Calvin & Hobbes fic!
So I wrote Calvin and Hobbes fic, because I read the comics obsessively when I was growing up (I had all the books, and whenever I felt crappy I would just sit down with one of them for hours, it was my homemade therapy), and I've been wanting to write a het love story for awhile now but wasn't inspired until I had this idea about teenage Calvin and Susie. I'd always thought about what Calvin would be like as a teenager, what would change and what would stay the same, and this story is basically my interpretation.
Title: Theories About Nuclear Winter
Fandom: Calvin and Hobbes
Pairing: Calvin/Susie
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Calvin finally sorts out his feelings for Susie his timing is not great.
Notes: Thank you so much to chlorate for the beta work!
Calvin is sixteen when he decides he's going to move to the Florida Keys and work on a shrimp farm. It seems like the logical thing to do. He's supposed to be a junior at school, but the collection of classes that he's actually managed to pass make him only some kind of freshman-sophomore mutant hybrid who doesn't really belong anywhere. Which is kinda how it's always been.
He does have a girlfriend, which is more than a lot of the honor student boys can say. She's a year younger than him but sort of world-weary already. Her name is Jessica and she's really pretty, hot, even, and not just in the sense that she likes to set things on fire. And if it weren't for the setting things on fire and for the whole getting Calvin arrested after she burned down the football stadium's concession stand incident, he might be willing to stay in high school just for her. But getting him arrested pretty much ruined his life, and now when he looks at her he just sees kind of a cartoonish devil woman with red horns, asking him what his problem is when he doesn't want to fool around. Also he's not so sure she's actually on birth control, though she keeps telling him she is and biting his ear hard enough to leave teeth marks when he doesn't believe her.
“What the hell are you going to do on a shrimp farm?” she asks when he tells her his plan. They're in his bedroom after school, or after half a day at school, anyway. Jessica is in her underwear, pacing and smoking a cigarette. If there's anything she loves as much as fire, it's sucking on ashes.
“Live off the land,” Calvin says. “Like a real, you know. Not like some suburban drone.”
“Whatever.” Jessica glowers at him. She wears a lot of black eye makeup and Calvin can't imagine what she'd look like without it. He wouldn't recognize her. “It'll stink,” she says. “Shrimp smell bad.”
“I don't care,” he says, though he has considered that. He's not sure why it's got to be shrimp, but he wants to live by the ocean and they were the first thing that popped into his head.
“Well, I'm going to move to New York as soon as I can save up enough money,” she says, as if this is a far superior plan.
“Will you open the window?” he asks, making a face. “You're going to set off the smoke alarm.”
“You don't care what happens to me,” she says. Calvin sighs. It's not completely untrue.
“You're on probation,” he says. “And so am I. If you get caught with a lighter they'll put you in juvie and me in real prison, probably.”
“I can't handle your drama right now,” she says, the cigarette flapping between her lips as she pulls her jeans on.
It's pretty hilarious, her accusing him of being dramatic, considering that she once asked him, with her eyes so wild that he was afraid she was going to bite his nose off, if he thought maybe they should burn down the school next. But she won't get the joke so he doesn't laugh, just stays on his back in bed, his head propped up on his pillows and his hands folded over his stomach.
“You're lucky I ever even talked to you,” she says when she's at the door, tears in her eyes because she must have figured out that this is the way Calvin is breaking up with her, telling her that he's going to run away from home to work on a shrimp farm and not inviting her along.
“Yeah,” Calvin agrees, listless and ready for her to leave. Certainly there were good times. Jessica was the first girl he kissed, the first girl he did everything with. She wasn't the first to look twice at him, though. He's widely considered a semi-dangerous loser at school, but some of the other less than stable girls have smiled at him once or twice. Jessica was just the first one who was at all interesting. Back when they first started dating she replaced the sky and everything in it, and Calvin lived under the shadow of her, worshipful and terrified that she would leave, because if she did there would be a nuclear winter, the sun and everything else up there blocked out and long gone. He actually wrote a paper that was semi-about this phenomenon for his history class when they were studying World War II, but the teacher didn't really get it.
Jessica slams the door on her way out. Calvin hopes his mother hasn't come home yet and that they won't run into each other on the stairs. His parents have forbidden him to see Jessica, but he figured out around six years old that they can't really stop him from doing anything without physical restraint, and that once he got older and stronger he'd get away with everything. Until the police got involved, anyway.
He's not actually a bad kid. That's what he can't seem to communicate to his teachers, the cops, even to his parents. He doesn't have a black heart and he doesn't wake up every morning trying to come up with new ways to make his parents' lives difficult. Such as with Jessica. He just wanted to have a girlfriend who was pretty and funny and kind of weird, and the fact that she got undressed without his prompting on their third date was a little alarming but definitely not unwelcome. Then she was burning things in bigger and bigger increments and telling him that her older brother killed a guy and that she'd never been able to sleep for more than an hour at a time because her mother did coke while she was pregnant and Calvin only knew that he didn't want to give her up. It wasn't like he wanted her to be that way.
His mother slams into his room and glares at him like he's the Antichrist, so he figures she must have seen Jessica.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison?” she shouts. Calvin doesn't move from the bed.
“No thanks,” he says.
“Listen,” his mother says, her jaw so tight she looks like a video game bad guy, something that makes its way across a level chomping mindlessly. “I can appreciate the fact that you are a teenager and you want certain things from girls. But if you think that girl is going to be worth -”
“I just broke up with her,” Calvin says. “God!” he adds, like this should have been obvious. His mother scoffs in disbelief, which is not entirely unfair. He has developed something of a reputation as a liar in this household.
“What's the matter with you?” This is his mother's favorite refrain. She acts like she sincerely wants him to explain.
“I don't know,” he says. “You raised me.”
“I endured you,” she says. “You were you right out of the box. We gave you everything-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Calvin says. He puts a pillow over his face because his eyes are watering and he would cry in front of the whole football team at school before he let his mother see it. “Get out.”
“Why can't you just make friends with normal kids?” she says. “Why don't you walk to school with Susie anymore?”
“She hates me.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” His mother slams back out of the room. She's always making dramatic entrances and exits, wound tight, jaw clenched. She has to wear a night guard so that she won't grind her teeth to dust while she sleeps.
Calvin rolls over when she's gone and reaches under the bed to find the stuffed tiger he hides whenever Jessica comes over. He still can't get to sleep without holding onto Hobbes; he got used to it when he was a kid and the shape of anything else doesn't work. He's tried pillows, blankets, Jessica. Hobbes just fits right into the lonely place on his chest, ducked under his chin and squeezed between his arms.
“It's okay,” he says, speaking into the matted fuzz of Hobbes' left ear. “In a week, we'll be up to our knees in shrimp.”
**
Calvin skips school the next day to work a shift at Bederman's grocery, where he is secretly employed as a produce unloader two days a week. It's one of his three jobs, the only one he has to do while he should be in school. He's saving up for a new transmission for the beater he inherited from his dad on his sixteenth birthday. As soon as the car is ready to go, he'll be headed for Florida.
“Sick of this yet?” Bederman asks when he comes out to the dock to watch Calvin unloading boxes of corn. He's under the impression that Calvin is a boy named Sven Larsen who has already left school, and he keeps trying to talk poor, misguided Sven into re-enrolling.
“No, sir,” Calvin says. “I like working with my hands.”
“Yeah, well, you're a kid,” Bederman says. “You think your back's going to like doing that for the rest of your life?”
Calvin shrugs. “I think I'm going to die when I'm eighteen, anyway,” he says. “I just have a feeling.”
Bederman laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Everyone felt that way when they were your age. Even your parents. Where are your parents, anyway?”
“Dead,” Calvin says. “Train accident.”
“I hope you're not under the impression that you're a good liar,” Bederman says before returning to the front of the store.
After his shift, Calvin walks to the park and climbs up onto the roof of the men's restrooms to eat an apple he swiped from work and watch the giraffes. It costs like seventeen dollars to get into the zoo, but from the top of the men's restroom you can at least see the giraffes for free. Calvin is still kind of stuck in his fantasy about being a poor migrant worker during the Great Depression, his muscles burning with exhaustion after unloading shipments of produce all day, and he imagines he's on the roof of his tiny ramshackle house, his pretty, somewhat downtrodden but ultimately plucky wife inside cooking him stone soup while he tries to catch a glimpse of the animals that are being mistreated at some traveling circus that's set up nearby. He concocts a side plot about liberating the animals. His wife would totally support him; she would keep watch while he led the giraffes out on giant leashes like over-sized dogs.
“What are you doing?” someone shouts, and Calvin flinches. He keeps thinking he's going to get arrested again, for everything, even for watching giraffes that he hasn't paid to see. But when he looks down it's just Susie Derkins staring up at him, her eyes narrowed to slits by the sun.
“Eating an apple,” Calvin says, holding up the core like she's an idiot for not noticing this. She rolls her eyes. She's got her book bag on and a paperback novel in her hand.
“Why are you doing it on the roof of the men's bathroom?”
“Why do you care?” Calvin asks, and Susie turns to walk away in exasperation. For some reason, Calvin follows her. It's something about what his mother said yesterday. About how it's his fault that Susie hates him, because of course it is. She was always willing not to.
“You weren't in school,” she says as they walk back toward their neighborhood. He's surprised she noticed; they don't have any classes together. Susie has been in all honors classes since freshman year. Calvin is in a class called Math Helpers where they play with colored blocks in order to at least get some idea of what geometry even is.
“I'll tell you a secret,” Calvin says, because he hasn't got anyone else left to talk to. “If you promise not to tell anyone.”
“No,” Susie says sharply. “I don't need to end up the accessory to a crime, thanks.”
“That's what I was, actually,” Calvin says. “In the fire. I actually didn't do anything. They just didn't believe me because I was the boy and she was the girl.”
