Fic: (Inner) Conflict Resolution.
Title: (Inner) Conflict Resolution
Author: strongly_worded
Word Count: 3062 words
Rating: PG-13, for some offensive language
Character/Pairing: Dick/Mac friendship. Dick POV.
Disclaimer: Me =/= Rob Thomas.
Summary: Mac begins the healing process. And, surprisingly enough, Dick has a hand in in it.
Spoilers: Up to 2 x 22 “Not Pictured.”
Dick thinks he should have gotten a free pass out of summer school. Dude, his little brother just jumped off a building and straight into a black 2006 Escalade. If that isn’t enough to overlook a D in Physics, he doesn’t know what is. Actually, he has no idea what the make of the car was, had barely registered the color at the time everything went down, so to speak, but he tells Clemmons all of these details, flailing his arms about in what he hopes will properly convey his grief. Clemmons can barely contain an eyeroll, because Clemmons knows Dick spent a five-day booze-and-booties binge in Tijuana after his brother’s funeral and came back very much like his normal self, except tanner and more obnoxious.
“Dude! I’m in mourning!”
“Mr. Casablancas, Vice-Principal Halpert and I extend our deepest sympathies for your loss -- ”
Dick somehow manages to refrain from doing an air-pump for successfully getting out of eight weeks in a stuffy, smelly, soul-sucking lab.
“ -- however,” Clemmons continues, “however, given the circumstances of your situation, we feel it is in your overall best interests to earn your diploma out of this institution and into a new stage in your life.”
Dick deflates.
Whatever. Clemmons is such a homo.
--
He can’t believe people would voluntarily spend their summer indoors. At school. When they actually graduated. What the fuck, man. But there Ghost World is, almost unrecognizable without the streaks in her hair, helping lead a pack of munchkins to the computer lab down the hallway, one after the other, like a tiny army of dorks-and-nerds-in-training. It’s really frickin’ sad. Dick would say it was the saddest thing he had ever seen, except he had been there when the paramedics scraped Beaver off a windshield. So, you know, kind of a no-contest sort of situation there.
When they see each other on campus, they acknowledge each other by nodding. Actually Dick nods, and she does this weird thing where she forces up the corners of her mouth into what he thinks is supposed to be a smile.
--
About two weeks into summer school, Dick is going out of his mind and swears he is about to go all Tom-Cruise-apeshit on Wu’s ass. Physics is as boring as it ever was, and there is no one to buddy up with or at least eye-stalk. The class is filled with sophomore nerds looking to get ahead, spaced-out riff-raff, and really, really nasty-looking females. And to top it all off, he knows he can’t sympathy-vote his way out of here, so he’s drowning himself in symbols and formulas that might as well be that stuff Egyptians wrote on their walls.
Dick spends his lunch breaks alone on one of the picnic tables, sitting not on the bench but on the surface itself. After chowing down on take-out, he balls up sheets of blank paper from his binder and hurls them towards the trash containers ten feet away.
On the third Monday of summer school, Mac walks directly into his line of sight towards her usual spot two tables away, and Dick is feeling considerate enough at that moment to pause his throwing during her passing.
“Hey, Freaks-and-Geeks. How are the orphans?”
“They’re not orphans,” she says as sits down. “They’re in summer camp.”
“What camp is that? Camp Noogie & Whirlie?” He goes back to trash bin basketball, and she ignores his question in favor of her Tupperware container of nuts and leaves.
“Can you at least aim for the recycling bin?” he hears her ask a few minutes later.
--
On the fourth Monday, he gets tired of trash bin basketball and plops himself down at her table without an invitation. She knows he’s there, but her eyes never lift up from her magazine. He spies her lunch, and it’s an apple and some gross-looking sandwich made of peanut butter that doesn’t look like normal peanut butter. He wrinkles his nose at it.
“Indian or pizza?” he asks as he whips out his cell phone.
Her head snaps up. “What?”
