[kh fic] My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada (AU, Part II)
I'm not ashamed to say it, writing this makes me happier than I have been in weeks.
Title: My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada (2/?)
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: T
Pairings: Axel/Roxas + others
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend-or a pretend one.
II.
“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say?”
(The Town and the City, Jack Kerouac)
*
By the third week of March, New England had hit another low pressure front, sending the weather lapsing pitifully into iron skies and snapping wind, bare, quivering trees as far as the eye could see. In the madding rush to make a half-assed wardrobe reversal, Roxas actually left his cell phone in one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. It made him feel kind of like a loser that he hadn’t even noticed it going missing for upwards of three days-but only a little bit.
When he’d finally unearthed the phone from the pile of semi-sentient laundry at the bottom of his closet, it was just in time to be perplexed by the three-and counting-ALL-CAPS text messages already nestled there, the content of which had ranged from:
FINGER NAILS GROW 4 TIMES FASTR THAN TOENAILS.
To:
THE KING OF HEARTS HAS NO MOUSTACHE.
And then, it had gotten really amazing:
TRUFAX: MOAR PPL USE BLUE TOOTHBRUSHES THAN RED ONES. Y?
“I think somebody is trying to mess with my head,” Roxas confessed Friday afternoon at the shop, cracking at last under the pressure.
Sally glared at him over a row of newly unboxed coffee tins. “Oh really, Roxas? All this from a couple of text messages? However did you come to that conclusion?”
In the wake of that which people clearly lacking in linguistic ingenuity had dubbed the Sunday Incident, Sally had entered some kind of emotional fugue state in which she alternated between being deliberately mean and palely loitering about the place. Pathetically, this bizarre combination actually reaped more productivity than the previous horn-dogging, and so Roxas had decided, grimly, that the pining would have to continue until morale improved.
“Not that I really care,” he soldiered on, ignoring the darkly accusatory vibes. “Except the person on the other end is keeping their number locked. And then,” he added, holding up his phone to show her the display, “there are all these accompanying pictures.”
The pictures in question were, respectively, Man With World Longest Finger Nails, Man Performing Cheap Parlor Tricks, and a blurry screenshot from that America’s Funniest Home Video episode featuring the guy who used his roommate’s toothbrush to clean the toilet.
Sally made a frustrated noise, and stomped off to putter with the espresso machine. “You know,” she said, in meaningful sotto voce, “some people would just be quietly thankful for the boons they get. Some people only wish they were that lucky, Roxas.”
Roxas thought this was a sign for him to start hiring people to open his mail, but before he had time to properly flesh out this theory, a customer (singular) had wandered up to the counter, and he found himself doling out the, “How may I help you?” by rote.
The customer-some guy in a black hoodie- silently handed him a cup of coffee.
Roxas blinked widely. “Um, I think you’re kind of confused. See, we sell the coffee. Besides,” he jabbed at the winter green logo on the cup sleeve, “I’m pretty sure management will have you lynched and strung up or something for bringing our competitor’s product in here.”
Hoodie guy, who did look admittedly confused, shrugged haplessly and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger, dude. I was just passing by when some guy out front gave this to me and said to deliver it to the blond kid at the counter. That’s you, right?”
“Some guy out front?” Roxas echoed, a feeling of cold dread settling into the pit of his stomach.
At this point, two things happened, in very quick succession:
1. His phone started shrieking a slow version of Katamari on the Rocks, signaling a new SMS.
2. Sally, who had appeared incapable of avoiding a parked truck only minutes prior, made a sudden, spirited attempt to launch herself over the counter. Her excited war cry could only be heard by dogs in Bolivia, but the loud thrashing sound that resulted from her crashing bodily into the wooden counter was audible to all.
Roxas would have assisted her, but he was busy staring disbelievingly at the display of his phone, which had not only the photo of the cup of coffee he was holding in his very hand but also the message: LOOK OUTSIDE.
So he did, looked up and across of Sally, who was straddling the edge of the counter awkwardly and probably painfully, past the guy in the hoodie, who was still looking kind of confused, and through the glass plate window at the front of the shop, where his line of vision was captured by green eyes a shade too familiar. Right down to the asshattish glint.
Tall, Thin, and Redheaded from the Sunday Incident grinned ostensibly and gave a friendly wave, a small silver phone tucked between his thumb and forefinger.
*
“I hope there’s an explanation for this,” Roxas said testily, tucking his arms around himself to brace against the chilly wind. “Something other than that you’re a recently paroled psychopath and I should be alerting the authorities.”
“First month of parol’s always tough,” the redhead agreed. Then he fiddled with a tassel of the shemagh he had bundled around his neck, and smiled languidly. “Call it a peace offering. You left all mad and huffy last time, so I figured you didn’t take too well to my apology, and you know how the criminally disturbed are about manners, we can’t be having with that.”
“If you think I’m going to be drinking something from a complete stranger,” Roxas pointed out, thinking, Jesus, people are so wrong about the idyllic small town life. New York got a lot of bad rap, but he had lived there for sixteen years and never encountered the faintest suggestion of trouble-place him in Massachusetts for three months and already there were escaped mental patients bringing him coffee and stalking his workplace and doing weirdly distracting things with their green, green eyes.
God, this guy even thought facial tattoos were cool.
“Bet you’d end up drinking it though,” the redhead said, tipping his head back to rest against the redbrick outer wall of the shop.
“Well, you’d be wrong,” snapped Roxas. “Then again, I can see how you’d think that, with the kind of logic that led you to buy coffee for someone who works in a coffee shop.”
“Okay,” the redhead said, holding up one long-fingered hand in a placating gesture. “Let’s get one thing straight. I think-I think-that we can both agree that unless the bean-farmers are willing to use pesticides on their trees, and use them proudly, then it just can’t be considered coffee, now can it?”
Roxas actually opened his mouth to argue the point, and then shook his head profusely, because-seriously, way to be focusing on all the wrong issues. “It was you who was sending me those text messages. How did you even get my number?”
“Your co-worker,” the redhead explained, waving nebulously over Roxas’s shoulder, “was very obliging-if not exactly professional.”
Roxas turned, and sure enough, there was Sally at the counter, raptly making bovine eyes and waving back with gusto. He felt a bit sorry for Stanley, who was going to have to have that conversation with her again about the lawsuits and being a strong, confident woman who didn’t need men to make her feel special.
“Don’t think badly of her,” assured the redhead. “She was very hard to break-I had to resort to coercion and trickery.”
“So you smiled at her, in other words,” Roxas said crossly. “Jesus.”
He stopped in the middle of hating the entire world when he realized that the stranger was grinning, watching Roxas’s left hand-raising the coffee cup and tipping it against his mouth, and Roxas muttered, “Shit,” underneath his breath, even as the liquid went down.
He bit back his next comment however, because the foamed milk had coated his tongue and it was sweet and perfect and perfectly sweet and sweetly perfect-he had long begun to fear that spending so much time at his job was starting to make him forget what real coffee tasted like, this was yet another keen reminder.
“Dry cappuccino,” said the redhead, looking pleased with himself. “I thought you might like it-you seem like a dry cappuccino kind of guy.”
