FIC (Supernatural): The Dukes of Earl
Title: The Dukes of Earl
Author: blue_fjords
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: teen AU Jensen/Misha
Word count: 3,320
Disclaimer: This is completely made up and is, in fact, an AU. So even MORE made up! I do not know these peeps and no disrespect is intended to them (or the awesome state of Texas).
Warnings: I would say none! (Though this is an RPF. So there's that.)
A/N: For qthelights, who got an owie the other day. Meant to post this then, but it kept growing. This is a missing scene from You & Me, Kings of the Summer Realm and does in fact fill a square on my Schmoop Bingo Card for PICNIC. You don't need to have read that to read this, but you should know this is a teen AU, so the events of this story take place in late summer of 1991. Or thereabouts. And Misha's car is the Babe Magnet.
The Babe Magnet was sick. It made a wheezy, spluttering whine each time Misha tried to push it past 40 mph, and the muffler was just barely hanging on. The passenger side door didn’t open, and Jensen usually climbed in through the window. He could live with all that. What he couldn’t live with was the broken radio. It only played the oldies’ station. And as he repeatedly pointed out to Misha, the oldies’ station was not cool.
Misha liked the oldies’ station, though, Jensen could tell. “Silence is golden, but my eyes still see-eee-eee!” he belted, tootling at a snail’s pace down the highway to Wendigo Pond while Jensen cringed in the passenger seat.
“The little old lady from Pas-a-de-na! (Go, Granny, go, Granny, go, Granny, go!) Has a little flower bed made of white gar-de-nyuhs!” he warbled, pulling up outside the church one Sunday morning, winking broadly at the little old ladies in their flowered hats as Jensen dived through the window, heedless of his Sunday best and his mother calling after him.
It was a little funny. In fact, Jensen usually spent the whole length of the song laughing while Misha made exaggerated faces for his solos. The only time it wasn’t funny was when Misha pulled up alongside Jensen and a dozen other eighth graders jogging along the side of the road and started crooning “It’s in His Kiss” along to the radio. Jensen’s face flamed brighter than what he could chalk up to the sun. He might not particularly want to try out for football, but his dad wanted him to and practice was going to be torture from here on out.
Misha climbed the tree in Jensen’s front yard and snuck into his bedroom that night. Jensen was sleeping on his side (not asleep) with his back to the window. The mattress dipped, and then Misha’s form was sprawled out next to him.
“You know, Jen, I think Orion’s gaining weight. That belt is mammoth,” Misha said conversationally.
“They’re glow-in-the-dark. They’re not supposed to be accurate,” Jensen mumbled into his pillow. He had a lot of glow-in-the-dark shit in his room. A thirteen-year-old wasn’t supposed to need a nightlight, but hey, glow-in-the-dark was cool. Well, for a ten-year-old. Now he just clung to the excuse that they were hard to take down.
“Remind me not to get lost in the woods with you,” Misha teased him. Jensen let out a long sigh.
“Could we discuss this some other time?” he grumbled. “I have to get up early for practice.”
Misha was silent for a moment. Jensen waited for the moment to turn golden, but it didn’t. It did grow heavier and heavier and finally he rolled over to look at the other boy. Misha was lying in his usual pose, flat on his back, hands behind his head, except he had quite a frown on his face.
“Misha?” Jensen asked. “Earth calling Misha.”
“I didn’t think about what those other kids would think,” Misha said. He turned to face Jensen. “And I thought you said you didn’t want to go out for football.”
The full moon shone through the window, lighting up Misha’s back and throwing his face into shadow, but Jensen could still see the brow furrowed in confusion.
“Yeah, well, my dad really wants me to. Football’s kind of a tradition around here.” He waved one of his hands vaguely in the air, indicating the Ackles house, their town, Texas.
“It seems like an awful lot of pain for a minimum amount of fun.”
“Welcome to Texas,” Jensen said and punched at his pillow. Football also entailed hours in the broiling sun, hours away from Misha and whatever harebrained scheme-of-the-day he’d concocted for them to get into trouble and wriggle out of the blame.
Misha squeezed his shoulder and Jensen started at the touch. “Okay then. I’ll pick you up after practice, no radio. And then we’ll go have fun, possibly illegal in Texas. Deal?”
Jensen smiled. “Sure.”
He watched Misha climb out of the window and slide on his belly across the tree branch. Misha paused at the juncture where the branch connected to the tree itself and raised himself up onto his hands and knees. “Jensen!” he hissed, all upside-down face and goofy grin. “Illegal in Texas!” He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
“Your face is gonna freeze that way!” Jensen whispered loudly back to him. “’Course, that’d be an improvement!”
