preston rawlings . {viola} (theviola) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-12-20 22:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth bennet, viola |
Who: Eli and Preston Elijah and Ash
What: They meet in high school, where all bad things are the end of the world, every emotion is times 100, and now is so forever.
Where: Their private school in Boston.
When: The mid-nineties.
Warnings: Language from Wayne's World.
Later in life, they would discover that when most people heard of Boston they thought of dark suburbs and mean streets, but for them, Boston was several minutes away. Their neighborhood was crowded with four- and five-bedroom homes; their school ordered and clean to the point where even the pranks were boring. Ash’s parents probably would have preferred that he go to St. George’s, but it was across town, so the nearest secular private school had to do. It didn’t matter that much to Ash, who probably would have behaved exactly the same regardless of where he was. He just tried to avoid attention, because all attention inevitably turned bad. He wasn’t sure why, but it did.
Ash was careful. He didn’t want to seem “too”: too smart, too stupid, too happy, too sad, too athletic, too dramatic, too interested, too bored... He didn’t want to be seen trying too hard and give people just another excuse to mock him. The only reason he wasn’t getting beat black and blue after school by the big athletic types was because he was (apparently) attractive enough to get asked on a couple dates once a year. He didn’t understand this either. They were usually girls that he knew only peripherally, in one of his classes, and sometimes he suspected that someone had put them up to it. The most recent one had been a disaster--not because he’d said no, not because she had been upset, but because she had just broken up with Stevey Millhouser and she did it in front of half the school. It was a direct disrespect, even though Ash didn’t have anything to do with it, and he’d so far been able to avoid Millhouser and all his athlete buddies despite their best attempts. Ash privately likened it to being a goldfish in a piranha pond.
The weeks following (leading into November) he’d kept his head down, and now it was easier to do since he was wrapped up in one of his mother’s scarves and almost everybody had something thicker than a jean jacket on. Snow was invisible in the air as Ash broke out of school late from the janitor side of building three, keeping a sharp eye out for Millhouser’s gang as he shouldered his bag and slid The Catcher in the Rye into his coat pocket to keep it from falling out of the splitting seams.
It was the first day of school for Elijah.
He’d crossed the portal only weeks before, and it had taken those weeks to get him registered and ready to begin classes. He’d spent his first week in humanity wondering if he’d done the right thing in crossing like he did, and he’d spent the second week missing his mother and his eldest sibling. The morning of the start of his new education had dawned cold and sharp, and he’d found himself in the school office with his aunt, Mrs. Garden, at his side before he even had even finished rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Elijah was smart. Scary smart, and he liked to tell people about it. It resulted in a nudge up the academic ladder in his placement exams that morning, and by the time Mrs. Garden had left the school, he was glad to see her go. It wouldn’t do to have his aunt, no matter how much he liked her, at his side on his first day. Elijah was too proud to want to be labeled as the dork whose aunt had to take him to school his first day.
He was dressed in uniform, like everyone else was, slacks, a button-down shirt and tie, a jean jacket overtop and a colorful scarf that his uncle had given him that morning. Cool, and expensive, and Elijah was rather fond of it. It made him feel like he was more than he was without it, and that made him walk a little straighter and stand a little taller. Unfortunately, it was so late in the day by the time his aunt left, that he only had one class before the day ended. He spent a few extra minutes talking to the teacher, confident in his ability to have an educated conversation with someone much older than him, and then he went wandering.
He saw the blond boy at a distance, in shadowed profile. Tall, aquiline nose, broad shoulders. Why the boy caught his attention, Elijah didn’t know. But the boy did, and so Elijah followed. Elijah was thin, black hair that was a little too long, piercing blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, even then. The boy, who he followed to the janitor’s side of the building, had some height on him, but not much. And more importantly, he was sneaking.
“Where are you headed?” he called out, once the boy had broken out into the fading sunlight, as if he had every right in the world to ask the question.
