Fic: Nothing's Fair in Love or High School (Bandom, Frank/Gerard, PG-13)
Title: Nothing’s Fair in Love or High School
Author: allyndra
Pairing: Frank/Gerard
Rating: PG-13(for cussing, because, hey. These guys cuss a lot)
Length: 4,038 words
Summary: Frank can deal with being a loser in high school, but he’d kind of like to stop being a loser who’s in love with his best friend, thanks.
Disclaimer: These are lies, and I’m the lying liar who made them up.
Notes: High School AU set in an I’m Not Okay-verse in the mid-nineties. Ages have been tweaked a bit. Beta’d by snarkyrainbow, who is awesome.
Frank flipped through the pages of Ray’s magazine carefully. Other guys bought these things and ripped them apart pulling out the posters; Ray bought them for the guitar tabs printed in the back, and God help you if you creased the pages.
“Dave Mustaine has girl hair,” he said meditatively. Then he snapped his mouth shut and looked over his shoulder, because he did not want Gerard giving him a lecture on how stifling gender roles could be. Or smacking him upside the head and calling him a retard, which was equally likely.
Mikey, who was either fearless or immune to the threat of Gerard, snorted and said, “Dave Mustaine has supermodel hair. He should give up being a rock star and do shampoo commercials.”
“Who should do shampoo commercials?” Gerard asked, dropping onto the step beside Frank and nudging him with his knee. His jacket was rucked up by the straps to his backpack, and his tie was crooked. Frank looked at him and was glad he was wearing sunglasses. It was fucking tiring keeping himself from staring at Gerard, all adoring and shit. He didn’t know if he could muster the energy before first period.
While Frank was indulging in googoo eyes behind the safety of his shades, Mikey answered, “You should,” with a wave at Gerard’s head.
Gerard rolled his eyes, but Frank could kind of see it. On the rare occasions when it was clean and combed, Gerard’s hair fell to his shoulders, silky and black, and feathery. Not feathery like a bird, feathery like a male, punk Farah Fawcett. Not that Frank would ever tell Gerard that, because Kate Jackson was totally his favorite Angel, and he didn’t want to know what Gerard would look like with Sabrina hair.
Gerard looked back and forth between Frank and Mikey, his expression serious, for a long moment. Then he quirked an eyebrow and said, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, assholes.”
Frank shoved his sunglasses up on his head and said earnestly, “But, Gee, I’m really shallow. I love you because you’re beautiful.”
Gerard threw his head back and laughed, making his Farah hair bounce. Frank didn’t know if he was laughing about the beautiful part or the love part.
The warning bell rang before he lost his head enough to ask.
***
Bob was way too cool to hang out with Frank. Apparently, no one had told Bob that, for which Frank was eternally thankful.
Like right now. Bob and Frank had first lunch shift together, while the rest of their friends had second. The two of them were sprawled on the bleachers during lunch, and people kept waving at Bob. Football players would shout, ”Hey!” and tell Bob he should try out for the team, and girls would stop on the field below to gaze up at Bob, giggling and saying things that Frank was too far away to hear. (Not that he wanted to. He’d had detention with Suzie and Marissa once, and they’d talked about Bob’s gorgeous blue eyes, and his strong shoulders, and how he was so mysterious the whole time. Frank could probably go the rest of his life without hearing that again.)
The point was, Bob could have been hanging out with other people, popular people, but he seemed perfectly content to sit here with Frank, half-assing his way through the homework that was due in his next class and eating a pudding cup.
Frank was stretched out on his stomach, with his legs kicked up behind him and crossed at the ankles, his mouth pursed in concentration. He used a Cheeto to add another song to his list. So far he had Rosanna, Jeremy, Sherry, Roxanne, and Hey, Mickey. He wasn’t sure if the “Hey” should disqualify the last one. He added a smudgy, orange Angela to the list and sang, “Angela, I’ll be there for ya,” under his breath, giggling a little, because that had to be the worst rhyme ever.
He ate the rest of that Cheeto and pulled another one from the bag. “You could just use a pencil,” Bob told him, raising his eyebrows like Frank was the weirdest thing he’d seen in days. And that was so not true, because Bob had seen Mikey attempting to French braid Ray’s hair just yesterday.
“Fuck you,” Frank said, pointing a Cheeto at him. “The pencil fascists have taken over the school system, but they won’t get me. When the Number 2 pencil regime rules the country, you’ll see. I’m a rebel.”
Bob shook his head. “Yeah, you’re like the one man French Resistance.” Frank grinned at him, both because he liked the sound of that and because “the French Resistance” always made him think of Top Secret, and that was some funny shit.
Frank licked his Cheeto to make it soft enough to write with and added Joey to the list. “Nobody ever writes songs called Frank,” he said sadly. “I’m musically neglected.” Bob just made a grunting noise, so Frank went on, “Someday I’m going to write a song named after somebody, too.” He liked the idea of some kid, years from now adding Frank’s song to his own “Songs With People’s Names for Titles” list, written out with the snack food of the future. “It’s gonna be awesome.”