“Jealous, much?” Misha called back and swung himself around to shimmy down the trunk of the tree.
***
True to his word, Misha and the Babe Magnet, silent but for engine whine, were waiting outside the middle school gym when Jensen got out of practice late the next morning. Jensen was exhausted, every muscle, it seemed, protesting its harsh treatment.
“I packed a picnic lunch,” Misha announced, opening the driver’s door with a flourish. “You can thank me later. Here, no window climbing today, you poor baby.” Jensen slid gratefully across the wide bench to his familiar corner. “Help yourself to snacks from the picnic basket,” Misha added, getting in behind him and slamming the door.
Jensen looked down at his feet. “That doesn’t count as a basket.”
“Sure it does! I borrowed it from my sister. Snazzier than a plastic bag, huh?” Misha flashed him a grin, and Jensen sighed. Still, he was hungry, so he reached down for the lunchbox and tried to ignore The New Kids on the Block plastered all over the metal surface.
Misha’s idea of a picnic consisted of Handi-Snacks (the breadstick variety, fancy), a small jar of pickles, a couple of overloaded sandwiches that made Jensen’s mouth water, a tiny smooshed white box decorated with ‘Lou & Merrill’s Wedding Day’ in fuchsia script, several snack-size boxes of raisins and a Snickers bar. Jensen opted for a box of raisins.
“So where are we going?” he asked, frowning into his box of raisins. They’d gone stale and were currently squished together in one large box-shaped raisin.
“It’s a magical land, where green giants work in the fields all day and provide lots of tasty corn to the hungry little elves who live in trees and spend all day baking cookies for silly rabbits who never get any love.” Misha’s smile grew even wider.
“You’re such a dweeb,” Jensen couldn’t help but laugh. He shook out his boxy raisins and bit off a corner.
“Careful, Jen, they clump together like that, it means you drew a box of rabbit turds instead of raisins.”
“Fuck!” Jensen swore. He was just starting to swear in earnest now, and the forbidden words tasted delicious on his tongue. There was just something so satisfying about a good loud ‘fuck,’ especially with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face. Especially with Misha laughing next to him as he spat the nasty raisins out the window, his grin almost blinding in the light. “You’re gross, man.”
“I don’t even have to try at it,” Misha replied, opening his eyes wide in mock surprise.
“Hmph.” Jensen leaned forward and flicked on the radio.
“Oh, I’m beginning to think that man has never found the words that could make you want me . . .”
“Lame,” Jensen sighed. “We have to do something about this radio.”
“That’s ‘Cherish’ by The Association. I think my cousin was conceived to that song,” Misha mused.
“Misha! That’s sick, man.”
“Oh, I could say I need you,” Misha sang along. His voice wasn’t bad, Jensen thought, just unacquainted with the concept of carrying a tune. “But then you’d re-a-lize that I want you. Just like a thousand other guys who’d say they love you! With all the rest of their lives when all they wanted was . . .” his voice trailed off. “Huh, I sang it too fast.”
The music took a moment to catch up to where Misha ended, but Misha was already thinking about something else, Jensen could tell. His lips were slightly parted, like he was about to bust out with a classic Misha-ism. Jensen held his breath.
“I think it’d be kind of cool to raise goats.”
Jensen burst out laughing. Misha looked over at him and smiled. “Oh, hey, we’re here.”
Jensen looked around. “Dude, is this the Kripke watering hole? I haven’t been here in years. I thought it dried up.”
“I guess we’ll find out.” Misha pulled off the road and onto a dirt track that wound up a slight incline. They bounced over potholes and Jensen bit his tongue on a particularly vicious dip. Misha put the Magnet in park at the top of the little hill and they both got out, Misha going through his own window in a gesture of solidarity. The vegetation surrounding the sinkhole was fairly brown at the tail end of summer, and there were more trees than Jensen remembered. He hadn’t been there for a swim in years.
“How’d you know about this place?” he asked Misha curiously. Jensen thought he was Misha’s guide. Who else could possibly tell him about all the cool places around town?
“There was an article in the paper about the Kripke family - they were a bit odd.” Jensen snorted. That was an understatement. And Misha read the paper? “It listed all their former property. I actually have no idea if there’s still any water here.”