Ash hadn’t heard anyone nearby, and since he had one ear out for stupid fake laughter or girlish giggles, he was surprised enough to stop in his tracks and whirl around. He had just been daydreaming, thinking about snow and the weird Tim Burton movie that came out last month, and wondering if he stood still long enough he’d turn into a skeleton. Envisioning a skeleton standing in the snow had been a diverting illusion (though Ash’s had not been dressed in a suit or done any singing), and this new voice jarred him entirely out of his thoughts.
Eyes sliding quickly one way, and then another, Ash’s eyes settled on the new kid (unmistakable) and he turned halfway around to face him. He didn’t want to seem like he cared too much (too) about anything, so he was careful to keep his gaze casual. He hoped it would make him look relaxed and aloof, but it only made him look wary. “Home. In case you hadn’t noticed, school’s out.” It occurred to him right after he said it that he should have had something more cool to do than go home, but it was too late.
Elijah rolled his eyes, and he took a step forward. “I’m not going to hit you or something,” he said, accent a combination of somewhere English and something American. He read wary on the other boy, regardless of what the intention was, and he zoned in on it without stopping to think he shouldn’t mention it. “I did notice. The ringing bells indicating the end of classes enlightened me.” Ooh, he looked proud then, like he’d managed to say just the right thing. Elijah very much liked saying just the right thing.
“My name is Elijah,” he said, and he held out a hand in what he felt was a very mature and grown up gesture. He could tell the other boy was older than him, but not by much, and he wanted to seem just as old as he was.
Ash didn’t like the attitude, and the accent labeled the new kid a foreigner, which by rights should mean that Ash was the one who should know what was up, not the other way around. He looked down at the hand, and to keep from staring at it without moving, he used both hands to unnecessarily hoist the backpack more firmly on his shoulders. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked, referring to the hand. The only people who shook Ash’s hand went to his church and were forty years older than he was. Then, balancing the rejection with acceptance, he threw out, “I’m Ash.”
He watched the other kid’s face. He had really intense eyes. Ash was aware that you weren’t supposed to notice other people’s features unless you were talking about ass or boobs, but there it was, anyway. The kid had intense eyes.
Elijah watched the bag hiking with an interest that was normally reserved for crumbling buildings, and he noticed the way the arm under the jacket moved in a way that was focused attention. The blue eyes moved back to the boy - Ash’s - face, and he did not withdraw his hand, the movement entirely stubborn. “Are you afraid?” he asked, goading. And yes, he had intense eyes, and those intense eyes were entirely fixed on Ash’s face.
Elijah had been in the country, in Devonshire, for years, and he’d spent as much time on his own as he liked. He was, as his aunt called him, unconventional, and it showed. “Handshakes are standard greetings in polite society,” he added, as if the voice of polite society being on his side would be particularly impactful. Elijah was what would generally be called precocious.
Ash laughed at the ridiculousness of it, and he didn’t mean it to be cruel. It was, rather, vaguely uncomfortable, the kind of uncomfortable that he felt when someone did something just plain weird. Weird was... was... “too.”
“Yeah?” There was a lot of Boston in the word. Elijah would get comfortable hearing it. “You’re not in polite society any more, brother.” He didn’t say it quite like it was a compliment; this was also a typically Boston thing to say, borrowed from the cooler, rougher side of town--not that Ash had ever been there. “I’m not scared of your dumb hand.” The blue eyes unnerved him, however, in a way he wasn’t used to, and he felt it somewhere in the pit of his stomach. It did scare him, and more than it should. He fought it and turned his shoulders to face Elijah completely. “Where are you from? London, or something?” He grinned. “You sound like James Bond or something.” That certainly was not an insult, though not quite the highest compliment.
“James Bond is stupid,” Elijah said almost immediately. “He wastes all kinds of time on drinking and girls,” he said, certainty in every word. “And you are scared. I don’t have cooties, Ash.” He took the other boy’s name and he said it like he owned it, even though he didn’t know he was doing it. The word, cooties, labeled him as not so entirely British, but British sounded much better than cruddy Las Vegas and cruddy Boston, at least to him. “I’m from Devonshire. It’s in England, but it isn’t London. There are other places in England than London.” He held his hand out a little further, and there was challenge in the blue eyes now. Challenge, and no understanding of what the challenge was.
