paradise ; mgc

one (or why michael is a wet sandwich)

1:20 am, saturday
south side

"Doesn't TJ invite North Siders to his parties?" Michael grumbled, while Ashton scowled at him from the other side of the ugly couch. He wasn't sure which was pissing him off more.

"Yeah but only hot ones who he wants to hook up with. They won't bother you, Mikey, just come with," Ash strained pleadingly, "TJ throws the best fucking parties."

"TJ Wasserman is a grade A douchebag, and you know it," Michael mumbled in response.

"Ok but consider this: naïve, hot, and sexually frustrated North Side girls."

Michael rolled his eyes and frustratedly raked a hand through his spiky black hair. He was annoyed.

It's this place, he thought, and it was.

Calum's stepdad was a dick, and his choices in decorum weren't much better. Everything was either white or beige.

"Calum," Ash said over the couch to the brown haired boy padding around in the small, beige kitchen, "Can you please tell Michael to stop being such a wet sandwich?"

Michael nearly bit his tongue off.

"Depends on what a wet sandwich is," Calum called to Ashton, while still fruitlessly searching for the food he'd purposefully stashed away from his guests, "Are we going anytime soon? Somebody told me there's gonna be a piñata filled with like, 200 blunts."

"Okay, Michael no, I am way to good of a friend to let you pass up free bud," Ashton decided.

Ashton was like this. He hated being bored, and people who were boring. Michael was that exactly. He loved his bed, and was perfectly content to lay in it all day getting high in his room, eating chips and playing video games.

Michael and Ashton were not yin and yang. They were boys with twin scars from the day in middle school when Ashton had stolen his fathers Swiss army knife, and cut a red stripe down the middles of their palms. When they pressed their cuts together, they became blood brothers.

"You know Bianca's gonna be there, right?" Ashton pointed out, smirking slightly at Michaels ears going bright red.

"Yeah, I know."

"So? You want to, like, cum on her heart, right?"

Bianca Fratelli was one year above Michael, and about a thousand notches out of his league. He doesn't much believe in angels, but he believes in her.  In his version of Scripture, she is heaven sent falling off clouds and smashing gold harps, with her pink hair that falls in velveteen curtains around the clusters of comets and freckles dotted on her cheeks.

Three years ago he noticed a crescent shaped scar down the back of her neck, about the size of a softball, and in his sketchers and leftover baby fat he asked her how she got it. She looked up from her spot under the bleachers at Michaels blonde head peering quizzically down at her. They were both in the middle of hiding from the gym teacher.

"Got in a fight," she laughed. One was hand tucking back a strand of hair, hazel brown from before she dyed it. The other was fumbling with the wrapper of a lollipop.

"With who?"

"God," Bianca said, and Mikey decided to play along.

"Cool. So who won?"

She grinned a toothy grin, even though at fourteen she hated showing people her braces.

"You're quick-witted for an eighth grader," she nodded approvingly, and stuffed the lollipop like a hamster into her cheek.

The other day she tried to get out of P.E. by pouring cafeteria milk down the front of her gym clothes. It was so hard for him to breathe watching it dripping down the curves of her breasts. And he felt gross for staring.

Her body was beautiful, but he had seen her brain, and it looked like Jupiter.

The boys in third period math say she knows how to give good head. Make her tongue soft around the sensitive parts like the wet inside of a peach.

Some days he's like to punch their teeth out for talking about her like that.

Some days the thought of her peachy sweet mouth around him makes his knees weak, and his dick swollen with ache and blood and heat.

But how the fuck does he say that to Ashton? He can't. So he just shrugs and says, "Kinda. It's whatever."

"Oh, whatever, ok sure, whatever over the girl you've been yearning and burning over since the sixth grade. Whatever my ass, Michael, why're you doing this?"

"Doing what? I'm not doing anything!" shouted Michael.

"That's what I mean. Every time we want to go out you dig out some bogus excuse to stay home."

"No I don't!" Michael exasperated, looking around at the two in raw anger, "Calum - come on, I don't. Right?"

Calum stopped searching and his shoulders tensed up.

"Right?!"

He turned around with a guilty look on his face.

"I mean-"

"Holy shit, I cannot even deal with you guys right now," Michael laughed bitterly. He stomped to the shoe corner behind the couches, sitting on the floor to sloppily tie his laces, and shrugging on his good jean jacket. He needed somewhere to sleep. Maybe somebody in the city would let him crash.

"Michael," Calum called after him, the slightest apology in his voice, "Come on man, I haven't had anything to eat all day cause you guys stole all my fucking snack foods-"

"Those Cheetoh's were begging to be opened-"

"The homecoming kegger is the best party of the year, don't fight me on that, and it only happens once, so let's go, let's just show up, get drunk and do...I don't know, what we want to do for once."

Calum stares like a brown eyed puppy with his tongue caught between his teeth, waiting for an answer.

"No, I--I just get stuck in the corner watching shit happen without me and it sucks."

"Then we'll stick together!" Calum reasons. The whole time he hasn't lost that hopeful grin, and the way he says it almost has Michael convinced. Like he's studied for this kind of stuff and he knows for sure.

But he knows Calum's puppy dog eyes are gonna get snagged on the red hem of some girls skirt. It's the same every time. Being lonely in the corner starts to hurt, so he takes whatever he can get, and comes crashing down on someone's couch, with foreign elbows digging into him.  Calum is never around to talk to. Ashton would tell him to stop being a pussy.

The house smells strange. He falls asleep with a stomach ache, and the overwhelming desire to swallow a bar of soap.

So he shakes his head roughly, and says "I've gotta get home."

"Have fun spending Friday night jerking off to tentacle porn," he heard Ashton mutter under his breath, and gripped the doorframe hard enough to muscle out his anger.

He pushed out the beige door into the night, towards their crumbling half of the city. South Side in all its neon glory. The city doesn't scare him. Neither does God. Death doesn't scare him in the least, but girls terrify him. Parties terrify him. Bianca practically petrifies him.

He doesn't know how to be like boys his age. He wants to be tough like Ashton and brave, like Calum. He's supposed to be sixteen but he doesn't know how to leave his dollhouse city, where he walks above the tiny skyscrapers like a giant. 

The asphalt streets tremble with his sobs when his big feet tangle in the telephone lines, and squish the people beneath him.