Jensen rolled his eyes. “Then what did you want to do here? Wait, hold that thought. Food first.” He leaned back in through the window to grab the lunchbox. “Did you bring anything to drink?”
“Only the finest: Yoo-Hoo’s.” Misha produced a cooler from the trunk with a flourish.
“Good man.” Misha was the only one Jensen would drink Yoo-Hoo’s with, as they were clearly a kids’ drink. But if Misha was doing it, then it totally didn’t count. They sat in the grass and leaned back against the Magnet’s front right tire. Jensen took off his sweaty football jersey and spread it out on the grass, then dumped the contents of the lunchbox on top. “Grub’s served.”
“Classy,” Misha murmured, and Jensen flushed a bit.
“What’s this thing?” he asked, flailing a moment before seizing on the strange squashed box with the fuchsia message. It looked like a wedding favor, like the little boxes of candy everyone had received at his aunt’s wedding.
“I found it in my mom’s purse,” Misha announced. “I think they’re already divorced.” He reached for the little box and slid a pinky under the lid. It opened with some difficulty, and both boys put their heads together to check it out.
“What do you think it is?” Jensen asked finally.
Misha held the box up to his eye level and squinted at it. He took a very loud sniff, and then his tongue darted out and licked it.
“Nasty!” Jensen exclaimed.
“You know, I think they’re figs,” Misha said. “Well, that up’s the fruit quotient. We have a rather well-balanced meal here.”
“You can have the figs. And raisins. I’ll take a sandwich.” It was truly a miracle of a sandwich, stocked with every kind of deli meat Jensen knew, and a couple he didn’t. He took a big bite. “Somwhaddawumdo?”
Misha raised one eyebrow (which was really cool, he was teaching Jensen how to do it, but thus far Jensen just wound up doing an exaggerated wink) and Jensen swallowed.
“So what did you wanna do?” he tried again.
Misha took a large bite of his sandwich. “Fifderayo.”
Jensen winked (exaggeratedly) and Misha swallowed. “Fix the radio.”
“Uh . . . how?”
Misha gave him a Cheshire Cat smile, spoiled somewhat by the bits of something green from his sandwich dotting his teeth. “I have a manual. Found it in some boxes we never unpacked.”
Jensen chewed his sandwich for a few more minutes. “I thought you liked the oldies’ station.”
Misha just looked at him before shoving the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. “Bu oo don.”
Misha rose to his knees and shuffled over to the back door, yanked it open and stuck the upper half of his body into the footwell of the backseat. “Ah-ha!” He threw the book onto the football jersey and backed up. Jensen hurriedly demolished the rest of his sandwich and wiped his hands on his shorts.
“You ever fixed a radio before?” Jensen asked as Misha flipped through pages. Misha shrugged.
“I’ve made a marionette before.”
Jensen frowned. “Is that, like, a puppet?”
“It required a lot of skill with my hands,” Misha said seriously. He thrust the book in Jensen’s chest. “You read out loud.”
Jensen laid back in the grass and haltingly read from the manual. He’d helped his dad fix the lawn mower last summer. Jensen’s job had been to hand his dad tools and keep his opinions to himself. The repairs had even worked, for a month at least, before the lawn mower died with a whimper on the hottest day of the year.
It took them about an hour to get the radio detached from the car, mainly because Misha kept interrupting the instructions with snippets from the play he’d written for his marionette. It featured the Abominable Snowman and a missing Roto-Rooter, and a quest for the origin of the color green. Jensen started to get sleepy, lulled by the sound of Misha’s voice and the heat baking into him from the sun. He jerked awake when Misha sat on his lap.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Look-ee what I have.” He hefted the radio in both hands like it was a trophy and grinned down at Jensen. He’d taken his shirt off at some point, and his hair stuck up in odd sweaty clumps. Jensen’s mouth went a little dry and he felt a humiliating surge of interest in his shorts.
“Get off me, you freak,” he rasped and shoved his friend. Misha slid with an “oof!” onto the ground. Jensen scrambled to his feet. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I need to water the trees.”
He trudged off around the perimeter of the sinkhole to a clump of trees that screened him from view and pushed his shorts down. He had needed to take a leak. That must have been it. Because he didn’t think of Misha like that, or any boy, for that matter. Misha was his best friend. He shook off the last few drops of piss and pulled his shorts back up, then wiped his hands on them. He craned his neck to look over the edge of the drop. There was about a foot of water in there, most likely teeming with leeches.
