Aaaaah, writing these things makes me so happy inside. The stories are all so cute and fluffy...
...And at first I spelled Ellie's name wrong. I spelled it as her voice actress's name, Elie. Huzzah.
"We've been goin' here longer 'n you have!"
"Well, we got here first, so it's our place now!"
"Nuh-uh!"
"Uh-huh!"
Carl fidgeted nervously as the fight escalated into the dreaded 'nuh-uh, uh-huh' stage, where it would probably remain for a while until somebody got hurt. He was glad he wasn't alone. On the other side of the battlefield, Mikey's soldiers shuffled their feet, either uncomfortable about ganging up on two people, or uncomfortable about Elie in general.
Girls couldn't punch. It was a well known fact. But every boy had heard the story where Ellie didn't' punch so hard, that Big Andy fell flat on his back and bounced right back up from sheer momentum, missing a tooth or twenty.
Though it seemed Mikey thought it was a myth. He really wasn't letting up. Carl glanced at the old abandoned house. It looked like it needed at least six new coats of paint. The floor creaked so much that he almost was tempted to oil it. And sometimes his foot went through the wood if he wasn't careful and stood still for more than a second.
"Ellie," he whispered, trying to penetrate the wall of childish arguments.
"Nuh-uh!"
"Uh-huuuuuuuh!"
It didn't work. He shifted his weight and stared helplessly at the enemy soldiers, who gave a sympathetic look in return. The Captains continued their thought-provoking banter.
"Nuh-uh, nuh-uh, nuh-uh!"
"Ellie," Carl repeated a little louder, and this time she turned to him.
"What?" she asked impatiently, though apparently proud that she had gotten the last three words in before the interruption.
The meek boy flinched suddenly at the attention and stuttered, waiting for his scattered words to order themselves again. "We - well, uh, um, you know, uh, maybe we, uh, could find some other place?" An abandoned house that didn't look like it would collapse if a fly even dare to rest on it, preferably, though he wasn't able to say that. Instead, he wilted under the redhead's glare. "Uh, er, never mind…"
And with that, the two started once more.
"Nuh-uh!"
Mikey, realizing that not only did Ellie skip his turn, but this whole inane spat was dragging on far too long, finally couldn't stop himself and punched the girl with a strong uppercut. Nobody gasped, but there was a sort of dramatic-gaspy-feeling in the air and everything seemed to freeze, Mikey still had his arm raised as his expression gradually changed to one of horror. Ellie sat up, rubbing her jaw. Her eyes had started tearing up, probably from the pain when her head hit the sidewalk.
He had broken The Unspoken Rules, the universal laws that every good boy followed. The punishments were terrible if he didn't, ranging from The Inescapable Glares to The Cold Shoulder. But this was beyond even social estrangement. He punched a girl. He made a girl cry. In the history of boydom, Carl had never known anybody who did that. This had to be a first. Had anybody even made official punishments for this occurrence?
Setting a precedent for years to come, Carl leapt on Mikey.
When he woke up, he noticed he couldn't see much of anything. His glasses were somewhere besides perched on his nose. His head pounded, so instead of scrabbling for them, he kept still and stared at the fuzzy ceiling through half-shut eyes. Maybe he'll go to sleep again…
A blurry monster entered his field of vision. "Wow, you're not dead!" Oh, wait, that's Ellie. "Mom! You can stop callin' those hospital guys now!"
Let's see…he was pretty sure he knew where he was. Ellie's house. It was his first time here. Too bad he could barely see anything. He was pretty sure it was still the same day, just perhaps an hour later at the most. He was fairly certain he knew how he got knocked out. That just left… "What happened?"
"You jumped onto Mikey and punched his face a lot! I didn't know y' had it in ya! You were really awesome, 'til Mikey knocked you out with one hit with his meaty fist. He broke yer glasses too. So I slugged him and the others went running and I was wond'rin' if you were dead so I got the wagon and dragged you here, and then you woke up and here we are." Carl just made out a shrug. "Oh yeah! Hold still a sec." Suddenly, the blurry form of Ellie slapped something over his eye. The sting made him yelp and almost sit up.
"Sorry, it's meat fer your eye. We would've used steak, but we didn't have any, so we just got some meat stuff."
Carl lay on the lumpy couch, ground beef dripping down his cheek. He really shouldn't just lie there. Not only would his hair probably smell of meat for days, but this was completely against The Unspoken Rules. Being Cared For By A Girl instead of Taking It Like A Man was punishable by Unrelenting Taunting. If word of this got out, he would get picked on (more so than usual) until he was like…in college or something. He should get up. He should insist that he's fine. He should go home and wash the meat off his face.
…But still, as Ellie ran off for salves and bandages, he couldn't help but get comfortable on the couch. Sometimes there had to be exceptions to the rules. Right?