Snakes and Ladders - Falice

First Loves

~I want to learn how to love, not just feel the feeling. I want to mend this heart before I quit believing.~

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The story of FP Jones and Alice Smith was much more than the fact that they dated and broke up in their youth. That was only the bottom line.

~Did we go there just a little too soon? Did we take our love for granted? If I had fought for us just a little bit harder, would anything be different?~

Before the summer of 1991, Alice Smith and FP Jones had only known each other from afar. They grew up on the same side of town, they ran with the same crowd, but they weren't close by no means. On the Southside, there's a mutual understanding and an undeniable feeling of community. Which meant that kids from that part of town often had similar homelives, and they all understood that and shared the unspeakable traumas silently.

Of course, they knew of each other. Especially since Fred and Alice had been friends since junior high and FP was Fred's best friend. But, before everything and everyone came together, FP and Alice's interactions consisted of brief, fleeting moments that they both reveled in fondly. They didn't think that they would ever really be friends. Based on the shameless amount of flirting that they did whenever they found themselves in each other's presence, they were either destined to be lovers or nothing at all.

Before their story really began, they shared small, seemingly insignificant moments, such as the time that Alice found herself at her locker after school the day before the first bush party of the year. It was being held at a place just out of town called Trappers that had been used for partying teenagers long before they'd been born. "Alice," she heard her name called and looked over her shoulder to see Fred Andrews approaching his own locker which was only two away from hers. "you're hitting Trappers tonight, yeah?"

Fred was born on the Northside, but that didn't stop him from being friends with just about anybody. Alice wasn't someone that you messed with at Riverdale High, and her blinding beauty would always make her someone that the boys would never say no to, but there were people who could be surprisingly snide about the fact that she was born on the so-called wrong side of the tracks.

"Of course." She said with a grin, shoving a textbook into her locker after deciding that she likely wasn't going to be doing any schoolwork that weekend. Now, from afar, it may have looked as though Fred Andrews was going to be a possible love interest in Alice Smith's life, but that was never the case for the two of them. They'd always been friends, they hopefully always would be friends. But there had never been any kind of romantic prospects between the two of them.

The boy that suddenly came by and jokingly slammed Fred into his locker on the other hand... he was a different story. As soon as FP Jones appeared, and the two best friends began laughing about whatever the hell was so funny to them, Alice was practically forgotten about. She didn't quite know FP well enough to insert herself into their conversation, but that didn't mean that she could ignore the fact that she would have loved to. He was probably the most popular guy on campus; football captain, basketball captain, soccer captain, you name it. How he didn't have a different girl on his arm every week was a mystery to her until she got to know him.

There wasn't anything wrong with him, personality, looks, or otherwise, but it was all psychological on his part. But, that's getting ahead of the story for now. He was much more than who he was at school. After classes finished for the day, he'd trade in his letterman jacket for a leather one that made him look all the more ruggedly handsome as he took care of business on the Southside. He came from a family that was worse than most; him and Alice both did, actually. Both of their mothers had walked out on them years ago, his long before hers. That left them, ironically, with respective abusive, alcoholic fathers.