Misha had the radio open by the time he got back. He didn’t glance up as Jensen approached, and Jensen scowled and kicked at a tuft of grass. Would he have to apologize again? It was already embarrassing.
“Waterhole’s dry,” he muttered, watching Misha poke and prod various pieces. “You’re doing that wrong, you know.”
“This way’s more fun,” Misha replied and tugged at a bundle of cords.
Jensen snorted and hunkered down in the grass, hugging his knees to his chest. He watched Misha, his long fingers digging through the parts of the radio like he was a surgeon conducting a delicate operation. His skin was slick and shiny with sweat, and a couple of rivulets formed trails from his hairline down his face to drip off his chin. Jensen stared at the drops, working their way through Misha’s stubble. Some day he’d have stubble just like Misha’s. He longed to reach out and touch it. What would it feel like, rough stubble over smooth skin over hard bone?
Misha looked across at him. “Why are you sitting all the way over there? Don’t you want to play with the radio?”
Jensen blinked. “I can touch it?”
Misha smirked at him. “Why, Jensen - !”
“Shove it.” He rolled his eyes, but scooted closer, kneeling on the edge of his jersey. Misha leaned into him, and he got a whiff of salty sweat and sweet fig. When he bent his head to look at the pieces, Misha bent his head, too. They stayed hunched over like that, heads brushing, as they adjusted wires and Misha wondered aloud what each piece did. Jensen could’ve reached back for the manual, but he felt good there, the sun hot on his bare back, Misha’s soft hair tickling his forehead, Misha’s warm breath in his face, the grass poking his knees up through his jersey.
His stomach was rumbling again by the time all the pieces were put back into the radio.
“Handi-Snack, Jen?” Misha asked him.
“Yeah, okay.”
“They’re hiding in Joey McIntyre’s pants.”
He gave a put-upon sigh, but fished out the cheese and breadsticks while Misha hooked the radio back up.
“Drumroll, please!” Misha called out.
“Dun dun dunnnnnnn!”
“I was thinking of something a little less ominous.” Misha turned the key in the ignition. The clock came on. “We have time!”
Jensen leaned into his side of the car and crawled partly in, his feet sticking up in the air out the window.
“Jensen, dear man, would you care to do the honors?”
Jensen thrust the Handi-Snacks at Misha and turned the dial. A crackly fuzz filled the car, and he pushed it slightly to the left. The Mac Dad will make you - Jump, Jump! The Daddy Mac will make you -Jump, Jump! Kriss Kross will make you - Jump, Jump!
Misha burst out laughing. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, because that is just so much better!” His entire body shook. Jensen scowled, and turned it farther left.
Prayed through the nights! So faithfully, knowing the one that I needed would find me eventually…
He flicked it off, but not fast enough.
“I had a vision of love!” Misha screeched.
“No you didn’t!” Jensen yelled back.
“And it was all that you’ve given to me!” Misha bellowed, and Jensen launched himself across the seat and into Misha’s chest. They fell backwards, out of the car, Misha still chortling. Jensen pinned him to the ground by the simple expedient of sitting on his chest and started tickling every inch of bare skin he could reach.
“Say you wanna have Mariah Carey’s babies!” Jensen shrieked, laughing.
“You wanna have Mariah Carey’s babies!” Misha howled.
“Ass wipe!” Jensen screamed and Misha laughed even harder, hooked his arms around Jensen’s waist and rolled them over. Jensen wound up flat on his back in the grass with Misha pressed against him, his chest still shaking. Jensen could feel the vibrations through his skin and in his very bones. He couldn’t help himself. He lifted his hand and touched that jaw, ran his fingers over stubble and skin and bone until he was infected, again, with Misha’s laugh. It burbled up and out of his throat and Misha grinned down at him.
“Jensen,” he whispered.
“What?” Jensen whispered back.
Misha bent his head until his lips tickled the shell of Jensen’s ear. “I squashed the Handi-Snacks.”
“Fuck!”
Misha laughed again, placed his hands on the ground to either side of Jensen’s shoulders and pushed himself up. “Here,” he said, and offered Jensen his hand, “we still have the Snickers. If it hasn’t melted.”
It hadn’t. They sat on the hood of the Babe Magnet with the radio tuned, by choice this time, to the oldies station, and passed the candy bar back and forth. Insects buzzed in the late afternoon of the late summer day and the slightest hint of a breeze ghosted through their hair. They could see all the way to the horizon from their lofty perch on the Magnet, on the little hill. It was just about perfect. Jensen didn’t even mind much when Misha started to sing along with the radio.