“In. Di. An. Or. Piz. Za,” he overenunciates. “I’m getting sick of Chinese. I don’t know how they can eat all those rice and noodles all the time, you know?”
She just stares at him blankly for a while, and then goes back to her magazine. “Indian. I hate pizza.”
He goes though his phonebook looking for the number for Maharani’s.
--
She has to babysit the camp kids during lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursday. On the fourth Thursday of summer school, Dick orders twenty Happy Meals, a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese McMeal, a salad, and a parfait because he really fucking hates eating alone, because dude, losers eat alone.
She starts to go into the evils of preservatives and globalization and blahblahblah, but Dick just points at this one girl who is doing a little happy dance with her McNuggets, and Mac shuts up and starts picking the chicken off of her California Cobb salad.
--
He’s not doing so hot in Physics, which is not all that surprising but kinda makes him panic in this way that he’s totally not used to, so he asks her to help her on the fifth Monday of summer school. “You’re, like, good at science, right?”
“Computer science,” she corrects in this ‘duh’ sort of voice. She uses that tone a lot with him.
“Yeah, but you took the class, right? And you passed, right?” He gets nowhere with this, so he tries, “Fifty bucks per lesson?”
He’s speaking her language now, and she accepts “for the good of her future college loans” and starts flipping through his textbook. As her head is bent down, Dick notices the blackness of her hair again.
“Hey, how come you don’t put those funky colors in anymore?” he asks, opening the bag of chips that came with his sub. “Hot Topic run out of dye or something?”
She shrugs and just says, “I don’t know. Too much upkeep, I guess.”
--
Mac is a friggin’ good tutor. He’s getting Cs on the weekly quizzes now, and sometimes they end their sessions by playing GTA or Half-Life, which is cool because it makes the house not so quiet and Logan hardly comes over anymore. And he leaves Dick’s biweekly parties before midnight, which is really fucking lame.
They play on the downstairs system, far away from Beaver’s room.
--
On the eighth and final Monday of summer school, Dick starts planning his end-of-summer bash (which is actually a lot like his other bashes, but with more kegs) and Mac contributes by designing a wicked invite for him that’s centered around a cartoon of Wu looking constipated. Dick says she should print out an invitation for herself, but Mac just snorts. “I haven’t really been in party-party mode lately.”
“Hey, college is around the corner. You gotta -- ” He makes a smooth sliding motion with his hands. “ ---eeeeeeeeeease your way back into the scene. Lot of mixers and par-tays. I bet even the Dungeons & Dragons crowds gets freaky-deaky.”
She smirks. “I’ve never really been iiiiiiiiiiiin the scene.”
“You should still come. Get away from the computer. Get a life.”
“I have a life, thanks,” Mac retorts. “Virtual, yes, but doesn’t involve damaging brain cells.”
--
Dick knows he should probably be studying or something, but he goes to the Hut after class on the eighth and final Wednesday of summer school to grab a snack and take care of some business. It’s before the afternoon rush, so there aren’t a lot of people around.
“Hey there, Ron-Ron,” Dick sing-songs as he approaches Veronica, snapping her out of her daze at the empty counter.
“Hey there, Dick,” she says with a faint smirk, and she starts wiping up the counter with the cloth in her hand.
“You busy?”
“I’m working.”
He watches the cloth move around the counter. “Working?”
“Yeah, see, you show up somewhere, and the owner pays you an hourly wage to perform menial labor. And then, after two weeks pass -- ” She pauses and pretends she’s just had a light bulb moment. “Actually, just download the SparkNotes.”
“It didn’t look like you were doing anything,” he replies, dropping down on a stool and starting to swivel in it back and forth. “You looked all spaced out, dazed and confused, out in the la-la, lost in your inner --”
“What do you want, Dick?” she snaps. Wow. Somebody needs some Midol.
“I need a favor.”
“I charge $100 per hour for my super-sleuth services,” Veronica says, throwing the towel into the sink. “I don’t do favors.”