“Yeah,” Ash said, agreeing about the James Bond comment with a certain kind of admiration that stemmed from very rarely contributing his own opinion unasked. He looked down again at Elijah’s hand, made a little ha sound as if he still did not care, and took it. It wasn’t much of a shake, he just gave the guy his hand (Ash had soft warm girl’s hands) and forgot to try to take it back. It was probably the eyes. “I know,” he said, about London. “It’s just the first place I thought of. What the hell you want to come here for?”
Elijah, who had not expected the challenge to be answered, forgot to let go. He forgot to let go, even as forgot what he was bloody saying for a moment. He’d had girlfriends, and Ash’s hand felt a little like that, but bigger, soft but guy, and he let go, quickasthat. “Does that yeah mean you agree? Or are you just saying he’s stupid because I said he’s stupid?” he asked, because he couldn’t tell, and Elijah liked to know what other people thought, even if he disagreed. “I came here because I wanted to,” he added a moment later, the tone almost defensive. “Why else would I? No one tells me where to go.” That was true enough. He’d run away from home, hadn’t he? “I do whatever I wish.”
Ash didn’t know what to think about the long handshake. None of the others he’d encountered had been like that, and he scraped the tingle off with the seam of his jeans. He was taken slightly off-guard by the question about Bond, and he said immediately, “I meant it. I mean, I thought it.” There wasn’t any way to tell whether that was true either. He listened to him say “whatever I wish,” and then he laughed. “You sound like fucking Shakespeare.” Unlike anything else he said, that was an unequivocal compliment. The laugh was unhindered too.
“Shakespeare would have used iambic pentameter,” and yeah, he was showing off, no doubt about it; Elijah paid attention in English class. “You drive?” he asked, hiking his own backpack on his shoulder as he waited for an answer. He didn’t. He wasn’t old enough yet, and he wouldn’t have thought about taking the Gardens’ car without permission. But maybe this guy had wheels, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he liked hanging with him. Because he’d just met him, and so far all he did was agree with him. “I bet you like those boy bands.” He didn’t bet any such thing. He just wanted to see if he agreed with everything.
This was something Ash had going for him. His parents didn’t embarrass him by getting him a really nice car, instead they got him this cheap sedan that was lame white, but hey, he had his own ride. He pointed vaguely off toward the school’s parking lot, where he was positioned nearest the exit in case there were too many Millhouser-s lingering around. Ash was not stupid enough to be tricked into liking boys--in bands, on tv, or anywhere. “Hell no.” He looked again at Elijah--in his new uniform and in a jacket that would freeze him solid halfway home--and then turned away toward his car. “Shakespeare didn’t always use iambic pentameter.” He started moving quickly toward the lot.
Elijah fell into pace at his side, as if a ride home was a given, and he looked over at Ash when he made the iambic pentameter comment and laughed. “Ok, maybe you aren’t completely brainwashed,” he said approvingly, hiking the bag higher again. Ash’s strides were longer than his, and he found himself watching one long leg before he even knew he was doing it. A cough, and his attention was back on the car, and what the bloody hell was the matter with him today? “He used it quite a lot, though,” he added, getting the last word in, as if he and Shakespeare would hang on a regular basis and he knew him best.
Ash took a quick look around the parking lot as they broke cover around the edge of a building, but no Millhouser--and nobody as big as Millhouser, either. There were a couple band guys, a group of giggling girls chewing gum, and some of the geeks nobody talked to leaving the library. Clear. Now it was like a zebra on the savanna: you just had to run faster than the other prey. “A lot of people did,” he muttered back at Elijah, somehow incensed that the new kid would dare put his opinion forward like it was fact. Ash dug his keys out of his pants pocket under his coat, and unlocked the driver’s side door. He stopped to stare at Elijah, who had been following close. “What are you doing?” he asked blankly, staring over the car roof.