Susie won't look at him; the set of her jaw reminds him of his mother's. He and Susie were actually kind of friends for awhile, when they were about eleven, after they'd stopped throwing water balloons at each other and stealing each other's toys. Calvin was used to getting picked on at school, but Susie got awkward around middle school and suddenly she was the subject of ridicule by the cool girls. He would defend her by acting insane and distracting them, a moving target. Sometimes she still cried on the walk home from school, and once he had held her hand.
“I believe you,” she says, and he's so shocked that he laughs.
“Why?”
“Because Jessica Peel is crazy.”
Calvin tries to work up the indignation required to defend his ex-girlfriend, but he can't.
“I know,” he says. “I broke up with her.”
Susie darts a look at him to check if he's serious. He shrugs. He's still trying to remember why Susie started hating him. As middle school went on she continued to be the nerdy, mousy girl she still is, and Calvin resented her more and more as school got harder and harder for him. It had always seemed so easy to her, like second nature, like what she was designed to do. He's given up finding something that feels like that, because he's learned, too late, that to do anything important and fascinating you have to learn math first, and it feels impossible to go back and do that now.
“So what's your secret?” she asks.
“I'm leaving,” Calvin says. “As soon as I can get my car fixed. I'm moving to Florida.”
Susie stops walking and frowns at him, clutching her book to her chest. It's Pride and Prejudice, one of those old girly love stories.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I'm going to work on a shrimp farm. Or something. Some kind of farm. Do they farm crabs? I mean, they must. It's not like crabs just walk into the grocery store. Though I guess they could if they wanted to. Wouldn't that be funny? I don't know, maybe not. But I guess if I was farming crabs I might get pinched. What?”
Susie looks horrified. He should have known she'd disapprove. He's not even sure why he told her. She reaches up and pushes her bangs out of her eyes.
“You can't just leave school,” she says.
“Yes, I can. When you're sixteen you can leave whenever you want.”
“Yeah, but.” She shuts her eyes in frustration. She's always done this, even when they were six and she was always trying to explain to Calvin why he couldn't be the pet gorilla when they played house, because he had to be the husband, because it just wasn't house if there wasn't a wife and a husband.
“But, what - you can't be serious,” she says.
“Why should I stay in school?” he asks. “It's not really doing me any good.”
“You're not stupid,” she says, glaring at him like she will take it as a personal insult if he disagrees.
“I know that,” he says, though actually sometimes he thinks he must be.
“You're just not trying,” she says. “You could - I could tutor you. Maybe.”
“I think it's too late for that.” They both know it's true. There was always something about the very essence of school, not just the lessons and the books and the homework, that Calvin couldn't abide. It was the bathroom passes and the poster presentations and the lunch room. It all seemed poisoned with some banal evil and he'd always felt he was doing the right thing by battling against it.
“Calvin, you can't just leave,” she says, and something about the way she says his name strikes through him. Not a lot of people say it that way, like he's someone who can have sense talked into him. “Where will you live?” she asks.
“I don't know. I've got some money saved, I can rent an apartment. And then I'll get a job and -”
“What about your parents? Are you just going to - leave them a note?”
“No. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I'll have to. My dad might tie me to the bed otherwise.”
“That might be the best thing for you,” Susie says. She starts walking again, and Calvin walks beside her. It's fall, damp leaves plastered to the streets, and he wants to get out of town before it gets cold. He used to love the snow, but lately winter just makes him sad.
“Do you still want to be a doctor?” Calvin asks.
Susie says nothing for a moment, watching the ground as she walks. Then she smiles.
“I can't believe you remember that,” she says.
“Why?”
“I don't know. But yeah, I do. I want to be an oncologist.”
“Cancer doctor?”
“See?” She snaps her head up to look at him. “You're not stupid.”
He grins, because he thinks she actually means it. She smiles back, and she looks sort of pretty with her cheeks going pink. They both look away and are quiet for awhile, walking slower as they get close to their neighborhood.
“What if you cured cancer?” he says, imagining seeing her on TV one day, in a white lab coat and science goggles, being interviewed with ten thousand microphones shoved in her face. Susie laughs.
“That's different,” she says. “That's, like, a research scientist. Oncologists treat patients who already have the disease.”
“Oh.” Calvin kicks a piece of gravel and it skitters into the gutter. “Like your mom?”
Susie's mother died two years earlier of bone cancer. Calvin was at the funeral with his parents, but Susie didn't seem to notice him. She was in pretty bad shape.
“Yeah,” she says. She stops walking and abruptly sits down on the curb. Calvin feels horrible; he shouldn't have said anything about her mother. She looks up at him, her face clear, and he sits down beside her.
“Don't go,” she says.
“What? Why not?” His heart starts racing. He still has dreams about Susie all the time, that she's mean to him and he pretends not to care, and he always wakes up angry and hurt.
“Because. Too much has changed already. Oh - Calvin.” She shuts her eyes and puts her hand over her face. “When I thought they were going to put you in jail-”
And then she is crying, but Calvin doesn't have time to react before she's popped up off the curb and is running toward her house at full speed. If he was still six years old he wouldn't think twice; he would chase her. But he's not a kid anymore, not really, so he sits, stunned, and watches her go.
**
Calvin goes to school the next morning hoping that he'll see Susie and be able to avoid Jessica. He dozes through his history class and builds an abstract sculpture with his geometric shapes in Math Helpers. At lunch, he sits out on the tennis court, eats the banana and peanut butter sandwich he made for himself that morning and drinks a grape soda. He thinks about Jessica and the days when she flattened herself over him on his bed like she knew everything. He secretly pretended he was her captive and went out of his mind with savage happiness. It was so good, but then when it was over she was still her, with her cigarettes and that big scar across her abdomen that she had a new story for every time he asked.
He thinks about Susie and how she's always out in her backyard before school, filling her mother's old bird feeders. The birds aren't afraid of her, and they're so crazy for the food that they'll come right up to the feeders while she's still standing there distributing sunflower seeds. He remembers one afternoon when it was pouring down rain and he saw her coming from school. He'd cut out after lunch and was just sitting at his window and staring at the sky, thinking about nothing in particular, a habit he'd always had that made his parents nervous. He saw Susie coming down the road, her umbrella blown inside out by the wind and her wet hair plastered to her cheeks. It was just a few months after her mother had died, and when she tripped in the mud and landed on all fours in a puddle it took her a few seconds to get up, as if she didn't have the strength for a minute. Calvin's heart had pounded as he tried to decide if he should do something. She would be inside her house by the time he could get downstairs, but she would be alone in there, her father at work for another two hours. He couldn't imagine what he could do to help her, and she would probably only have been embarrassed to know that he had seen her fall, so he just stayed where he was and watched her walk into the house. For the rest of the afternoon he'd stared at the house's dark windows and imagined Susie inside, and how things would have gone if he'd been brave enough to walk up and knock on her door. It was the closest he'd gotten to thinking about kissing her since he was a kid, back when Hobbes used to torment him with the idea.
He finally sees her at her locker before fifth period, talking with a guy from the marching band who was in Calvin's Spanish class freshman year. The guy is skinny and wears glasses, and Calvin walks over to the two of them trying not to feel like the skittish held-back loser that the kids in that Spanish class all surely remember him as. At least he's not doofy-looking like this kid.
“Hey,” he says, and Susie and the boy turn to him. Calvin ignores the boy and stares at Susie, thinking of that day when it rained and how he should have gone to the door. She smiles.
“Calvin!”
Again, he really likes the way she says his name.
“Hey,” he says again, smiling stupidly. She blushes and toys with the corner of her open locker. The marching band boy frowns in confusion.
“You guys are friends?” he asks in disbelief.
“We're neighbors,” Susie says.
“Yes,” Calvin says at the same time. Susie laughs.
“We sort of grew up together,” she says.
“Wow,” the boys says, making a face like Susie just told him she was raised by wild boars. “I gotta go to Physics.”
“See ya,” Susie says, looking back to Calvin as the boy walks off. Calvin can't stop grinning. This was how it was with Jessica in the beginning, only this is less terrifying. Or more terrifying, or something.
“Physics,” he says. “What a dork.”
“You would like physics if you had the patience to learn the boring stuff first,” Susie says, and Calvin remembers how much she can annoy him; she still thinks she knows everything. In a completely different way than Jessica did. “And Phil's nice,” she says, but her pitying tone re: Phil is encouraging.
“What are you doing right now?” Calvin asks.
“Going to Current Events.”
“There's a class called Current Events?”
“Yeah, it's really interesting. It's my favorite this year.”
“You know what my history class is called? What Happened Yesterday. I guess that's kind of like Current Events. But it's more like, 'what day of the week was it yesterday? Tuesday! Right!'”
Susie laughs, and boy is she prettier when she's laughing. Calvin is on the ceiling, through the roof.
“And my science class?” he says. “It's just a windowless room with a TV and a VCR that plays old Bill Nye the Science Guy tapes. Like, 'Hey, kids, if you put masking tape on two sides of a balloon you can stick a needle through it! Ooooh, science!' Only we don't actually get to try it because they don't trust us with pointy things.”
“I'd go to that class,” Susie says, laughing so hard that her face is red. She stops walking in front of a classroom crowded with actual juniors. “This is my stop,” she says.
“No, it's not.”
“Huh?”
“C'mere. I want to show you something.”
“Calvin, I have to go to class.”
“I'm leaving town forever in like three days! Humor me, okay?”
She groans and turns to look into the classroom. There's an empty desk up front and Calvin is sure that it's hers. She probably watched two hours of the news the night before just to prepare for class. Or maybe she just stared at the TV while the news played and couldn't think about anything but him.
“Please,” he says, and he grabs her hand without meaning to.
Susie follows him out of school silently, as if she's a little irritated by the fact that he's managed talk her into it. Calvin isn't sure how he pulled it off, and he tries not to look at her too much, but suddenly he can't believe she's real. It happened overnight, probably; things usually change while he's asleep, without his permission. He wanted to make up with Susie before he left town just to prove something to his mother, but now he kind of wants to take Susie with him. Though of course she'd never go.