Bob stole a Cheeto and said, “No, it won’t. Nothing good rhymes with ‘Gerard.’”
On second thought, the football players could have Bob. He was an asshole. Frank threw a Cheeto at him and laughed when it landed in his hair.
***
Frank kept an illegal Sharpie in his backpack at all times. It was illegal because the principal had decided that the only thing students could possibly do with a permanent marker was deface school property. It made Frank kind of want to deface something, just out of spite.
If his mom had asked him why he had the Sharpie - and if she knew he had it, she would ask. She was almost as bad as the principal, but his mom would think he was sniffing the marker, not vandalizing stuff with it - Frank would have told her he used it to color over scuffs in his shoes. Or he would have gone way out and said he used it for making posters for the Student Council, or something.
But really, he just kept it so Gerard could use it to draw on him.
They had the same study hall, even though Gerard was a senior and Frank was just a sophomore. They sat next to each other in the back corner, next to the broken pencil sharpener and the bookshelf full of National Geographics from ten years ago. They were supposed to be studying and doing homework, but usually they passed a notebook back and forth, using the pages to talk shit about the kids on the lacrosse team, make up and then critique song lyrics, argue about what they should do over the weekend. And whenever Ms. Pagliotta got interested enough in her magazine to ignore the kids, Frank made Gerard draw him a tattoo.
No matter how permanent the marker was supposed to be, the drawings always faded after a few days, but that wasn’t so bad. It meant Frank could make Gerard replace them. He waited until Ms. Pagliotta had the line between her eyebrows that meant she was completely entranced in the pages of Cosmo and kicked Gerard’s desk.
“Hey,” he whispered. He held out the marker. “Ink me, baby.”
Gerard rolled his eyes, but he scooched closer to Frank’s. He bit his lip and looked at Frank’s arms, which were still covered by his shirt sleeves. He’d gotten into a drawing groove over the weekend, and he’d drawn serpents and vines all over Frank’s left arm and flames and dragons all over the right. “I think you’re maxed out,” Gerard said. He forgot to whisper, and the guy sitting in front of Frank glared over his shoulder at them. Frank considered referring him to the guidance counselor, because anyone who took study hall that seriously needed an intervention.
Frank pulled off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. “Here,” he said. “All shiny and clean.” Gerard huffed out a sigh, but he leaned in and undid two more buttons, baring Frank’s collar bone. He held the fabric in place with one hand and started drawing. Frank craned his neck in a variety of stupid ways, trying to see what Gerard was drawing, but all he could see was dark messy hair and Gerard’s hands.
Which, really. Looking down at his own body and seeing that? Was so hot.
Frank concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, because he kind of wanted to gasp or pant or in some other way breathe like a romance novel heroine about to be ravished. Not that Gerard showed any signs of ravishing Frank. He just kept on drawing, intent on the black lines - lightning and dead trees - he was marking onto Frank’s skin. Frank didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed off. On the one hand, he didn’t really want the embarrassment of Gerard noticing how he affected Frank. But on the other hand, Frank was sitting right here, blushing under Gerard’s hands, and it was a little insulting that Gerard found the Sharpie more interesting.
A few minutes before the bell rang, Gerard finished up and popped the cap back on the marker. He bit a thumbnail and surveyed his work. After a moment, he nodded. “I like it,” he said.
“It’s fucking awesome, man,” Frank told him. He couldn’t actually tell from this vantage point, but he was pretty sure it was awesome. Gerard did the shy thing where he ducked his head when someone complimented him. One of these days, Frank was going to lose it and duck down too, keeping eye contact while he told Gerard over and over how amazing he was.
Postponing that day took a lot of Frank’s concentration.
After the bell rang and Gerard took off for his next class, Frank grabbed his tie, jacket, and backpack and went to the restroom. He ignored the trio of boys getting high in one of the stalls and stared at himself in the mirror. His collar was still undone, and he spread it wider to see the drawing. It was creepy and gorgeous, tree branches clawing up at the sky and lightning raking down toward the ground, all laid out in thin black lines on his pale skin. He let himself run his fingers over it just for a moment, then he resolutely buttoned his shirt and put on his tie.
He could see the drawing faintly through the white fabric of his shirt, so he pulled his jacket on, too. Then he untucked his shirt, even though he knew he’d get in trouble for it. If he had to choose between detention and getting caught in the halls with a hard on, he’d take detention.
***
Maybe it was because he was short, but people sometimes didn’t notice Frank. He didn’t understand it, because he was loud and obnoxious a whole lot of the time, but people kept forgetting he was around. That’s how he’d gotten stuck listening to The Many Virtues of Bob in detention that time.
And it’s how he wound up listening to a pack of girls from the art club talking about how cute it was that Gerard and Lindsey were so in love. “Even though she could do better,” they said.