“A lot of people did,” Elijah said, “but no one did it as well or as often as the bard. He’s remembered for it in a way no one else is,” he said, and he didn’t care about the giggling girls, or the geeks, or the band guys, or any possible Millhousers in the immediate area. He wasn’t scared of anything in the parking lot, and it was pretty obvious, because he was willing to stand there and argue the point, even after following too close. “Who were you running from?” he asked, remembering his initial reason for following Ash in the first place, and he looked around obviously, then, wanting to see who was around.
“Nobody,” Ash said immediately, amazed that anybody could be so forward to take such a dumb shot in the dark like that. He pulled open his car door as all the doors clicked unlocked (so they’d put out to fit out the cheap sedan with power locks and windows, so what, you couldn’t tell from the outside), throwing his backpack in the mobile closet that was his backseat. He’d never heard anybody outside of a textbook called Shakespeare “the bard” and he hadn’t realized it was more than some lame old guy title. Maybe everyone in Britain called him that. It still didn’t make him the only one to master iambic pentameter though, and Ash quashed the desire to say anything else about it as he glanced on his passenger seat, where several library books (public, he didn’t want to be seen in the school one) were under some fast food wrappers and old mix tapes.
“Liar,” Elijah said, pulling the passenger’s door open and looking down at the seat. He pushed the tapes aside, but he kept the books in his hands as he sat down, reaching down to push the seat back and allow for his legs. He reached a hand out for the radio, turning it on without asking, and flipping stations until he found Glycerine, by Bush. “You disagree with me. It’s all over you. Why don’t you argue your point?” he asked, opening the top book on the stack. “Is the public library close to your house?” he asked immediately after, looking over and just then realizing how close Ash was in the car. He stared a moment too long, and then he looked back at the book with a jerky movement.
“Hey,” Ash protested, as Elijah made himself at home on his seat. They sat there for a second as Ash locked all the doors around them (a chorus of solid clicks) and started the engine to heat it up. He glanced in the rearview to make sure nobody was watching. Nobody was. He glanced to the side to see what Elijah was doing, and saw him looking at the library copy of The Collected Works of John Donne. “Hey!” He leaned over to try to snatch the copies away. Beneath that was a biography of Shakespeare (ironically) and The Decameron. They all had been name-dropped in the last week in English. Ash pushed at Elijah’s hands and tried to pull the books away. “Get the hell out of my stuff, man!” The inside cover of the first book named a branch a good ten miles away from the school--and Ash’s house. He wanted to relax, and that meant going somewhere nobody from his school was ever going to go.
Elijah paged through the books before Ash’s hands even came close. “I want to see where they lived,” he said honestly, of the Shakespeare and Donne. He’d realized after just a week that he could see old things in rooms. His aunt and uncle had told him it was normal to be able to do weird things, but he couldn’t tell Ash that. “To get a better feel for them. Homes tell stories, sometimes more stories than there are in books.” There had been two Hey!s by this point, which Elijah ignored entirely. When the hands pushed at his, Elijah reached out without even looking and grabbed onto Ash’s fingers, wanting to see the library branch. “Running from people there too?” he asked, looking over at Ash, then, blue gaze intense as he asked, fingers still holding Ash’s hands back.
It wasn’t like he’d taken kung fu, or anything; the best Ash generally managed in confrontations was some wild flailing and then curling up to protect his stomach. The weird eyes stared at him again, and Ash stared back about an inch away. He wondered for a second if his breath smelled bad from lunch. “Look, you need a ride home, fine, but if you’re going through my stuff, I’m going to kick you out of my car.” He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d manage that, but he said it anyway. Nobody was going to believe this new guy if he decided to make fun of Ash and his dumb library books. Only... they would if he told someone about the branch location. “Shit.” He flexed his fingers to try to work them free.