“Not even for tus compadres?”
“We are not compadres. ¿Comprende?” She crosses her arms across her chest. “$100 per hour.”
“Look, I don’t need you to work your Nancy Drew voodoo, mmmkay? I just want you to put in a casual appearance at my shin-dig.” He slaps down the invite on the now gleaming surface. “BAM! Friday, 8:00, Casa Casablancas, B.Y.O.B. That last B doesn’t stand for Beer. That’s covered. It’s for Booty and Beotches.”
She makes a face at it. “I’m going to have to pass. Seeing as how beer, booty, and beotches didn’t really work too much in my favor at one particular 09er shindig.” Her voice is getting pissier and pissier by the second.
“Dude, are you still on that? I thought we had forgiven and forgotten -- ” He clasps his hands together before him and shakes the linked fingers. “ -- and made amends.” And they had. Or at least he thinks they did. He had apologized to her the summer before and offered her to come with him and Logan on their surfing trips. He even said she could use his board, which he thinks was a cool gesture considering she had put his first baby underneath the wheels of her car.
“I was missing information,” she returns, her shoulders all tense and rigid, and now she’s back to work and re-stocking the baked goods display.
“Dude, you know, I already said sorry for what I did, missing info or not. It was a jackass move, fucking retarded and lame.”
She ignores him.
“But I can’t apologize for Beav.”
She still says nothing, but her lips are pressed together so tightly that she reminds him of his Great Aunt Mildred.
“I know life really sucks -- ”
A bitter laugh here.
“I do!” he insists. This was getting really annoying.
“Yeah, you seem so down, throwing raging parties every other weekend with 100 of your closest pals,” Veronica throws back at him.
“Look, some people deal by PMSing and whipping out their Harriet the Spy binoculars and getting their bitch on,” Dick replies. “I deal by partying and get my fuh-reak on.”
“Wow, so you must be really depressed.”
Now it’s time for Dick to say nothing, and the silence is pretty awkward. Veronica almost looks like she regrets what she says, looks like she may actually feel sorry for him. It’s weird seeing her like this, and fuck being pitied and fuck being That Guy That Dashboard Confessional Writes Songs About, so Dick starts talking again and pushes the invite towards her. “Look, Mac’s kind of my buddy now. I just want her to come, see people she knows, have a good time. She good use some chillaxation. You can still hate me or whatever.”
She looks down at the card, and after a while, she sort of sighs and picks it up. “Dick, are you actually developing awareness outside of yourself? I do believe you may be growing.” The hostility is still in her voice, but it’s as not out there and obvious like it was before.
“Don’t get all Ricki Lake on me, Ronnie. Ricki’s boring. And a fatty.”
--
On the night of the last day of summer school, Dick is feeling goooooooooood. The final went pretty damn well, and his bash is in full-swing, and he’s on his third beer, and Mikaela Johnson is looking really sweet tonight. He’s on his way out to the patio again when he spots Mac, Logan, Veronica, and that kid Veronica always hangs out with playing pool in the game room. He grins and waves at Mac.
She waves back and smiles. A real smile this time.
--
Two weeks before their freshman years begins, Dick wants to see the new shark movie at the IMAX dome in the Ruben H. Fleet Center, but none of the guys want to come with because it’s educational. Dick’s all, “DUDE! SHARKS!,” but they’re being lame.
Mac agrees to go with him, and together they made the two-hour drive to the southern end of San Diego and battle it out over the control of the radio. Dick says it’s his car, but Mac says she’s a guest in it.
The movie is awesome, and they have a good time goofing around in the connected museum. Dick buys a sharkhead mask, the rubbery kind that goes completely over your head, and chases Mac around the place with it on.
“For someone who is supposedly cool,” she says when they’ve stopped acting like eight-year-olds, “you sure act like a grade-A dork sometimes.” She pretends to be annoyed, but whatever. She was totally laughing the whole time.