As I walk through this world, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl . . .
Author: blue_fjords
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: teen AU Jensen/Misha
Word count: 3,320
Disclaimer: This is completely made up and is, in fact, an AU. So even MORE made up! I do not know these peeps and no disrespect is intended to them (or the awesome state of Texas).
Warnings: I would say none! (Though this is an RPF. So there's that.)
A/N: For qthelights, who got an owie the other day. Meant to post this then, but it kept growing. This is a missing scene from You & Me, Kings of the Summer Realm and does in fact fill a square on my Schmoop Bingo Card for PICNIC. You don't need to have read that to read this, but you should know this is a teen AU, so the events of this story take place in late summer of 1991. Or thereabouts. And Misha's car is the Babe Magnet.
The Babe Magnet was sick. It made a wheezy, spluttering whine each time Misha tried to push it past 40 mph, and the muffler was just barely hanging on. The passenger side door didn’t open, and Jensen usually climbed in through the window. He could live with all that. What he couldn’t live with was the broken radio. It only played the oldies’ station. And as he repeatedly pointed out to Misha, the oldies’ station was not cool.
Misha liked the oldies’ station, though, Jensen could tell. “Silence is golden, but my eyes still see-eee-eee!” he belted, tootling at a snail’s pace down the highway to Wendigo Pond while Jensen cringed in the passenger seat.
“The little old lady from Pas-a-de-na! (Go, Granny, go, Granny, go, Granny, go!) Has a little flower bed made of white gar-de-nyuhs!” he warbled, pulling up outside the church one Sunday morning, winking broadly at the little old ladies in their flowered hats as Jensen dived through the window, heedless of his Sunday best and his mother calling after him.
It was a little funny. In fact, Jensen usually spent the whole length of the song laughing while Misha made exaggerated faces for his solos. The only time it wasn’t funny was when Misha pulled up alongside Jensen and a dozen other eighth graders jogging along the side of the road and started crooning “It’s in His Kiss” along to the radio. Jensen’s face flamed brighter than what he could chalk up to the sun. He might not particularly want to try out for football, but his dad wanted him to and practice was going to be torture from here on out.
Misha climbed the tree in Jensen’s front yard and snuck into his bedroom that night. Jensen was sleeping on his side (not asleep) with his back to the window. The mattress dipped, and then Misha’s form was sprawled out next to him.
“You know, Jen, I think Orion’s gaining weight. That belt is mammoth,” Misha said conversationally.
“They’re glow-in-the-dark. They’re not supposed to be accurate,” Jensen mumbled into his pillow. He had a lot of glow-in-the-dark shit in his room. A thirteen-year-old wasn’t supposed to need a nightlight, but hey, glow-in-the-dark was cool. Well, for a ten-year-old. Now he just clung to the excuse that they were hard to take down.
“Remind me not to get lost in the woods with you,” Misha teased him. Jensen let out a long sigh.
“Could we discuss this some other time?” he grumbled. “I have to get up early for practice.”
Misha was silent for a moment. Jensen waited for the moment to turn golden, but it didn’t. It did grow heavier and heavier and finally he rolled over to look at the other boy. Misha was lying in his usual pose, flat on his back, hands behind his head, except he had quite a frown on his face.
“Misha?” Jensen asked. “Earth calling Misha.”
“I didn’t think about what those other kids would think,” Misha said. He turned to face Jensen. “And I thought you said you didn’t want to go out for football.”
The full moon shone through the window, lighting up Misha’s back and throwing his face into shadow, but Jensen could still see the brow furrowed in confusion.
“Yeah, well, my dad really wants me to. Football’s kind of a tradition around here.” He waved one of his hands vaguely in the air, indicating the Ackles house, their town, Texas.
“It seems like an awful lot of pain for a minimum amount of fun.”
“Welcome to Texas,” Jensen said and punched at his pillow. Football also entailed hours in the broiling sun, hours away from Misha and whatever harebrained scheme-of-the-day he’d concocted for them to get into trouble and wriggle out of the blame.
Misha squeezed his shoulder and Jensen started at the touch. “Okay then. I’ll pick you up after practice, no radio. And then we’ll go have fun, possibly illegal in Texas. Deal?”
Jensen smiled. “Sure.”
He watched Misha climb out of the window and slide on his belly across the tree branch. Misha paused at the juncture where the branch connected to the tree itself and raised himself up onto his hands and knees. “Jensen!” he hissed, all upside-down face and goofy grin. “Illegal in Texas!” He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
“Your face is gonna freeze that way!” Jensen whispered loudly back to him. “’Course, that’d be an improvement!”
