Alex’s POV:

“Are you boys going to stay over for dinner?” Ms. Kathi was stood at the top of the basement stairs, looking down at the four of us.

We all looked towards her while packing up, but before any of us who didn’t live in this house could answer, Rian piped up, “nope, they’ve got to be going home.”

“Oh, maybe some other time then?” She asked with a smile, to which we all nodded respectfully.

It was only when she left that we all turned to Rian and gave him a disapproving look. He always did this. As soon as band practice was over, he’d push us out of his house. He even hated it if Mickey stayed over and much rather liked to go over to her house instead. It made us seem like the assholes who never wanted to stay over and eat Ms. Kathi’s food. By now, she must have realized that it was always Rian who solely came up with the answer, but still. We all still felt a little guilty.

“Really, dude?” Zack shook his head and crossed his arms having moved all his stuff to its designated place and having picked up his backpack already.

“What?” Rian shrugged as if he had no clue he had done it again. “You said you had a test tomorrow.”

“Which I ‘studied’ for in the weekend.”

“I’m just trying to help you pass,”’ Rian continued to defend himself. “Either way it’s too late to change the answer now.”

Zack just chuckled deeply, by now knowing that Rian always tried to get us out of his house as soon as band practice was over. We were used to it. Even Jack was all ready to go, his backpack already hanging from his shoulder. Only I was still hanging back. And no, it was not because I actually had permission to stay here, I was included in the group of people that were being forced to leave immediately. I just wasn’t exactly finished.

“That includes you.” Rian patted me on my back, but was actually subtly trying to push me in the direction of the others.

“Yeah, yeah, hang on,” I mumbled as I finished turning the last peg into place.

“Ri, he’s gotta make it perfect for his girlfriend!” Jack blurted out with a smirk tugging at his lips.

I glared at him, coincidentally just having finished putting the last new string on Mickey’s guitar that she had left here. She never asked me to change the strings, nor did I ever tell her that I was going to, but I decided to do it as a surprise. Giving back the guitar she had forgotten here kinda seemed like a shitty thing to do if the strings were still fucked up. So, I went out and bought the strings myself and used the last half hour of our band practice to change them all.

“I just needed to make sure the strings aren’t on too loose,” I retorted, picking up the guitar by his neck and rolling my eyes as I went to pick up my bag as well. “I haven’t even tuned them yet.”

“Well, then it’s not perfect,” Jack pointed out accusingly.

“And…?” I shrugged as I got another slight push from Rian. “By the time I get this to her, it will be completely out of tune again.”

“You’ve got a point there…” he admitted as we were all being shoved up the stairs and out of the house.

Just like that, we were outside.

I wasn’t intending on giving the guitar to Mickey yet despite the fact that I was taking it with me and not leaving it down in the basement. In fact, we had already said our goodbyes for the day. However, when I stood there in Rian’s driveway, my car just a few feet away, and looked at Mickey’s house, something seemed off. It wasn’t a gut feeling, it was something that I saw. Her car was outside, meaning she had to be home, but all the lights in the house were off. Even if she had gone out for a walk or something, there would have been a couple of lights on. The last time the house looked so dark was when nobody lived there.

Jack snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “Earth to Alex, you ok there?”

“Yeah…” I nodded and tried to shake it off. “Something’s wrong, all the lights are off.”

“Nobody’s home probably.” He started dragging me to the driver’s door of my car, but I wasn’t cooperating with him.

Instead, I shook my head and wriggled my arm out of his grip, staring my way across the road. “Where else would she be?”

“I dunno. It’s Mickey. She can be anywhere doing anything.”

While that used to be true, it wasn’t so true anymore. She no longer hung out with her old group of friends (which was true ever since she broke up with Devon, but they were completely out of the picture after she helped out with the police investigation). She didn’t just randomly go out shopping, she wasn’t working, and she wasn’t hanging out with us. The only place she could have been was in that house.

“Wait, dude,” Jack called after me, “you’re my ride home!”

“So, come along,” I told him as I stupidly stopped in the middle of the road and turned to look at him.

“And watch you guys sucking face? No thanks.”

“Ok, well, I’m not going home right now,” as I continued to refuse I turned on the heel of my right foot to continue.

“Alex,” Jack whined, “it’s too far to walk!”

“Sorry, man,” I apologized half-heartedly as I started up the path to Mickey’s front door.

Lucky for him, Zack decided to step in and help him out. “Ugh, I’ll take you. Thank you very much, Alex!”

“No problem.” I gave back a sarcastic smile and went to ring the doorbell.