Roxas would have tossed back something searing, but it was difficult to work past the tiny heart attack he was currently experiencing. He’d risk death by deadly toxins for this, and anyway he was spontaneously starting to think that maybe this guy wasn’t so bad-creepy as hell, sure, but no one with such impeccable taste could be all bad. He settled for drinking his-dry, so dry, dry like a desert’s bones-cappuccino in silence.
Which was the exact moment that the redhead got all into Roxas’s face and crooned, “So, can I give you a ride when you get off work?”
*
The car-owning population of Amherst, driving home from work that Friday afternoon, were treated to a very peculiar sight.
It wasn’t Roxas’s laundry day jeans, though those were likely a registered disaster zone. No, if there was ever a reason for all the outright staring and lingering intrigue and annoyed tooting of car horns, it had to be the odd combination of him on his skateboard rolling (normally!) along the sidewalk, and the enormous, chunky-frame motor scooter that was meandering at an unbearably slow pace beside him, engine whirring dully in low gear. It didn’t help that the vehicle kept jerking in dangerously random curves every few minutes; the driver was preoccupied trying to engage Roxas in a conversation:
“You know, a simple no would have sufficed. You didn’t have to throw the coffee at my head like that.”
“Yes,” Roxas agreed, keeping his eyes straight ahead like he was the one behind the handlebars. “That was a waste of a perfectly good cappuccino. Clearly, what I should have done was look around for a largish rock.”
The world was luminous for a moment, and presently, there was a loud clap of thunder overhead. Roxas scowled-as he had stood in the doorway of the shop, the bruised, overcast sky had made itself apparent, a metallic tang of rain heavy in the brisk air. He remembered tamping down the rushing wave of sense-memory at the first storm-rumble, and then a horn had honked at him, loudly, and he’d looked down to the fatigue green of a Piaggio Vespa’s front shield, the glassy finish bringing to mind color schemes in the classics.
“Have you considered seeing someone for those rage issues?”
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Roxas snapped, spinning around angrily. “Why are you still following me?”
“Roxas, right?” the redhead said infuriatingly. “Well, Roxas, can I tell you a secret?”
Roxas pretended not to have heard him. This had little to no effect.
“I have a disease,” the redhead continued, in a low, solemn tone. Roxas wished the guy didn’t insist on emphasizing the roll of the ‘r’ in his name like that-it made him irrationally uncomfortable. “It’s something I’ve kept to myself for a long time, but I feel I can trust you with it. Can I trust you with it?”
Roxas couldn’t help but care a little more. Perhaps it could be terminal. He made a sort of encouraging grimace.
The redhead grinned, delighted. “Right. Once upon a time, Roxas, I came to the majestic shores of Nova Scotia and fell in love with a feisty but petite barmaid with curls of spun gold. We shared a whirlwind romance for one sun-drenched summer, at the end of which she broke my youthful heart and married a lobsterman from Newfoundland. Ironically, the experience has left me with a weakness-being a tragic attraction to small, bossy blondes.”
He said this all in one breath. Half a minute passed. Thunder clapped in the ominous distance.
“You’re so full of shit,” Roxas said flatly.
“Almost had you, though,” the redhead chuckled appreciatively.
Roxas bit his lips, hard. He turned a corner, and his companion just followed him, did something impossibly illegal with his scooter to make a razor-sharp left. Several cars had to swerve abruptly to avoid hitting him, and they were immediately surrounded by a cacophony of angry honking.
“God, you’re going to cause a traffic accident,” Roxas said, not unhopefully. “Why can’t you be a normal person?”
“Wouldn’t have to be if you’d just let me take you home,” shrugged the redhead, pulling over and killing his engine with an anticlimatic whimper. He peered at Roxas earnestly through the visor of his motorcycle helmet. “Come off it, you know perfectly well you’d have a much better chance at beating the rain with Rosalina than on that skateboard.”
“Rosalina?”
“Roxas, meet Rosalina,” the redhead said proudly, stroking the speedometer of his Vespa in a thoroughly sexual way. “Rosalina, Roxas.”
Roxas snorted derisively. “Since you haven’t even told me your name, I don’t think you’re in the best position to be making introductions.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” the redhead said, and his smile was manic. “My name’s Axel. Try to remember that.”
“Axel,” Roxas repeated to himself, fully intending to forget it at his earliest convenience. He had grown rather partial to Crazy Redheaded Dude.
There was a kind of awkward silence. It was broken when a fat drop of water hit Roxas square on the nose. The sky was growing darker by the second, and his feeling of unease noticeably increased with it.
“Alright, this is your last chance,” the redhea-Axel, his name was Axel, it was even a tacky name-said matter-of-factly. “I’m not sticking around to get rained on-either take the ride or be a good girl scout and catch pneumonia, whatever you decide.” He started the engine again, as if to make a point.
“Fine,” Roxas said, to his own surprise.
Axel blinked. “Huh. Really? Just like that?”
“Yes,” said Roxas, growing irate-although at what he wasn’t certain. “I’ll take the ride. Try anything and I’ll hunt you down like a dog in the streets.”
Any normal person would have at least returned a snappy comeback; Axel smiled brilliantly and held out a dark red helmet, a spare he’d pulled out from the pass-through, saying simply, “You’re going to need this.”
Later, Roxas would wonder if that and not the chasing storm was what had made up his mind after all, but this would not come until long, long after he had found himself settling into the backseat of the Vespa, securing the helmet strap beneath his chin. There was no help for it: a normal person wouldn’t go out of their way to help someone who had verbally abused them and physically thrown them into trees anyway.
“I’m gonna hit a brick foot,” Axel warned, coming to balance. “You’d better hold on.”
Roxas cast a hollowly despairing look at the darkening heavens, and placed his hands gingerly on either side of Axel’s skinny waist. He wasn’t in the habit of touching people to whom he wasn’t at least directly related, and the sensation made his skin prickle with goosebumps. There was something almost perverse in the way the angular bones stabbed into the heart of his palms.
But before he could dwell any further on the matter, Axel had switched into reverse and then suddenly they were flying down the street, away from the concrete pavement and into the cold, heavy air, faintly smelling of rain. The wind whipped past his face, rolling off his skin like ghostly fingers and drifting back into the sky; the scenery smeared into a blur all around. If someone had set a soundtrack to this, it would be fey and chilling, the notes rising dark and ethereal like industrial birds, the strumming rhythm of staccato downpour.
“Wow,” Axel could be heard saying over the noise of the scooter. “How Garden State is this?”
Roxas almost dug his fingers maliciously into Axel’s flesh, in the way that made it hurt. He refrained, not wanting to be driven into a tree. “Are you calling me a girl?”
Axel laughed. For a lean man, his laughter was surprisingly deep, booming out of nothing and quickly filling up the spaces in rich, eager slices. His whole body moved with it. Roxas wondered where he usually kept it-in between the easy smiles, strings of never-ending words.
“Please, blondie. You’re no Natalie Portman.”
*
Granted, all that had happened three months ago, but as Roxas caught the fiercely resolute look faintly blazing in Olette’s eyes when she cornered him by the main doors just as school was letting out on Tuesday afternoon, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this stroke of unparallel cruelty was his punishment for the aforementioned poor judgment call.