"Where are we going?" Susie asks as they cut through the woods toward the park.
"It's a surprise," Calvin says.
"Are you taking me back here to murder me?" Susie asks, but she doesn't really sound too worried. She's probably the only one in school who knows he's actually harmless.
"I said it was a surprise." He gives her an imitation psycho-killer grin and she snorts.
"You remember that time I painted that play house in your backyard black?" Calvin asks.
"Yes. Well, you started to, and then you got bored," she says, as if this is typical of him, which it is.
"I didn't actually do it to be mean. I was going to make a haunted house. You know? For Halloween? And then I realized it was kind of a dumb idea and then you came running out and got mad at me."
"I hope you're not trying to make amends," she says. "It's not like I sit around thinking about all the stuff we did to each other as kids."
Something about that makes them both go red, and neither of them speaks until they reach their destination: the men's bathroom in the park.
"What the hell?" Susie says, frowning up at it.
"You asked me what I was doing here yesterday," Calvin says. "Here, I'll show you." He kneels down and cups his hands together so she can boost herself up onto the roof. She gives him a suspicious look.
"Is this going to end up making me mad?" she asks.
"I don't know. I doubt it. Here, c'mon, you'll like it."
She sighs and puts her foot in Calvin's hands. It's a bit awkward, hoisting her up onto the roof of the restroom, but she's wearing jeans and she's able to scramble up fairly easily. Calvin hands her her book bag when she's on the roof, and she reaches back down again to help him up. He doesn't really need help, but he grabs her hand anyway, and stumbles against her as he climbs up onto the roof. She smells good, like synthetic citrus, and he remembers trying to eat one of her flavored chapsticks when they were eight and being extremely disappointed.
"Sorry," he says, peeling himself off of her. She touches her hair and sits Indian-style while Calvin searches the horizon for giraffes. He can't see any, and he prays they'll show up so she won't think he's crazy.
"So what am I looking at?" she asks. He offers her a hand and pulls her up, then turns back toward the zoo, squinting and desperate for giraffes. Susie sighs. She's still holding his hand.
"What, Calvin?" she asks, like she's already a little broken-hearted, like she was hoping for more than the usual weirdness.
"THERE!" Calvin shouts, so loudly that she jumps. She follows his gaze, gasping when she sees the giraffe that has emerged, just its head and the top of its neck visible as it lopes through its exercise area. She laughs and squeezes Calvin's hand.
"Oh," she says, soft and smiling, watching as two more giraffes emerge. "Why didn't you say so?"
Calvin is breathing kind of hard and shaking with something like triumph. Susie keeps adjusting her bangs and the process is just incredibly fascinating to him, the idea that she could somehow be nervous herself. When she turns to him, her smile fading, he knows he's got to say something big.
"Remember that day when I held your hand?" he asks. "On the way home from school?"
It had felt so natural at first, that day when Susie was sniffling and walking beside him, trying not to break into full-fledged tears. A girl had picked on her for wearing Keds when apparently Keds were not allowed to be worn anymore, at least according to the girls who knew better. Calvin had wanted to tell her that she wasn't alone in feeling like an outcast, or just like she wanted to be who she was without commentary, but he was eleven and he didn't know how to say those things, so he grabbed her hand instead. She didn't even look up at him, just wrapped her fingers tight around his and kept walking. They were like that all the way home, walking so close their shoulders bumped, and Calvin didn't feel weird or nervous about it until they got to her driveway and let go of each other. The next day he waited until he'd seen her leave to head toward school, because he was afraid she would expect him to hold her hand again, and afraid, too, that she wouldn't. That was about the time they stopped speaking to each other. It wasn't really anything to do with Susie doing well in school and Calvin doing horribly. It was that day when they held hands, and not knowing what to do about it afterward.
"Yes," Susie says, her voice shaky and small. "I remember." Something seems to pass from her eyes to his, an invisible but physical thing, and then his hands are on her shoulders and he's going to kiss her, but somebody is shouting and she turns.
"Hey!"
Calvin turns to see what he first thinks is a policeman looking up at them with stern disapproval. He feels the color drain from his cheeks, and it's just a park services guy, but still, there's the uniform, and the look of accusation.
"What are you two doing?" the guy asks. "Get down from there!"
They scramble to do as he asked, Calvin dropping down first and reaching up to help Susie, but she grabs her book bag and jumps down without assistance, stumbling against Calvin.
"You can't be up there," the guy says, frowning at them like they're insane. "It's not safe. Shouldn't you kids be in school?"
"Sorry," Calvin mumbles, hurrying to lead Susie away. She's trembling a little and he feels horrible. Already he's getting her in trouble.
"I should get back to school," she says when they reach the gravel parking lot beside the park. Calvin nods, feeling shredded. Her gaze is shifty and she keeps touching her hair. Maybe she didn't want to kiss him anyway.
"Okay," he says, and he walks with her for awhile in silence, wishing he could come up with anything to say that isn't Come back to my room and take a nap with me, please, just come, we don't have to do anything but sleep. He wants her quiet and near him for a little longer, but there's no point, and what's he thinking? He barely looks at her when they part ways at the intersection that will take him home and her back to school.
"Calvin!" she shouts when he's halfway across the street, standing right under the stop lights. She looks angry, and then just pretty again.
"Don't start ignoring me this time, okay?" she says. She turns and heads for the school, not waiting for a response.
Calvin runs all the way home, jumping over pot holes and grinning like a maniac, as if she'll be there waiting when he arrives.
*
He spends the rest of the day in bed, thinking about Susie, but not the way he used to think about Jessica. Susie with her soft, fine hair -- he remembers what it feels like, though he used to only reach into it to pull. Susie with her old-timey romance novels and shoes that look like ballet slippers and her Current Events, the things she cares about, she's on the debate team and model UN, she's going to be a doctor, and Calvin wants to hold her in his lap until he leaves. And then maybe he would stay. Probably he would.
He falls asleep on his back and wakes himself up with a snore. The room is softly dark, just barely purple. He wipes the drool from the corner of his mouth and walks to the window. The light is on in the front room at the Derkins' house, and Calvin imagines Susie kneeling on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, her books spread out in front of her, staring into space with a smile her father will worry about.
He's going to run right over there, but then for some reason he eats dinner with his parents. They seem shocked; his mother checks his forehead for a temperature. He eats a plate full of couscous, which he usually hates, and drinks the V-8 juice his mother poured for him.
"What's going on?" his father asks. He looks vaguely frightened and Calvin isn't sure he's earned this level of concern, though there was a significant structural fire, and his parents are among the many who don't believe it wasn't his idea.
"Nothing," Calvin says. He pushes broccoli around on his plate, not quite out of his mind enough to eat it. "I talked to Susie today," he says, looking at his mother.
"Oh?" His parents share a hopeful look. They always wanted him to fall in love with Susie, or, more like, they knew that he would and prayed that she would continue to give him the time of day.
"How's she doing?" his father asks, trying to act casual.
"Good," Calvin says. "She still wants to be a doctor."
His parents look at him like he's got a big red bow tied around his head. It's been awhile since they gave him any look that didn't make him wonder if he had food on his face.
"Well, that's great," his mother says. "You should bring her over for dinner sometime."
Calvin begins to regret involving his parents; an hour ago this felt like an untouchable thing, but he's starting to realize that it's not just going to keep happening for him, that he's going to have to go over there and actually knock on the door like he's been waiting to since that day, two years ago, when he saw Susie walking home in the rain.
It's so dark out and he isn't sure what he would say if he went over there, and what if Susie's father answered the door? So he watches TV for awhile, and then he and his father get into the usual homework-related fight, and Calvin storms up to his room and slams the door.
He shuts out all the lights in his room and leans out the open window, though it's cold outside and the wind stings his cheeks. Susie's second-floor bedroom window is covered by a white and yellow checked curtain, and he can see her light on behind it, but no shadows moving about. Maybe she's on the phone with Phil the marching band guy, laughing about the pyromaniac who lives next door, who seems to think he's going to court her. But she told Calvin she didn't want him to ignore her, brought it up specifically, and that's not what he's doing, right? No, not even close. Tomorrow he'll walk to school with her. He'll actually get up on time, and maybe she'll have lunch with him out on the tennis court.
Her house starts to seem far away and impossible like it did that day in the rain, like it's inside a snow globe, something he's only imagined a real girl living in. He puts his headphones on and lies back on his bed, shuts his eyes and tries not to think about things that might actually happen. He imagines Susie's wedding to Phil, black roses in her bouquet, and just before she can say "I do," as she's struggling with the words, Calvin throws open the doors of the chapel and screams her name. Susie turns to him, her eyes wide with fear, and then she recognizes him, flings the roses away and runs down the aisle. Calvin grabs her and kisses her. This part lasts for awhile. Then they run out the door, just in time to duck the hands of Phil's furious relatives, and embark on a life of crime. For an hour he just thinks about robbing banks with her. She'd be the brains behind the operation, the book-learned brains, anyway, and he'd bring an instinctual knack for thievery. Or, whatever, no one robs banks anymore. She'll be one of those doctors who goes to Africa and he'll be her driver, with a big rifle in his lap, fending off road pirates and murderous animals. But he'd only shoot the animals with sleeping darts. He digs Hobbes out from under the bed and tucks himself around his childhood playmate, who once seemed so big. As he drifts off to sleep he's thinking about himself and Susie in a tent in the Sahara, shaking sand out of their clothes and reaching for each other in the dark.
But then he dreams about the fire anyway, like always. It's all around him, the whole stadium up in flames, and out in the parking lot the cops are arguing with Calvin's history teacher about what should be done. He's in the middle of the blaze, alone, Jessica long gone, and sometimes when he looks up at the sky, when he's lucid enough to change things, a pterodactyl swoops down to save him, but this is not one of those dreams.
