#6: EIGHTH GRADE HEARTBREAK

2x04 "Fool Me Once," 3x06 "3XK," and Season 5


"Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't." —Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis


They're looking through some of his old photos and yearbooks. Of course, Kate doesn't know any of these people, but it's still exciting to see some of the faces from her boyfriend's adolescence—not to mention teenage Ricky Rodgers and a visual overview of the 1980s, the first full decade that he remembers more vividly than she does.

She's holding a class photo from the fall of '84. Oh, the sleeves. Oh, the glasses. Oh, the awkward little faces wishing they were anywhere but there in four straight rows. She can't help but grin. She's all the more delighted that she picks him out almost immediately, even without looking at the caption of listed names.

"Well, weren't you the little trendsetter."

"What? Why?" He glances at what she's found, and she dodges playfully, as though he's not allowed to see it, but he manages to get a look.

Pointedly she focuses more on the picture than on him; can see him squirming in her peripheral vision. "Only one in a flannel shirt."

"So?"

"Was that already a thing in 1984 or did you start that?" Her eyes are still glued to this fabulous find and she can't stop herself. "Six boys in horizontal stripes. Did they coordinate?"

He offers an alternate theory: "Or Big Brother had an invested interest in young men's fashion."

"And of course you escaped indoctrination."

"Of course."

She smiles and rolls her eyes, and her gaze falls on the list of names. One catches her attention. "Sherry Ort. Why does that name sound familiar?"

Rick blushes. Has she ever seen him truly blush? If she has, she doesn't remember. She's too distracted by her sweet, sexy boyfriend and his pretty pink cheeks.

"Castle?"

He's still busying himself with his own discoveries, his attention divided. "You mean the Triple Killer's fifth victim?" he says. His answer doesn't account for his reluctance or his shame. It seems subtly subversive.

Especially given the facts at hand. They're rummaging through his junior high mementos, not a database at the Twelfth, and he's never mentioned a connection. And then there's the girl herself, staring up at her from the picture.

"Ah, no," she says, "this is Sherry with a Y. A brunette."

Those traits can be changed, of course, but 3XK's victim would have been born around the time this picture was taken. No, this is definitely a different person. And there is definitely something else about this name in the haze of her memory besides a detail from a case file. She studies the teenage girl's face; tries to think if she's ever seen her.

"Pretty girl," she says with a shrug, and she's actually about to move on when Castle speaks up like a broken suspect.

He responds now like it was never a big deal, badly overcompensating. "Oh, that Sherry Ort. Yeah, she stole my lunch money." Without a pause, the casual tone slides unbidden into a higher pitch: "I told you about her?" He clearly does not remember this.

But she does. "Wait a minute. Eighth-grade-crush Sherry Ort? Broke-your-heart Sherry Ort?"

He clears his throat and reiterates: "She also stole my lunch money."

"And laughed about it with her friends. I know. You told me."

A small sigh escapes him. "It was so much less awkward when you knew that as not-my-girlfriend."

And suddenly it makes sense—why something he once mentioned so easily now makes him look uncomfortable. His feelings haven't changed. Their relationship status has. She tilts her head to get a better look at him, even if he's not making eye contact. "You don't really believe that, do you?"

"Well, it's not so much something you believe as it is something you sense," he hedges.

Bullshit. "Castle, you can tell me things," she says, setting aside the picture and reaching for him, squeezing his knee. "You can tell me anything. More so now than ever."

He glances at the hand on his knee; glances off to the side as he gathers himself. "It's stupid," he says, finally. "I know it is. I got over that a long time ago."

She doesn't say anything because it looks like he'll say more when he's ready.

"It's just—that was one of the first times I understood how much someone I cared about could hurt me."

She's quiet now, not just because she wants to hear whatever more he'll say, but because she feels physical heartache inside her at the thought of him learning that inevitable and difficult lesson; the possibility that she may not be able to imagine how often he's had to learn it.

The pain only tightens with the selfish thought that she herself must have reinforced that lesson for him more times than she'd care to count.

If the heartbreak she feels for him over all of this is half of what he feels, she's sorry she ever asked about Sherry Ort.

His voice isn't emotional at all, but his face is too contemplative, too honest for her to think that this memory is as meaningless to him as it may have seemed the first time he mentioned it to her. "The next year I went to Edgewyck and never saw her again," he says, before she can think fast enough to offer him an out. "But I'll never forget her, either. And I—I hate her for that. Because in the end, she doesn't matter . . . but she did."

After a moment, after she gives his knee another squeeze and they start shuffling through photos again, she tells him, "Thank you."

She doesn't need to elaborate. She knows that he knows by now why she's thanking him. He just nods.

They sit in companionable silence for a while longer, digging a bit more through his past without talking about it. Then, finally, she breaks their habit with another question: "Would you like me to arrest Sherry Ort for stealing your lunch money?"

"Please."

His smile makes her smile, too. And she decides that, even though all is still not right in the world, at least they know how to face it together.