His paranoia was not, altogether, reasonless. Roxas knew for a fact that Olette was involved at any given time in at least a dozen after-school organizations, including but not limited to something horrific called the Largesse Society, which made her offer of, “Let’s walk home together, Roxas, we never spend any time with each other anymore,” not only some kind of lie but also highly portentous.
Bracing himself, he said reasonably, “We just had the same class seventh period. You live on the opposite side of town.”
“Really?” Olette answered mistily. “Imagine that. Well, it doesn’t affect anything, since all I wanted to do was spend some time with you. We can… talk.”
Given that Olette stood maybe all of five foot two in trendy jeans, the deep intent in her voice totally shouldn’t freak him out as much as it did, but as he had come home at 7 pm the day before with bits of shrimp tempura in his hair, personal dignity probably wasn’t the point anymore.
“But don’t you usually go with Rai?” Roxas said, kind of desperately, and felt an unforeseeably huge rush of relief when he caught out of the corner of his eye a familiar apish backside, standing in a cluster of similarly hulk-like goons clad in identical Letterman jackets. “I think he’ll have something to say about that, don’t you?”
Olette gave him a particularly pitying look. Then she turned and shouted into the dwindling crowd near the entrance, “Hey! Rai! I’m taking Roxas home with me so I can have my way with him and make him like it.”
Rai smiled indulgently and yelled back, “Okay, baby. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Turning back to Roxas, Olette said smugly, “I’ve got those jock-straps exactly where I want them.”
No, personal dignity was definitely not the point anymore. One of these days, he’d just go ahead and commit ritual suicide.
He took a quiet moment to regain equilibrium and smooth down his expression, which was starting to border forlornness, during which time Olette firmly gripped him by the wrist and began dragging him presumably in the direction of his own home.
To her credit, she held out until the school was at least six yards behind them before saying, in a deceptively light tone, “So. You have a girlfriend.”
Roxas tried not to groan, so as to spare her feelings. “Why did I have a feeling this was going to come up?”
A tinge of color rose to Olette’s cheeks, but she valiantly went on. “It’s not that I want to be nosy, but you can’t blame me for being curious. After all, even with Pence and Hayner being,” she made a vague hand gesture that could mean anything from ‘blockheads’ to ‘amoebas’, “the way that they are, you were still not exactly my prime candidate in a run for steady relationship status.”
It was obvious she had spent some time rehearsing this conversation; the little stress in her voice was perfectly pitched when she said, “No offense, but you’re even worse around girls than they are.”
Roxas choked, in a totally manly way.
Olette nodded her sympathy, then brightened immediately, beaming and saying, “But I’m glad I was wrong. I’m really happy for you, Roxas.”
She was nearly sparkling at him, smiling wildly and shiny-eyed, all of which had the effect of making Roxas feel like eleven kinds of jackass.
“But I wish you’d tell me more about her,” Olette went on, jittery. “I know you’re a private person, but I’m sure it won’t hurt to let one of your closest friends know a few things about your girlfriend. Other than that she has red hair, of course.”
All his feelings of remorse promptly evaporated, and Roxas found himself regressing quickly to his former state of passive-aggressive resentment. “I just don’t know what to tell you.”
He had once read somewhere-probably in a book-that when creating something like an imaginary girlfriend or boyfriend, it was a good idea to have a real person in mind, as this made it easier to maintain consistency. And really, thinking back to the events of yesterday, he wasn’t surprised that his brain had leapt to that seemingly inconsequential detail. Obviously, he had had Axel’s text message on his mind, and anyway, Axel’s hair was one of his more, if not the most, distinctive traits-it was big and jostled around when he laughed, and smelled kind of warm and spicy, as Roxas’s career in shotgun riding could attest. Like a Big Red, only the day he was heard uttering that simile aloud would be the day they found his seppuku’d corpse in an alleyway dumpster.
It took a moment for him to realize that Olette was still talking, and he came up just in time to catch the tail end of her sentence, “-a nice start.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said that knowing your girlfriend’s name would be a nice start,” Olette said patiently, and gave a loud, false gasp of indignation. “What if by some chance you decide to introduce us one day, she might think you’ve never even talked about her with your friends.”
Roxas didn’t see anything wrong with that, but judging by Olette’s determined expression, he knew full well that she wasn’t going to let it drop until he had properly mollified her busybody tendencies. Morosely, he cast his mind around until it landed, inexplicably, on the image of a quaintly archaic platform, the whistling of a coming train, and a hardback novel about rich, beautiful people who did dramatic things all the time but in a dark, tragic, really wordy way.
“Anna,” he said finally. I read too many damn books for my own good, Roxas thought a bit blasphemously. “Her name is Anna-we met in a coffee shop.”
It’s all snowballing from here, some part of him thought depressingly. The red hair thing might have been just a naughty fib, but he had just lied outright to one of his best friends, next thing you knew God would reach his hand down to smite him where he stood for willful deception and other assorted sins.
Roxas knew he had completely lost it. Olette didn’t seem to notice. “You met in a coffee shop?” she was asking, sounding immeasurably fond.
“Yes,” Roxas said, defeated, committing himself to reveling in his lies and possibly a fiery fate. “Anna-she likes her coffee.” Espresso, dark, dark, dark like Satan’s soul, his memory supplied, for no good reason. A most inauspicious sign.
Olette made an encouraging motion with her head, eager for more details. The fucked-up thing was, Roxas was starting to want to provide them now, like he had some sick need to add more fodder to the flame of her curiosity. His own wrongness unnerved him.
“Right. So we kept running into each other, and, uh, eventually she, um, asked to walk home with me.”
And as if it was further proof that this whole thing was an affront to the divine plan, they now reached the corner of East Street where Axel had dropped Roxas off on that first scooter ride, still a good two blocks from his house because, all things aside, there was no way he had been about to lead a possible stalker right to his front door.
They hadn’t quite beat the rain, he remembered.
*
The architectural style in downtown Amherst was highly traditional, probably dating back to something completely ridiculous like colonial times, but as Roxas had stood on that street corner, watching the rain stream down from the sky like pale, uncurling rollers, misting up the town in gothic shades of blue and grey, he’d found he hadn’t particularly cared.
“Keep it,” Axel said when Roxas made to hand over the spare helmet he’d been using. “I haven’t got much room on here for it, and who knows-you might want to get some use out of it some other time.”
He grinned widely, the rivulets of water streaming down his visor shielding his eyes from view, but the fact that they were both soaked to the skin and running equal risks of developing hypothermia seemed to level the playing field somewhat. Roxas wasn’t feeling any dire need to rip Axel a new one for his wild presumptions. Plus, they had made it all the way to East Street without inciting any road rage by way of erratic driving, that had to count for something.
Before he had time to say anything, like thank you or never come near me again, Axel had raised two fingers to his crown in a flip salute, and sped away on his Vespa. Drifted down the street and faded into the pouring rain.
It was only later, running a towel through his damp hair and shivering despite the change of clothes, that Roxas found the new text message, sent from a now unblocked number. It read:
LIGHTNING DOES SO STRIKE TWICE IN THE SAME PLACE.
*
Axel was a college student or a freelancer or a recently paroled psychopath. Or something.