--
Five days before Move-In Day, Dick blows off Madison’s own end-of-summer party (“She’s acting like she’s on her rag 24/7. Jesus.”) and hangs out with Mac instead. They catch the 7:00 showing of Little Miss Sunshine because she really likes indie films and he thinks Steve Carell is hee-larious. It’s completely win-win.
When they go out for a late dinner, she walks in the direction of Giovanni’s and he’s surprised because he thought she didn’t like pizza. But he doesn’t say anything because he’s really craving some deep-dish.
--
It’s the morning Dick is leaving for San Diego State. He’s just finished up loading up the medium-sized U-haul trailer attached to his car when Mac pulls up in her lime green Beetle. He slides the back of the trailer down and walks to the driver’s side of his SUV to wait for her park.
“Hey there, Big Mac,” he greets her amiably as she walks over.
Mac rolls her eyes good-naturedly at the nickname and holds out a mix CD. “Just came over to bid you adieu and drop off this for the drive to college. Filled with songs to mark this momentous occasion of your journey to a less-functioning liver.”
“Awwwwesome.” He takes it from her and flips the CD over, reading the tracklist and nodding his approval at some of the choices.
She gestures at the house behind him. “So what’s going to happen to your humble abode?”
“Uhhh… Mom’s leasing it out for me, I think? Or selling?” Dick shrugs; he’s never been one for the details. When he finally looks up again from the disc in his hands, he notices a spot of color. “Hey!” He pulls at some of the orange in her hair.
“I just felt like doing it again,” she tells him, trying to play it off casually.
“Tang-a-licious.” Dick flicks it back into place with his fingers, and decides it’s a good time to give her something. He pulls out a velvet jewelry box from his jacket box and tosses to her. “I found this in Beaver’s desk before the packing people Mom hired came to do his room last week,” he tries to say as lightly as possible. “I’m pretty sure he was going to give it to you.”
Mac doesn’t say anything at first. She simply stares at the box like she doesn’t know what to do about it or how to open it or something. After a long moment, she flips the top open to reveal a delicate platinum chain with a small charm in the shape of the Apple logo.
“I’m sorry if it’s, like, weird -- ”
“No,” she says immediately, cutting him off and gently touching the metal with her fingers. “No, it’s fine. I think…” She bites her lip, waffles a little on what she wants to say and wants to acknowledge. “I think I loved him. Even though…”
“Yeah,” is all that Dick says as her voice drifts off , because he gets it, and he hopes she knows what he means by the “yeah” because he doesn’t really feel like saying he loves his brother out loud. It’s kind of Brokeback. He watches her slip on the necklace, and then: “Look, if I had paid attention more? If I known? About Woody, I would have… I would have done something. Then maybe -- ”
Mac holds up her hand to stop him, and Dick’s grateful for that because the ‘maybes’ have sorta been driving him nuts when he lets himself think about the whole thing. “Then maybe a lot of things,” she says. “Playing the what-if game gets you nowhere. Trust me on that one.”
Dick nods at that, then clears his throat and says in a less gloomy voice, “So San Diego’s only an hour away. You should come to visit. We could hang out, tear it up Neptune-stye.” He does a few mock dance moves.
“That’d be cool,” Mac replies, and they smile at each other, even though they both know it’s never going to happen and this friendship or whatever it is will turn into one or two phone calls and a handful of emails. And then nothing at all.
“Suh-weet. Just give me a call on the celly.” There’s another awkward silence as Dick tries to figure out how to end this good-bye. With any other girl, Dick would have pulled her into a hug that was mostly about feeling her up, but this was Mac, so it was different. He finally balls his hand and holds it out to her. Mac smirks and bumps fists with him.
“Later,” he says, grinning now.
“Later,” Mac returns, and then starts to walk towards her car. She says over her shoulder, “Try to go to class every once in a while?”
Dick scoffs. “Pffff. Whatever.”
--
The first day of classes arrives. Dick actually goes to his Sociology lecture. He manages to stay awake the entire time, even though it’s boring with a capital B-O-H.
