he tuned a surveillant ear to their voices as he read—a bit pleased when Tarble followed Kakarot's absurd babble about freshwater sharks and giant serpents long as the boat and thick as Raddy's thighs by quipping, "Don't be so stupid, Kat."
More and more, their father's practical intelligence was showing on the boy, a trait Vegeta had inherited too, and which thankfully, was one of the man's better qualities. Tarble would perhaps get the best of both of them. Despite the pitiable state of his health in the first few years of his life, Tarble was impossibly buoyant and endlessly sweet—their mother writ all over him. Vegeta loathed to remember that he'd ever felt burdened resentment for the kid even just a few years ago, preferring to relegate those feelings as nothing more than hazy dreams from a fake life, because now that Tarble had grown to develop all the intricate detailings of a full-fledged person, he was one Vegeta quite liked, perhaps the only one.
Though the little jab of pride he'd been smirking about behind the pages of his book was quickly soured when Vegeta heard his name hissed from the queen bee's lips. He tried to brush it off, but he couldn't focus anymore and found himself staring at, or rather through, the pages—not that he should care what they thought of him.
His name often traveled the halls of their high school in the third person, snide commentary delivered at an intentional volume. He didn't care, not really. Cliquey high school drama was never a problem unless directly provoked, which happened more often than he'd like to admit. The disappointment from his teachers he could swallow. The shakes of their heads as they tried to guilt him into feeling remorse through inane claims about a smart boy's squandered potential were only fortuitous when they insisted on relaying these incidences to his father, and he'd miss a week of classes to 'illness' while he healed from the only brand of discipline the man knew how to serve.
With his ear carefully dialed to the voices in the next boat, he listened to Bulma defending him out of sheer ignorance. Not attuned to the social cues of a premiere prep academy, the homeschooled heiress laughed off her friends with mock scorn and went so far as to claim, or at least insinuate that she liked him—the idea of which, true or not, left his stomach unsettled with a kind of complicated dread. If he'd been confronted by her claim face-to-face in any other moment, he might have been regretfully flattered and, maybe, capable of dodging it with a sugar-coated explanation of his circumstances, but not now. Their pitiful laughter burned his ears, and he stuffed his nose into the book to hide his reddened face and take solace in the musky scent of its pages.
A nearby splash had Vegeta peeking from behind the cover to see Bulma wade back to the boat, beer in hand. As she climbed the ladder behind him, his face was so stiff with embarrassment that he couldn't move and continued to stare blearily at the lines of text, wondering why she'd come. But instead of the voice he expected to pipe with some shrill demand, he felt her weight settle over his hips, and his eyes grew wide as he realized the girl had straddled him from the back. Vegeta darted his head over his shoulder to where the heiress sat atop him, grinning as she rubbed her palms together.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Your back is burning, idiot. You didn't put on any sunscreen." She began to run her lotion drenched palms over his back. Not for his health, he guessed, but to make some sort of statement to her so-called friends.
God, he hated it. He felt like a pawn, like she was trying to prove some point to them that she didn't care what they thought of him or that they've got him all wrong. They didn't have him all wrong, Vegeta knew. He was a social pariah. He didn't have any friends because he didn't want any friends. All their feigned pleasantries, if one weren't completely void of common sense, were poorly veiled and politically motivated in a kind of tit-for-tat. They wanted their homework completed, their essays written, and their test answers delivered by some sap who was naive enough to think the currency, an invitation to their posse, worth the trouble. Even without caring for Tarble and the ominous stress of plotting their future, keeping up his own grades, and boxing after school, Vegeta had far too much pride to degrade himself for those idiots.
"I think it's about covered." He bucked a bit, hoping she'd take the hint. Her massage was only making the situation so much worse. An unmistakable rush of blood began to fill between his legs as she knit the muscles of his back, digging in with the perfect mix of pressure to break-up the tissues and tingling, light strokes of her fingertips to smooth them back out.
"All done," she chirped. She hopped off his hips, and her palm came down on his ass with a hearty slap that jumped his nerves. "Come on! Just hang out for five minutes, that's all I'm asking."
"Fuck off, Bulma, seriously." Even if his dick wasn't as stiff as a popsicle, he would still say no.
"You're a real boner sometimes, you know that?"
Vegeta didn't respond, afraid any more words to leave his throat would escape with the obvious croak of his distress. Here he was, stuck to suffer with his dick throbbing between his legs and his face buried in his arms, mumbling muffled curses between them until she gave up and went back to the other boat.