“Jealous, much?” Misha called back and swung himself around to shimmy down the trunk of the tree.
***
True to his word, Misha and the Babe Magnet, silent but for engine whine, were waiting outside the middle school gym when Jensen got out of practice late the next morning. Jensen was exhausted, every muscle, it seemed, protesting its harsh treatment.
“I packed a picnic lunch,” Misha announced, opening the driver’s door with a flourish. “You can thank me later. Here, no window climbing today, you poor baby.” Jensen slid gratefully across the wide bench to his familiar corner. “Help yourself to snacks from the picnic basket,” Misha added, getting in behind him and slamming the door.
Jensen looked down at his feet. “That doesn’t count as a basket.”
“Sure it does! I borrowed it from my sister. Snazzier than a plastic bag, huh?” Misha flashed him a grin, and Jensen sighed. Still, he was hungry, so he reached down for the lunchbox and tried to ignore The New Kids on the Block plastered all over the metal surface.
Misha’s idea of a picnic consisted of Handi-Snacks (the breadstick variety, fancy), a small jar of pickles, a couple of overloaded sandwiches that made Jensen’s mouth water, a tiny smooshed white box decorated with ‘Lou & Merrill’s Wedding Day’ in fuchsia script, several snack-size boxes of raisins and a Snickers bar. Jensen opted for a box of raisins.
“So where are we going?” he asked, frowning into his box of raisins. They’d gone stale and were currently squished together in one large box-shaped raisin.
“It’s a magical land, where green giants work in the fields all day and provide lots of tasty corn to the hungry little elves who live in trees and spend all day baking cookies for silly rabbits who never get any love.” Misha’s smile grew even wider.
“You’re such a dweeb,” Jensen couldn’t help but laugh. He shook out his boxy raisins and bit off a corner.
“Careful, Jen, they clump together like that, it means you drew a box of rabbit turds instead of raisins.”
“Fuck!” Jensen swore. He was just starting to swear in earnest now, and the forbidden words tasted delicious on his tongue. There was just something so satisfying about a good loud ‘fuck,’ especially with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face. Especially with Misha laughing next to him as he spat the nasty raisins out the window, his grin almost blinding in the light. “You’re gross, man.”
“I don’t even have to try at it,” Misha replied, opening his eyes wide in mock surprise.
“Hmph.” Jensen leaned forward and flicked on the radio.
“Oh, I’m beginning to think that man has never found the words that could make you want me . . .”
“Lame,” Jensen sighed. “We have to do something about this radio.”
“That’s ‘Cherish’ by The Association. I think my cousin was conceived to that song,” Misha mused.
“Misha! That’s sick, man.”
“Oh, I could say I need you,” Misha sang along. His voice wasn’t bad, Jensen thought, just unacquainted with the concept of carrying a tune. “But then you’d re-a-lize that I want you. Just like a thousand other guys who’d say they love you! With all the rest of their lives when all they wanted was . . .” his voice trailed off. “Huh, I sang it too fast.”
The music took a moment to catch up to where Misha ended, but Misha was already thinking about something else, Jensen could tell. His lips were slightly parted, like he was about to bust out with a classic Misha-ism. Jensen held his breath.
“I think it’d be kind of cool to raise goats.”
Jensen burst out laughing. Misha looked over at him and smiled. “Oh, hey, we’re here.”
Jensen looked around. “Dude, is this the Kripke watering hole? I haven’t been here in years. I thought it dried up.”
“I guess we’ll find out.” Misha pulled off the road and onto a dirt track that wound up a slight incline. They bounced over potholes and Jensen bit his tongue on a particularly vicious dip. Misha put the Magnet in park at the top of the little hill and they both got out, Misha going through his own window in a gesture of solidarity. The vegetation surrounding the sinkhole was fairly brown at the tail end of summer, and there were more trees than Jensen remembered. He hadn’t been there for a swim in years.
“How’d you know about this place?” he asked Misha curiously. Jensen thought he was Misha’s guide. Who else could possibly tell him about all the cool places around town?
“There was an article in the paper about the Kripke family - they were a bit odd.” Jensen snorted. That was an understatement. And Misha read the paper? “It listed all their former property. I actually have no idea if there’s still any water here.”
Jensen rolled his eyes. “Then what did you want to do here? Wait, hold that thought. Food first.” He leaned back in through the window to grab the lunchbox. “Did you bring anything to drink?”
