Chapter Text
Leaves of brown, red, and gold skittered across the dirt path ahead, and every so often, he felt one crunch under his heels. The autumn wind stung at his nose and chilled his cheeks, and he huddled his face down into the plaid scarf wound three times around his neck.
“Summer baby.”
He cut his eyes to his right, where she walked in step with him. A smile rarely left her face here; it just took on a different shape. Right now, she was grinning at him sharply, waiting for his response to her jibe.
“Of the two of us, you were the one born in June, as I recall.”
Her fingers tightened around his palm as she turned away, snickering. “That may be true, but you’ve never been able to handle any type of cold.”
“I can if you’re here.” The warmth from their joined hands radiated up his arm and spilled into the rest of his body, and he was sure she felt the same.
She came to a halt, wide green eyes trained on him. Her grin softened into something fonder as she edged in closer. He could get away with expressing such sentiments here without worrying about being rebuffed or barbed by sarcasm. Here, she believed him when he said gentle things.
“Come to think of it, I could use some warming up in other places.”
“Oh?”
“Right here, for example.” She touched a finger to her bottom lip. “Think you can help me with that?”
He felt himself smile back. “I think I’ve got a solution.”
She closed the gap between them, jasmine swirling into his nose and orange pressing against his lips. He slipped his tongue out for an extra taste, and she giggled, such a bright sound, before tilting her head and kissing him deeper. All at once, holding her hands wasn’t enough. He pulled her in, one hand on her cheek and the other at her waist, and her palm was over his heart, which was thrashing hard even through the thick wool of his coat. That was for her – did she know that? All for her. All for her. All…
It wasn’t a grating alarm that woke Jimmy, nor was it the sun that had the audacity to shine in his face. It was logic overriding imagination, reminding him that he was not older, self-assured, and deeply in love. Instead, he was sixteen, awkward, and heartbroken. But broken hearts still love, a fact which he refused to examine too closely.
Routine pulled him out of bed and toward the shower, in front of the bathroom sink and back to his dresser. He moved through the dark, despite having several functional lighting fixtures in his room. If he hesitated for even a second, Jimmy was certain he’d collapse on the carpet in catatonia.
Goddard watched this silent march warily from his post next to Jimmy’s desk chair. Every so often, he’d let out a low whine meant to draw Jimmy’s attention away from the task at hand, but to no avail. Though his programming did not contain a specific protocol for how to manage heartbreak, Goddard knew enough to know when his best friend was in pain, physical or emotional. And right now, Jimmy was very much in pain. How the little metallic canine wished he could do anything to alleviate it.
Only when he was fully dressed and groomed did Jimmy go for the curtains. He opened the ones on the left side of his bed first, the skating of metal grommets against the rod much louder than he remembered. The curtains over his desk were another matter. For a moment, he debated leaving them closed; he had no plants in his room at present, and Goddard had adequately charged himself yesterday by sitting in the living room’s front window with his solar panels unfolded. Then he realized his mom would likely come up and open them anyway on her morning tour of the house, checking to see if anything needed cleaning. Besides, it wasn’t like leaving them closed would make the world outside disappear, much as he might want that to be the case.
With great hesitation, Jimmy grabbed his curtains, rubbed a thumb over one gold-foil crescent moon, and pulled them open.
Part of him expected 4320 Alcorn Street to look different somehow. He’d expected the same thing every day for nearly a week now and had been disappointed each time, but that didn’t stop him from thinking it. Surely with the seismic shift that’d occurred, a shingle or three could stand to fall from the roof, or the siding could crack, or the front door could rip from its hinges. Something. But no. The house sat as it had for years, glowing rosily in the dawn, indifferent to what had changed.
To their immense credit, his parents tried to make him feel at ease when he made it downstairs for breakfast. Judy was gentler than usual, not pushing him to eat when he clearly had little appetite, but encouraging him all the same. Hugh read him headlines from the paper in a silly voice, asking questions he most definitely knew the answers to in an effort to get Jimmy to talk. They cared very much, yet were also quite aware there was no quick fix to what afflicted their son.
When he got up from the table, Jimmy was seized by an errant thought to ask his mom for an extra soft-boiled egg in his lunch so he could lob it and deface the pink-and-white perfection of 4320 Alcorn Street. But he let the urge pass. It was juvenile, and it would only improve his mood temporarily. Plus, there’d be little question as to who the culprit was, and he’d prefer not to have his parents deal with an annoyed Sasha Vortex on their doorstep.
“Want a ride to school, Jimbo?” Hugh offered.
Jimmy considered this. Retroville High was well within walking distance, though he generally preferred to either take his hovercar or jet pack. He’d been handling his own transportation to school for years now, but this morning, his limbs and mind felt particularly leaden. “Sure, Dad,” he replied.
Hugh beamed, pleased to have made an inroad. “Just let me know when you’re ready.”
Jimmy pushed through the remainder of his breakfast, then walked his dishes over to the sink. Judy, in the middle of wiping down the counter, whispered “Thank you” and kissed him on the forehead. He smiled bashfully and went to check through the contents of his backpack one last time.
When they pulled out of the driveway fifteen minutes later, Jimmy made it a point not to look back at the house across the street.
Her lungs burned and her legs ached. The assistant coach monitoring the indoor track blinked as Cindy went by for yet another lap, then went back to reading off of his tablet with a twitch of his mustache.
Classes would keep her focused, even the boring ones, and navigating the crowded hallways required more instinct than active thought. Lunch was a hazard, but that was only thirty minutes out of her day, and she could sneak out of the cafeteria if it got to be too much. As long as she gave herself enough time to change and get to first period, she could keep running. If she kept running, she couldn’t cry. In theory, at least.