After another hour spent pretending to read, his eyes glazed over the same paragraph on repeat while he split his attention between the boys, to make sure Kakarot didn't drown Tarble by accident, and the fools in the other boat, listening for his name. They stopped harping on him after a while and moved on to ridiculing the rest of the student body, before finally, the drunken morons exhausted their mouths and decided it was time to go, a plan Vegeta would have been relieved by if they didn't suggest to all return to the cabin with them.
Vegeta threw his two cents into the debate, knowing that his aunt and uncle would not approve of the teens hosting an unsupervised party, especially with the young boys present. But more than that, he was loathe to spend one more minute with the academy's resident assholes. Hell, over the past two hours they made fun of him within earshot, in front of his dickhead cousin no less, and even for someone with his thick skin, his self-esteem had dropped to a new low.
Bulma was tipsy enough to brush off his protests as she climbed back into the boat, calling him names—lame, stuck-up, buzz-kill—in mimicry of his peers. That dipshit, Yamcha followed up the ladder behind her, practically licking his lips as he stared at the two round cheeks of her ass that were directly in front of his face.
Bulma went for the keys, but Vegeta snatched them out of her hands.
He drove the boat back across the lake at a reasonable speed, fighting the urge to move faster as he was forced to watch the dipshit QB pull Bulma into his lap. In a slick motion as they crossed another boat's wake, he purposely spilled his beer on her tits and apologized dumbly for the rough water as he used his bare hand to brush the liquid from her chest. Bulma laughed off his groping with a kind of ditzy, drunken ignorance, as if she really believed the act, which was the most deplorable part of it all.
The young boys at least proved to be useful distractions, and Vegeta let Tarble and Kakarot take turns steering the boat. Tarble whooped and hollered as he propped himself in the captain's seat, perched high on his knees to see over the steering wheel, and Vegeta focused on that as his modest reward for putting up with this weekend at all. He couldn't deny that the kid deserved every minute because by now, he'd give his own life just to see Tarble happy. Even the stupid, feral grin on his goofy cousin Kakarot was some consolation.
Bulma and her friends continued to drink and party on the open porch, blaring shitty hip-hop from the living room sound system that was nothing but the vocoded whines of a bunch of posers that couldn't actually sing, but that his classmates danced and sang to with equal incompetence. Vegeta grilled cheeseburgers for the kids on the opposite end of the long porch—sans burger for Tarble who'd recently become something of a vegetarian. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forcibly smother the beat of his pulse against his temples only to pop them open again when a bottle of beer slammed down against the edge of the grill.
Yamcha looked down at him, an amused smirk pulled over his lips. "So, Bulma Briefs, huh? Didn't think you had it in you."
Was that supposed to be a question? Even if Vegeta had a response ready to spit at whatever Yamcha seemed to be insinuating, he wouldn't validate the prick by saying it. He flipped the meat and watched the flames ignite and spray fresh grease across the grates, unheeded by the fool.
"Do you really think you stand a chance cause you were kiddy pals back in the day?" Of course, the moron wasn't going to take his silence for an answer. He twirled the lip of his beer bottle between his thumb and forefinger, feigning indifference as he waited for Vegeta to reply.
Vegeta cleared his throat to utter, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Ha! Bullshit!" Yamcha's voice rose with a hint of contempt before he glanced over his shoulder as if to conceal the fact that he was speaking to Vegeta at all. He wrangled in his volume and leaned to meet Vegeta's ear. "If I were you, I'd save myself the heartache and forget about her. She won't want anything to do with you when she figures out what you're really like."
It was obvious; he was trying to provoke him, force him to showcase his notorious temper. As much as Vegeta wanted to hit him, could feel the unmistakable pressure pulsing through his clenched fists, he wouldn't dare indulge the urge in front of them, Tarble especially. Besides, whatever Yamcha thought he wanted couldn't be further from the truth. He didn't want to date Bulma Briefs. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to be friends with the heiress. Whatever flame these people seemed to believe was lit between them wasn't anything more than a childish fantasy. The only thing Vegeta truly wanted was to be left alone.
He ate with the boys in the kitchen, trying to drown out the crappy beats and aggravated tension that refused to settle in his veins by distracting himself with Kakarot's tale of some treehouse in the forest. The kid spoke about the structure with wild gestures; bits of hamburger spat from his open mouth as he described every extraneous detail, down to the damn shingles. Tarble begged to see it, but the sun was already dipping below the horizon, and from what Kakarot described, the place was a trek, nestled deep in the woods. Vegeta promised they'd scope out the treehouse in the morning and bribed away their whines with the suggestion of campfire smores.
