Hook Me Up

It’s a Friday morning, so the hallways are packed with students. Most are in groups, standing by lockers, talking about what’s on for the weekend. A group of footballers are tossing around a football, at least until it goes astray and manages to hit a student on a skateboard in the face, at which point Principal Tippett makes an appearance from his office. Seriously, it’s as if he can sense these things sometimes.

He confiscates the football, and the other boy’s skateboard, holding up a stern hand to tell them all to stop their protesting.

Hannah Mercer stands by her locker with her best friend, Lana Cole, and laughs at the proceedings. She looks at Lana to laugh with along with her once the football captain starts reaching for the ball, and Principal Tippett holds it just above his reach. But of course, Lana isn’t looking. She’s drooling, basically, looking over Hannah’s shoulder at the group of boys entering through the front doors.

Hannah fights not to roll her eyes as she turns to see members of the school’s hockey team file in, three of them in particular. The blonde, good-looking trio of Mikkel Boedker, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and the object of Lana’s affection, David Rundblad, laugh and smile amongst each other as they approach.

Hannah looks back to Lana in time to see her bury her head in her locker. “Oh god, Lana, just talk to him, please,” Hannah pleads quietly. “Just tell him you like him. Put yourself out of this misery.”

Lana eyes Hannah with a look that conveys all the typical reasons that she can’t. He’s her next-door-neighbour, they’ve been family friends since they were young and she doesn’t want to make it awkward, he’s already going to the Prom with Miranda Kinley, yadda yadda yadda. Hannah has heard all the reasons already, countless times over. Lana’s crush on David blossomed after seven years of friendship, all starting from when his family moved into the house next to hers, coming over from Sweden. But Lana has had her crush for years now, and Hannah doesn’t think she can take any more of watching Lana pine, while David stares at her affectionately when he doesn’t think anyone else is watching. She’s given up on trying to convince Lana that David likes her back, he’s just too shy to say anything.

“Hey Hannah, Hey Lana,” David says, suddenly at the girls’ lockers already. He tilts his head up and smiles at Hannah, and then when Lana pulls her head out of her locker to greet him, he grins at her in a whole different way. With blindingly obvious heart-eyes like that, Hannah has no idea how Lana doesn’t know David has a thing for her in return.

“Hi David, hi boys,” Hannah greets, because Lana seems too tongue-tied to manage it. Oliver and Mikkel give waves of acknowledgement.

“So, hey,” David says, nervously rubbing at the back of his head, ruffling his golden hair, “Are you guys going to Biz’s party tonight?”

Lana’s eyes shoot to Hannah. She’s been begging Hannah to go with her for the last week, bribing her with the offer of loaning her any item from her closet, and doing her English assignments for the rest of the month. Hannah would rather stay home and wash her hair than go to a party at Paul Bissonnette’s house, but she’s sucking hard at English lately, so she needs to take the bait.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I guess we are. Starts at nine, once his parents leave for their weekend away, right?”

All three boys nods in unison. Lana bites her lip to keep from grinning. And, speak of the devil, Biz appears from nowhere, thrusting a brightly coloured flyer into everyone’s hand.

“You’re invited to the party of the year, losers,” he chimes proudly, “be there or regret it forever. Like, literally for the rest of your life.”

Hannah crumples the flyer and throws it in her locker. For someone who’s trying to host a party he doesn’t want his parent’s to find out about, handing out flyers and inviting half the school seems like an idiotic idea. Which means its Biz through and through. All big talk and very little thought. Such a shame, since if he wasn’t such a loud-mouth, cocky little shit, he’d be alright. Not that Hannah’s given it that much thought or anything.

Lana laughs and blushes at something David says, and Hannah shakes the thought from her head. Biz is still the stupid boy who stuck gum in her hair in kindergarten, he’s just overgrown now. Regardless, David and his friends are on the hockey team with Biz, so Hannah knows that there’s no getting out of going to the party.

“Will I see you there, or are you gonna stay home and stick more pins in the voodoo doll you have of me, Mercer?” Biz teases Hannah, putting his hand on her shoulder.

Hannah groans and swots at his hand, pushing him away from her. “You need new material, Bissonnette. I torched that doll years ago. Too bad you didn’t disintegrate along with it.”

“You’d miss me too much,” Biz grins sleazily, looking pleased with himself, at least until he hears a gruff voice call from behind them. He immediately stands up straighter and plasters an innocent look on his face. “You called, Captain?”

Shane Doan steps forward and hands Biz a handful of change. He’s usually only got two expressions, friendly or fierce, and the one he wears today is the latter.

“I got the stuff for you,” he says to Biz, and Hannah can only presume that he’s talking about alcohol, since no one actually knows how old Shane is, but he’s one of the best on the hockey team –along with being the captain- so no one asks too many questions.

He and Biz talk times and drop-offs, and then Shane gives Biz a warning look and says, “I don’t give a shit what you get up to tonight, as long as you’re at practice on time and all in one piece on Saturday morning, and that we both agree I had nothing to do with any of this.”