“Only the finest: Yoo-Hoo’s.” Misha produced a cooler from the trunk with a flourish.
“Good man.” Misha was the only one Jensen would drink Yoo-Hoo’s with, as they were clearly a kids’ drink. But if Misha was doing it, then it totally didn’t count. They sat in the grass and leaned back against the Magnet’s front right tire. Jensen took off his sweaty football jersey and spread it out on the grass, then dumped the contents of the lunchbox on top. “Grub’s served.”
“Classy,” Misha murmured, and Jensen flushed a bit.
“What’s this thing?” he asked, flailing a moment before seizing on the strange squashed box with the fuchsia message. It looked like a wedding favor, like the little boxes of candy everyone had received at his aunt’s wedding.
“I found it in my mom’s purse,” Misha announced. “I think they’re already divorced.” He reached for the little box and slid a pinky under the lid. It opened with some difficulty, and both boys put their heads together to check it out.
“What do you think it is?” Jensen asked finally.
Misha held the box up to his eye level and squinted at it. He took a very loud sniff, and then his tongue darted out and licked it.
“Nasty!” Jensen exclaimed.
“You know, I think they’re figs,” Misha said. “Well, that up’s the fruit quotient. We have a rather well-balanced meal here.”
“You can have the figs. And raisins. I’ll take a sandwich.” It was truly a miracle of a sandwich, stocked with every kind of deli meat Jensen knew, and a couple he didn’t. He took a big bite. “Somwhaddawumdo?”
Misha raised one eyebrow (which was really cool, he was teaching Jensen how to do it, but thus far Jensen just wound up doing an exaggerated wink) and Jensen swallowed.
“So what did you wanna do?” he tried again.
Misha took a large bite of his sandwich. “Fifderayo.”
Jensen winked (exaggeratedly) and Misha swallowed. “Fix the radio.”
“Uh . . . how?”
Misha gave him a Cheshire Cat smile, spoiled somewhat by the bits of something green from his sandwich dotting his teeth. “I have a manual. Found it in some boxes we never unpacked.”
Jensen chewed his sandwich for a few more minutes. “I thought you liked the oldies’ station.”
Misha just looked at him before shoving the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. “Bu oo don.”
Misha rose to his knees and shuffled over to the back door, yanked it open and stuck the upper half of his body into the footwell of the backseat. “Ah-ha!” He threw the book onto the football jersey and backed up. Jensen hurriedly demolished the rest of his sandwich and wiped his hands on his shorts.
“You ever fixed a radio before?” Jensen asked as Misha flipped through pages. Misha shrugged.
“I’ve made a marionette before.”
Jensen frowned. “Is that, like, a puppet?”
“It required a lot of skill with my hands,” Misha said seriously. He thrust the book in Jensen’s chest. “You read out loud.”
Jensen laid back in the grass and haltingly read from the manual. He’d helped his dad fix the lawn mower last summer. Jensen’s job had been to hand his dad tools and keep his opinions to himself. The repairs had even worked, for a month at least, before the lawn mower died with a whimper on the hottest day of the year.
It took them about an hour to get the radio detached from the car, mainly because Misha kept interrupting the instructions with snippets from the play he’d written for his marionette. It featured the Abominable Snowman and a missing Roto-Rooter, and a quest for the origin of the color green. Jensen started to get sleepy, lulled by the sound of Misha’s voice and the heat baking into him from the sun. He jerked awake when Misha sat on his lap.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Look-ee what I have.” He hefted the radio in both hands like it was a trophy and grinned down at Jensen. He’d taken his shirt off at some point, and his hair stuck up in odd sweaty clumps. Jensen’s mouth went a little dry and he felt a humiliating surge of interest in his shorts.
“Get off me, you freak,” he rasped and shoved his friend. Misha slid with an “oof!” onto the ground. Jensen scrambled to his feet. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I need to water the trees.”
He trudged off around the perimeter of the sinkhole to a clump of trees that screened him from view and pushed his shorts down. He had needed to take a leak. That must have been it. Because he didn’t think of Misha like that, or any boy, for that matter. Misha was his best friend. He shook off the last few drops of piss and pulled his shorts back up, then wiped his hands on them. He craned his neck to look over the edge of the drop. There was about a foot of water in there, most likely teeming with leeches.
Misha had the radio open by the time he got back. He didn’t glance up as Jensen approached, and Jensen scowled and kicked at a tuft of grass. Would he have to apologize again? It was already embarrassing.