But there was one problem. The doorbell didn’t work. I pressed it once, but couldn’t hear it ring. The first time, I assumed I just hadn’t pressed the button properly. But it happened the second time as well. Naturally, I then pressed it like a crazy motherfucker, but still it didn’t work. Or at least, not that I could hear. So, I just walked right into the house after trying the door and seeing that it was unlocked, confirming that somebody was most likely home.

“Mickey?” I called out, not wanting to go in too far in case something horrible had happened. I didn’t need to be like that one stupid person in a horror movie who noticed something strange and had to go and investigate despite all the bad signs.

I just heard a groan come from somewhere on the ground floor, but it wasn’t loud enough for me to locate its whereabouts from where I was standing at the door that was still open wide. So, I shouted again, “where are you?”

“Kitchen,” she grumbled, sounding like she was in extreme discomfort.

I expected to see a shocking scene in front of me, but all I saw was Mickey is a sweatshirt and shorts, her hair up in a messy bun, sprawled out on the floor, a spoon in her hand, a half-eaten tub of ice cream in the other, and many other empty containers surrounding her.

I chuckled lightly at the sight as she pouted at me. “What happened in here?”

“I don’t know,” she continued to pout and groan, “the power in the entire house shut off and I can’t find out which fuse blew. All the ice cream was going to melt... We have a shit-ton of ice cream. Why do we have so much ice cream?”

“I’ll happily help you finish it all,” I offered and remembered I was still holding the guitar, which she couldn’t see because it was just behind the small wall, “but I think the first thing to do it go over to Rian’s and ask his step-dad if he can help.”

“Please.”

“Take care of my stuff while I go, ok?” I stepped into the kitchen and put my bag and the guitar next to her.

She looked at the objects and frowned before sitting up. “Wait, what’s this?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I excused and started my journey back to Rian’s.

To my luck, his step-dad had just come home and I hadn’t made some empty promise to Mickey. Rian wasn’t all too glad to see me, but when I said it was an emergency, he was just a bit more cool about it. Of course, I felt guilty to ask for his step-dad’s help right after he got home, but I didn’t know shit about how all the electricity stuff worked either. But he was willing to help.

When I came back, he immediately went to try and fix it while I went to join Mickey back in the kitchen. She already had an extra spoon while she stuffed another bite in her mouth with a fed-up scowl. I sat across for her, picking up the extra spoon and digging in. My attitude toward the ice cream problem was probably what her's had been like when she had started this conquest.

“Explain,” she stated as I let the ice cream melt in my mouth.

“What?” I questioned, as I tried to get some more of the soft treat.

“Guitar.”

“Oh, I was fixing it up,” I said through bites.

“Why would you do that?” She pushed the container towards me in disgust and looked at the red instrument.

“Because it was making me sad seeing it standing there every band practice.”

“But you know I’m never going to play it.”

“I can teach you,” I smirked and pulled the guitar into my lap, only to be met with the string sounding all over the place when I strummed it, “when I tune it properly…”

She raised an eyebrow at me and shook her head. Of course, I fixed it because I wanted to do something for her, not because I felt bad for the guitar. The guitar being in Rian’s basement just happened to give me an advantage. Showing up at Mickey’s door with some strings one day didn’t seem as special as bringing her the entire guitar. However, she didn’t seem as happy with my surprise as I had hoped.

“You should really stop paying for and giving me all these things,” she explained as if she could tell that I was a little disappointed in the lack of excitement on her part. “You paid for my lunch when I ran away from home, you pay for everything on our dates. Somehow I’m going to have to pay you all back for this.”

“You pay back for it by being an amazing girlfriend,” I replied, leaving my spoon in the ice cream tub and taking hold of her hand instead.

“But that’s the other problem, I don’t know how to be an amazing girlfriend.”

“You’re doing just fine, Micks.”

I wanted to lean in and kiss her, it was what I was doing. She even seemed completely ok with it. But before I could go through with it, the lights all turned on and the fridge started humming again. Rather than letting me finish leaning in and going in for the kiss, Mickey pulled away completely and threw her hand up in the air.

“And then there was light!” She exclaimed in triumph and grinned brightly, standing up in excitement.

Seeing her so happy was a good alternative to kissing her, though.

She thanked Rian’s step-dad when he came to check up on us in the kitchen. Of course, he said that he was glad to help, but Mickey was still grateful nonetheless. The only sad part was that all the ice cream that hadn’t been eaten was not completely ruined and couldn’t be frozen anymore.

Slowly, I stood up too, unsure whether to just leave the mess on the floor or to start cleaning it up. However, I didn’t need to think about it anymore after Rian’s step-dad had left. As soon as the door had shut again, Mickey was stood in front of me and she had finished what I had started. Her arms circled around my neck when her lips were on mine. Since it had been my intention to do this from the beginning, I was fully prepared to place my hands on her waist. It took more in me to not let my hands slip to her ass than I was willing to admit.