End.
Author: strongly_worded
Word Count: 3062 words
Rating: PG-13, for some offensive language
Character/Pairing: Dick/Mac friendship. Dick POV.
Disclaimer: Me =/= Rob Thomas.
Summary: Mac begins the healing process. And, surprisingly enough, Dick has a hand in in it.
Spoilers: Up to 2 x 22 “Not Pictured.”
Dick thinks he should have gotten a free pass out of summer school. Dude, his little brother just jumped off a building and straight into a black 2006 Escalade. If that isn’t enough to overlook a D in Physics, he doesn’t know what is. Actually, he has no idea what the make of the car was, had barely registered the color at the time everything went down, so to speak, but he tells Clemmons all of these details, flailing his arms about in what he hopes will properly convey his grief. Clemmons can barely contain an eyeroll, because Clemmons knows Dick spent a five-day booze-and-booties binge in Tijuana after his brother’s funeral and came back very much like his normal self, except tanner and more obnoxious.
“Dude! I’m in mourning!”
“Mr. Casablancas, Vice-Principal Halpert and I extend our deepest sympathies for your loss -- ”
Dick somehow manages to refrain from doing an air-pump for successfully getting out of eight weeks in a stuffy, smelly, soul-sucking lab.
“ -- however,” Clemmons continues, “however, given the circumstances of your situation, we feel it is in your overall best interests to earn your diploma out of this institution and into a new stage in your life.”
Dick deflates.
Whatever. Clemmons is such a homo.
--
He can’t believe people would voluntarily spend their summer indoors. At school. When they actually graduated. What the fuck, man. But there Ghost World is, almost unrecognizable without the streaks in her hair, helping lead a pack of munchkins to the computer lab down the hallway, one after the other, like a tiny army of dorks-and-nerds-in-training. It’s really frickin’ sad. Dick would say it was the saddest thing he had ever seen, except he had been there when the paramedics scraped Beaver off a windshield. So, you know, kind of a no-contest sort of situation there.
When they see each other on campus, they acknowledge each other by nodding. Actually Dick nods, and she does this weird thing where she forces up the corners of her mouth into what he thinks is supposed to be a smile.
--
About two weeks into summer school, Dick is going out of his mind and swears he is about to go all Tom-Cruise-apeshit on Wu’s ass. Physics is as boring as it ever was, and there is no one to buddy up with or at least eye-stalk. The class is filled with sophomore nerds looking to get ahead, spaced-out riff-raff, and really, really nasty-looking females. And to top it all off, he knows he can’t sympathy-vote his way out of here, so he’s drowning himself in symbols and formulas that might as well be that stuff Egyptians wrote on their walls.
Dick spends his lunch breaks alone on one of the picnic tables, sitting not on the bench but on the surface itself. After chowing down on take-out, he balls up sheets of blank paper from his binder and hurls them towards the trash containers ten feet away.
On the third Monday of summer school, Mac walks directly into his line of sight towards her usual spot two tables away, and Dick is feeling considerate enough at that moment to pause his throwing during her passing.
“Hey, Freaks-and-Geeks. How are the orphans?”
“They’re not orphans,” she says as sits down. “They’re in summer camp.”
“What camp is that? Camp Noogie & Whirlie?” He goes back to trash bin basketball, and she ignores his question in favor of her Tupperware container of nuts and leaves.
“Can you at least aim for the recycling bin?” he hears her ask a few minutes later.
--
On the fourth Monday, he gets tired of trash bin basketball and plops himself down at her table without an invitation. She knows he’s there, but her eyes never lift up from her magazine. He spies her lunch, and it’s an apple and some gross-looking sandwich made of peanut butter that doesn’t look like normal peanut butter. He wrinkles his nose at it.
“Indian or pizza?” he asks as he whips out his cell phone.
Her head snaps up. “What?”