Elijah made a sound that was frustration and teenage sulk all at once and he let go of Ash’s fingers. “Are you going to listen to anything I say if I don’t agree to stop going through your stupid things that were just sitting there in the open?” he asked, closing the top book and holding them over. “It’s not as if I was sent here to infiltrate the secrets of your car,” he added. His speech pattern was an obvious thing, once you’d talked to him awhile. When he reacted and didn’t think, he sounded his age. If he had time to formulate a response, he sounded older. He slouched, tossing his own backpack between wide spread thighs. “I’m not going to tell anyone your dirty secrets. I’ve only been here two weeks. I don’t have anyone to tell.”
Ash took his hands back and used them to dump all the books in the backseat, where nobody could see them and he could pretend he didn’t care. Scowling over the dashboard at the fogged up windshield, he messed with the controls to try to get the defroster going and pushed down panic. When he didn’t sound like he was trying to be fifty years old, and he wasn’t looking directly at Ash and making him feel like a loser, Elijah was fine. Like the pretty, unbelievable, I-can’t-look-away kind of fine that was a darker, dirtier secret than the stupid poetry books. “You should have stayed in Devon--wherever.” He was going to pretend he wasn’t paying attention to the name. “Because here is way worse, I promise.” He shifted and the car lurched in reverse. They narrowly missed another (parked) car as Ash got the hell out of the parking lot and left school for another day.
“Devonshire,” Elijah corrected. “Hey! Try not to kill me before I get laid!” he protested when Ash almost hit the parked car, unthinking and completely crass boy. He glanced over at his new maybe-friend-if-he-wasn’t-insane. “What the hell was that about?” he asked, looking out the back window as the parking lot faded from view, and then back. “This is better than Devonshire was,” he said, “but I’m not the one running from things here. You are,” he said, emphasis on the you and on the fact that he knew it was true, no matter what Ash said. “Why is it worse?” he asked, groaning when Boyz-II-Men came on the radio and trying channels, turning in the seat to do so.
“It just is,” Ash said, with all the certainty of seventeen years of experience in life. The tires squealed on cracking pavement as Ash took a hard turn. “Especially if somebody sees you hanging out with me.” He glanced at the radio, but he didn’t have any strong preferences, just mild aversions, so he didn’t say anything. “Or if you tell anybody you got in my car after five minutes of talking like a freak serial killer.” He was going for diversion to avoid the topic of running from things and getting laid.
“It just is isn’t an answer,” Elijah protested, finding Wonderwall by Oasis and making an approving sound as he moved his hand away from the radio. “So what, you’re a theater geek or something.” He motioned to the books in the back of the car. “Or a book geek. Who cares? We’re different in England. We read.” He said it like they were, indeed, better in England. And there was something to it, he’d learned in the past two weeks. People expected the accent to come with something sophisticated. Elijah felt he could be very sophisticated. “I’ll just make you cool by proximity,” he said, “And you don’t have the earmarks of a serial killer, Ash. Sorry to break it to you, mate.”
Ash had only heard Australians on television say mate, and he almost ran them through a solid red thinking about it, so when he applied the brake it was about fifty yards too late and they both were thrown forward against their seatbelts as the car stopped just short of the line. Then, as if nothing had happened, Ash said, “Nothing and nobody is ever going to make me cool. I could be with the hottest babe in school and still be a total loser, and so could you. Unless you’re an amazing sports star. Where do you live, anyway?” He’d just realized he’d been auto-piloting toward this taco stand on the way to the library, and he needed to get rid of Elijah before he said something stupid--or missed an opportunity to check out a girl or something.
Elijah cussed when Ash almost killed them at the red light, and then he stared at him when he went on talking like he hadn’t just almost killed them at the red light. He fought with his seatbelt, because Ash was obviously insane, and once he managed to free it he started listening to what the other boy was saying again. He started to give directions to his house, and he stopped midway through. “You’re bloody insane. You almost killed us again. Move aside. I’m driving,” he insisted. “You’re mental.” He started to open the door, yes, on the moving car, but he stopped and looked back at Ash. “You’re too good looking to be as much of a loser as you say.” He hadn’t meant to say that. Not really. Bollocks. “Not that I was checking you out or anything queer like that.” No, really, really not queer.