He flips himself out of bed somehow, and Hobbes lands beside him. Calvin scoops him up guiltily and leans against the bed taking huge breaths, like the smoke from the dreams is still stuck in his lungs. Well, it was the scariest thing that ever happened to him. It's okay, it's normal. For a second after the cops showed up he was actually relieved, because they seemed to have come to save him.
Tired of feeling pathetic and scared, he tucks Hobbes into bed and puts on his shoes. It's around two o'clock in the morning, but he creeps downstairs anyway and lets himself out the front door. He's still dressed; he's been sleeping in his clothes lately, like a firefighter.
He can't exactly knock the door of Susie's house, but this feels like his last chance, like tomorrow things will have changed again unless he does something now. There's a white trellis covered in dead brown rose vines that is nailed onto the side of the house, and it leads up to a short stretch of roof below Susie's window. He grabs the trellis and pulls a little, testing its strength. Probably it could hold him. He likes the idea of climbing up to her window so much that he doesn't give it too much thought before he's halfway up.
That's when the thorns start, still in place on the vines that are growing near the top of the creaking trellis. Calvin curses as they bite into his hands, but when he looks back down the ground seems much farther away than he expected. He doesn't want to wimp out, so he keeps going, wincing when a particularly bad patch of prickers tears the hem of his t-shirt.
By the time he reaches the roof, which is not as flat as it looked from the ground, his hands are bleeding and throbbing from having been torn apart by the thorns. He tip-toes carefully over to Susie's window, almost glad for the distraction of the pain, because it makes the knocking seem easy.
It takes a few minutes but eventually she hears his knuckles rapping just hard enough to wake her and she gets out of bed, puffy-faced and pale. She's wearing a pale blue undershirt with lace along the bust and he's staring at it when she opens the window.
"Are you insane?" she hisses.
"I just wanted to see you," he says, hoping this will be enough to win her over. She frowns and crosses her arms over her chest.
"Calvin, I can't do this," she says, her voice going to a strange, high-pitched place. "This is too much, it's - I'm not Jessica Peel."
"I know you're not. Can I come in?"
"What for?" She looks so sad, and he should have known to stay out of her life or risk tearing it down until it was something like his. Her hair is a mess and he wants to reach up and comb it into place with his fingers, wouldn't care what happened next. But that must not be true, because he doesn't do it.
"I need a band-aid," he says, holding up his bloody hands. She gasps.
"Calvin - what -" She takes his hands in hers and examines them in the moonlight. He can see the goosebumps on her arms, and, oh. He wishes he could tell her now that he's secretly a superhero and that he's come to let her ride on his shoulders while he flies over the countryside on patrol.
"I climbed up that rose thing," he says. She looks up at him, and he feels it again, something that seems to land in his eyes and move down through him.
"Hurry," she whispers, ducking back into her room and motioning for him to follow. "It's cold."
She shuts the window when he's inside, pushes him onto her bed and sneaks out into the hallway. Calvin sits and listens to the tick of her bedside clock, examining the contents of her room in the darkness. He hasn't seen the inside of this room since he was nine years old and she had My Little Ponies lined up on the dresser. Now it's ninety percent books, stacked everywhere.
When Susie returns she's got a little first aid kit in her hands. She shuts her bedroom door quietly and begins to lay out her supplies on the bed beside Calvin, kneeling on the floor. He's so honored to be her practice patient, to get some glimpse of the doctor she'll eventually become, and he wants to live in her cluttered little room forever.
"Remember when we played doctor?" Calvin asks as she cleans his cuts with a damp wash rag.
"Yes, I remember," she says, not looking up at him. "Calvin, what are you doing?"
"Nothing - I - what do you mean?"
"Uh! Climbing into my room at night? Talking about when we were kids? You never - why are you suddenly - um?"
He watches her cover his cuts in tiny bandages like the ones his father uses when he nicks himself shaving. Her hair is neat and combed now; she must have fixed it when she went to the hall bathroom for the wash rag.
"You want me to leave you alone?" he asks. She finally looks up at him, and her eyes might be a little wet, but it's really too dark to tell.
"No," she says. "I hated it, before. When you left me alone."
"You were always asking me to."
"I know that." She stands up, and he does, too. He's maybe five inches taller than her, and he loves the new smallness of her, remembers when they were the same size.
"I feel like I messed everything up," he says.
"Yeah, well. You kind of did."
He looks down at his feet and she ducks in close, arching up to kiss him. Her hand shakes like a moth on his chest, and he puts his hand over it while he opens her mouth up with his, licking though her lips. She lets out a hard breath and he feels it all the way through him like she's giving him CPR.
"Not for good, though," she says. He touches her hair, not knowing why he wants to or what to do with it once he has. She shuts her eyes and puts her head against his chest. He isn't sure what to do next or why he's shaking with nerves, why it feels like he's never done this before when he thought he'd already done everything.
"You know what I've always wanted to do?" Susie asks, her arms locked tight around the small of his back.
"What?" He's just glad she's got something in mind.
"This," she says, leading him over to the bed. She pushes him down onto it gently, and his heartbeat is drowning out every sound in the world as he lies back on her pillows, because she can't possibly, right? Is this something that every girl in the world secretly does to every terrified boy?
She lies down beside him, a few inches away, but he can still feel how warm she is. She tucks her hands under her cheek and smiles at him. She's gone from progressively prettier to blazingly gorgeous, hard to look at directly, in the space of a few days. It's a neat trick. He rolls toward her, trying to keep his ragged breathing from getting loud enough to wake her father. She takes one of his band-aid-covered hands and kisses his dirty fingertips.
"I always wanted to do this," she says, her voice a new kind of low that makes him flush and fidget. She touches his face and he's gone, just blown to bits. "When we were kids, even. I wanted to play house and just lie in a pretend bed with you. I just wanted you to be calm and look at me and smile."
"I want to stay here," he says. "Can I stay here?"
"No," she says, but she scoots close and kisses him, wraps him into her arms and doesn't ask him to leave. Calvin squeezes her to him, every warm brush of her bare skin under his uncertain hands enough to make him fear spoiling the moment by shouting and shuddering and getting sent home with cold, sticky underwear. But he doesn't want it to be like that, not like it was with Jessica, one dizzying moment after another. He wants to stretch this out and linger inside it; he wants to be on fire, here with her.
"Oh, I hated you for getting so cute," Susie says, her mouth still over Calvin's and her eyes shut as if she's talking in her sleep. She hooks a leg around his hip and he almost loses it, but manages to hold himself together, arching backward a little in case she's not yet familiar with teenage boy anatomy.
"It would have been easy to forget you if you hadn't ended up with such a sweet face," she says, sitting up on her elbow like suddenly she wants to chat. Calvin is shaking and licking his lips, missing hers already. He scoots into the crook of her arm and looks up at her like she's going to sing him to sleep.
"It used to make me cry, just the way you looked," she says, running her fingers through his hair. He lets his eyes fall shut, spreading his legs apart and no longer bothering to hide what she's certainly noticed by now. "That you could look like that and still be the way you were, the way you are. It was like you weren't going to take advantage of it, not like the other guys who got cute, and I just, I don't know, it got to me. And then you were with Jessica." She sighs as if that was a very long time ago. Calvin keeps his eyes shut.
"I wish I hadn't been," he says.
"I know you do," she says, and she kisses him again, soft and slow, and her leg is sliding in the general direction of his lap. He should probably reach out to stop it, but instead he just turns into it and pushes against her knee once, and that's all it takes.
He sputters and winces, curling against her in shame even during the part that still feels so good, the best, worst, uncontrollable part wearing down. It's just like everything else: he learned it wrong and now he's stuck, remedial and hopeless. Susie tucks an arm around him and leans down to kiss his ear.
"Sorry," he says, lines of stinging tears gathering along his pinched-up eyes.
"It's okay," she says, stroking her fingers down the back of his neck. "Calvin, it's okay."
He laughs at himself and wipes at his cheeks, afraid to open his eyes. She kisses the edges of his eyes, licks up his tears, and he remembers that she's not really all that delicate.
"I just want to stay here," he says, again, because he doesn't know how else to explain what's happening. He opens his eyes and looks up at her. She's smiling, unfazed, and messy-haired again.
And this time she says, "Okay."
She sets her alarm for five in the morning so he'll have time to sneak away. He gathers her into his still-trembling arms and she fits against him better than anything he's ever tried.
*
Calvin wakes up dry-mouthed and achy, Susie's bedside clock blaring like a tripped alarm. She's awake before he is, rubbing her eyes and punching a button on the clock that shuts off the alarm. Calvin rolls onto his back, his chest ratcheting like he's woken up in a fox hole with bullets flying over his head. Then Susie turns to him and puts her hand on his collarbone, and he's okay again.
"What time is it?" he asks, liking the creaky gravel in his voice. He sounds like a grownup, like a man.
"Five," she says, her own voice pinched-up from sleep, the kind of thing he can't believe he's allowed to hear. He tucks a hand around her waist and squeezes just a little.
"Look at the window," she says. He could listen to her talk like this for hours, in her secret before-dawn voice. "It's all icy out there. You can't climb down the roof, you'll slip."
"I'll stay here," he says, and she laughs. She kisses him, just quick and dry, because they both have morning breath.
"Calvin." She sighs and puts her head on his shoulder. "What are we going to do?"
"Nothing," he says, not really understanding the question, and then, "Come with me to Florida."
She groans and sits up, yawning. He watches her profile for awhile, thinking that it already feels like they've slept in the same bed all their lives, like they were born married. Maybe it's all the games of house they played as kids.
"I can take you out the front," she says. "We'll just have to be quiet."
"Wait," he says, sitting up and catching her arm when she starts to move away from the bed. She lets him hold her back.
"What?"
But he isn't sure why he's stopped her. It's just that something about what's happened feels fragile, like once they leave her room they'll have to remember everything else, all the things that kept them apart for so long.
"I'll walk you to school," he says. "Wait for me."
She smiles, though she looks kind of sad. "I guess I've been waiting five years for you to say that."
"I wanted to," he says. He wishes they could lie together in her bed for the rest of the day, feels like they were in the middle of something that got interrupted, something that was going to make everything okay.