“In. Di. An. Or. Piz. Za,” he overenunciates. “I’m getting sick of Chinese. I don’t know how they can eat all those rice and noodles all the time, you know?”
She just stares at him blankly for a while, and then goes back to her magazine. “Indian. I hate pizza.”
He goes though his phonebook looking for the number for Maharani’s.
--
She has to babysit the camp kids during lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursday. On the fourth Thursday of summer school, Dick orders twenty Happy Meals, a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese McMeal, a salad, and a parfait because he really fucking hates eating alone, because dude, losers eat alone.
She starts to go into the evils of preservatives and globalization and blahblahblah, but Dick just points at this one girl who is doing a little happy dance with her McNuggets, and Mac shuts up and starts picking the chicken off of her California Cobb salad.
--
He’s not doing so hot in Physics, which is not all that surprising but kinda makes him panic in this way that he’s totally not used to, so he asks her to help her on the fifth Monday of summer school. “You’re, like, good at science, right?”
“Computer science,” she corrects in this ‘duh’ sort of voice. She uses that tone a lot with him.
“Yeah, but you took the class, right? And you passed, right?” He gets nowhere with this, so he tries, “Fifty bucks per lesson?”
He’s speaking her language now, and she accepts “for the good of her future college loans” and starts flipping through his textbook. As her head is bent down, Dick notices the blackness of her hair again.
“Hey, how come you don’t put those funky colors in anymore?” he asks, opening the bag of chips that came with his sub. “Hot Topic run out of dye or something?”
She shrugs and just says, “I don’t know. Too much upkeep, I guess.”
--
Mac is a friggin’ good tutor. He’s getting Cs on the weekly quizzes now, and sometimes they end their sessions by playing GTA or Half-Life, which is cool because it makes the house not so quiet and Logan hardly comes over anymore. And he leaves Dick’s biweekly parties before midnight, which is really fucking lame.
They play on the downstairs system, far away from Beaver’s room.
--
On the eighth and final Monday of summer school, Dick starts planning his end-of-summer bash (which is actually a lot like his other bashes, but with more kegs) and Mac contributes by designing a wicked invite for him that’s centered around a cartoon of Wu looking constipated. Dick says she should print out an invitation for herself, but Mac just snorts. “I haven’t really been in party-party mode lately.”
“Hey, college is around the corner. You gotta -- ” He makes a smooth sliding motion with his hands. “ ---eeeeeeeeeease your way back into the scene. Lot of mixers and par-tays. I bet even the Dungeons & Dragons crowds gets freaky-deaky.”
She smirks. “I’ve never really been iiiiiiiiiiiin the scene.”
“You should still come. Get away from the computer. Get a life.”
“I have a life, thanks,” Mac retorts. “Virtual, yes, but doesn’t involve damaging brain cells.”
--
Dick knows he should probably be studying or something, but he goes to the Hut after class on the eighth and final Wednesday of summer school to grab a snack and take care of some business. It’s before the afternoon rush, so there aren’t a lot of people around.
“Hey there, Ron-Ron,” Dick sing-songs as he approaches Veronica, snapping her out of her daze at the empty counter.
“Hey there, Dick,” she says with a faint smirk, and she starts wiping up the counter with the cloth in her hand.
“You busy?”
“I’m working.”
He watches the cloth move around the counter. “Working?”
“Yeah, see, you show up somewhere, and the owner pays you an hourly wage to perform menial labor. And then, after two weeks pass -- ” She pauses and pretends she’s just had a light bulb moment. “Actually, just download the SparkNotes.”
“It didn’t look like you were doing anything,” he replies, dropping down on a stool and starting to swivel in it back and forth. “You looked all spaced out, dazed and confused, out in the la-la, lost in your inner --”
“What do you want, Dick?” she snaps. Wow. Somebody needs some Midol.
“I need a favor.”
“I charge $100 per hour for my super-sleuth services,” Veronica says, throwing the towel into the sink. “I don’t do favors.”
“Not even for tus compadres?”