Usually Frank would have cussed them out and maybe made up a scathing chant in reply to an insult to Gerard like that, but he felt like he had a football stuck in his throat.
It turned out to be really hard to defend his stupid fucking moronic friend who fell in love with girls even though Frank was right fucking in front of him when he had a football in his throat.
***
Ray was kind of soothing to be around. Not because he was all calm and zen, because he wasn’t. Ray could be one uptight bitch. No, Ray was soothing because he was really fucking oblivious.
Frank was drooping when he walked into Ray’s garage. He was like a limp, soggy ball of unhappiness on legs, and he didn’t think he could even deal with anyone other than Ray. Bob would have put him in a headlock and noogied him until he told him what was bothering him, and Mikey would have stared at him and somehow divined it with his creepy mind powers. Ray just looked up from his guitar and said, “What’s wrong with this chord progression?”
Frank grabbed his own guitar from the corner where it lived (he had a better one at home that his dad had bought him last time he’d visited, even though it still kind of broke his dad’s heart that he didn’t play the drums) and folded himself up cross-legged on the floor next to Ray. He still felt limp and soggy, but holding a guitar made it a little more bearable. Like it was some kind of Frank-supporting scaffold.
“Play it again,” he said. Ray did.
They played for nearly two hours, stopping to rearrange things and argue and accuse one another of ripping off other people’s melodies. It was good. When Frank played in front of people, he got such a high from performing that he couldn’t even consciously think about the music. He just played it, couldn’t stop it from happening. But sometimes it was nice to feel like he had a brain when he held a guitar.
Frank got all caught up in it - turning notes over in his head and trying them out with his hand, singing snatches of lyrics to see if maybe they could become songs instead of bits of weird poetry - and that was good, too. It meant that he couldn’t think about Gerard. Actually, most of the lyrics were Gerard’s, so Frank did think about him, but he thought about his voice and his vocabulary and his inability to survive without metaphors, not about Gerard maybe wanting to date Lindsey. So Frank counted it as a win.
Frank spent so much time thinking about Gerard in general that it felt wrong to try and block off Gerard-thoughts. Even the really crappy ones about pigtails and laughter and the fucking art club. It wasn’t really much of a surprise when those thoughts came rushing back in on him as soon as he packed up his guitar. He slumped against the wall next to the guitar stand and wondered if maybe he could run away from home so he didn’t have to go to school tomorrow.
The circus still took kids in, right? Frank could totally rock a trapeze, he was sure.
He sighed. If he ran away, his mom would come after him, and she’d make him start seeing a therapist again. Frank was fine with the idea of therapy and whatever, but there was no way he was going to look into some shrink’s eyes and tell him he’d run away from home because a boy didn’t like him. Plus, trapeze artists wore way too much Spandex.
Frank picked up his stuff and said goodbye to Ray, who was frowning intently at the papers he’d been making notes on. He didn’t really expect Ray to even notice that he was leaving, much less care, but Ray called out to him just as he was leaving the garage.
“Hey, Frank!” Frank paused and glanced back over his shoulder. Ray was looking at him the same way he’d been looking at the music. “You’re being a pussy. You should ask him out.” He gave Frank this encouraging nod and smile, like he was a kindergarten teacher and Frank was particularly slow with the Play-Doh.
Frank gave him a weak glare and left. He needed to find friends who either noticed less or gave better advice.
***
Because Frank was completely lame in all things, he decided to deal with Gerard’s mad love affair with Lindsey Ballato through the time honored technique of complete avoidance. Since he usually saw Gerard before school, between classes, in study hall, and at band practice, this required some pretty extreme measures. He started getting to school extra early so he could already be in class by the time Gerard showed up to loiter on the front steps. He mapped out alternate routes through the hallways, ones that didn’t intersect with any possible path that could get Gerard from place to place. He blew off band practice, even though he knew he was risking death by Ray Toro. He couldn’t stop going to study hall, but he sat on the other side of the room, near the bulletin board full of notices and lunch menus from two semesters ago.
He was impressed with himself, actually. He thought maybe he should call up the FBI or the CIA and apply to be a spy after he graduated high school.
He was taking one of his super secret new routes to study hall on Friday when he felt a hand grab his elbow as he walked past the auto shop. He startled and dropped his books. The hand was attached to Gerard, which was surprising. It wasn’t surprising that Gerard would want to stop him, but where he stopped him. Frank was pretty sure Gerard’s own car ran on rubber bands.
“Come on,” Gerard said. His shoulders were kind of hunched, and he hadn’t let go of Frank’s arm.
“I have class,” Frank said lamely.
Gerard scoffed. “You have study hall. Grab your shit and come on.”
Frank thought about making a break for it when Gerard let go of him long enough to gather his books, but Gerard looked twitchy enough to catch hold of him before he could get away, so he didn’t try it. He just picked up his stuff and followed meekly as Gerard led him out behind the portables, where the stoner kids went to get high.
Gerard didn’t look like he wanted to get high, though. He looked like he wanted to maybe throw something. “What the hell, Frank?” he said. “Why have you been blowing us off?”