It was never very clear, and at this point Roxas couldn’t remember if the subject had ever even been broached. He didn’t seem to have a last name or a house or anything, just sent inane SMS’s to Roxas’s cell phone and wandered up to the counter during his shifts at the coffee shop, invariably providing Sally and the regulars with a fresh array of entertainment because he was very obviously an insane person. The fact that Roxas always left with him just proved that Axel had a running contender in the category.
Even more troubling, Roxas had, in time, become used to seeing Axel waiting for him on the street corner with his giant Vespa-“Rosalina,” corrected Axel, emphasizing the “r” with a dark, exotic roll of his tongue that made something inside Roxas squirm-and he really got a lot more use out of that spare helmet than he was comfortable admitting to.
In the course of being eased into the mad, wonderful world of Axel, Roxas had begun studying him-like a particularly convoluted book, something Beat Generation. Kerouac perhaps, who had written on huge rolls of butcher paper, his prose free-flowing from his fingertips, going on and on because he had always felt there’d been much to say (most drunks often did).
And after extensive observation, this was what Roxas knew:
Axel loved the sound of his own voice, and had a running commentary for everything. He also had the questionable gift of absorbing obscure trivia by some sort of osmosis, and could generally be counted on to start rattling them off at random, often segueing gracefully back into the stream of conversation without a hitch. He made a lot of bad jokes, and pretended to be stupider than he actually was-to Roxas’s very vast amazement.
Despite being a complete pop-culture addict, he had some really weird habits. E.g., sitting front rows at the movies. The reason for which, he claimed, was because front-rowers received the images first as they came off the screen. Like in The Dreamers.
“I think The Dreamers was really pretentious and soft-core porn at best,” Roxas had said mulishly, rubbing at his over-strained eyes after one such excursion. Several people in their vicinity had given them a wide berth before skittering away, alarmed.
Axel had laughed. “Is there any other reason to watch it?” he’d asked, winking at the disturbed pedestrians.
The way he casually dismissed Roxas’s considerably high threshold for personal space suggested a reckless outlook on life as well as a lack of basic survival instincts. Which Roxas kind of knew anyway, given Axel’s penchant for manorexia and driving really fast and, at times, going for days subsisting entirely on caffeine and Malboro Red, like he was some kind of Mary-Kate Olsen in reverse. The hobo-chic attires only proved it.
“You keep saying that,” Axel had said feelingly, pulling a hang-dog expression the first time Roxas had expressed this opinion. “Like I’m a one-man fashion wreck or something. Do I really dress that badly?”
The answer was yes, very often, all the time, really. Axel’s wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of offensive things, including truly ill-advised shirts, blazers that looked like they’d been made from the skin of animals that had died and been tanned in the early stages of decomposition, various colorful, over-long wool scarves which he insisted on wearing, sometimes all at once, in the early summer heat. And of course, the green Chucks. His clothes clashed with everything, including themselves and his hair. Roxas was going to have to introduce Axel to a personal shopper someday; he was embarrassed to be seen with him.
But all this was made up for by the fact that Axel had a seemingly endless knowledge of Amherst’s local attractions, and could make the most out of any mundane activity. He and Roxas had an epic five-rounds-and-counting argument over whether Main Street’s Black Sheep or Lone Wolf was the superior restaurant-Roxas insisted that Lone Wolf’s waffles could revive the dead, Axel maintained that waffles were breakfast food and everyone knew that meal was an urban legend, and besides, Roxas was just a hater because Black Sheep siphoned away his customers by putting crack cocaine into their espresso.
They got on well like that-better than could be expected, certainly like nothing Roxas had ever experienced in his admittedly limited social range. No questions were asked, therefore there was never a need to tell any lies.
And if Roxas felt an occasional spike of anxiety over all the things that weren’t being said, Axel would just do something like laugh or be crazy or say, “I bet if we set fire to an hundred paper aeroplanes…” and, “Did you know rubber bands last longer refrigerated?” and it would all fall away, like the quietly receding tide.
The point was, whether he liked it or not, Axel had more or less hustled himself into Roxas’s life and made his presence, inelegant stalking and compulsive text-messaging and all, something of a constant fixture.
Which was just perfect, Roxas thought with immense bitterness, as he clearly should have known that the wretched day would come when he had to come up with a fake girlfriend and Axel’s stupid face was the only one that came to mind.
*
“And she wears these horrible green Converse sneakers,” Roxas said vehemently, grimacing at the thought. “Really ugly old things- they look like something ate them and vomited the remains right back up.”
Olette blinked at him oddly.
“Um,” Roxas backtracked, quickly racking his brain. “But it’s cute and all. Since it proves she has character. And stuff. I like that.”
He knew he sounded like a complete moron. The only thing that comforted him was the fact that at least he hadn't followed it up with some hamfisted argument about personality over looks. It was a wonder Olette hadn’t yet figured out the whole thing and had him murdered on the spot, or at least locked away in a crumbling tower to wait for his Prince(ss) Charming.
But Olette just smiled at him some more, and patted his arm in a slightly beatific way. Female hormones were such weird things. “It’s really nice that you notice things like that,” Olette said approvingly. “Anna sounds like a really cool person.”
Roxas saw the inevitable coming for him at Mach 5, and was helpless to stop it.
“Of course, now you really have to introduce her to us.”
“Oh look, here we are,” Roxas exclaimed in a loud, fake voice. “This is my house. I’m going to go inside now.” And pretend this conversation never, ever happened. “You should really get going, Olette, you don’t want to get home too late.”
Olette looked momentarily thwarted. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, suspicious, “Is Anna waiting for you inside your house?”
Roxas bolted.
He regretted it the moment he managed to shut the door behind him, as his apparent eagerness to get inside would obviously only lead Olette to believe that he was indeed harboring his (fictional) girlfriend in the safety of his home. He was confirmed in this suspicion when his friend spent fifteen minutes loitering in front of the house, probably hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive “Anna”, before giving up and marching off in the direction of her own home. He almost, but not quite, repressed the sigh of relief.
Roxas had a sudden, unsettling vision of his life for the next however long-a dizzying web of tangled lies and deceits-and the thought seemed to drain the marrow of his soul. He went into his room and threw himself down on the bed with a groan, not even bothering to take off his shoes. Rolling over, he stared at his ceiling, the softly weaving patterns of slatted light, before digging his fists into his eyes.
He stopped clawing at his own face in frustration when his computer made a friendly sound in his direction, and removed his hands to find a little iChat window blinking at him, indicating a conference invitation. His lips quirked at the familiar screen name.
“Hey, Nam,” Roxas said, settling into the swivel chair and readjusting the monitor, “Long time no see,” breaking into a full-on smile as his younger sister’s equally cheerful face gazed out at him through the iSight camera mounted on his Mac.
*
TBC
And now have a song rec: this is the soundtrack that kept me through writing the joy ride scene. It's not fey or chilling or any of that shit, but PURE POWER POP GOODNESS: The Scooters - Big Brother. I swear I came up with the scene before I heard it, honestly. Download it and crank that motherfucker up to the roof.
(Sometimes I like to replace all the "your momma"'s in the lyrics with "fandom" or possibly "ElJay", because, come on guys, what's with all this Axel's too old for Roxas shit, like any of that's ever stopped you bunch of perverts before ♥)
Title: My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada (2/?)