“We are not compadres. ¿Comprende?” She crosses her arms across her chest. “$100 per hour.”
“Look, I don’t need you to work your Nancy Drew voodoo, mmmkay? I just want you to put in a casual appearance at my shin-dig.” He slaps down the invite on the now gleaming surface. “BAM! Friday, 8:00, Casa Casablancas, B.Y.O.B. That last B doesn’t stand for Beer. That’s covered. It’s for Booty and Beotches.”
She makes a face at it. “I’m going to have to pass. Seeing as how beer, booty, and beotches didn’t really work too much in my favor at one particular 09er shindig.” Her voice is getting pissier and pissier by the second.
“Dude, are you still on that? I thought we had forgiven and forgotten -- ” He clasps his hands together before him and shakes the linked fingers. “ -- and made amends.” And they had. Or at least he thinks they did. He had apologized to her the summer before and offered her to come with him and Logan on their surfing trips. He even said she could use his board, which he thinks was a cool gesture considering she had put his first baby underneath the wheels of her car.
“I was missing information,” she returns, her shoulders all tense and rigid, and now she’s back to work and re-stocking the baked goods display.
“Dude, you know, I already said sorry for what I did, missing info or not. It was a jackass move, fucking retarded and lame.”
She ignores him.
“But I can’t apologize for Beav.”
She still says nothing, but her lips are pressed together so tightly that she reminds him of his Great Aunt Mildred.
“I know life really sucks -- ”
A bitter laugh here.
“I do!” he insists. This was getting really annoying.
“Yeah, you seem so down, throwing raging parties every other weekend with 100 of your closest pals,” Veronica throws back at him.
“Look, some people deal by PMSing and whipping out their Harriet the Spy binoculars and getting their bitch on,” Dick replies. “I deal by partying and get my fuh-reak on.”
“Wow, so you must be really depressed.”
Now it’s time for Dick to say nothing, and the silence is pretty awkward. Veronica almost looks like she regrets what she says, looks like she may actually feel sorry for him. It’s weird seeing her like this, and fuck being pitied and fuck being That Guy That Dashboard Confessional Writes Songs About, so Dick starts talking again and pushes the invite towards her. “Look, Mac’s kind of my buddy now. I just want her to come, see people she knows, have a good time. She good use some chillaxation. You can still hate me or whatever.”
She looks down at the card, and after a while, she sort of sighs and picks it up. “Dick, are you actually developing awareness outside of yourself? I do believe you may be growing.” The hostility is still in her voice, but it’s as not out there and obvious like it was before.
“Don’t get all Ricki Lake on me, Ronnie. Ricki’s boring. And a fatty.”
--
On the night of the last day of summer school, Dick is feeling goooooooooood. The final went pretty damn well, and his bash is in full-swing, and he’s on his third beer, and Mikaela Johnson is looking really sweet tonight. He’s on his way out to the patio again when he spots Mac, Logan, Veronica, and that kid Veronica always hangs out with playing pool in the game room. He grins and waves at Mac.
She waves back and smiles. A real smile this time.
--
Two weeks before their freshman years begins, Dick wants to see the new shark movie at the IMAX dome in the Ruben H. Fleet Center, but none of the guys want to come with because it’s educational. Dick’s all, “DUDE! SHARKS!,” but they’re being lame.
Mac agrees to go with him, and together they made the two-hour drive to the southern end of San Diego and battle it out over the control of the radio. Dick says it’s his car, but Mac says she’s a guest in it.
The movie is awesome, and they have a good time goofing around in the connected museum. Dick buys a sharkhead mask, the rubbery kind that goes completely over your head, and chases Mac around the place with it on.
“For someone who is supposedly cool,” she says when they’ve stopped acting like eight-year-olds, “you sure act like a grade-A dork sometimes.” She pretends to be annoyed, but whatever. She was totally laughing the whole time.