“I talked to Mikey on the phone last night,” Frank muttered, dropping his books and his backpack onto the crabgrass. “And I had lunch with Bob all week.”
“Fine. Why have you been blowing me off?” Gerard sighed. “Usually if I piss you off, you just say so and break my stuff.”
Frank had a bunch of options. He could deny being mad, could fake illness, could make up some offensive thing for Gerard to have done. Instead, he opened his mouth and said, “I didn’t think you’d notice.”
Gerard blinked. Then he blinked again. “How could I not notice the Frank-shaped hole in the world? It’s like the Scissormen came and cut you out, because you’re just gone.” He bit his lip. “It really sucks.”
“I thought maybe you’d rather spend time with Lindsey,” Frank said. He couldn’t believe he said it. He was being jealous and pathetic, which blew, but now Gerard knew that he was being jealous and pathetic, and that blew way more.
Gerard opened his eyes really wide, and when Gerard opened his eyes wide, they were practically inhuman. The guy had Mogwai eyes or something. And seriously, how the hell did Frank fall for a guy with Farah Fawcett hair and Mogwai eyes? He had fucked up taste in men.
“You’re such a retard,” Gerard said. It was unfair that Gerard got to call people retards and he still got to be the sensitive one. “Things aren’t always all,” he paused to bite his nails, and then started talking again without taking them out of his mouth, “binary. It’s not either or. I mean, I can have a PopTart once in a while and still love Boo Berry. I’ve got fucking depth.“
“Yeah, but, Gee,” Frank looked at the ground and smoothed his hair with his hand. He’d lost enough poker games to Bob and Mikey to know that the hair smoothing was a tell, but he couldn’t help it. “The Boo Berry doesn’t get jealous. Or the PopTart doesn’t. I don’t know where I fit into the breakfast metaphor.”
“You’re the Boo Berry,” Gerard said. His voice was soft and warm and closer than Frank had been expecting. He looked up, and Gerard was right there. So close that Frank had to look up at him, even though Gerard wasn’t really much taller than he was. “I can count on you to be there every day. I don’t get tired of you. You’re sweet and interesting, and sometimes I have to share you with my brother, and that’s okay, too.”
Frank flushed. He was pretty sure being compared to cereal was not supposed to be the highlight of his life. “And Lindsey?”
“She’s the … shit, can I stop with the food?” Frank nodded. “She’s pretty rad. I like her. She’s smart and fun, and she kicks ass with oil pastels. And I think she’s kind of hot,” Gerard admitted. “But I can think that about her and still feel the same way I always have about you.”
Frank had admitted to being jealous, even if it was by breakfast cereal proxy, so he wasn’t letting Gerard off that easy. Especially if this was going where he thought it was going. “How have you always felt about me?”
“Fine. God, you’re a shit. I like you. Since maybe June? There was a day last summer when you came over to bug Mikey, and you were laying on your back in the middle of the yard, just screaming at him about The Maxx and how he didn’t get it,” Gerard told him.
Frank grinned. He couldn’t have stopped himself from smiling if he tried, and he wasn’t trying at all. “You thought my obnoxious defense of a comic book was hot?”
Gerard shifted, not exactly stepping away, but looking like he was considering it. “Well, comics are pretty hot,” he said.
Frank put a hand on his arm to stop him from moving away. “You know what’s hot?” he asked brightly. Gerard shook his head, his hair slipping out from behind his ears. It fell around Frank’s face as he leaned in and kissed Gerard, and Frank reached up to tangle his fingers in it.
Frank might possibly have spent a summer reading through all of his mom’s Harlequin romances, and they had led him to believe that when he kissed The One, there would be fireworks and possibly earthquakes. Frank thought those authors should be ashamed of their lies, but he didn’t really care, because his stomach had gone tight and his face felt hot, and he didn’t fucking need fireworks. Gerard made a little noise and let his head tilt back, and Frank thought smugly that he must not need fireworks, either.
Gerard’s hands were magic, because they had been on Frank’s shoulders a second ago, and now they were around his waist, sliding toward the small of his back and pulling him close. Frank let himself be pulled. He was really glad that Gerard wasn’t some big guy, like Bob, because he loved the way their bodies almost matched, lining up thigh to thigh and chest to chest.
“Okay. Okay,” Frank gasped, pulling away. “Not being binary doesn’t mean you expect me to share, right? ‘Cause I’m sure Lindsey’s great and all, but I might rip her ponytails off.”
Gerard shook his head emphatically. “No, I’m a one cereal man,” he said. Then he looked worried. “But not really, right? Sometimes a man needs some Cinnamon Toast Crunch.”
Frank looked at Gerard, with his lips all red and kissed in the middle of his stupid face and his eyes absurdly wide at the idea of losing the right to choose his own cereal, and he thought, ‘Yeah. That’s what I want.’
