The Get-Go [Ashton Irwin]

06: Get Together

I'd reccommend that you listen to 'Lightning in A Bottle' by the Summer Set during the date... it kind of fits, I think.

Also, this chapter is dedicated to prettynouiss (aka lily) because she's a doll and an amazing writer and she puts up with my shit (ie singing The Little Mermaid songs in the comments of her Michael fic, Ineffable) and is just generally rad, okay?

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    It turned out, I didn't need to call someone to come pick me up that night; someone was provided for me.

    The downside? My driver was a motherfreaking cop. Officer Andrew Holden, to be exact.

 

    After I’d hung up with Ashton, I’d walked hesitantly back to where I’d come from, expecting to fall back upon the group I’d left behind.

    Instead, I fell across the terrible cherry on top of a just fucking shitty night.

    Where originally there had been a group of maybe ten teenagers before, there was now a group of ten teenagers, and a couple of pissed-off looking cops.

    Before I’d had any grasp of what had been going on, someone (Scott), grabbed my hand, and started dragging me back through the woods at a run. Of course, just my luck, I’d tripped over a log, and fell face-first into a pile of leaves left over from the previous autumn. Scott, being the gentleman he is, had let go of my hand immediately, and kept running, leaving me behind for the Sergeant to catch up to.

    Luckily, Officer Holden was a pretty nice guy, especially after I explained the situation down at the station. True, he did still make me pee in a cup, but at least they weren't holding me until my mom came to get me, like Scott and his buddies. Instead, I got the courtesy of a midnight ride home, and spent most of the ride time thinking about how in the hell I was going to explain that to my mother.

    The entire ride there, the young officer tried to hold a decent conversation; occasionally reassuring me that I wasn't in any trouble, and that he'd explain everything fully to my 'guardian'. In theory, it was a nice gesture, but he had so clearly never met my mother. She would fucking murder me, and ask questions later.

 

    I never came up with a plan. I did have an idea to use the fact that my mother had a different last name than me (she kept hers - Saxon - from her marriage to a guy named Andrew that had lasted from when I was six, until I was ten), before realizing that I didn’t know anyone else with the last name White that could pretend to be my mother. So instead, Officer Holden and I showed up at the door to the condo, my real mother answered, and if looks could kill, I would be beyond dead. Luckily, they can't, but I still wondered if staying at the station mightn't have been a better idea; at least then, there would've been some iron bars in between us.

 

    There's a dangerous downside to not having any concept of time. Sure, it's great for most occasions, but in certain others (ie, waiting for a cop to explain that he found you in the company of a group of underaged boys who were stoned and drunk out of their minds), it means that you have no idea how long you're waiting for it.

 

    With that in mind, it's probably easy to understand why a conversation that probably took less than ten minutes in the real world felt like an hours-long night at the opera in Wynter-time. At least I hope it does. I really don't want you to think I'm some kind of nutcase, or something. It's like that old Matchbox 20 song goes – 'I'm not crazy, I'm just a little… Unwell.'