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: T
Pairings: Axel/Roxas + others
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend-or a pretend one.
II.
“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say?”
(The Town and the City, Jack Kerouac)
*
By the third week of March, New England had hit another low pressure front, sending the weather lapsing pitifully into iron skies and snapping wind, bare, quivering trees as far as the eye could see. In the madding rush to make a half-assed wardrobe reversal, Roxas actually left his cell phone in one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. It made him feel kind of like a loser that he hadn’t even noticed it going missing for upwards of three days-but only a little bit.
When he’d finally unearthed the phone from the pile of semi-sentient laundry at the bottom of his closet, it was just in time to be perplexed by the three-and counting-ALL-CAPS text messages already nestled there, the content of which had ranged from:
FINGER NAILS GROW 4 TIMES FASTR THAN TOENAILS.
To:
THE KING OF HEARTS HAS NO MOUSTACHE.
And then, it had gotten really amazing:
TRUFAX: MOAR PPL USE BLUE TOOTHBRUSHES THAN RED ONES. Y?
“I think somebody is trying to mess with my head,” Roxas confessed Friday afternoon at the shop, cracking at last under the pressure.
Sally glared at him over a row of newly unboxed coffee tins. “Oh really, Roxas? All this from a couple of text messages? However did you come to that conclusion?”
In the wake of that which people clearly lacking in linguistic ingenuity had dubbed the Sunday Incident, Sally had entered some kind of emotional fugue state in which she alternated between being deliberately mean and palely loitering about the place. Pathetically, this bizarre combination actually reaped more productivity than the previous horn-dogging, and so Roxas had decided, grimly, that the pining would have to continue until morale improved.
“Not that I really care,” he soldiered on, ignoring the darkly accusatory vibes. “Except the person on the other end is keeping their number locked. And then,” he added, holding up his phone to show her the display, “there are all these accompanying pictures.”
The pictures in question were, respectively, Man With World Longest Finger Nails, Man Performing Cheap Parlor Tricks, and a blurry screenshot from that America’s Funniest Home Video episode featuring the guy who used his roommate’s toothbrush to clean the toilet.
Sally made a frustrated noise, and stomped off to putter with the espresso machine. “You know,” she said, in meaningful sotto voce, “some people would just be quietly thankful for the boons they get. Some people only wish they were that lucky, Roxas.”
Roxas thought this was a sign for him to start hiring people to open his mail, but before he had time to properly flesh out this theory, a customer (singular) had wandered up to the counter, and he found himself doling out the, “How may I help you?” by rote.
The customer-some guy in a black hoodie- silently handed him a cup of coffee.
Roxas blinked widely. “Um, I think you’re kind of confused. See, we sell the coffee. Besides,” he jabbed at the winter green logo on the cup sleeve, “I’m pretty sure management will have you lynched and strung up or something for bringing our competitor’s product in here.”
Hoodie guy, who did look admittedly confused, shrugged haplessly and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger, dude. I was just passing by when some guy out front gave this to me and said to deliver it to the blond kid at the counter. That’s you, right?”
“Some guy out front?” Roxas echoed, a feeling of cold dread settling into the pit of his stomach.
At this point, two things happened, in very quick succession:
1. His phone started shrieking a slow version of Katamari on the Rocks, signaling a new SMS.
2. Sally, who had appeared incapable of avoiding a parked truck only minutes prior, made a sudden, spirited attempt to launch herself over the counter. Her excited war cry could only be heard by dogs in Bolivia, but the loud thrashing sound that resulted from her crashing bodily into the wooden counter was audible to all.
Roxas would have assisted her, but he was busy staring disbelievingly at the display of his phone, which had not only the photo of the cup of coffee he was holding in his very hand but also the message: LOOK OUTSIDE.
So he did, looked up and across of Sally, who was straddling the edge of the counter awkwardly and probably painfully, past the guy in the hoodie, who was still looking kind of confused, and through the glass plate window at the front of the shop, where his line of vision was captured by green eyes a shade too familiar. Right down to the asshattish glint.
Tall, Thin, and Redheaded from the Sunday Incident grinned ostensibly and gave a friendly wave, a small silver phone tucked between his thumb and forefinger.
*
“I hope there’s an explanation for this,” Roxas said testily, tucking his arms around himself to brace against the chilly wind. “Something other than that you’re a recently paroled psychopath and I should be alerting the authorities.”
“First month of parol’s always tough,” the redhead agreed. Then he fiddled with a tassel of the shemagh he had bundled around his neck, and smiled languidly. “Call it a peace offering. You left all mad and huffy last time, so I figured you didn’t take too well to my apology, and you know how the criminally disturbed are about manners, we can’t be having with that.”
“If you think I’m going to be drinking something from a complete stranger,” Roxas pointed out, thinking, Jesus, people are so wrong about the idyllic small town life. New York got a lot of bad rap, but he had lived there for sixteen years and never encountered the faintest suggestion of trouble-place him in Massachusetts for three months and already there were escaped mental patients bringing him coffee and stalking his workplace and doing weirdly distracting things with their green, green eyes.
God, this guy even thought facial tattoos were cool.
“Bet you’d end up drinking it though,” the redhead said, tipping his head back to rest against the redbrick outer wall of the shop.
“Well, you’d be wrong,” snapped Roxas. “Then again, I can see how you’d think that, with the kind of logic that led you to buy coffee for someone who works in a coffee shop.”
“Okay,” the redhead said, holding up one long-fingered hand in a placating gesture. “Let’s get one thing straight. I think-I think-that we can both agree that unless the bean-farmers are willing to use pesticides on their trees, and use them proudly, then it just can’t be considered coffee, now can it?”
Roxas actually opened his mouth to argue the point, and then shook his head profusely, because-seriously, way to be focusing on all the wrong issues. “It was you who was sending me those text messages. How did you even get my number?”
“Your co-worker,” the redhead explained, waving nebulously over Roxas’s shoulder, “was very obliging-if not exactly professional.”
Roxas turned, and sure enough, there was Sally at the counter, raptly making bovine eyes and waving back with gusto. He felt a bit sorry for Stanley, who was going to have to have that conversation with her again about the lawsuits and being a strong, confident woman who didn’t need men to make her feel special.
“Don’t think badly of her,” assured the redhead. “She was very hard to break-I had to resort to coercion and trickery.”
“So you smiled at her, in other words,” Roxas said crossly. “Jesus.”
He stopped in the middle of hating the entire world when he realized that the stranger was grinning, watching Roxas’s left hand-raising the coffee cup and tipping it against his mouth, and Roxas muttered, “Shit,” underneath his breath, even as the liquid went down.
He bit back his next comment however, because the foamed milk had coated his tongue and it was sweet and perfect and perfectly sweet and sweetly perfect-he had long begun to fear that spending so much time at his job was starting to make him forget what real coffee tasted like, this was yet another keen reminder.
“Dry cappuccino,” said the redhead, looking pleased with himself. “I thought you might like it-you seem like a dry cappuccino kind of guy.”