What he said out loud was, “Dickhead.” But Gerard seemed to understand, because he leaned forward and kissed Frank again before the word was all the way out of his mouth.
Author: allyndra
Pairing: Frank/Gerard
Rating: PG-13(for cussing, because, hey. These guys cuss a lot)
Length: 4,038 words
Summary: Frank can deal with being a loser in high school, but he’d kind of like to stop being a loser who’s in love with his best friend, thanks.
Disclaimer: These are lies, and I’m the lying liar who made them up.
Notes: High School AU set in an I’m Not Okay-verse in the mid-nineties. Ages have been tweaked a bit. Beta’d by snarkyrainbow, who is awesome.
Frank flipped through the pages of Ray’s magazine carefully. Other guys bought these things and ripped them apart pulling out the posters; Ray bought them for the guitar tabs printed in the back, and God help you if you creased the pages.
“Dave Mustaine has girl hair,” he said meditatively. Then he snapped his mouth shut and looked over his shoulder, because he did not want Gerard giving him a lecture on how stifling gender roles could be. Or smacking him upside the head and calling him a retard, which was equally likely.
Mikey, who was either fearless or immune to the threat of Gerard, snorted and said, “Dave Mustaine has supermodel hair. He should give up being a rock star and do shampoo commercials.”
“Who should do shampoo commercials?” Gerard asked, dropping onto the step beside Frank and nudging him with his knee. His jacket was rucked up by the straps to his backpack, and his tie was crooked. Frank looked at him and was glad he was wearing sunglasses. It was fucking tiring keeping himself from staring at Gerard, all adoring and shit. He didn’t know if he could muster the energy before first period.
While Frank was indulging in googoo eyes behind the safety of his shades, Mikey answered, “You should,” with a wave at Gerard’s head.
Gerard rolled his eyes, but Frank could kind of see it. On the rare occasions when it was clean and combed, Gerard’s hair fell to his shoulders, silky and black, and feathery. Not feathery like a bird, feathery like a male, punk Farah Fawcett. Not that Frank would ever tell Gerard that, because Kate Jackson was totally his favorite Angel, and he didn’t want to know what Gerard would look like with Sabrina hair.
Gerard looked back and forth between Frank and Mikey, his expression serious, for a long moment. Then he quirked an eyebrow and said, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, assholes.”
Frank shoved his sunglasses up on his head and said earnestly, “But, Gee, I’m really shallow. I love you because you’re beautiful.”
Gerard threw his head back and laughed, making his Farah hair bounce. Frank didn’t know if he was laughing about the beautiful part or the love part.
The warning bell rang before he lost his head enough to ask.
***
Bob was way too cool to hang out with Frank. Apparently, no one had told Bob that, for which Frank was eternally thankful.
Like right now. Bob and Frank had first lunch shift together, while the rest of their friends had second. The two of them were sprawled on the bleachers during lunch, and people kept waving at Bob. Football players would shout, ”Hey!” and tell Bob he should try out for the team, and girls would stop on the field below to gaze up at Bob, giggling and saying things that Frank was too far away to hear. (Not that he wanted to. He’d had detention with Suzie and Marissa once, and they’d talked about Bob’s gorgeous blue eyes, and his strong shoulders, and how he was so mysterious the whole time. Frank could probably go the rest of his life without hearing that again.)
The point was, Bob could have been hanging out with other people, popular people, but he seemed perfectly content to sit here with Frank, half-assing his way through the homework that was due in his next class and eating a pudding cup.
Frank was stretched out on his stomach, with his legs kicked up behind him and crossed at the ankles, his mouth pursed in concentration. He used a Cheeto to add another song to his list. So far he had Rosanna, Jeremy, Sherry, Roxanne, and Hey, Mickey. He wasn’t sure if the “Hey” should disqualify the last one. He added a smudgy, orange Angela to the list and sang, “Angela, I’ll be there for ya,” under his breath, giggling a little, because that had to be the worst rhyme ever.
He ate the rest of that Cheeto and pulled another one from the bag. “You could just use a pencil,” Bob told him, raising his eyebrows like Frank was the weirdest thing he’d seen in days. And that was so not true, because Bob had seen Mikey attempting to French braid Ray’s hair just yesterday.
“Fuck you,” Frank said, pointing a Cheeto at him. “The pencil fascists have taken over the school system, but they won’t get me. When the Number 2 pencil regime rules the country, you’ll see. I’m a rebel.”
Bob shook his head. “Yeah, you’re like the one man French Resistance.” Frank grinned at him, both because he liked the sound of that and because “the French Resistance” always made him think of Top Secret, and that was some funny shit.
Frank licked his Cheeto to make it soft enough to write with and added Joey to the list. “Nobody ever writes songs called Frank,” he said sadly. “I’m musically neglected.” Bob just made a grunting noise, so Frank went on, “Someday I’m going to write a song named after somebody, too.” He liked the idea of some kid, years from now adding Frank’s song to his own “Songs With People’s Names for Titles” list, written out with the snack food of the future. “It’s gonna be awesome.”