The kids ran around the lawn to collect kindling and stuffed the twigs between the logs that Vegeta stacked in alternating squares like a log cabin. Once he got the flames roaring, it was a full-time job helping them roast marshmallows without ruining them.
The boys squealed when they'd set their marshmallows aflame and were forced to scrape the charred remains against the rocks around the fire and begin again with a fresh one. Kakarot tore through half the bag, burning every damned one, but it seemed less like discoordination than his cousin's inner pyromaniac. He laughed like a little psychopath and waved the flaming marshmallows over his head, letting the goo drip down the stick, sparks and ash spraying from his sugary torches.
Tarble, however, stared intently into the fire with his marshmallow hovering just out of reach of the licking flames, turning the stick ever so slowly. As he pulled it out to examine it, a grin stretched across his face. After countless tries, he'd finally roasted the most perfect, golden marshmallow, and looked up at Vegeta with his chin tipped up proudly.
"Nice work, dude," Vegeta said, readying the graham crackers and chocolate.
Tarble placed the end of the stick against the graham and watched with his tongue flicking out the side of his mouth as Vegeta placed the other on top. He pulled the stick out and dropped it at his feet to trade for the smore. But instead of taking a bite, he only turned the treat in his hands with a thoughtful examination, like there was some deeper meaning in his work of art, then looked up at Vegeta with the same expression. The kid was deep, and often Vegeta was left to decode his mannerisms, because Tarble would never clue him in on what he was thinking whenever he left Planet Earth, as Vegeta described his odd, far-away moments—nothing beyond the bits he thought Vegeta would want to hear, like he was censoring himself, in a way, like he was feeling all the same dark, leftover thoughts, but he didn't want to influence Vegeta to brood anymore than he already constantly brooded.
Tarble mutely climbed into Vegeta's lap, an arm wound around his neck, and held the smore to his lips. "You first."
"Whatever you say." Vegeta sunk his teeth into the thing.
He licked the gooey remnants from his lips, and Tarble laid his head into the crook of Vegeta's neck to nibble at the rest. All of the boy's energy was quickly sapped after the long, eventful day, and he was unable to finish even half of the perfect smore. Struggling to keep his eyelids open, he let the thing plop into his lap.
Kakarot's boundless energy was finally waning too. He sat cross-legged, wiping his sticky fingers in the grass only to have them covered in dirt and blades. The boy held his messy palms before his face, and Vegeta watched the slow gears turn in the idiot's head before he began to lick the grime from them.
"Egh! Kakarot, no!" he scolded him like a naughty dog, which wasn't far off. The boy stopped and looked up at him with round, dopey eyes and a face covered in dirt. "Get up. It's time for bed."
Vegeta carried his sleeping brother into the cabin with Kakarot trailing close behind. After tucking Tarble into bed, he directed his cousin into the bathroom to clean him up before putting him to bed too.
Just one last pain in the ass was left, and Vegeta groaned knowing that Raditz wasn't going to be quite so easy to handle.
Bulma swayed between the soles of her flip flops, feeling the alcohol take its toll on her coordination, but it didn't stop her from grabbing the beer Yamcha extended in her direction. She'd nurse it, like the last one. Saying no would only make her seem lame, and she already had a lot to prove.
Making friends her age, she thought would be easy, at least easier than the politics of traded favors with which the adults around her determined who their 'friends' were. And it was easy, at first. Launch, Tien and Yamcha were welcoming, accommodating, and their excitement learning that she'd enrolled in their junior class felt genuine. Sure, they had years of inside jokes and often derailed for hours reminiscing tales that were difficult to keep up with, not knowing any of the characters or their backstories. Yamcha would always apologize for boring her, needlessly, because she wasn't the least bit bored. Their retellings of high school dramas were as entertaining as a daytime soap. She lived vicariously through them, almost felt a part of them, and every story was a dossier that offered her insight into the students and teachers with whom she'd soon be sharing the halls.
But then Vegeta arrived. Bulma didn't know he was coming; she was blindsided the moment she saw him on the porch. And while she was head-over-heels, Disney-princess-level thrilled to see him again, the others sort of butchered the bliss. They'd turned her excitement into anxiety. All the faceless people that starred in their stories were just that; she didn't feel bad about them because she didn't know them. But with Vegeta, suddenly the politics of high school cliques had become personal and increasingly difficult to manage. She didn't even know he attended the academy, and learning that he was a misfit, while it wasn't entirely surprising considering how aloof he was as a kid, she knew they were wrong about him. Now all of their stories about their other classmates felt tainted. While it was clear that these kids liked her now, the way they gossiped about everyone else with such ruthless abandon, today Vegeta being the topic of scrutiny, she worried if one wrong move could condemn her to social oblivion before her first day, and if she wasn't careful, she'd be the next one to star in their juicy narratives.