The taco stand was right outside the door as Elijah tried to exit, and even though the doors were still locked, Ash was alarmed enough to pull over to the side of the road. Heat was climbing up the back of his neck, but it was a good, embarrassed-thrilled kind of heat, because it spread down the rest of him. “Yeah, right.” Like he got called good looking all the time. In this kind of agreeing haze, he stared intently at the taco place to avoid the intense eyes. He sort of smiled anyway. “I didn’t almost kill us. I know what I’m doing. You want a taco?” Then, to advance the explanation, he indicated the stand (a dingy block of a building with cheap plastic tables, ragged umbrellas, and steam that smelled like cheap carne asada issuing from its top).
“You did almost kill us. I was present, remember? You can’t argue if I was present for my almost-death.” Clearly Elijah had gotten over said almost-death, since his sentences were no longer stilted, screaming word collections. He glanced toward the taco stand, wondering why Ash was staring at it like it was a hot girl or something. It didn’t look all that great to him, definitely not like a hot girl. “Are they all that and a bag of chips?” Yeah, he hadn’t always lived in Devonshire. He tried his door - still locked - and then he reached across Ash and flicked the lock-protect on his side. “If you can’t stop staring at them, how can I say no?”
“You didn’t almost-die,” Ash said automatically, but finding his face spread in an unfamiliar grin as Elijah went for the door. He turned the car off and tried to elbow Elijah off the controls, pressing a forearm to his chest and nudging while avoiding catching him in the face. “It looks like a dump but they’re the best in driving distance.” Additional plus: all the other kids were too good to be seen here, so they never came.
“Had you run the red light, I could have died,” Elijah insisted, shoving back at the forearm and stilling inexplicably and doing it again. Elijah wasn’t normally the shove-y type, and he didn’t stop to think about it. He just freed the lock and shoved with his hands at Ash’s chest, did it once more, and moved back and immediately opened his own door. “Fine. Prove it,” he said, as if he hadn’t just... what? Nothing, that’s what. Whatever. He stepped out into the bitter cold, and he walked up to the man behind the unimpressive looking stand. “I’m told your tacos are fit for Shakespeare, even when he is not using iambic pentameter,” he told the man manning the window cheekily.
Feeling abruptly as if he had just won something, something milestone, like a million dollars, Ash glanced back at traffic and climbed out of his car. The man in the window stared at Elijah’s uniform but he recognized Ash, who gave him a sheepish wave as he came up behind Elijah. “Um,” he said. “Hey. Can I get four of the crispy tacos?” Then at the other kid, after a quick revision of the situation and casually adjusting the distance between them, “What do you want?”
“I’ll take what the expert is taking,” Elijah said, this to the man being the stand and not to Ash. By the time he looked over at the taller boy, he had quirked a brow at him. “Are you buying, since you almost killed me.” He liked reminding him of that. “You should let me drive,” he added, holding his palm out for the keys. Elijah knew how to drive, sure, sort of. How hard could it be? And it would make him feel more normal, because he was feeling a little sick to his stomach right now.
“Like hell,” Ash, perversely pleased at being a mortal danger to anyone. “You drive on the wrong side of the road, and we’ll die in a head-on collision. Like James Dean. Crash, done.” He nudged Elijah aside to pay, getting him in the ribs with his elbow again. “Thanks,” he told the guy on the other side of the window. He actually seemed to mean it, and the guy noticed too, because he smiled and handed over the change without saying anything else. Again to Elijah, “You owe me five bucks.”