“Waterhole’s dry,” he muttered, watching Misha poke and prod various pieces. “You’re doing that wrong, you know.”
“This way’s more fun,” Misha replied and tugged at a bundle of cords.
Jensen snorted and hunkered down in the grass, hugging his knees to his chest. He watched Misha, his long fingers digging through the parts of the radio like he was a surgeon conducting a delicate operation. His skin was slick and shiny with sweat, and a couple of rivulets formed trails from his hairline down his face to drip off his chin. Jensen stared at the drops, working their way through Misha’s stubble. Some day he’d have stubble just like Misha’s. He longed to reach out and touch it. What would it feel like, rough stubble over smooth skin over hard bone?
Misha looked across at him. “Why are you sitting all the way over there? Don’t you want to play with the radio?”
Jensen blinked. “I can touch it?”
Misha smirked at him. “Why, Jensen - !”
“Shove it.” He rolled his eyes, but scooted closer, kneeling on the edge of his jersey. Misha leaned into him, and he got a whiff of salty sweat and sweet fig. When he bent his head to look at the pieces, Misha bent his head, too. They stayed hunched over like that, heads brushing, as they adjusted wires and Misha wondered aloud what each piece did. Jensen could’ve reached back for the manual, but he felt good there, the sun hot on his bare back, Misha’s soft hair tickling his forehead, Misha’s warm breath in his face, the grass poking his knees up through his jersey.
His stomach was rumbling again by the time all the pieces were put back into the radio.
“Handi-Snack, Jen?” Misha asked him.
“Yeah, okay.”
“They’re hiding in Joey McIntyre’s pants.”
He gave a put-upon sigh, but fished out the cheese and breadsticks while Misha hooked the radio back up.
“Drumroll, please!” Misha called out.
“Dun dun dunnnnnnn!”
“I was thinking of something a little less ominous.” Misha turned the key in the ignition. The clock came on. “We have time!”
Jensen leaned into his side of the car and crawled partly in, his feet sticking up in the air out the window.
“Jensen, dear man, would you care to do the honors?”
Jensen thrust the Handi-Snacks at Misha and turned the dial. A crackly fuzz filled the car, and he pushed it slightly to the left. The Mac Dad will make you - Jump, Jump! The Daddy Mac will make you -Jump, Jump! Kriss Kross will make you - Jump, Jump!
Misha burst out laughing. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, because that is just so much better!” His entire body shook. Jensen scowled, and turned it farther left.
Prayed through the nights! So faithfully, knowing the one that I needed would find me eventually…
He flicked it off, but not fast enough.
“I had a vision of love!” Misha screeched.
“No you didn’t!” Jensen yelled back.
“And it was all that you’ve given to me!” Misha bellowed, and Jensen launched himself across the seat and into Misha’s chest. They fell backwards, out of the car, Misha still chortling. Jensen pinned him to the ground by the simple expedient of sitting on his chest and started tickling every inch of bare skin he could reach.
“Say you wanna have Mariah Carey’s babies!” Jensen shrieked, laughing.
“You wanna have Mariah Carey’s babies!” Misha howled.
“Ass wipe!” Jensen screamed and Misha laughed even harder, hooked his arms around Jensen’s waist and rolled them over. Jensen wound up flat on his back in the grass with Misha pressed against him, his chest still shaking. Jensen could feel the vibrations through his skin and in his very bones. He couldn’t help himself. He lifted his hand and touched that jaw, ran his fingers over stubble and skin and bone until he was infected, again, with Misha’s laugh. It burbled up and out of his throat and Misha grinned down at him.
“Jensen,” he whispered.
“What?” Jensen whispered back.
Misha bent his head until his lips tickled the shell of Jensen’s ear. “I squashed the Handi-Snacks.”
“Fuck!”
Misha laughed again, placed his hands on the ground to either side of Jensen’s shoulders and pushed himself up. “Here,” he said, and offered Jensen his hand, “we still have the Snickers. If it hasn’t melted.”
It hadn’t. They sat on the hood of the Babe Magnet with the radio tuned, by choice this time, to the oldies station, and passed the candy bar back and forth. Insects buzzed in the late afternoon of the late summer day and the slightest hint of a breeze ghosted through their hair. They could see all the way to the horizon from their lofty perch on the Magnet, on the little hill. It was just about perfect. Jensen didn’t even mind much when Misha started to sing along with the radio.
As I walk through this world, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl . . .