Mickey and Me

Suggested Slash “Your eyes are blue,” he’d said to me. The bell had rung hours ago – school was long over. I didn’t care. Oneshot

Rated PG13 – Violence, drugs, I think there might be some swearing, too.

Mickey and Me

I met him in an alleyway one day after school. He’d taken my lunch money and told me to brown-bag it so that it would never happen again, like he was doing me a favor by teaching me this lesson. So, after school, I followed him. Maybe I did it because I thought I could beat him up, I still don’t know.

I found him shooting up some cheap street drug and humming something low and sad.

It was my first black eye and certainly not my last.

Every day after that he’d corner me and ask me for my lunch money. If I told him I didn’t have any money, he’d punch me and take it anyway. If I told him I’d brown-bagged it, he’d take my lunch sack and run.

I never reported him. I guess even back then I loved him a little.

I met Mickey at the mall one Friday afternoon. I’d been shopping with my little sister Sydney. He saw me and he hollered and slung an arm around my shoulders, and somehow that escalated into a fistfight. No one stopped us, because he quit after my little sister started screaming.

He held me afterward and cried.

I never asked him about it, and he never mentioned it. It was all that Mickey was, love and hate, and sometimes he was so full of emotion that he shook. Sometimes he shook so bad he broke. And when he broke, I had to clean him up.

I did. I always did.

Mickey broke once on Christmas last year. It was so bad, we thought it would be all over after that. He came by in the morning with a flower in his hand – the store-bought kind, the most he could afford. I gave him a present I’d been saving just for him: a fat, gold ring I’d found in the attic. I knew he’d pawn it, but I didn’t care. It was Mickey, and it was Christmas.

He opened it and froze up like he does, his eyes glazed over, making them look fake, like marbles. He opened his mouth, slowly, and then screamed.

He screamed, and he came at me, swinging. I’d never seen him like that before. His pale, freckled face was twisted and red with unknown rage, so much that he hardly looked like Mickey anymore. He broke through the wall, punching through the plaster like it was glass. My brother was shouting; my mother was screaming; and then, oh, God, Sydney was throwing her CD’s at him, and they bounced off of him harmlessly onto the carpet.

He broke my arm. He split Sam, my brother’s, lip. He had slapped my mother.

Afterwards he crumpled up and cried.

My mother hates him. My father loathes him. Every time I bring him up, my brother scowls and my little sister busts into tears.

But I love Mickey. I do.

I smoked my first joint in the alleyway with Mickey in January. He just gave it to me and told me to try it. He said it would help my healing arm. I think he was trying to apologize in his own way. Mickey never apologizes.

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have done it, but it was Mickey holding out that little white stick to me, full of warmth and chocolate eyes that could never lie. It was Mickey.

I smoked it, and it was good.

It was the joints. The joints ruined everything.

My arm had just come out of its cast later that month, and we had skipped school to sit together out in the alleyway and smoke. It hadn’t been long, but it really had. Days seem to melt into weeks so slowly when you spend them sitting and smoking and laughing.

“Your eyes are blue,” he’d said to me. The bell had rung hours ago – school was long over. I didn’t care.

“Yours are brown,” I replied, and I thought I was really witty. I laughed to myself and smoked and smiled.

“Jesus, though, Seth,” he said. “They’re blue. It’s like someone ripped out the sky and put it on your face.”

Mickey seemed to be the most lucid and the most dangerous when he was high. You almost thought he was a normal guy after he’d had a good joint or two. I almost felt at-ease with him, and at the same time I was tenser than ever. It was those evenings with him, when he didn’t hit me, that I loved him the most. Sometimes he did hit me – hard, too. I’d almost gotten used to it. He hadn’t broken in almost a month. It was a record.

But then that kid came – that big, hulking boy with his little group of four or five guys. One had a baseball bat. The other had a switchblade. There was one who had a gun in his back pocket – but I didn’t know that until it was too late.

I can’t remember what they called us now. The words weren’t so important. It was mostly the colors, and the movement, and the pain.

They were on me before I could take a breath. One had an arm locked around my waist, and he was pulling me hard to him, chest-to-back, knocking the wind from me. The world swirled into dull shades of grey and blue. He had his hands on my hips, in my jeans pockets. Another was climbing up my shirt, feeling out my sweater. Weapons. Joints. Change. Anything I had, he took it, or was looking for it, until I started to fight him.

He took his switchblade and held it to my throat. The cold metal teased my flesh when I swallowed. It stung even though he wasn’t cutting me. My fingertips went numb.

His hands. God, his hands.

They were in my pants, cupping my crotch, and he was pushing me hard against the brick wall. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t scream.

Mickey must have had three of them on him. He was screaming that scream I knew so well, but I couldn’t see him. I caught flashes of his jacket, the only jacket he had, and his worn-out sneakers flying in the air.

And then he’d pulled out the gun. He couldn’t afford a gun. I knew it wasn’t his. I knew it wasn’t his, because one of the boys went to draw out his own gun and couldn’t find it, and he started screeching that it was loaded.

The hard arms around my waist vanished. I fell forward into the dirt and the trash. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stand.

Mickey was swearing, and then all of the world was drowned out in the single foreboding roar of the gun as he fired.

The shades of grey turned to red.

------

Mickey came and saw me in jail while I waited for my trial. I never understood the legal system, but for some reason they let him in to see me. A guard stood at the door, gazing at us with an acute suspicion that sickened me.

I was not a murderer.

And there was Mickey, in all his gangly glory, looking right at me with those bold brown eyes, and he smiled his crooked smile. It occurred to me that he would be graduating from high school with me, if he’d bothered to attend, but Mickey would never go to school. Mickey could never be anything more than Mickey.

“Hey,” he murmured in a voice that was too quiet. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

“You could have said something,” I told him, and my voice was trembling even though I tried to hold the emotion back. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I saved your life,” he rasped back.

“You ruined my life.”

I’d never spoken to him like that before, and I could see that it hurt him, but for some reason he didn’t break. Instead, he just nodded, and touched my shoulder.

The guard shifted sharply.

“You’ll get out of it,” he whispered. “I know you will.”

“Jesus,” I said, and pulled my shoulder away.

He let his hands fall to his side, and we were both silent.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know, Mickey.”

He squeezed my hand and kissed me, in that way that only Mickey could, like a caring brother and somehow without emotion at all.

When I opened my eyes he was gone.

I was glad.

------

They found me innocent, just as he’d said. I didn’t feel relieved. I didn’t feel anything.

Except for one thing.

I felt comfort, because when I stepped out of the courtroom, Mickey was standing by the sidewalk with a cigarette in his hand, and he was grinning at me.

I felt comfort, because it was Mickey.

And I love him.

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The End

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Author’s Notes: Wrote it for a school project a long time ago. Revised it, and now here it is. So tell me what you think. THIS IS A ONESHOT. THAT’S IT.