Eventually, her mind wandered. Inevitable when the only visual point of interest were the pictograms of sports figures spray-painted in royal blue on the off-white wall. Back she went to her bed, to the minutes before her alarm summoned her to consciousness.
“Come to think of it, I could use some warming up in other places.”
Only in a dream could she get away with such an unclever line. Only in a dream would he react with a grin and accept her boldness without flinching. Only in a dream would they kiss like that again.
“Vortex!”
She snapped her head to the left. The assistant coach had stood from his folding chair, tablet in hand.
“That was the ten-minute warning bell I just heard,” he said. “Think it’s best if you wrap it up.”
It took far too long for Cindy’s fuzzy brain to formulate a response. “Thanks,” she called back, voice wavering more than she’d like.
The coach grunted and sat back down. Rather than finish her lap, Cindy cut across the track at a brisk jog, grabbed her backpack from where it sat against the blue vinyl wall pads, and headed back to the locker room. She changed quickly, swapping her shorts for jeans and tugging a dark green hoodie on over her white RHS Roadrunners tee. One brushout and readjustment of her ponytail later, Cindy was out in the throng milling through the hallway.
As usual, Libby was waiting next to Cindy’s locker, thumbs pumping away on the slide-out keyboard of her phone.
“Were you in the gym again?” she asked without looking up. “That’s like the third time this week.”
“On the track,” Cindy corrected. “And seeing as how this is Wednesday, yeah, it would be the third time I’ve been there.”
“Don’t get smart with me, girl.”
“Can’t help being what I am.”
Libby stepped aside to let Cindy work the tumbler on her locker. “How’re you doing?”
“Day just started. Kinda hard to judge.”
“Britney told me you were by yourself at the Candy Bar last night, elbow-deep in a pecan ripple Dreamboat.”
“What, does Britney just hang out there so she can be the first to score gossip on people?”
“Nah, she wants Sam to cater her birthday party, so she’s buttering him up by workin’ odd jobs down there. You know he’s her uncle?”
Cindy paused, one dial turn away from snapping the tumbler open. “News to me.”
“Me, too. But let’s not get distracted,” Libby said, sliding her phone shut and tucking it in her pocket. “Why didn’t you invite me to the Candy Bar?”
“I wanted some alone time.”
“So you went to one of the most public places in town for that.”
Cindy rolled her eyes and dumped an armload of textbooks from her unzipped backpack into her locker. “Thanks for pointing out the irony.”
“Look, when you get upset, you tend to yell. Seeing you shut down like this is honestly a little scary.”
“Yeah, well, yelling is what got me into this mess.”
“My point is, you’re not gonna fix anything by bottling it all up. You can talk to me.”
“It’d be different if there was anything new to say, Libs, but there—”
At that moment, Jimmy walked by, Sheen chattering beside him. Though he didn’t stop, Jimmy visibly stiffened, and a tendon in his forearm flexed as he tightened his grip on the binder tucked to his side. His eyes never left Cindy, and Cindy’s eyes never left him. The dull throbbing at the base of her neck that she'd finally gotten to settle down after five nights straight of intensive t'ai chi flared up again, and she winced. Jimmy, taking that as his cue, turned away.
Libby sighed heavily. This had already been a long week, and it showed no signs of shortening up anytime soon.
"Now as we've seen through our in-depth exploration of cellular respiration, we can express that entire process as C6H12O6 + O2 → CO2 + H2O, and of course we can't forget our friend," the red marker squeaked as Ms. Holly, the biology teacher, wrote "ATP" in capital letters. "Would anyone care to balance this equation?"
The class of sophomores stared blankly up at the whiteboard. Asking them to do math in first period was bad enough, but asking them to do it in a non-math class was borderline insanity. Jimmy drummed his fingers against his temple; he could balance chemical equations like this when his classmates were still learning their colors and shapes. But he kept his hand down, unwilling to raise it.
"Jimmy?" Ms. Holly was clearly fishing for engagement. "Any suggestions?"
He shook his head just enough for her to get the memo: I do know, but I'm not answering.
"Anyone else?"
A voice from the back of the room suggested there should be the number six in front of carbon dioxide; another suggested six water molecules to get to twelve hydrogen atoms. It took a third person to finally bring the equation to balance. Counting the colored flecks in the floor tiles would have been less tedious.
"Does anyone have any particular observations about this equation and another one we've discussed describing a crucial biological process?"
Once more, the class was still, save for a few people paging back through their notebooks in an attempt to answer the question. Once more, Jimmy bit his tongue. He heard whispers from a few rows back, no doubt wondering why the resident genius wasn't piping up. Let them talk.
A flicker of motion off to his right caught his attention. Cindy had her hand up, though it was more tentative than he'd ever seen it. Did he detect a tremor in her fingers?
Ms. Holly did little to hide her relief. "Yes, Cindy. Your thoughts?"
"Cellular respiration is the inverse of photosynthesis. Obviously, plants don't produce ATP, but on a molecular level, it's all the same players." Cindy punctuated her answer with a shrug. "You could almost say they're mirrors of each other."
"Very well put! Yes, when we consider..."
While Ms. Holly continued on, Jimmy stole another glance to the side. Although she seemed composed enough, he could tell Cindy was exhausted. The languid twiddling of her pen between her fingers, the way she leaned her cheek a little too much into her palm, the low set of her eyebrows that indicated disinterest. All details one picked up on when they knew someone well. Funny that she'd mentioned mirrors: she very much was a mirror to the dream version he'd known earlier this morning.
She turned her head toward him, and he suddenly became profoundly interested in his mechanical pencil. Juvenile, maybe, but he should have known better. He couldn't be caught staring at her so openly. Not anymore.