Bob stole a Cheeto and said, “No, it won’t. Nothing good rhymes with ‘Gerard.’”
On second thought, the football players could have Bob. He was an asshole. Frank threw a Cheeto at him and laughed when it landed in his hair.
***
Frank kept an illegal Sharpie in his backpack at all times. It was illegal because the principal had decided that the only thing students could possibly do with a permanent marker was deface school property. It made Frank kind of want to deface something, just out of spite.
If his mom had asked him why he had the Sharpie - and if she knew he had it, she would ask. She was almost as bad as the principal, but his mom would think he was sniffing the marker, not vandalizing stuff with it - Frank would have told her he used it to color over scuffs in his shoes. Or he would have gone way out and said he used it for making posters for the Student Council, or something.
But really, he just kept it so Gerard could use it to draw on him.
They had the same study hall, even though Gerard was a senior and Frank was just a sophomore. They sat next to each other in the back corner, next to the broken pencil sharpener and the bookshelf full of National Geographics from ten years ago. They were supposed to be studying and doing homework, but usually they passed a notebook back and forth, using the pages to talk shit about the kids on the lacrosse team, make up and then critique song lyrics, argue about what they should do over the weekend. And whenever Ms. Pagliotta got interested enough in her magazine to ignore the kids, Frank made Gerard draw him a tattoo.
No matter how permanent the marker was supposed to be, the drawings always faded after a few days, but that wasn’t so bad. It meant Frank could make Gerard replace them. He waited until Ms. Pagliotta had the line between her eyebrows that meant she was completely entranced in the pages of Cosmo and kicked Gerard’s desk.
“Hey,” he whispered. He held out the marker. “Ink me, baby.”
Gerard rolled his eyes, but he scooched closer to Frank’s. He bit his lip and looked at Frank’s arms, which were still covered by his shirt sleeves. He’d gotten into a drawing groove over the weekend, and he’d drawn serpents and vines all over Frank’s left arm and flames and dragons all over the right. “I think you’re maxed out,” Gerard said. He forgot to whisper, and the guy sitting in front of Frank glared over his shoulder at them. Frank considered referring him to the guidance counselor, because anyone who took study hall that seriously needed an intervention.
Frank pulled off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. “Here,” he said. “All shiny and clean.” Gerard huffed out a sigh, but he leaned in and undid two more buttons, baring Frank’s collar bone. He held the fabric in place with one hand and started drawing. Frank craned his neck in a variety of stupid ways, trying to see what Gerard was drawing, but all he could see was dark messy hair and Gerard’s hands.
Which, really. Looking down at his own body and seeing that? Was so hot.
Frank concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, because he kind of wanted to gasp or pant or in some other way breathe like a romance novel heroine about to be ravished. Not that Gerard showed any signs of ravishing Frank. He just kept on drawing, intent on the black lines - lightning and dead trees - he was marking onto Frank’s skin. Frank didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed off. On the one hand, he didn’t really want the embarrassment of Gerard noticing how he affected Frank. But on the other hand, Frank was sitting right here, blushing under Gerard’s hands, and it was a little insulting that Gerard found the Sharpie more interesting.
A few minutes before the bell rang, Gerard finished up and popped the cap back on the marker. He bit a thumbnail and surveyed his work. After a moment, he nodded. “I like it,” he said.
“It’s fucking awesome, man,” Frank told him. He couldn’t actually tell from this vantage point, but he was pretty sure it was awesome. Gerard did the shy thing where he ducked his head when someone complimented him. One of these days, Frank was going to lose it and duck down too, keeping eye contact while he told Gerard over and over how amazing he was.
Postponing that day took a lot of Frank’s concentration.
After the bell rang and Gerard took off for his next class, Frank grabbed his tie, jacket, and backpack and went to the restroom. He ignored the trio of boys getting high in one of the stalls and stared at himself in the mirror. His collar was still undone, and he spread it wider to see the drawing. It was creepy and gorgeous, tree branches clawing up at the sky and lightning raking down toward the ground, all laid out in thin black lines on his pale skin. He let himself run his fingers over it just for a moment, then he resolutely buttoned his shirt and put on his tie.
He could see the drawing faintly through the white fabric of his shirt, so he pulled his jacket on, too. Then he untucked his shirt, even though he knew he’d get in trouble for it. If he had to choose between detention and getting caught in the halls with a hard on, he’d take detention.
***
Maybe it was because he was short, but people sometimes didn’t notice Frank. He didn’t understand it, because he was loud and obnoxious a whole lot of the time, but people kept forgetting he was around. That’s how he’d gotten stuck listening to The Many Virtues of Bob in detention that time.
And it’s how he wound up listening to a pack of girls from the art club talking about how cute it was that Gerard and Lindsey were so in love. “Even though she could do better,” they said.
Usually Frank would have cussed them out and maybe made up a scathing chant in reply to an insult to Gerard like that, but he felt like he had a football stuck in his throat.