Roxas would have tossed back something searing, but it was difficult to work past the tiny heart attack he was currently experiencing. He’d risk death by deadly toxins for this, and anyway he was spontaneously starting to think that maybe this guy wasn’t so bad-creepy as hell, sure, but no one with such impeccable taste could be all bad. He settled for drinking his-dry, so dry, dry like a desert’s bones-cappuccino in silence.
Which was the exact moment that the redhead got all into Roxas’s face and crooned, “So, can I give you a ride when you get off work?”
*
The car-owning population of Amherst, driving home from work that Friday afternoon, were treated to a very peculiar sight.
It wasn’t Roxas’s laundry day jeans, though those were likely a registered disaster zone. No, if there was ever a reason for all the outright staring and lingering intrigue and annoyed tooting of car horns, it had to be the odd combination of him on his skateboard rolling (normally!) along the sidewalk, and the enormous, chunky-frame motor scooter that was meandering at an unbearably slow pace beside him, engine whirring dully in low gear. It didn’t help that the vehicle kept jerking in dangerously random curves every few minutes; the driver was preoccupied trying to engage Roxas in a conversation:
“You know, a simple no would have sufficed. You didn’t have to throw the coffee at my head like that.”
“Yes,” Roxas agreed, keeping his eyes straight ahead like he was the one behind the handlebars. “That was a waste of a perfectly good cappuccino. Clearly, what I should have done was look around for a largish rock.”
The world was luminous for a moment, and presently, there was a loud clap of thunder overhead. Roxas scowled-as he had stood in the doorway of the shop, the bruised, overcast sky had made itself apparent, a metallic tang of rain heavy in the brisk air. He remembered tamping down the rushing wave of sense-memory at the first storm-rumble, and then a horn had honked at him, loudly, and he’d looked down to the fatigue green of a Piaggio Vespa’s front shield, the glassy finish bringing to mind color schemes in the classics.
“Have you considered seeing someone for those rage issues?”
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Roxas snapped, spinning around angrily. “Why are you still following me?”
“Roxas, right?” the redhead said infuriatingly. “Well, Roxas, can I tell you a secret?”
Roxas pretended not to have heard him. This had little to no effect.
“I have a disease,” the redhead continued, in a low, solemn tone. Roxas wished the guy didn’t insist on emphasizing the roll of the ‘r’ in his name like that-it made him irrationally uncomfortable. “It’s something I’ve kept to myself for a long time, but I feel I can trust you with it. Can I trust you with it?”
Roxas couldn’t help but care a little more. Perhaps it could be terminal. He made a sort of encouraging grimace.
The redhead grinned, delighted. “Right. Once upon a time, Roxas, I came to the majestic shores of Nova Scotia and fell in love with a feisty but petite barmaid with curls of spun gold. We shared a whirlwind romance for one sun-drenched summer, at the end of which she broke my youthful heart and married a lobsterman from Newfoundland. Ironically, the experience has left me with a weakness-being a tragic attraction to small, bossy blondes.”
He said this all in one breath. Half a minute passed. Thunder clapped in the ominous distance.
“You’re so full of shit,” Roxas said flatly.
“Almost had you, though,” the redhead chuckled appreciatively.
Roxas bit his lips, hard. He turned a corner, and his companion just followed him, did something impossibly illegal with his scooter to make a razor-sharp left. Several cars had to swerve abruptly to avoid hitting him, and they were immediately surrounded by a cacophony of angry honking.
“God, you’re going to cause a traffic accident,” Roxas said, not unhopefully. “Why can’t you be a normal person?”
“Wouldn’t have to be if you’d just let me take you home,” shrugged the redhead, pulling over and killing his engine with an anticlimatic whimper. He peered at Roxas earnestly through the visor of his motorcycle helmet. “Come off it, you know perfectly well you’d have a much better chance at beating the rain with Rosalina than on that skateboard.”
“Rosalina?”
“Roxas, meet Rosalina,” the redhead said proudly, stroking the speedometer of his Vespa in a thoroughly sexual way. “Rosalina, Roxas.”
Roxas snorted derisively. “Since you haven’t even told me your name, I don’t think you’re in the best position to be making introductions.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” the redhead said, and his smile was manic. “My name’s Axel. Try to remember that.”
“Axel,” Roxas repeated to himself, fully intending to forget it at his earliest convenience. He had grown rather partial to Crazy Redheaded Dude.
There was a kind of awkward silence. It was broken when a fat drop of water hit Roxas square on the nose. The sky was growing darker by the second, and his feeling of unease noticeably increased with it.
“Alright, this is your last chance,” the redhea-Axel, his name was Axel, it was even a tacky name-said matter-of-factly. “I’m not sticking around to get rained on-either take the ride or be a good girl scout and catch pneumonia, whatever you decide.” He started the engine again, as if to make a point.
“Fine,” Roxas said, to his own surprise.
Axel blinked. “Huh. Really? Just like that?”
“Yes,” said Roxas, growing irate-although at what he wasn’t certain. “I’ll take the ride. Try anything and I’ll hunt you down like a dog in the streets.”
Any normal person would have at least returned a snappy comeback; Axel smiled brilliantly and held out a dark red helmet, a spare he’d pulled out from the pass-through, saying simply, “You’re going to need this.”
Later, Roxas would wonder if that and not the chasing storm was what had made up his mind after all, but this would not come until long, long after he had found himself settling into the backseat of the Vespa, securing the helmet strap beneath his chin. There was no help for it: a normal person wouldn’t go out of their way to help someone who had verbally abused them and physically thrown them into trees anyway.
“I’m gonna hit a brick foot,” Axel warned, coming to balance. “You’d better hold on.”
Roxas cast a hollowly despairing look at the darkening heavens, and placed his hands gingerly on either side of Axel’s skinny waist. He wasn’t in the habit of touching people to whom he wasn’t at least directly related, and the sensation made his skin prickle with goosebumps. There was something almost perverse in the way the angular bones stabbed into the heart of his palms.
But before he could dwell any further on the matter, Axel had switched into reverse and then suddenly they were flying down the street, away from the concrete pavement and into the cold, heavy air, faintly smelling of rain. The wind whipped past his face, rolling off his skin like ghostly fingers and drifting back into the sky; the scenery smeared into a blur all around. If someone had set a soundtrack to this, it would be fey and chilling, the notes rising dark and ethereal like industrial birds, the strumming rhythm of staccato downpour.
“Wow,” Axel could be heard saying over the noise of the scooter. “How Garden State is this?”
Roxas almost dug his fingers maliciously into Axel’s flesh, in the way that made it hurt. He refrained, not wanting to be driven into a tree. “Are you calling me a girl?”
Axel laughed. For a lean man, his laughter was surprisingly deep, booming out of nothing and quickly filling up the spaces in rich, eager slices. His whole body moved with it. Roxas wondered where he usually kept it-in between the easy smiles, strings of never-ending words.
“Please, blondie. You’re no Natalie Portman.”
*
Granted, all that had happened three months ago, but as Roxas caught the fiercely resolute look faintly blazing in Olette’s eyes when she cornered him by the main doors just as school was letting out on Tuesday afternoon, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this stroke of unparallel cruelty was his punishment for the aforementioned poor judgment call.