"I know you did," she says, touching his bottom lip, soft and curious like it's a mushroom growing on a tree.
And that's why he loves her, she just knows.
*
Continued
Title: Theories About Nuclear Winter
Fandom: Calvin and Hobbes
Pairing: Calvin/Susie
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When Calvin finally sorts out his feelings for Susie his timing is not great.
Notes: Thank you so much to chlorate for the beta work!
Calvin is sixteen when he decides he's going to move to the Florida Keys and work on a shrimp farm. It seems like the logical thing to do. He's supposed to be a junior at school, but the collection of classes that he's actually managed to pass make him only some kind of freshman-sophomore mutant hybrid who doesn't really belong anywhere. Which is kinda how it's always been.
He does have a girlfriend, which is more than a lot of the honor student boys can say. She's a year younger than him but sort of world-weary already. Her name is Jessica and she's really pretty, hot, even, and not just in the sense that she likes to set things on fire. And if it weren't for the setting things on fire and for the whole getting Calvin arrested after she burned down the football stadium's concession stand incident, he might be willing to stay in high school just for her. But getting him arrested pretty much ruined his life, and now when he looks at her he just sees kind of a cartoonish devil woman with red horns, asking him what his problem is when he doesn't want to fool around. Also he's not so sure she's actually on birth control, though she keeps telling him she is and biting his ear hard enough to leave teeth marks when he doesn't believe her.
“What the hell are you going to do on a shrimp farm?” she asks when he tells her his plan. They're in his bedroom after school, or after half a day at school, anyway. Jessica is in her underwear, pacing and smoking a cigarette. If there's anything she loves as much as fire, it's sucking on ashes.
“Live off the land,” Calvin says. “Like a real, you know. Not like some suburban drone.”
“Whatever.” Jessica glowers at him. She wears a lot of black eye makeup and Calvin can't imagine what she'd look like without it. He wouldn't recognize her. “It'll stink,” she says. “Shrimp smell bad.”
“I don't care,” he says, though he has considered that. He's not sure why it's got to be shrimp, but he wants to live by the ocean and they were the first thing that popped into his head.
“Well, I'm going to move to New York as soon as I can save up enough money,” she says, as if this is a far superior plan.
“Will you open the window?” he asks, making a face. “You're going to set off the smoke alarm.”
“You don't care what happens to me,” she says. Calvin sighs. It's not completely untrue.
“You're on probation,” he says. “And so am I. If you get caught with a lighter they'll put you in juvie and me in real prison, probably.”
“I can't handle your drama right now,” she says, the cigarette flapping between her lips as she pulls her jeans on.
It's pretty hilarious, her accusing him of being dramatic, considering that she once asked him, with her eyes so wild that he was afraid she was going to bite his nose off, if he thought maybe they should burn down the school next. But she won't get the joke so he doesn't laugh, just stays on his back in bed, his head propped up on his pillows and his hands folded over his stomach.
“You're lucky I ever even talked to you,” she says when she's at the door, tears in her eyes because she must have figured out that this is the way Calvin is breaking up with her, telling her that he's going to run away from home to work on a shrimp farm and not inviting her along.
“Yeah,” Calvin agrees, listless and ready for her to leave. Certainly there were good times. Jessica was the first girl he kissed, the first girl he did everything with. She wasn't the first to look twice at him, though. He's widely considered a semi-dangerous loser at school, but some of the other less than stable girls have smiled at him once or twice. Jessica was just the first one who was at all interesting. Back when they first started dating she replaced the sky and everything in it, and Calvin lived under the shadow of her, worshipful and terrified that she would leave, because if she did there would be a nuclear winter, the sun and everything else up there blocked out and long gone. He actually wrote a paper that was semi-about this phenomenon for his history class when they were studying World War II, but the teacher didn't really get it.
Jessica slams the door on her way out. Calvin hopes his mother hasn't come home yet and that they won't run into each other on the stairs. His parents have forbidden him to see Jessica, but he figured out around six years old that they can't really stop him from doing anything without physical restraint, and that once he got older and stronger he'd get away with everything. Until the police got involved, anyway.
He's not actually a bad kid. That's what he can't seem to communicate to his teachers, the cops, even to his parents. He doesn't have a black heart and he doesn't wake up every morning trying to come up with new ways to make his parents' lives difficult. Such as with Jessica. He just wanted to have a girlfriend who was pretty and funny and kind of weird, and the fact that she got undressed without his prompting on their third date was a little alarming but definitely not unwelcome. Then she was burning things in bigger and bigger increments and telling him that her older brother killed a guy and that she'd never been able to sleep for more than an hour at a time because her mother did coke while she was pregnant and Calvin only knew that he didn't want to give her up. It wasn't like he wanted her to be that way.
His mother slams into his room and glares at him like he's the Antichrist, so he figures she must have seen Jessica.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison?” she shouts. Calvin doesn't move from the bed.
“No thanks,” he says.
“Listen,” his mother says, her jaw so tight she looks like a video game bad guy, something that makes its way across a level chomping mindlessly. “I can appreciate the fact that you are a teenager and you want certain things from girls. But if you think that girl is going to be worth -”
“I just broke up with her,” Calvin says. “God!” he adds, like this should have been obvious. His mother scoffs in disbelief, which is not entirely unfair. He has developed something of a reputation as a liar in this household.
“What's the matter with you?” This is his mother's favorite refrain. She acts like she sincerely wants him to explain.
“I don't know,” he says. “You raised me.”
“I endured you,” she says. “You were you right out of the box. We gave you everything-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Calvin says. He puts a pillow over his face because his eyes are watering and he would cry in front of the whole football team at school before he let his mother see it. “Get out.”
“Why can't you just make friends with normal kids?” she says. “Why don't you walk to school with Susie anymore?”
“She hates me.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” His mother slams back out of the room. She's always making dramatic entrances and exits, wound tight, jaw clenched. She has to wear a night guard so that she won't grind her teeth to dust while she sleeps.
Calvin rolls over when she's gone and reaches under the bed to find the stuffed tiger he hides whenever Jessica comes over. He still can't get to sleep without holding onto Hobbes; he got used to it when he was a kid and the shape of anything else doesn't work. He's tried pillows, blankets, Jessica. Hobbes just fits right into the lonely place on his chest, ducked under his chin and squeezed between his arms.
“It's okay,” he says, speaking into the matted fuzz of Hobbes' left ear. “In a week, we'll be up to our knees in shrimp.”
**
Calvin skips school the next day to work a shift at Bederman's grocery, where he is secretly employed as a produce unloader two days a week. It's one of his three jobs, the only one he has to do while he should be in school. He's saving up for a new transmission for the beater he inherited from his dad on his sixteenth birthday. As soon as the car is ready to go, he'll be headed for Florida.
“Sick of this yet?” Bederman asks when he comes out to the dock to watch Calvin unloading boxes of corn. He's under the impression that Calvin is a boy named Sven Larsen who has already left school, and he keeps trying to talk poor, misguided Sven into re-enrolling.
“No, sir,” Calvin says. “I like working with my hands.”
“Yeah, well, you're a kid,” Bederman says. “You think your back's going to like doing that for the rest of your life?”
Calvin shrugs. “I think I'm going to die when I'm eighteen, anyway,” he says. “I just have a feeling.”
Bederman laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Everyone felt that way when they were your age. Even your parents. Where are your parents, anyway?”
“Dead,” Calvin says. “Train accident.”
“I hope you're not under the impression that you're a good liar,” Bederman says before returning to the front of the store.
After his shift, Calvin walks to the park and climbs up onto the roof of the men's restrooms to eat an apple he swiped from work and watch the giraffes. It costs like seventeen dollars to get into the zoo, but from the top of the men's restroom you can at least see the giraffes for free. Calvin is still kind of stuck in his fantasy about being a poor migrant worker during the Great Depression, his muscles burning with exhaustion after unloading shipments of produce all day, and he imagines he's on the roof of his tiny ramshackle house, his pretty, somewhat downtrodden but ultimately plucky wife inside cooking him stone soup while he tries to catch a glimpse of the animals that are being mistreated at some traveling circus that's set up nearby. He concocts a side plot about liberating the animals. His wife would totally support him; she would keep watch while he led the giraffes out on giant leashes like over-sized dogs.
“What are you doing?” someone shouts, and Calvin flinches. He keeps thinking he's going to get arrested again, for everything, even for watching giraffes that he hasn't paid to see. But when he looks down it's just Susie Derkins staring up at him, her eyes narrowed to slits by the sun.
“Eating an apple,” Calvin says, holding up the core like she's an idiot for not noticing this. She rolls her eyes. She's got her book bag on and a paperback novel in her hand.
“Why are you doing it on the roof of the men's bathroom?”
“Why do you care?” Calvin asks, and Susie turns to walk away in exasperation. For some reason, Calvin follows her. It's something about what his mother said yesterday. About how it's his fault that Susie hates him, because of course it is. She was always willing not to.
“You weren't in school,” she says as they walk back toward their neighborhood. He's surprised she noticed; they don't have any classes together. Susie has been in all honors classes since freshman year. Calvin is in a class called Math Helpers where they play with colored blocks in order to at least get some idea of what geometry even is.
“I'll tell you a secret,” Calvin says, because he hasn't got anyone else left to talk to. “If you promise not to tell anyone.”
“No,” Susie says sharply. “I don't need to end up the accessory to a crime, thanks.”
“That's what I was, actually,” Calvin says. “In the fire. I actually didn't do anything. They just didn't believe me because I was the boy and she was the girl.”
Susie won't look at him; the set of her jaw reminds him of his mother's. He and Susie were actually kind of friends for awhile, when they were about eleven, after they'd stopped throwing water balloons at each other and stealing each other's toys. Calvin was used to getting picked on at school, but Susie got awkward around middle school and suddenly she was the subject of ridicule by the cool girls. He would defend her by acting insane and distracting them, a moving target. Sometimes she still cried on the walk home from school, and once he had held her hand.