It turned out to be really hard to defend his stupid fucking moronic friend who fell in love with girls even though Frank was right fucking in front of him when he had a football in his throat.
***
Ray was kind of soothing to be around. Not because he was all calm and zen, because he wasn’t. Ray could be one uptight bitch. No, Ray was soothing because he was really fucking oblivious.
Frank was drooping when he walked into Ray’s garage. He was like a limp, soggy ball of unhappiness on legs, and he didn’t think he could even deal with anyone other than Ray. Bob would have put him in a headlock and noogied him until he told him what was bothering him, and Mikey would have stared at him and somehow divined it with his creepy mind powers. Ray just looked up from his guitar and said, “What’s wrong with this chord progression?”
Frank grabbed his own guitar from the corner where it lived (he had a better one at home that his dad had bought him last time he’d visited, even though it still kind of broke his dad’s heart that he didn’t play the drums) and folded himself up cross-legged on the floor next to Ray. He still felt limp and soggy, but holding a guitar made it a little more bearable. Like it was some kind of Frank-supporting scaffold.
“Play it again,” he said. Ray did.
They played for nearly two hours, stopping to rearrange things and argue and accuse one another of ripping off other people’s melodies. It was good. When Frank played in front of people, he got such a high from performing that he couldn’t even consciously think about the music. He just played it, couldn’t stop it from happening. But sometimes it was nice to feel like he had a brain when he held a guitar.
Frank got all caught up in it - turning notes over in his head and trying them out with his hand, singing snatches of lyrics to see if maybe they could become songs instead of bits of weird poetry - and that was good, too. It meant that he couldn’t think about Gerard. Actually, most of the lyrics were Gerard’s, so Frank did think about him, but he thought about his voice and his vocabulary and his inability to survive without metaphors, not about Gerard maybe wanting to date Lindsey. So Frank counted it as a win.
Frank spent so much time thinking about Gerard in general that it felt wrong to try and block off Gerard-thoughts. Even the really crappy ones about pigtails and laughter and the fucking art club. It wasn’t really much of a surprise when those thoughts came rushing back in on him as soon as he packed up his guitar. He slumped against the wall next to the guitar stand and wondered if maybe he could run away from home so he didn’t have to go to school tomorrow.
The circus still took kids in, right? Frank could totally rock a trapeze, he was sure.
He sighed. If he ran away, his mom would come after him, and she’d make him start seeing a therapist again. Frank was fine with the idea of therapy and whatever, but there was no way he was going to look into some shrink’s eyes and tell him he’d run away from home because a boy didn’t like him. Plus, trapeze artists wore way too much Spandex.
Frank picked up his stuff and said goodbye to Ray, who was frowning intently at the papers he’d been making notes on. He didn’t really expect Ray to even notice that he was leaving, much less care, but Ray called out to him just as he was leaving the garage.
“Hey, Frank!” Frank paused and glanced back over his shoulder. Ray was looking at him the same way he’d been looking at the music. “You’re being a pussy. You should ask him out.” He gave Frank this encouraging nod and smile, like he was a kindergarten teacher and Frank was particularly slow with the Play-Doh.
Frank gave him a weak glare and left. He needed to find friends who either noticed less or gave better advice.
***
Because Frank was completely lame in all things, he decided to deal with Gerard’s mad love affair with Lindsey Ballato through the time honored technique of complete avoidance. Since he usually saw Gerard before school, between classes, in study hall, and at band practice, this required some pretty extreme measures. He started getting to school extra early so he could already be in class by the time Gerard showed up to loiter on the front steps. He mapped out alternate routes through the hallways, ones that didn’t intersect with any possible path that could get Gerard from place to place. He blew off band practice, even though he knew he was risking death by Ray Toro. He couldn’t stop going to study hall, but he sat on the other side of the room, near the bulletin board full of notices and lunch menus from two semesters ago.
He was impressed with himself, actually. He thought maybe he should call up the FBI or the CIA and apply to be a spy after he graduated high school.
He was taking one of his super secret new routes to study hall on Friday when he felt a hand grab his elbow as he walked past the auto shop. He startled and dropped his books. The hand was attached to Gerard, which was surprising. It wasn’t surprising that Gerard would want to stop him, but where he stopped him. Frank was pretty sure Gerard’s own car ran on rubber bands.
“Come on,” Gerard said. His shoulders were kind of hunched, and he hadn’t let go of Frank’s arm.
“I have class,” Frank said lamely.
Gerard scoffed. “You have study hall. Grab your shit and come on.”
Frank thought about making a break for it when Gerard let go of him long enough to gather his books, but Gerard looked twitchy enough to catch hold of him before he could get away, so he didn’t try it. He just picked up his stuff and followed meekly as Gerard led him out behind the portables, where the stoner kids went to get high.
Gerard didn’t look like he wanted to get high, though. He looked like he wanted to maybe throw something. “What the hell, Frank?” he said. “Why have you been blowing us off?”