“As if! You have more money than I do,” Elijah protested, taking his own tacos without returning the elbowing. “He’s elblowy,” he told the man behind the window. “Don’t you think as much? Is he always elbowy?” He had the conversation knowing Ash would find it annoying, and that made it better. “Also,” he said, taking a bite of a taco, “he drives like a madman. And,” this to Ash, “ James Dean had a death wish, I’ll have you know. He felt he was his characters, and he wasn’t stable. I’m entirely stable, so I could not possibly crash like James Dean.” Smug.
Ash was easily embarrassed, and even if he didn’t know the taco guy’s name, he saw him a lot and he knew that the taco guy had never seen him with anyone else, so he elbowed Elijah toward one of the tables, keeping his head down and ignoring the prods. “You didn’t know him,” he said, in a challenge that wasn’t quite an argument. He’d read a book on Dean from the library last year, and Ash didn’t get why everybody was so convinced the guy offed himself. “It was a car accident. Some other guy hit him.”
When they reached the table, Elijah unwound the scarf from around his throat, and he shucked off the jacket. Without the bulk, he was still thin, but it wasn’t scrawny thin. His shoulders were broad in the right places and he was very proud to have grown out of his bird chest the year before. He loosened the tie at his throat enough that he could breathe, and then he sat down, rolling up his sleeves to his forearms before he picked up the taco he’d taken a bite of while standing. “He was self destructive,” he said, taking another bite. “Just like Marilyn Monroe,” and this was kind of like talking to Lucas back home, because Lucas would let him go on about everything in the world, even if it wasn’t cool.
Ash knew enough to look the other way when somebody was taking off their clothes, especially if he was attracted to them. He didn’t take off his scarf, or coat, and he wasn’t wearing a hat, so he sat there in his winter-wear and opened up one of his tacos to mix the ingredients a little before taking a bite. They fried the shells, and it was delicious. “No he wasn’t,” Ash said, not that he knew anything about Marilyn Monroe, but by the sound of it he should, possibly by saying something about how hot she was, but he didn’t want to take a blind shot so he just shut up. “Maybe he was just stupid.” He crunched into his taco.
“You don’t get famous by being stupid,” Elijah said, putting down his taco when the shell cracked and then picking at the innards with his fingers. “He thought he was Jim Starke. He thought he was the guy from East of Eden, and he started racing like crazy, and he got himself dead.” Beginning to end, and his tone said that was that. “Marilyn Monroe was different, but it was the same thing in the end. They just couldn’t find what they were on screen. It must be hard, playing at being the bomb, and then having to go back and be just who you are all the time.” He picked up his second taco, and he took a bite, but the blue eyes were fixed on Ash, awaiting agreement.
Ash didn’t agree at all, at least, not about James Dean. The book had been pretty amazing, and even though he looked hot (hot) on screen, James Dean had been totally messed up and screwing with friends and drugs and junk. The part that really got Ash had been the part about him and this other guy, the friend of his that wrote the book (or was in the book, or ghost-wrote the book, or something). The guy said they were together. In secret. It was really romantic, and Ash didn’t think it was like Marilyn Monroe at all. “Everybody does that,” he said down at his tacos, again not disagreeing but not quite agreeing.
“Everybody does what?” Elijah asked, because maybe he missed something while he had stopped eating and started just staring at the boy across the table waiting for an answer. He didn’t think so, but maybe, because he was trying to figure out if- no, no he wasn’t trying to figure anything out. He took a harder bite of the taco, and the thing cracked all over the place. “Dammit,” he cursed, and he sort of wished the ground would swallow him up a little. He felt younger than Ash, then, for the first time in the conversation, and he didn’t like it.
At least that brought Ash’s head up and put a smile on his face. “You have to eat over the tray,” he advised, demonstrating with his elbows on his table. Reluctantly, Ash repeated, “I said everybody thinks they’re the bomb until they go back to being themselves.” To prevent an immediate continuation from being expected, he took another bite, still managing to stay clean while consuming the mess and licking carne asada off his fingers. He shrugged at Elijah just to prove he didn’t care what he thought of his table manners.