“I believe you,” she says, and he's so shocked that he laughs.
“Why?”
“Because Jessica Peel is crazy.”
Calvin tries to work up the indignation required to defend his ex-girlfriend, but he can't.
“I know,” he says. “I broke up with her.”
Susie darts a look at him to check if he's serious. He shrugs. He's still trying to remember why Susie started hating him. As middle school went on she continued to be the nerdy, mousy girl she still is, and Calvin resented her more and more as school got harder and harder for him. It had always seemed so easy to her, like second nature, like what she was designed to do. He's given up finding something that feels like that, because he's learned, too late, that to do anything important and fascinating you have to learn math first, and it feels impossible to go back and do that now.
“So what's your secret?” she asks.
“I'm leaving,” Calvin says. “As soon as I can get my car fixed. I'm moving to Florida.”
Susie stops walking and frowns at him, clutching her book to her chest. It's Pride and Prejudice, one of those old girly love stories.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I'm going to work on a shrimp farm. Or something. Some kind of farm. Do they farm crabs? I mean, they must. It's not like crabs just walk into the grocery store. Though I guess they could if they wanted to. Wouldn't that be funny? I don't know, maybe not. But I guess if I was farming crabs I might get pinched. What?”
Susie looks horrified. He should have known she'd disapprove. He's not even sure why he told her. She reaches up and pushes her bangs out of her eyes.
“You can't just leave school,” she says.
“Yes, I can. When you're sixteen you can leave whenever you want.”
“Yeah, but.” She shuts her eyes in frustration. She's always done this, even when they were six and she was always trying to explain to Calvin why he couldn't be the pet gorilla when they played house, because he had to be the husband, because it just wasn't house if there wasn't a wife and a husband.
“But, what - you can't be serious,” she says.
“Why should I stay in school?” he asks. “It's not really doing me any good.”
“You're not stupid,” she says, glaring at him like she will take it as a personal insult if he disagrees.
“I know that,” he says, though actually sometimes he thinks he must be.
“You're just not trying,” she says. “You could - I could tutor you. Maybe.”
“I think it's too late for that.” They both know it's true. There was always something about the very essence of school, not just the lessons and the books and the homework, that Calvin couldn't abide. It was the bathroom passes and the poster presentations and the lunch room. It all seemed poisoned with some banal evil and he'd always felt he was doing the right thing by battling against it.
“Calvin, you can't just leave,” she says, and something about the way she says his name strikes through him. Not a lot of people say it that way, like he's someone who can have sense talked into him. “Where will you live?” she asks.
“I don't know. I've got some money saved, I can rent an apartment. And then I'll get a job and -”
“What about your parents? Are you just going to - leave them a note?”
“No. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I'll have to. My dad might tie me to the bed otherwise.”
“That might be the best thing for you,” Susie says. She starts walking again, and Calvin walks beside her. It's fall, damp leaves plastered to the streets, and he wants to get out of town before it gets cold. He used to love the snow, but lately winter just makes him sad.
“Do you still want to be a doctor?” Calvin asks.
Susie says nothing for a moment, watching the ground as she walks. Then she smiles.
“I can't believe you remember that,” she says.
“Why?”
“I don't know. But yeah, I do. I want to be an oncologist.”
“Cancer doctor?”
“See?” She snaps her head up to look at him. “You're not stupid.”
He grins, because he thinks she actually means it. She smiles back, and she looks sort of pretty with her cheeks going pink. They both look away and are quiet for awhile, walking slower as they get close to their neighborhood.
“What if you cured cancer?” he says, imagining seeing her on TV one day, in a white lab coat and science goggles, being interviewed with ten thousand microphones shoved in her face. Susie laughs.
“That's different,” she says. “That's, like, a research scientist. Oncologists treat patients who already have the disease.”
“Oh.” Calvin kicks a piece of gravel and it skitters into the gutter. “Like your mom?”
Susie's mother died two years earlier of bone cancer. Calvin was at the funeral with his parents, but Susie didn't seem to notice him. She was in pretty bad shape.
“Yeah,” she says. She stops walking and abruptly sits down on the curb. Calvin feels horrible; he shouldn't have said anything about her mother. She looks up at him, her face clear, and he sits down beside her.
“Don't go,” she says.
“What? Why not?” His heart starts racing. He still has dreams about Susie all the time, that she's mean to him and he pretends not to care, and he always wakes up angry and hurt.
“Because. Too much has changed already. Oh - Calvin.” She shuts her eyes and puts her hand over her face. “When I thought they were going to put you in jail-”
And then she is crying, but Calvin doesn't have time to react before she's popped up off the curb and is running toward her house at full speed. If he was still six years old he wouldn't think twice; he would chase her. But he's not a kid anymore, not really, so he sits, stunned, and watches her go.
**
Calvin goes to school the next morning hoping that he'll see Susie and be able to avoid Jessica. He dozes through his history class and builds an abstract sculpture with his geometric shapes in Math Helpers. At lunch, he sits out on the tennis court, eats the banana and peanut butter sandwich he made for himself that morning and drinks a grape soda. He thinks about Jessica and the days when she flattened herself over him on his bed like she knew everything. He secretly pretended he was her captive and went out of his mind with savage happiness. It was so good, but then when it was over she was still her, with her cigarettes and that big scar across her abdomen that she had a new story for every time he asked.
He thinks about Susie and how she's always out in her backyard before school, filling her mother's old bird feeders. The birds aren't afraid of her, and they're so crazy for the food that they'll come right up to the feeders while she's still standing there distributing sunflower seeds. He remembers one afternoon when it was pouring down rain and he saw her coming from school. He'd cut out after lunch and was just sitting at his window and staring at the sky, thinking about nothing in particular, a habit he'd always had that made his parents nervous. He saw Susie coming down the road, her umbrella blown inside out by the wind and her wet hair plastered to her cheeks. It was just a few months after her mother had died, and when she tripped in the mud and landed on all fours in a puddle it took her a few seconds to get up, as if she didn't have the strength for a minute. Calvin's heart had pounded as he tried to decide if he should do something. She would be inside her house by the time he could get downstairs, but she would be alone in there, her father at work for another two hours. He couldn't imagine what he could do to help her, and she would probably only have been embarrassed to know that he had seen her fall, so he just stayed where he was and watched her walk into the house. For the rest of the afternoon he'd stared at the house's dark windows and imagined Susie inside, and how things would have gone if he'd been brave enough to walk up and knock on her door. It was the closest he'd gotten to thinking about kissing her since he was a kid, back when Hobbes used to torment him with the idea.
He finally sees her at her locker before fifth period, talking with a guy from the marching band who was in Calvin's Spanish class freshman year. The guy is skinny and wears glasses, and Calvin walks over to the two of them trying not to feel like the skittish held-back loser that the kids in that Spanish class all surely remember him as. At least he's not doofy-looking like this kid.
“Hey,” he says, and Susie and the boy turn to him. Calvin ignores the boy and stares at Susie, thinking of that day when it rained and how he should have gone to the door. She smiles.
“Calvin!”
Again, he really likes the way she says his name.
“Hey,” he says again, smiling stupidly. She blushes and toys with the corner of her open locker. The marching band boy frowns in confusion.
“You guys are friends?” he asks in disbelief.
“We're neighbors,” Susie says.
“Yes,” Calvin says at the same time. Susie laughs.
“We sort of grew up together,” she says.
“Wow,” the boys says, making a face like Susie just told him she was raised by wild boars. “I gotta go to Physics.”
“See ya,” Susie says, looking back to Calvin as the boy walks off. Calvin can't stop grinning. This was how it was with Jessica in the beginning, only this is less terrifying. Or more terrifying, or something.
“Physics,” he says. “What a dork.”
“You would like physics if you had the patience to learn the boring stuff first,” Susie says, and Calvin remembers how much she can annoy him; she still thinks she knows everything. In a completely different way than Jessica did. “And Phil's nice,” she says, but her pitying tone re: Phil is encouraging.
“What are you doing right now?” Calvin asks.
“Going to Current Events.”
“There's a class called Current Events?”
“Yeah, it's really interesting. It's my favorite this year.”
“You know what my history class is called? What Happened Yesterday. I guess that's kind of like Current Events. But it's more like, 'what day of the week was it yesterday? Tuesday! Right!'”
Susie laughs, and boy is she prettier when she's laughing. Calvin is on the ceiling, through the roof.
“And my science class?” he says. “It's just a windowless room with a TV and a VCR that plays old Bill Nye the Science Guy tapes. Like, 'Hey, kids, if you put masking tape on two sides of a balloon you can stick a needle through it! Ooooh, science!' Only we don't actually get to try it because they don't trust us with pointy things.”
“I'd go to that class,” Susie says, laughing so hard that her face is red. She stops walking in front of a classroom crowded with actual juniors. “This is my stop,” she says.
“No, it's not.”
“Huh?”
“C'mere. I want to show you something.”
“Calvin, I have to go to class.”
“I'm leaving town forever in like three days! Humor me, okay?”
She groans and turns to look into the classroom. There's an empty desk up front and Calvin is sure that it's hers. She probably watched two hours of the news the night before just to prepare for class. Or maybe she just stared at the TV while the news played and couldn't think about anything but him.
“Please,” he says, and he grabs her hand without meaning to.
Susie follows him out of school silently, as if she's a little irritated by the fact that he's managed talk her into it. Calvin isn't sure how he pulled it off, and he tries not to look at her too much, but suddenly he can't believe she's real. It happened overnight, probably; things usually change while he's asleep, without his permission. He wanted to make up with Susie before he left town just to prove something to his mother, but now he kind of wants to take Susie with him. Though of course she'd never go.
"Where are we going?" Susie asks as they cut through the woods toward the park.
"It's a surprise," Calvin says.
"Are you taking me back here to murder me?" Susie asks, but she doesn't really sound too worried. She's probably the only one in school who knows he's actually harmless.