“I talked to Mikey on the phone last night,” Frank muttered, dropping his books and his backpack onto the crabgrass. “And I had lunch with Bob all week.”
“Fine. Why have you been blowing me off?” Gerard sighed. “Usually if I piss you off, you just say so and break my stuff.”
Frank had a bunch of options. He could deny being mad, could fake illness, could make up some offensive thing for Gerard to have done. Instead, he opened his mouth and said, “I didn’t think you’d notice.”
Gerard blinked. Then he blinked again. “How could I not notice the Frank-shaped hole in the world? It’s like the Scissormen came and cut you out, because you’re just gone.” He bit his lip. “It really sucks.”
“I thought maybe you’d rather spend time with Lindsey,” Frank said. He couldn’t believe he said it. He was being jealous and pathetic, which blew, but now Gerard knew that he was being jealous and pathetic, and that blew way more.
Gerard opened his eyes really wide, and when Gerard opened his eyes wide, they were practically inhuman. The guy had Mogwai eyes or something. And seriously, how the hell did Frank fall for a guy with Farah Fawcett hair and Mogwai eyes? He had fucked up taste in men.
“You’re such a retard,” Gerard said. It was unfair that Gerard got to call people retards and he still got to be the sensitive one. “Things aren’t always all,” he paused to bite his nails, and then started talking again without taking them out of his mouth, “binary. It’s not either or. I mean, I can have a PopTart once in a while and still love Boo Berry. I’ve got fucking depth.“
“Yeah, but, Gee,” Frank looked at the ground and smoothed his hair with his hand. He’d lost enough poker games to Bob and Mikey to know that the hair smoothing was a tell, but he couldn’t help it. “The Boo Berry doesn’t get jealous. Or the PopTart doesn’t. I don’t know where I fit into the breakfast metaphor.”
“You’re the Boo Berry,” Gerard said. His voice was soft and warm and closer than Frank had been expecting. He looked up, and Gerard was right there. So close that Frank had to look up at him, even though Gerard wasn’t really much taller than he was. “I can count on you to be there every day. I don’t get tired of you. You’re sweet and interesting, and sometimes I have to share you with my brother, and that’s okay, too.”
Frank flushed. He was pretty sure being compared to cereal was not supposed to be the highlight of his life. “And Lindsey?”
“She’s the … shit, can I stop with the food?” Frank nodded. “She’s pretty rad. I like her. She’s smart and fun, and she kicks ass with oil pastels. And I think she’s kind of hot,” Gerard admitted. “But I can think that about her and still feel the same way I always have about you.”
Frank had admitted to being jealous, even if it was by breakfast cereal proxy, so he wasn’t letting Gerard off that easy. Especially if this was going where he thought it was going. “How have you always felt about me?”
“Fine. God, you’re a shit. I like you. Since maybe June? There was a day last summer when you came over to bug Mikey, and you were laying on your back in the middle of the yard, just screaming at him about The Maxx and how he didn’t get it,” Gerard told him.
Frank grinned. He couldn’t have stopped himself from smiling if he tried, and he wasn’t trying at all. “You thought my obnoxious defense of a comic book was hot?”
Gerard shifted, not exactly stepping away, but looking like he was considering it. “Well, comics are pretty hot,” he said.
Frank put a hand on his arm to stop him from moving away. “You know what’s hot?” he asked brightly. Gerard shook his head, his hair slipping out from behind his ears. It fell around Frank’s face as he leaned in and kissed Gerard, and Frank reached up to tangle his fingers in it.
Frank might possibly have spent a summer reading through all of his mom’s Harlequin romances, and they had led him to believe that when he kissed The One, there would be fireworks and possibly earthquakes. Frank thought those authors should be ashamed of their lies, but he didn’t really care, because his stomach had gone tight and his face felt hot, and he didn’t fucking need fireworks. Gerard made a little noise and let his head tilt back, and Frank thought smugly that he must not need fireworks, either.
Gerard’s hands were magic, because they had been on Frank’s shoulders a second ago, and now they were around his waist, sliding toward the small of his back and pulling him close. Frank let himself be pulled. He was really glad that Gerard wasn’t some big guy, like Bob, because he loved the way their bodies almost matched, lining up thigh to thigh and chest to chest.
“Okay. Okay,” Frank gasped, pulling away. “Not being binary doesn’t mean you expect me to share, right? ‘Cause I’m sure Lindsey’s great and all, but I might rip her ponytails off.”
Gerard shook his head emphatically. “No, I’m a one cereal man,” he said. Then he looked worried. “But not really, right? Sometimes a man needs some Cinnamon Toast Crunch.”
Frank looked at Gerard, with his lips all red and kissed in the middle of his stupid face and his eyes absurdly wide at the idea of losing the right to choose his own cereal, and he thought, ‘Yeah. That’s what I want.’
What he said out loud was, “Dickhead.” But Gerard seemed to understand, because he leaned forward and kissed Frank again before the word was all the way out of his mouth.