All summer long, Launch and the boys reigned compliments on her like she was a goddess, and Bulma couldn't help but give in to their flattery. More than anything, she wanted to fit in with teens her own age. But she liked Vegeta, and despite their warnings that by associating with him, she was committing social suicide, she was reluctant to listen. They were still harping on him now, telling her to avoid him like the plague if she knew what was good for her, which, considering these were the very people who ran the popularity contest, almost felt like a threat.
"I think he's gay," Yamcha went on, "I mean, have you seen wrestling? It's pretty homoerotic if you ask me."
"I'm pretty sure he's a boxer," Bulma said. She knew for a fact that he was because she read it on his t-shirt, but she didn't want to appear like she was correcting the star quarterback. At the same time, even if Vegeta was gay, what would that matter? But she knew that he wasn't, and for reasons beyond her drunken comprehension, she resolved to tell them so. "I know he's straight, because I kissed him once, and you should have seen his face."
Though she regretted the decision when she saw the three gaping holes of their mouths dropped open in a moment of shock before they erupted into a fury of expletive roars.
"Hold the goddamn phone!" Launch cried, shaking Bulma by the shoulders. "Explain!"
"It was New Year's Eve, five years ago, and I kissed him at midnight. What's to explain?"
"Uh… why?" asked Yamcha, his face puckered in disgust.
"I dunno. I always thought he was cute. I saw my mom kiss his dad, and I guess I just copied her. Anyway, it was nothing… just a peck. Technically, my first kiss."
"Oh, you poor thing. Never repeat that to anybody!" Launch demanded.
Bulma looked across the lawn to where Vegeta was sitting by the campfire, acting like he was allergic to human contact. He'd always been like that, like when she kissed him, and his face turned scarlet before he ran from her, and she suspected, vowed to never attend another Briefs' function. She couldn't understand why he was like that, why he took life so seriously and could never relax, act his age and exist among his peers. He always seemed a bit miserable, like he was depressed or something, and not because his mother died. He'd been that way forever, always over analyzing, internalizing every thought and action of the people around him to the point that if someone sneezed too close, he'd take it as a personal affront.
While the others dug in and continued to deride him, Bulma was stuck in a daze watching him at the campfire as he helped Kakarot and Tarble make smores, holding out graham crackers and chocolate for them to deposit their marshmallows.
Tarble climbed into Vegeta's lap and hugged one arm around his neck; in the other, he held out his smore. Vegeta took a messy bite. His thick arm was wrapped around the entirety of the kid's skinny frame, and as Tarble fell asleep, Vegeta's face tipped to burrow his nose in his hair like he was smelling it.
That sensitivity was one layer of him that the others refused to see. Instead, they only acknowledged the reclusive side of him that had, over the years, developed into a dickish defense. They called him an asshole and a psycho, claimed that his temper was legendary, triggered by the smallest slight. Maybe he was an asshole, but not inherently so. It seemed more like a cover, a kind of mismanagement of his insecurities.
As she watched him carry his brother inside, Kakarot trailing sleepily at his heels, Bulma started to feel a bit shitty. The others had moved on to mocking more classmates she didn't know, and she felt herself growing distracted as she stood among them sipping on her beer with nothing to contribute to the conversation. Their words had lost value now that she'd removed her blinders and could see what they were really worth. Craning her neck behind her toward the house, she wondered if Vegeta had gone to bed and felt compelled to find him.
Bulma excused herself from the porch and stepped through the sliding glass door. Shouts down the hall rang from the room the cousins were forced to share, and indeed, it was a scene she'd expected to see upon entering—the two were wound together, grabbing, pulling, smacking at each other's limbs as Vegeta tried to wrestle a bottle of rum from Raditz's fist. The bratty freshman, who was easily twice Vegeta's size, still struggled to play keep-away, cussing wildly when Vegeta managed to throw him to the floor, get on top and wrench his elbow in a direction the joint wasn't meant to move.
"Ach! You fucking asshole!" Raditz cried out; finally overcome by the pain, his fingers released their grip to let Vegeta tear the bottle away and jump nimbly back to his feet.
To say she wasn't impressed by how easily he'd taken Raditz down would have been a lie.
Red-faced and brooding, Raditz pushed himself off the floor to tower over Vegeta and spat, "My parents are going to hear about this. You could have dislocated my fucking elbow!"