"I said it was a surprise." He gives her an imitation psycho-killer grin and she snorts.
"You remember that time I painted that play house in your backyard black?" Calvin asks.
"Yes. Well, you started to, and then you got bored," she says, as if this is typical of him, which it is.
"I didn't actually do it to be mean. I was going to make a haunted house. You know? For Halloween? And then I realized it was kind of a dumb idea and then you came running out and got mad at me."
"I hope you're not trying to make amends," she says. "It's not like I sit around thinking about all the stuff we did to each other as kids."
Something about that makes them both go red, and neither of them speaks until they reach their destination: the men's bathroom in the park.
"What the hell?" Susie says, frowning up at it.
"You asked me what I was doing here yesterday," Calvin says. "Here, I'll show you." He kneels down and cups his hands together so she can boost herself up onto the roof. She gives him a suspicious look.
"Is this going to end up making me mad?" she asks.
"I don't know. I doubt it. Here, c'mon, you'll like it."
She sighs and puts her foot in Calvin's hands. It's a bit awkward, hoisting her up onto the roof of the restroom, but she's wearing jeans and she's able to scramble up fairly easily. Calvin hands her her book bag when she's on the roof, and she reaches back down again to help him up. He doesn't really need help, but he grabs her hand anyway, and stumbles against her as he climbs up onto the roof. She smells good, like synthetic citrus, and he remembers trying to eat one of her flavored chapsticks when they were eight and being extremely disappointed.
"Sorry," he says, peeling himself off of her. She touches her hair and sits Indian-style while Calvin searches the horizon for giraffes. He can't see any, and he prays they'll show up so she won't think he's crazy.
"So what am I looking at?" she asks. He offers her a hand and pulls her up, then turns back toward the zoo, squinting and desperate for giraffes. Susie sighs. She's still holding his hand.
"What, Calvin?" she asks, like she's already a little broken-hearted, like she was hoping for more than the usual weirdness.
"THERE!" Calvin shouts, so loudly that she jumps. She follows his gaze, gasping when she sees the giraffe that has emerged, just its head and the top of its neck visible as it lopes through its exercise area. She laughs and squeezes Calvin's hand.
"Oh," she says, soft and smiling, watching as two more giraffes emerge. "Why didn't you say so?"
Calvin is breathing kind of hard and shaking with something like triumph. Susie keeps adjusting her bangs and the process is just incredibly fascinating to him, the idea that she could somehow be nervous herself. When she turns to him, her smile fading, he knows he's got to say something big.
"Remember that day when I held your hand?" he asks. "On the way home from school?"
It had felt so natural at first, that day when Susie was sniffling and walking beside him, trying not to break into full-fledged tears. A girl had picked on her for wearing Keds when apparently Keds were not allowed to be worn anymore, at least according to the girls who knew better. Calvin had wanted to tell her that she wasn't alone in feeling like an outcast, or just like she wanted to be who she was without commentary, but he was eleven and he didn't know how to say those things, so he grabbed her hand instead. She didn't even look up at him, just wrapped her fingers tight around his and kept walking. They were like that all the way home, walking so close their shoulders bumped, and Calvin didn't feel weird or nervous about it until they got to her driveway and let go of each other. The next day he waited until he'd seen her leave to head toward school, because he was afraid she would expect him to hold her hand again, and afraid, too, that she wouldn't. That was about the time they stopped speaking to each other. It wasn't really anything to do with Susie doing well in school and Calvin doing horribly. It was that day when they held hands, and not knowing what to do about it afterward.
"Yes," Susie says, her voice shaky and small. "I remember." Something seems to pass from her eyes to his, an invisible but physical thing, and then his hands are on her shoulders and he's going to kiss her, but somebody is shouting and she turns.
"Hey!"
Calvin turns to see what he first thinks is a policeman looking up at them with stern disapproval. He feels the color drain from his cheeks, and it's just a park services guy, but still, there's the uniform, and the look of accusation.
"What are you two doing?" the guy asks. "Get down from there!"
They scramble to do as he asked, Calvin dropping down first and reaching up to help Susie, but she grabs her book bag and jumps down without assistance, stumbling against Calvin.
"You can't be up there," the guy says, frowning at them like they're insane. "It's not safe. Shouldn't you kids be in school?"
"Sorry," Calvin mumbles, hurrying to lead Susie away. She's trembling a little and he feels horrible. Already he's getting her in trouble.
"I should get back to school," she says when they reach the gravel parking lot beside the park. Calvin nods, feeling shredded. Her gaze is shifty and she keeps touching her hair. Maybe she didn't want to kiss him anyway.
"Okay," he says, and he walks with her for awhile in silence, wishing he could come up with anything to say that isn't Come back to my room and take a nap with me, please, just come, we don't have to do anything but sleep. He wants her quiet and near him for a little longer, but there's no point, and what's he thinking? He barely looks at her when they part ways at the intersection that will take him home and her back to school.
"Calvin!" she shouts when he's halfway across the street, standing right under the stop lights. She looks angry, and then just pretty again.
"Don't start ignoring me this time, okay?" she says. She turns and heads for the school, not waiting for a response.
Calvin runs all the way home, jumping over pot holes and grinning like a maniac, as if she'll be there waiting when he arrives.
*
He spends the rest of the day in bed, thinking about Susie, but not the way he used to think about Jessica. Susie with her soft, fine hair -- he remembers what it feels like, though he used to only reach into it to pull. Susie with her old-timey romance novels and shoes that look like ballet slippers and her Current Events, the things she cares about, she's on the debate team and model UN, she's going to be a doctor, and Calvin wants to hold her in his lap until he leaves. And then maybe he would stay. Probably he would.
He falls asleep on his back and wakes himself up with a snore. The room is softly dark, just barely purple. He wipes the drool from the corner of his mouth and walks to the window. The light is on in the front room at the Derkins' house, and Calvin imagines Susie kneeling on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, her books spread out in front of her, staring into space with a smile her father will worry about.
He's going to run right over there, but then for some reason he eats dinner with his parents. They seem shocked; his mother checks his forehead for a temperature. He eats a plate full of couscous, which he usually hates, and drinks the V-8 juice his mother poured for him.
"What's going on?" his father asks. He looks vaguely frightened and Calvin isn't sure he's earned this level of concern, though there was a significant structural fire, and his parents are among the many who don't believe it wasn't his idea.
"Nothing," Calvin says. He pushes broccoli around on his plate, not quite out of his mind enough to eat it. "I talked to Susie today," he says, looking at his mother.
"Oh?" His parents share a hopeful look. They always wanted him to fall in love with Susie, or, more like, they knew that he would and prayed that she would continue to give him the time of day.
"How's she doing?" his father asks, trying to act casual.
"Good," Calvin says. "She still wants to be a doctor."
His parents look at him like he's got a big red bow tied around his head. It's been awhile since they gave him any look that didn't make him wonder if he had food on his face.
"Well, that's great," his mother says. "You should bring her over for dinner sometime."
Calvin begins to regret involving his parents; an hour ago this felt like an untouchable thing, but he's starting to realize that it's not just going to keep happening for him, that he's going to have to go over there and actually knock on the door like he's been waiting to since that day, two years ago, when he saw Susie walking home in the rain.
It's so dark out and he isn't sure what he would say if he went over there, and what if Susie's father answered the door? So he watches TV for awhile, and then he and his father get into the usual homework-related fight, and Calvin storms up to his room and slams the door.
He shuts out all the lights in his room and leans out the open window, though it's cold outside and the wind stings his cheeks. Susie's second-floor bedroom window is covered by a white and yellow checked curtain, and he can see her light on behind it, but no shadows moving about. Maybe she's on the phone with Phil the marching band guy, laughing about the pyromaniac who lives next door, who seems to think he's going to court her. But she told Calvin she didn't want him to ignore her, brought it up specifically, and that's not what he's doing, right? No, not even close. Tomorrow he'll walk to school with her. He'll actually get up on time, and maybe she'll have lunch with him out on the tennis court.
Her house starts to seem far away and impossible like it did that day in the rain, like it's inside a snow globe, something he's only imagined a real girl living in. He puts his headphones on and lies back on his bed, shuts his eyes and tries not to think about things that might actually happen. He imagines Susie's wedding to Phil, black roses in her bouquet, and just before she can say "I do," as she's struggling with the words, Calvin throws open the doors of the chapel and screams her name. Susie turns to him, her eyes wide with fear, and then she recognizes him, flings the roses away and runs down the aisle. Calvin grabs her and kisses her. This part lasts for awhile. Then they run out the door, just in time to duck the hands of Phil's furious relatives, and embark on a life of crime. For an hour he just thinks about robbing banks with her. She'd be the brains behind the operation, the book-learned brains, anyway, and he'd bring an instinctual knack for thievery. Or, whatever, no one robs banks anymore. She'll be one of those doctors who goes to Africa and he'll be her driver, with a big rifle in his lap, fending off road pirates and murderous animals. But he'd only shoot the animals with sleeping darts. He digs Hobbes out from under the bed and tucks himself around his childhood playmate, who once seemed so big. As he drifts off to sleep he's thinking about himself and Susie in a tent in the Sahara, shaking sand out of their clothes and reaching for each other in the dark.
But then he dreams about the fire anyway, like always. It's all around him, the whole stadium up in flames, and out in the parking lot the cops are arguing with Calvin's history teacher about what should be done. He's in the middle of the blaze, alone, Jessica long gone, and sometimes when he looks up at the sky, when he's lucid enough to change things, a pterodactyl swoops down to save him, but this is not one of those dreams.
He flips himself out of bed somehow, and Hobbes lands beside him. Calvin scoops him up guiltily and leans against the bed taking huge breaths, like the smoke from the dreams is still stuck in his lungs. Well, it was the scariest thing that ever happened to him. It's okay, it's normal. For a second after the cops showed up he was actually relieved, because they seemed to have come to save him.