His paranoia was not, altogether, reasonless. Roxas knew for a fact that Olette was involved at any given time in at least a dozen after-school organizations, including but not limited to something horrific called the Largesse Society, which made her offer of, “Let’s walk home together, Roxas, we never spend any time with each other anymore,” not only some kind of lie but also highly portentous.
Bracing himself, he said reasonably, “We just had the same class seventh period. You live on the opposite side of town.”
“Really?” Olette answered mistily. “Imagine that. Well, it doesn’t affect anything, since all I wanted to do was spend some time with you. We can… talk.”
Given that Olette stood maybe all of five foot two in trendy jeans, the deep intent in her voice totally shouldn’t freak him out as much as it did, but as he had come home at 7 pm the day before with bits of shrimp tempura in his hair, personal dignity probably wasn’t the point anymore.
“But don’t you usually go with Rai?” Roxas said, kind of desperately, and felt an unforeseeably huge rush of relief when he caught out of the corner of his eye a familiar apish backside, standing in a cluster of similarly hulk-like goons clad in identical Letterman jackets. “I think he’ll have something to say about that, don’t you?”
Olette gave him a particularly pitying look. Then she turned and shouted into the dwindling crowd near the entrance, “Hey! Rai! I’m taking Roxas home with me so I can have my way with him and make him like it.”
Rai smiled indulgently and yelled back, “Okay, baby. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Turning back to Roxas, Olette said smugly, “I’ve got those jock-straps exactly where I want them.”
No, personal dignity was definitely not the point anymore. One of these days, he’d just go ahead and commit ritual suicide.
He took a quiet moment to regain equilibrium and smooth down his expression, which was starting to border forlornness, during which time Olette firmly gripped him by the wrist and began dragging him presumably in the direction of his own home.
To her credit, she held out until the school was at least six yards behind them before saying, in a deceptively light tone, “So. You have a girlfriend.”
Roxas tried not to groan, so as to spare her feelings. “Why did I have a feeling this was going to come up?”
A tinge of color rose to Olette’s cheeks, but she valiantly went on. “It’s not that I want to be nosy, but you can’t blame me for being curious. After all, even with Pence and Hayner being,” she made a vague hand gesture that could mean anything from ‘blockheads’ to ‘amoebas’, “the way that they are, you were still not exactly my prime candidate in a run for steady relationship status.”
It was obvious she had spent some time rehearsing this conversation; the little stress in her voice was perfectly pitched when she said, “No offense, but you’re even worse around girls than they are.”
Roxas choked, in a totally manly way.
Olette nodded her sympathy, then brightened immediately, beaming and saying, “But I’m glad I was wrong. I’m really happy for you, Roxas.”
She was nearly sparkling at him, smiling wildly and shiny-eyed, all of which had the effect of making Roxas feel like eleven kinds of jackass.
“But I wish you’d tell me more about her,” Olette went on, jittery. “I know you’re a private person, but I’m sure it won’t hurt to let one of your closest friends know a few things about your girlfriend. Other than that she has red hair, of course.”
All his feelings of remorse promptly evaporated, and Roxas found himself regressing quickly to his former state of passive-aggressive resentment. “I just don’t know what to tell you.”
He had once read somewhere-probably in a book-that when creating something like an imaginary girlfriend or boyfriend, it was a good idea to have a real person in mind, as this made it easier to maintain consistency. And really, thinking back to the events of yesterday, he wasn’t surprised that his brain had leapt to that seemingly inconsequential detail. Obviously, he had had Axel’s text message on his mind, and anyway, Axel’s hair was one of his more, if not the most, distinctive traits-it was big and jostled around when he laughed, and smelled kind of warm and spicy, as Roxas’s career in shotgun riding could attest. Like a Big Red, only the day he was heard uttering that simile aloud would be the day they found his seppuku’d corpse in an alleyway dumpster.
It took a moment for him to realize that Olette was still talking, and he came up just in time to catch the tail end of her sentence, “-a nice start.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said that knowing your girlfriend’s name would be a nice start,” Olette said patiently, and gave a loud, false gasp of indignation. “What if by some chance you decide to introduce us one day, she might think you’ve never even talked about her with your friends.”
Roxas didn’t see anything wrong with that, but judging by Olette’s determined expression, he knew full well that she wasn’t going to let it drop until he had properly mollified her busybody tendencies. Morosely, he cast his mind around until it landed, inexplicably, on the image of a quaintly archaic platform, the whistling of a coming train, and a hardback novel about rich, beautiful people who did dramatic things all the time but in a dark, tragic, really wordy way.
“Anna,” he said finally. I read too many damn books for my own good, Roxas thought a bit blasphemously. “Her name is Anna-we met in a coffee shop.”
It’s all snowballing from here, some part of him thought depressingly. The red hair thing might have been just a naughty fib, but he had just lied outright to one of his best friends, next thing you knew God would reach his hand down to smite him where he stood for willful deception and other assorted sins.
Roxas knew he had completely lost it. Olette didn’t seem to notice. “You met in a coffee shop?” she was asking, sounding immeasurably fond.
“Yes,” Roxas said, defeated, committing himself to reveling in his lies and possibly a fiery fate. “Anna-she likes her coffee.” Espresso, dark, dark, dark like Satan’s soul, his memory supplied, for no good reason. A most inauspicious sign.
Olette made an encouraging motion with her head, eager for more details. The fucked-up thing was, Roxas was starting to want to provide them now, like he had some sick need to add more fodder to the flame of her curiosity. His own wrongness unnerved him.
“Right. So we kept running into each other, and, uh, eventually she, um, asked to walk home with me.”
And as if it was further proof that this whole thing was an affront to the divine plan, they now reached the corner of East Street where Axel had dropped Roxas off on that first scooter ride, still a good two blocks from his house because, all things aside, there was no way he had been about to lead a possible stalker right to his front door.
They hadn’t quite beat the rain, he remembered.
*
The architectural style in downtown Amherst was highly traditional, probably dating back to something completely ridiculous like colonial times, but as Roxas had stood on that street corner, watching the rain stream down from the sky like pale, uncurling rollers, misting up the town in gothic shades of blue and grey, he’d found he hadn’t particularly cared.
“Keep it,” Axel said when Roxas made to hand over the spare helmet he’d been using. “I haven’t got much room on here for it, and who knows-you might want to get some use out of it some other time.”
He grinned widely, the rivulets of water streaming down his visor shielding his eyes from view, but the fact that they were both soaked to the skin and running equal risks of developing hypothermia seemed to level the playing field somewhat. Roxas wasn’t feeling any dire need to rip Axel a new one for his wild presumptions. Plus, they had made it all the way to East Street without inciting any road rage by way of erratic driving, that had to count for something.
Before he had time to say anything, like thank you or never come near me again, Axel had raised two fingers to his crown in a flip salute, and sped away on his Vespa. Drifted down the street and faded into the pouring rain.
It was only later, running a towel through his damp hair and shivering despite the change of clothes, that Roxas found the new text message, sent from a now unblocked number. It read:
LIGHTNING DOES SO STRIKE TWICE IN THE SAME PLACE.
*
Axel was a college student or a freelancer or a recently paroled psychopath. Or something.