Just like before, though, she suddenly broke away, only this time silently looking in the direction of the stairs for a few seconds. “Oh my god, my music’s playing upstairs again! Yes!”

She grabbed hold of my hand and started pulling me along.

My heart pounded at the idea of going into her bedroom. I didn’t know why. It was just-- I had never been in it before. I knew Rian had, but it still seemed so otherworldly. It was like this whole other side of her would be revealed to me. A bedroom could hold so many secrets. I couldn’t help but wonder what hers looked like. Mickey was one of those people that could easily have one wall painted black and the other a deep dark red. I wondered if she had just as many posters as I did.

Her room was strangely… normal. The walls were white and empty except for the one above her desk that had multiple sketches in different media. A queen sized bed was pushed up against the opposite wall, the sheets askew but made up nonetheless. As expected there was a stand for her guitar close to her window, but the guitar was still on the floor in the kitchen with all the ice cream. The speakers booming music were on her desk, her iPod plugged into them. Her room was more ‘normal’ than mine was. I was expecting something extravagant.

As Mickey turned down the music, I looked around to find any sign that showed Mickey’s rebellion other than the ideas for new tattoos. It was almost like a lost cause until something caught my eye. I walked over to the headboard of her bed and sat down on the mattress. On the right bedpost, there were multiple small lines engraved into it like a tally mark. I tried to count how many there were as my fingers grazed them. Some were small, others crooked, making it difficult to estimate. There must have been over thirty.

“Which one am I?” I joked and looked in Mickey’s direction to already see her looking at me.

She shook her head and softly said, “you’re not one of them.”

I continued my joke but couldn’t help the small smile that formed on my lips knowing that she hadn’t considered me as another minuscule line. “What, was I too bad to be added?”

Again, she shook her head to reject my statement. Her mouth opened like she was going to say something, but she decided against it and closed it. I noticed how she suddenly didn’t make eye contact anymore and turned around to act like she was busy doing something else.

“What?” I asked, keeping my tone warm and comforting so she’d tell me what was bothering her.

Her shoulders raised as she took a deep breath in. “I-- I discontinued that list four years ago.”

The thought that the only reason I wasn’t a tally was that she just didn’t count that way anymore instead of thinking of me as different didn’t even cross my mind. All I cared about was that the list obviously upset her.

I stood up and carefully walked up to her. “You don’t have to be ashamed of that list, not around me.”

“I’m not ashamed,” she snapped back. But she didn’t stay mad, she turned quiet. If I hadn’t been so close, I wouldn’t have heard her speak. “Alex, that’s two years of my life. That’s when I was thirteen and fourteen. What do you think happened over the next six years?”

“So what? That’s what happened the past eight years. As far as I know, you might have already brought your average down in the past few weeks.”

“Really?” She snorted, her anger making its appearance again and any advances she had made to turn toward me were reversed as she stood straight towards her wall full of drawings. “You make me feel worse and try to guilt trip me? Well, thank you very much.”

“I’ll admit that that sounded way worse out loud than it did in my head,” I apologized, beating myself up about the fact that I could never find the right wording to comfort her. It was like I was trying to speak too much in metaphors, but was constantly making the wrong ones. “What I meant with that is that the past doesn’t matter. It’s what you decide to do from now on that matters.”

“But it will always be a part of me and most people aren’t all too keen on it."

“I’m not most people.”

I decided that trying to kiss her wasn’t going to work this time. Something else had to close this off. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her from behind, giving her a peck on the cheek before resting my chin on her shoulder. She accepted my embrace although she didn’t lean into it. But I blamed that on this being a new experience for her. Sometimes she didn’t know how to act to show that she accepted an apology, especially in a way like this. However, she didn’t push me off, and that was good enough for me.

“You know, you’re going to have to draw one for me, right?” I whispered as I looked at all her creations. It ranged from dragons to intricate flowers all the way to weird doodles.

“Like I don’t procrastinate enough already,” she laughed.

Notes

Finally finished writing this piece of shit. I've been way too busy to write recently. I'm not sure it's going to get better soon, but I haven't forgotten about my stories, don't worry!

I came to a very shocking realization today. I've been writing this story for like a year now, and I only now realized that I've called my main character "Mickey" but always imagine it as "Mikey". It was an initial typo I made when writing a character description... it's come all this way. I am very unsure of the meaning of life right now. It's too shocking to deal with.

Also, if anybody misses strong and powerful Mickey, this chapter was more about her insecurities. She'll be back soon ;)