Elijah didn’t put his elbows on the table. It was the principle of the thing. “Well, it stands to reason that some people have more trouble going back to being themselves. James Dean was one of them. Imagine if you got to spend months on end being this beautiful, angst-ridden fly dude, and then you had to go back to being just some guy who had dropped out of college.” Yeah, he’d read a Dean biography along the line, too. “It’s got to suck, mate. I’m not saying he was trying to kill himself. I’m saying he was self destructive.” He popped the broken-off corner of a shell into his mouth, and he raised a brow, waiting for the counter argument.
Since he had not yet been mocked or criticized for his deviating opinions, his car, his clothes, the food or some other aspect of his being, Ash was a little more willing to reply. “I don’t think so. He was just depressed sometimes and a thrill-junkie the rest of the time, and sometimes he was stupid, but it’s not the same thing. Ash was on taco three, and he pushed the remains of taco two into the shell to eat it.
“Are you either of those things?” Elijah asked, because hiding and running was maybe a depressed thing, and it was easier to ask it this way than outright. “Do you have a girlfriend?” because, yeah, that was random, but it just popped into his head out of nowhere, and he looked down at his taco as if figuring it out was more important than getting into a good college, which was really important.
“Psh,” Ash said, as if that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, being depressed. “No way.” Again he shook his head to the second question. “Girls are more of a pain than anything.” And the usual story to get them to leave him alone: “I like this girl I met in summer camp, but that’s, like, another state.” And more taco-stuffing. He assumed that two weeks wasn’t long enough to find a girl, so he didn’t ask the same question.
Elijah pushed what was left of the tacos aside, and he crossed his arms in front of himself on the table. “You should come over this weekend, crash, watch some James Dean and argue about it. Maybe sneak out and see if we can find something to hit.” Eljiah had never hit anything, but Ash had a car, and everyone knew girls liked cars. “My-” he stopped just shy of saying aunt and uncle. “My crib was designed as the servant quarters, so it’s above the house and we can get in and out without anyone seeing.” There was a challenge there, like here had been when he’d held out his hand to shake originally. “It’s all good if you’re scared, though.” Grin.
A piece of lettuce fell out of Ash’s mouth in his surprise. “What, are you serious?” Nobody invited him to anything, especially not to their house. Not seriously, anyone. Someone had invited him to a party once that hadn’t actually been happening, and then they laughed when he showed up. That was generally the kind of thing that Ash was invited to. Wiping his hand on a napkin, he pushed a shock of hair out of one eye and tried to see if Elijah was serious or not. Would he be able to tell? He just met the guy. “...You still owe me five bucks.”
“I’ll order pizza,” Elijah offered. He had just started school that day, and he didn’t know Ash was part of the outsiders. He saw a tall, handsome (not in a gay way) guy with wheels and who knew what iambic pentameter was, and he thought Ash just lacked confidence. He could help with confidence. He could see the uncertainty there, even without the question, though. Maybe he dressed like a dork out of uniform? “No, genuis, I’m joshing you. Yes, I’m serious.” Eye roll. “Friday after school?” there were a few days between there and now, and maybe he could figure Ash out better between now and then.
Ash’s chin came up a little bit. That would be enough time for Elijah to figure out school, meet some other people more interested in Babe Ruth’s batting average, and back out. “Yeah, okay.” He was still going to hope, though. He’d just have to hide it. A lot of things could happen between now and then. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home, if you stop being such a coward about it.” He grinned and dumped the contents of his tray.
Elijah stood, and he went through the process of rolling his sleeves and slipping on his jacket and winding his scarf again, and he didn’t rush. He picked up the tray once he was done, and he dumped it. “If I don’t make it home,” he called to the oblivious man behind the counter, “it’s because he killed us with his jacked up driving!” He grinned at Ash then, and he clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not a coward. You’re a menace.”
Ash grinned back. He now felt that his driving was a messed-up badge of honor, like an awesome James Dean thing, and he beamed like it was fucking Christmas morning. It wasn’t until they were both back in the car again that he realized that he was so completely screwed.