It was never very clear, and at this point Roxas couldn’t remember if the subject had ever even been broached. He didn’t seem to have a last name or a house or anything, just sent inane SMS’s to Roxas’s cell phone and wandered up to the counter during his shifts at the coffee shop, invariably providing Sally and the regulars with a fresh array of entertainment because he was very obviously an insane person. The fact that Roxas always left with him just proved that Axel had a running contender in the category.
Even more troubling, Roxas had, in time, become used to seeing Axel waiting for him on the street corner with his giant Vespa-“Rosalina,” corrected Axel, emphasizing the “r” with a dark, exotic roll of his tongue that made something inside Roxas squirm-and he really got a lot more use out of that spare helmet than he was comfortable admitting to.
In the course of being eased into the mad, wonderful world of Axel, Roxas had begun studying him-like a particularly convoluted book, something Beat Generation. Kerouac perhaps, who had written on huge rolls of butcher paper, his prose free-flowing from his fingertips, going on and on because he had always felt there’d been much to say (most drunks often did).
And after extensive observation, this was what Roxas knew:
Axel loved the sound of his own voice, and had a running commentary for everything. He also had the questionable gift of absorbing obscure trivia by some sort of osmosis, and could generally be counted on to start rattling them off at random, often segueing gracefully back into the stream of conversation without a hitch. He made a lot of bad jokes, and pretended to be stupider than he actually was-to Roxas’s very vast amazement.
Despite being a complete pop-culture addict, he had some really weird habits. E.g., sitting front rows at the movies. The reason for which, he claimed, was because front-rowers received the images first as they came off the screen. Like in The Dreamers.
“I think The Dreamers was really pretentious and soft-core porn at best,” Roxas had said mulishly, rubbing at his over-strained eyes after one such excursion. Several people in their vicinity had given them a wide berth before skittering away, alarmed.
Axel had laughed. “Is there any other reason to watch it?” he’d asked, winking at the disturbed pedestrians.
The way he casually dismissed Roxas’s considerably high threshold for personal space suggested a reckless outlook on life as well as a lack of basic survival instincts. Which Roxas kind of knew anyway, given Axel’s penchant for manorexia and driving really fast and, at times, going for days subsisting entirely on caffeine and Malboro Red, like he was some kind of Mary-Kate Olsen in reverse. The hobo-chic attires only proved it.
“You keep saying that,” Axel had said feelingly, pulling a hang-dog expression the first time Roxas had expressed this opinion. “Like I’m a one-man fashion wreck or something. Do I really dress that badly?”
The answer was yes, very often, all the time, really. Axel’s wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of offensive things, including truly ill-advised shirts, blazers that looked like they’d been made from the skin of animals that had died and been tanned in the early stages of decomposition, various colorful, over-long wool scarves which he insisted on wearing, sometimes all at once, in the early summer heat. And of course, the green Chucks. His clothes clashed with everything, including themselves and his hair. Roxas was going to have to introduce Axel to a personal shopper someday; he was embarrassed to be seen with him.
But all this was made up for by the fact that Axel had a seemingly endless knowledge of Amherst’s local attractions, and could make the most out of any mundane activity. He and Roxas had an epic five-rounds-and-counting argument over whether Main Street’s Black Sheep or Lone Wolf was the superior restaurant-Roxas insisted that Lone Wolf’s waffles could revive the dead, Axel maintained that waffles were breakfast food and everyone knew that meal was an urban legend, and besides, Roxas was just a hater because Black Sheep siphoned away his customers by putting crack cocaine into their espresso.
They got on well like that-better than could be expected, certainly like nothing Roxas had ever experienced in his admittedly limited social range. No questions were asked, therefore there was never a need to tell any lies.
And if Roxas felt an occasional spike of anxiety over all the things that weren’t being said, Axel would just do something like laugh or be crazy or say, “I bet if we set fire to an hundred paper aeroplanes…” and, “Did you know rubber bands last longer refrigerated?” and it would all fall away, like the quietly receding tide.
The point was, whether he liked it or not, Axel had more or less hustled himself into Roxas’s life and made his presence, inelegant stalking and compulsive text-messaging and all, something of a constant fixture.
Which was just perfect, Roxas thought with immense bitterness, as he clearly should have known that the wretched day would come when he had to come up with a fake girlfriend and Axel’s stupid face was the only one that came to mind.
*
“And she wears these horrible green Converse sneakers,” Roxas said vehemently, grimacing at the thought. “Really ugly old things- they look like something ate them and vomited the remains right back up.”
Olette blinked at him oddly.
“Um,” Roxas backtracked, quickly racking his brain. “But it’s cute and all. Since it proves she has character. And stuff. I like that.”
He knew he sounded like a complete moron. The only thing that comforted him was the fact that at least he hadn't followed it up with some hamfisted argument about personality over looks. It was a wonder Olette hadn’t yet figured out the whole thing and had him murdered on the spot, or at least locked away in a crumbling tower to wait for his Prince(ss) Charming.
But Olette just smiled at him some more, and patted his arm in a slightly beatific way. Female hormones were such weird things. “It’s really nice that you notice things like that,” Olette said approvingly. “Anna sounds like a really cool person.”
Roxas saw the inevitable coming for him at Mach 5, and was helpless to stop it.
“Of course, now you really have to introduce her to us.”
“Oh look, here we are,” Roxas exclaimed in a loud, fake voice. “This is my house. I’m going to go inside now.” And pretend this conversation never, ever happened. “You should really get going, Olette, you don’t want to get home too late.”
Olette looked momentarily thwarted. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, suspicious, “Is Anna waiting for you inside your house?”
Roxas bolted.
He regretted it the moment he managed to shut the door behind him, as his apparent eagerness to get inside would obviously only lead Olette to believe that he was indeed harboring his (fictional) girlfriend in the safety of his home. He was confirmed in this suspicion when his friend spent fifteen minutes loitering in front of the house, probably hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive “Anna”, before giving up and marching off in the direction of her own home. He almost, but not quite, repressed the sigh of relief.
Roxas had a sudden, unsettling vision of his life for the next however long-a dizzying web of tangled lies and deceits-and the thought seemed to drain the marrow of his soul. He went into his room and threw himself down on the bed with a groan, not even bothering to take off his shoes. Rolling over, he stared at his ceiling, the softly weaving patterns of slatted light, before digging his fists into his eyes.
He stopped clawing at his own face in frustration when his computer made a friendly sound in his direction, and removed his hands to find a little iChat window blinking at him, indicating a conference invitation. His lips quirked at the familiar screen name.
“Hey, Nam,” Roxas said, settling into the swivel chair and readjusting the monitor, “Long time no see,” breaking into a full-on smile as his younger sister’s equally cheerful face gazed out at him through the iSight camera mounted on his Mac.
*
TBC
And now have a song rec: this is the soundtrack that kept me through writing the joy ride scene. It's not fey or chilling or any of that shit, but PURE POWER POP GOODNESS: The Scooters - Big Brother. I swear I came up with the scene before I heard it, honestly. Download it and crank that motherfucker up to the roof.
(Sometimes I like to replace all the "your momma"'s in the lyrics with "fandom" or possibly "ElJay", because, come on guys, what's with all this Axel's too old for Roxas shit, like any of that's ever stopped you bunch of perverts before ♥)