--
Five days before Move-In Day, Dick blows off Madison’s own end-of-summer party (“She’s acting like she’s on her rag 24/7. Jesus.”) and hangs out with Mac instead. They catch the 7:00 showing of Little Miss Sunshine because she really likes indie films and he thinks Steve Carell is hee-larious. It’s completely win-win.
When they go out for a late dinner, she walks in the direction of Giovanni’s and he’s surprised because he thought she didn’t like pizza. But he doesn’t say anything because he’s really craving some deep-dish.
--
It’s the morning Dick is leaving for San Diego State. He’s just finished up loading up the medium-sized U-haul trailer attached to his car when Mac pulls up in her lime green Beetle. He slides the back of the trailer down and walks to the driver’s side of his SUV to wait for her park.
“Hey there, Big Mac,” he greets her amiably as she walks over.
Mac rolls her eyes good-naturedly at the nickname and holds out a mix CD. “Just came over to bid you adieu and drop off this for the drive to college. Filled with songs to mark this momentous occasion of your journey to a less-functioning liver.”
“Awwwwesome.” He takes it from her and flips the CD over, reading the tracklist and nodding his approval at some of the choices.
She gestures at the house behind him. “So what’s going to happen to your humble abode?”
“Uhhh… Mom’s leasing it out for me, I think? Or selling?” Dick shrugs; he’s never been one for the details. When he finally looks up again from the disc in his hands, he notices a spot of color. “Hey!” He pulls at some of the orange in her hair.
“I just felt like doing it again,” she tells him, trying to play it off casually.
“Tang-a-licious.” Dick flicks it back into place with his fingers, and decides it’s a good time to give her something. He pulls out a velvet jewelry box from his jacket box and tosses to her. “I found this in Beaver’s desk before the packing people Mom hired came to do his room last week,” he tries to say as lightly as possible. “I’m pretty sure he was going to give it to you.”
Mac doesn’t say anything at first. She simply stares at the box like she doesn’t know what to do about it or how to open it or something. After a long moment, she flips the top open to reveal a delicate platinum chain with a small charm in the shape of the Apple logo.
“I’m sorry if it’s, like, weird -- ”
“No,” she says immediately, cutting him off and gently touching the metal with her fingers. “No, it’s fine. I think…” She bites her lip, waffles a little on what she wants to say and wants to acknowledge. “I think I loved him. Even though…”
“Yeah,” is all that Dick says as her voice drifts off , because he gets it, and he hopes she knows what he means by the “yeah” because he doesn’t really feel like saying he loves his brother out loud. It’s kind of Brokeback. He watches her slip on the necklace, and then: “Look, if I had paid attention more? If I known? About Woody, I would have… I would have done something. Then maybe -- ”
Mac holds up her hand to stop him, and Dick’s grateful for that because the ‘maybes’ have sorta been driving him nuts when he lets himself think about the whole thing. “Then maybe a lot of things,” she says. “Playing the what-if game gets you nowhere. Trust me on that one.”
Dick nods at that, then clears his throat and says in a less gloomy voice, “So San Diego’s only an hour away. You should come to visit. We could hang out, tear it up Neptune-stye.” He does a few mock dance moves.
“That’d be cool,” Mac replies, and they smile at each other, even though they both know it’s never going to happen and this friendship or whatever it is will turn into one or two phone calls and a handful of emails. And then nothing at all.
“Suh-weet. Just give me a call on the celly.” There’s another awkward silence as Dick tries to figure out how to end this good-bye. With any other girl, Dick would have pulled her into a hug that was mostly about feeling her up, but this was Mac, so it was different. He finally balls his hand and holds it out to her. Mac smirks and bumps fists with him.
“Later,” he says, grinning now.
“Later,” Mac returns, and then starts to walk towards her car. She says over her shoulder, “Try to go to class every once in a while?”
Dick scoffs. “Pffff. Whatever.”
--
The first day of classes arrives. Dick actually goes to his Sociology lecture. He manages to stay awake the entire time, even though it’s boring with a capital B-O-H.
End.