Tired of feeling pathetic and scared, he tucks Hobbes into bed and puts on his shoes. It's around two o'clock in the morning, but he creeps downstairs anyway and lets himself out the front door. He's still dressed; he's been sleeping in his clothes lately, like a firefighter.
He can't exactly knock the door of Susie's house, but this feels like his last chance, like tomorrow things will have changed again unless he does something now. There's a white trellis covered in dead brown rose vines that is nailed onto the side of the house, and it leads up to a short stretch of roof below Susie's window. He grabs the trellis and pulls a little, testing its strength. Probably it could hold him. He likes the idea of climbing up to her window so much that he doesn't give it too much thought before he's halfway up.
That's when the thorns start, still in place on the vines that are growing near the top of the creaking trellis. Calvin curses as they bite into his hands, but when he looks back down the ground seems much farther away than he expected. He doesn't want to wimp out, so he keeps going, wincing when a particularly bad patch of prickers tears the hem of his t-shirt.
By the time he reaches the roof, which is not as flat as it looked from the ground, his hands are bleeding and throbbing from having been torn apart by the thorns. He tip-toes carefully over to Susie's window, almost glad for the distraction of the pain, because it makes the knocking seem easy.
It takes a few minutes but eventually she hears his knuckles rapping just hard enough to wake her and she gets out of bed, puffy-faced and pale. She's wearing a pale blue undershirt with lace along the bust and he's staring at it when she opens the window.
"Are you insane?" she hisses.
"I just wanted to see you," he says, hoping this will be enough to win her over. She frowns and crosses her arms over her chest.
"Calvin, I can't do this," she says, her voice going to a strange, high-pitched place. "This is too much, it's - I'm not Jessica Peel."
"I know you're not. Can I come in?"
"What for?" She looks so sad, and he should have known to stay out of her life or risk tearing it down until it was something like his. Her hair is a mess and he wants to reach up and comb it into place with his fingers, wouldn't care what happened next. But that must not be true, because he doesn't do it.
"I need a band-aid," he says, holding up his bloody hands. She gasps.
"Calvin - what -" She takes his hands in hers and examines them in the moonlight. He can see the goosebumps on her arms, and, oh. He wishes he could tell her now that he's secretly a superhero and that he's come to let her ride on his shoulders while he flies over the countryside on patrol.
"I climbed up that rose thing," he says. She looks up at him, and he feels it again, something that seems to land in his eyes and move down through him.
"Hurry," she whispers, ducking back into her room and motioning for him to follow. "It's cold."
She shuts the window when he's inside, pushes him onto her bed and sneaks out into the hallway. Calvin sits and listens to the tick of her bedside clock, examining the contents of her room in the darkness. He hasn't seen the inside of this room since he was nine years old and she had My Little Ponies lined up on the dresser. Now it's ninety percent books, stacked everywhere.
When Susie returns she's got a little first aid kit in her hands. She shuts her bedroom door quietly and begins to lay out her supplies on the bed beside Calvin, kneeling on the floor. He's so honored to be her practice patient, to get some glimpse of the doctor she'll eventually become, and he wants to live in her cluttered little room forever.
"Remember when we played doctor?" Calvin asks as she cleans his cuts with a damp wash rag.
"Yes, I remember," she says, not looking up at him. "Calvin, what are you doing?"
"Nothing - I - what do you mean?"
"Uh! Climbing into my room at night? Talking about when we were kids? You never - why are you suddenly - um?"
He watches her cover his cuts in tiny bandages like the ones his father uses when he nicks himself shaving. Her hair is neat and combed now; she must have fixed it when she went to the hall bathroom for the wash rag.
"You want me to leave you alone?" he asks. She finally looks up at him, and her eyes might be a little wet, but it's really too dark to tell.
"No," she says. "I hated it, before. When you left me alone."
"You were always asking me to."
"I know that." She stands up, and he does, too. He's maybe five inches taller than her, and he loves the new smallness of her, remembers when they were the same size.
"I feel like I messed everything up," he says.
"Yeah, well. You kind of did."
He looks down at his feet and she ducks in close, arching up to kiss him. Her hand shakes like a moth on his chest, and he puts his hand over it while he opens her mouth up with his, licking though her lips. She lets out a hard breath and he feels it all the way through him like she's giving him CPR.
"Not for good, though," she says. He touches her hair, not knowing why he wants to or what to do with it once he has. She shuts her eyes and puts her head against his chest. He isn't sure what to do next or why he's shaking with nerves, why it feels like he's never done this before when he thought he'd already done everything.
"You know what I've always wanted to do?" Susie asks, her arms locked tight around the small of his back.
"What?" He's just glad she's got something in mind.
"This," she says, leading him over to the bed. She pushes him down onto it gently, and his heartbeat is drowning out every sound in the world as he lies back on her pillows, because she can't possibly, right? Is this something that every girl in the world secretly does to every terrified boy?
She lies down beside him, a few inches away, but he can still feel how warm she is. She tucks her hands under her cheek and smiles at him. She's gone from progressively prettier to blazingly gorgeous, hard to look at directly, in the space of a few days. It's a neat trick. He rolls toward her, trying to keep his ragged breathing from getting loud enough to wake her father. She takes one of his band-aid-covered hands and kisses his dirty fingertips.
"I always wanted to do this," she says, her voice a new kind of low that makes him flush and fidget. She touches his face and he's gone, just blown to bits. "When we were kids, even. I wanted to play house and just lie in a pretend bed with you. I just wanted you to be calm and look at me and smile."
"I want to stay here," he says. "Can I stay here?"
"No," she says, but she scoots close and kisses him, wraps him into her arms and doesn't ask him to leave. Calvin squeezes her to him, every warm brush of her bare skin under his uncertain hands enough to make him fear spoiling the moment by shouting and shuddering and getting sent home with cold, sticky underwear. But he doesn't want it to be like that, not like it was with Jessica, one dizzying moment after another. He wants to stretch this out and linger inside it; he wants to be on fire, here with her.
"Oh, I hated you for getting so cute," Susie says, her mouth still over Calvin's and her eyes shut as if she's talking in her sleep. She hooks a leg around his hip and he almost loses it, but manages to hold himself together, arching backward a little in case she's not yet familiar with teenage boy anatomy.
"It would have been easy to forget you if you hadn't ended up with such a sweet face," she says, sitting up on her elbow like suddenly she wants to chat. Calvin is shaking and licking his lips, missing hers already. He scoots into the crook of her arm and looks up at her like she's going to sing him to sleep.
"It used to make me cry, just the way you looked," she says, running her fingers through his hair. He lets his eyes fall shut, spreading his legs apart and no longer bothering to hide what she's certainly noticed by now. "That you could look like that and still be the way you were, the way you are. It was like you weren't going to take advantage of it, not like the other guys who got cute, and I just, I don't know, it got to me. And then you were with Jessica." She sighs as if that was a very long time ago. Calvin keeps his eyes shut.
"I wish I hadn't been," he says.
"I know you do," she says, and she kisses him again, soft and slow, and her leg is sliding in the general direction of his lap. He should probably reach out to stop it, but instead he just turns into it and pushes against her knee once, and that's all it takes.
He sputters and winces, curling against her in shame even during the part that still feels so good, the best, worst, uncontrollable part wearing down. It's just like everything else: he learned it wrong and now he's stuck, remedial and hopeless. Susie tucks an arm around him and leans down to kiss his ear.
"Sorry," he says, lines of stinging tears gathering along his pinched-up eyes.
"It's okay," she says, stroking her fingers down the back of his neck. "Calvin, it's okay."
He laughs at himself and wipes at his cheeks, afraid to open his eyes. She kisses the edges of his eyes, licks up his tears, and he remembers that she's not really all that delicate.
"I just want to stay here," he says, again, because he doesn't know how else to explain what's happening. He opens his eyes and looks up at her. She's smiling, unfazed, and messy-haired again.
And this time she says, "Okay."
She sets her alarm for five in the morning so he'll have time to sneak away. He gathers her into his still-trembling arms and she fits against him better than anything he's ever tried.
*
Calvin wakes up dry-mouthed and achy, Susie's bedside clock blaring like a tripped alarm. She's awake before he is, rubbing her eyes and punching a button on the clock that shuts off the alarm. Calvin rolls onto his back, his chest ratcheting like he's woken up in a fox hole with bullets flying over his head. Then Susie turns to him and puts her hand on his collarbone, and he's okay again.
"What time is it?" he asks, liking the creaky gravel in his voice. He sounds like a grownup, like a man.
"Five," she says, her own voice pinched-up from sleep, the kind of thing he can't believe he's allowed to hear. He tucks a hand around her waist and squeezes just a little.
"Look at the window," she says. He could listen to her talk like this for hours, in her secret before-dawn voice. "It's all icy out there. You can't climb down the roof, you'll slip."
"I'll stay here," he says, and she laughs. She kisses him, just quick and dry, because they both have morning breath.
"Calvin." She sighs and puts her head on his shoulder. "What are we going to do?"
"Nothing," he says, not really understanding the question, and then, "Come with me to Florida."
She groans and sits up, yawning. He watches her profile for awhile, thinking that it already feels like they've slept in the same bed all their lives, like they were born married. Maybe it's all the games of house they played as kids.
"I can take you out the front," she says. "We'll just have to be quiet."
"Wait," he says, sitting up and catching her arm when she starts to move away from the bed. She lets him hold her back.
"What?"
But he isn't sure why he's stopped her. It's just that something about what's happened feels fragile, like once they leave her room they'll have to remember everything else, all the things that kept them apart for so long.
"I'll walk you to school," he says. "Wait for me."
She smiles, though she looks kind of sad. "I guess I've been waiting five years for you to say that."
"I wanted to," he says. He wishes they could lie together in her bed for the rest of the day, feels like they were in the middle of something that got interrupted, something that was going to make everything okay.
"I know you did," she says, touching his bottom lip, soft and curious like it's a mushroom growing on a tree.
And that's why he loves her, she just knows.
*
Continued