Always More

3: Teenage Hooligans

Nora spotted the pale blond hair of Quincy King and her stomach began to twist like a rollercoaster. He was so friendly to her and he was cute as well. Behind him a tall, tan boy with wild dark brown curls skated. He introduced himself with smiling brown eyes hidden behind large glasses. "I'm Charlie Sanchez, nice to meet you!" He held out a thin, tan hand and gave her a wide, easy smile and she could already tell that he'd always been able to make friends easily. "Is that my sweater?" She watched Quincy tug on Charlie's baggy knit sweater. She stomach curled again from imagining what it would be like to wear his sweaters. "Can we get some ice cream now? I've been having the fattest sugar cravings." Mik tugged on the ice cream shop's door and stepped inside without waiting for an answer. Nora, up on getting to know Eloise and her friends, discovered a few key points of their personalities. Mik's impatience, for example, and Emmet's gentleness. Eloise was bold and Quincy was the quiet one. Charlie, it seemed, was plainly and simply friendly. Nora grinned to herself as the rest of the group followed Mik into the shop. He'd be a great friend!

When Nora had first met Quincy, he'd simply smiled and waved, then looked down at his phone once more. She'd felt awkward sitting silently on the blanket Emmet had brought while Mik and Eloise debated over the finer points of drowning in freezing water versus drowning in boiling water. Emmet had gone to grab his phone which he'd left in his car and Quincy had been just tapping away at his phone. She'd noticed the scars across the knuckles of his left hand, cutting long since faded pink against his freckled skin. "How'd you get the scars?" Quincy looked up from his phone and grinned sheepishly. "I was screwing around with my best friend Charlie and I wanted to make him think I was super cool. So I punched a tree wrong and sprained my wrist like a dumbass. He wouldn't stop laughing at me for two weeks in between him asking if I was ok or not." Nora snorted. What a complete dork! "Why your left hand?" Quincy smiled at his phone before bringing his eyes back up to Nora. "I'm actually a lefty." Nora shook her hands in a jazz-hands gesture. "Ambidextrious." After that they'd somehow managed to get on to the topic of steampunk versus pirates. "Okay, but what about steampunk pirates," Quincy had suggested and Nora shrugged. "Not bad, not bad. But what if you add in mythical characters like dragons?" Quincy nodded vigorously. "Dragons fucking rock." Nora beamed and nodded in agreement. All of them stayed out late and the whole time, Nora and Quincy talked about so many different things she could hardly remember now. But after three more hang out sessions like that, Nora realized with some fascination that she might just like this freckle-covered boy with pale blond hair and a gap between his two front teeth.

Charlie kept stealing bites from Quincy's banana split, but Quincy did not return the favor. "How can you eat that? It pure diabetes." Charlie swallowed and took another bite of his toffee ice cream with marshmallow sauce. "I can eat it because it's pure diabetes." He scooped a little spoonful of Quincy's ice cream. "You're so thin and you eat like that? God, I wish." Nora joked, since she was actually pretty fine with her rather cute stomach rolls. Charlie shrugged. "I actually do cross country, and track and field." Nora shook her head when she tried imagining this absolute twig-boy with visible muscle. Nope, she'd decided, that just looked wrong. Quincy finally snatched Charlie's spoon, scooped up the sticky marshmallow sauce off of Charlie's ice cream, and smeared it on the bespectacled boy's nose. "You dare?" He stuck his skinny finger into Quincy's whipped cream and flicked it on to Quincy's nose. "Now we're even. I call truce?" Quincy rolled his eyes and continued eating his ice cream. "Truce, you absolute fish." Nora choked on her chocolate sundae.

The ice cream was gone and all of them had been rolling around on skateboards or roller blades, including herself. Then they stopped at a park that nobody else seemed to be at and Eloise suddenly sprinting toward the playground area carrying her skateboard. "Where are you going?"

"TO BE A TEENAGE HOOLIGAN!"

That had insited a race to get to the play set first, which Eloise had won since she had a head start. Mik was already climbing on the plastic cone over the slide area and they were screeching a very heartfelt rendition of a song about narwhals while climbing. There was a singular tube slide and Quincy was sitting at the top end of it and holding out his phone. She peeked over the little rails to see Charlie squatting at the bottom end with his phone held out. Nora backed up and pulled her phone out and managed to angle her phone so she could get a picture of them taking a picture of each other. "Charlie?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm gonna drag you up here."
"No."
"Yeah."
"You can't."
"Yes I can, you French fry."

The plastic tube slide was remarkably short to anybody not under seven and Quincy slithered his upper body down to loop his arms underneath Charlie's. It was sort of horrifying to watch, it was like some sort of giant plastic snake was swallowing a spaghetti noodle. So of course Nora recorded every last second of this. Emmet was perched on a swing, swinging scarily high while Mik was on the very top of the cone overhead at the other slide and doing some godawful Tiktok dances. Eloise was on top of the little plastic rockwall, sitting crisscrossed while cackling for absolutely no reason. This deserved a separate video, which began with Eloise's shriek of, "SCARE THE CONSERVATIVE KARENS!"
"Hey Emmet, what are you doing?"
Emmet looked dead at the camera while he swung. "Trying to swing high enough to launch myself off of Earth. It'd be nice to get away from all this bullshit."
"Hey, Mik, what are you doing?"
"Trying to dance the plastic away. Save the turtles sksksksk."
Nora could barely keep the laughter out of her voice when she turned to Charlie and Quincy.
"Boys, what are you doing?"
"Trying to squish Quincy."
"Failing at being squished by Charlie."
Nora allowed a snort to escape and turned to Eloise. "Eloise, what are you doing?"
"Calling for Zeus to strike me down."
The end of the video was of Nora's laughter, then her following shriek of "Oh shit!" when her phone dropped to the wood chips below.