"Go ahead. Tell 'em!" Vegeta called his bluff, shaking the half-drunk bottle before his cousin's face to drive the threat home.
Vegeta stormed past Bulma in the doorway in a cloud of rage, like he didn't see her. She followed him into the kitchen where he picked up the recycling bin, dropped the rum inside and began to swat at the empty beer bottles that were littered across the counter, along with whatever else she and her friends had concocted.
"You don't have to clean up my mess. I'll do it in the morning."
Vegeta didn't acknowledge that she was speaking; stuck in a mutinous sulk with his brows pinched together, he tossed the bin to the floor, letting the bottles clang angrily as it slid across the tiles. He jerked a rag from the counter and flipped on the sink to wet it.
"Come on, Vegeta. This isn't your job. Can you just relax? You don't have to be so perfect all the time."
He refused to look at her, like some inner protest, and as she stood at the edge of the kitchen watching him fastidiously clean, she felt a kind of resentment for him and his need to play the adult in her home. He won't let loose, not even a little, and instead was determined to torture himself.
"Bulma!" The muffled shout of her name came from the porch, and Yamcha slid the door open just wide enough to poke his head through. "Come on, we're going to Zarbon's."
They'd grown bored out in the lawn, and wanted to boat across the lake to the local bar, one favored by the youth thanks to its eponymous owner—a man who, despite hailing from the area, had a cultured, overrefined air about him and was notorious for serving drinks to the underage teens. Quite frankly the man gave Bulma the creeps, always eavesdropping on their conversations, leaning uncomfortably close across the bar with a synthetic smile stretched over his straight, white teeth.
But more than that, she felt guilt for abandoning Vegeta, his brooding agitation being read as something broader than the mere remnants of a fight with his cousin; she sensed she was partially responsible. Perhaps the fact that she hadn't helped much, or at all, with the kids goaded his anger.
"You guys go ahead. I think I'm gonna stay."
"Seriously?" Yamcha sneered. His eyebrow lifted skeptically, and he glanced toward Vegeta with a slightly miffed look. "He can come too, I guess." The invitation was extended indirectly through her in a tone so obvious in its reluctance that Vegeta let a cruel laugh slip from under his breath. He scrubbed the center island with a force, the muscles at his temple twitching in irritation.
"Sorry, Yamcha. I'm just really tired is all. Too much sun and fun, I guess. Catch you tomorrow?"
"Whatever. Fucking buzz kill." Yamcha slammed the door shut, leaving Bulma to wonder who the comment was directed toward. She hoped it wasn't her.
From the window she watched her friends run down the dock to untie their boat and zoom off across the glassy water before returning her attention to the angry storm behind her who was scraping half-eaten burgers into the garbage and flinging open the dishwasher to stuff dirty plates inside. He filled the sink with soapy water to wash the larger pieces by hand, and as Bulma picked up a drying cloth and quietly bellied up to the counter beside him, she sensed a shift in his demeanor, however slight, as he handed her grilling utensils one by one after he'd scrubbed them free of blackened grisel to a spotless silver sheen.
Conversation was a bit trying with the testiness of his mood that lingered in the room like damp air after a hard rain. As Bulma stared at his profile, she took a guess as to what topic might interest him and extended her fingers to brush lightly over the gash on his cheekbone that, earlier in the day had blended in with the reddened skin under his eye, but now contrasted sharply against a dark purple bruise.
"Did you lose a match yesterday?"
He sucked a sharp breath and jerked his head away the second she touched him, and with the same cat-like reflexes he'd used on Raditz, seized her tightly by the wrist.
"Don't!" he hissed with such venom and snap of his dark eyes to meet hers, that Bulma took a step back, as far as the short leash he'd formed would let her. Then just as fast, as if recognizing her fright, he let go, tossed her hand back at her. His focus returned to the sink as he slunk shamefaced, shaking his head he muttered, "Sorry... I just don't want to talk about it."
Of course he wouldn't. He was probably a sore loser that got all bent out of shape over one bad fight. But regardless, the way he turned on her was almost ferally triggered, and a part of her wondered if it was something more than a bad day at the gym, or if what her friends warned about him was true.
Bulma helped him finish scrubbing the kitchen to a spotless sheen in silence, cleaner than any of their housekeepers had ever kept it.
"It's still early," she said, trying once again to break the awkward tension and loosen him up. "Do you want to watch a movie?"
Maybe he felt guilty for scaring her, but regardless of his motivation, she was pleased to see the indifferent shrug of his shoulders. It wasn't a no.