Biz salutes Shane and nods agreeably, and the other boys follow suit when Shane glances over at them. “Good,” he says, then nods at Hannah and Lana as he passes by, headed for the auditorium. “Ladies.”

Then the bell rings, loudly, signalling that everyone start the same path. Hannah gives some consideration to carrying on the conversation, like asking David whether he needs a ride tonight, even though Mikkel and Oliver both have cars, and it’s rare that the three of them are ever apart. Principal Tippett starts herding students down the hall, threatening detentions, though, so Hannah grabs the sleeve of Lana’s hoodie and tugs her down the hall.

The last thing they need is to get handed a detention, and spend even more of their weekend with the detention king, Paul Bissonnette.

-^-

“Holy shit, Lana,” Hannah exclaims later that night, up in her bedroom.

Lana blushes and does a little twirl, smiling as skirt of her dress lifts and spins with her. “You sure it looks okay?”

Hannah nearly scoffs. She holds it back though, and looks over her best friend, brunette hair hanging in curls, blue eyes shining brightly, accentuated by the help of some eye-liner and mascara, electric blue lace dress hugging her curvy figure in all the right places.

“Are you kidding me?” she asks. “Of course I’m sure. I think David might be the one drooling tonight for a change.”

Lana shakes her head, like the thought is impossible, but Hannah can see her small, hopeful smile.

“As long as he’s not too busy with Miranda,” Lana adds quietly, wincing when she says Miranda’s name.

“Chill, Lans,” Hannah says, handing Lana a pair of her wedges to slip on. “I’ve told you a million times, David doesn’t like Miranda. He likes you. You’d notice the looks he gives you, if you weren’t so busy looking at that jacket he wears and imagining how it’d look on you.”

“While we’re on that subject,” Lana grins wickedly, and Hannah knows she’s in trouble. “Should we talk about Biz, and whether his pig-tail pulling method of flirting could make it any more obvious?”

“Obvious that he’s a douche? Because no, he couldn’t make that any more obvious,” Hannah rolls her eyes as they both grabs their phones, keys and lip-gloss, then head downstairs and out the door.
As she buckles her belt and puts the key in the ignition, she catches Lana grinning smugly.

“What?” she asks.

“Oh nothing,” Lana shrugs, tugging down the sun visor to use the mirror to apply her lip gloss. “It’s just – You only said douche. Usually you have a whole vocabulary of words to describe him. I think he might be wearing you down.”

“Either that or driving me insane,” Hannah mutters, pulling out into the street.

-^-
The Bissonnette’s are pretty well off financially, so they have a nice house in a nice area of town, filled with nice things. Nice things like vases, expensive looking paintings and a series of family portraits, none of which Biz has made any effort to put in a safer place, while he lets his fellow high school students run riot in the house.

By the time Hannah and Lana have managed to navigate their way through the masses of students in the house who are spilled over couches, filling drinks in the kitchen and dancing on the coffee table, the music changes genre three times, no doubt due to members of different cliques arguing over what to play.

Out in the backyard, there are less people, more chairs, a make-shift dance floor on the deck, and plates full of barbequed sausages, bowls of Doritos and potato chips. It’s dark by now, but the yard is lit up by garden lights on the edge of the lawn, and a trail of lanterns, hung in lines.

The song choice changes again, switching to a Ke$ha song, and a collective cheer goes up all around, approving of the pop change. People start singing along, but it doesn’t drown out the noise of a large group of people in the corner of the section.

Hannah and Lana both look over to see a mix of hockey boys and footballers standing in a circle, around a keg. Of course. They make their way over, slowly, just in time to see the woozy looking host be put back on his feet, reaching his hand out for something to grab on to as the blood rushes back through his body.

“Mercer!” he yells once he sees a glimpse of Hannah in her skinny jeans and singlet. “You did come! I knew you loved me!” He muscles away from the grasp of his teammates and stumbles over.

“Love is hardly the word I’d use,” Hannah replies. “If there’s anything I ‘love’, it’s the charming photos inside, especially the one hanging on the wall just inside the front door, where you’re in a diaper, looking innocent and not old enough to talk.”

Biz blinks at Hannah and a slow grin forms on his lips. “Exactly how you want your children to look, right?” he asks. “Don’t worry, I can arrange that.”

Hannah ducks away from the hand he reaches out with, bumping into Lana as she steps aside. “Where’s David?”

“You mean the Swedish trio?” He waves his hand in the vague direction of porch swing, where it looks less crowded, due to the popularity of dancing and refilling solo cups. “Him and Boeds and OEL are over there somewhere.”

“Thanks,” Lana says when she realises Hannah isn’t going to. “But you do realise that Mikkel is Danish, right?”

Biz shrugs it off. “Whatever. Honestly, I’m not even convinced that they’re not conjoined triplets, but who cares. Why do you want to talk to the Trio, Mercer?”

Hannah doesn’t sell out Lana, because Biz is the kind of big mouth who wouldn’t think twice about pausing the music and announcing it to the whole party, and while that might actually finally get David and Lana together, Hannah has too much respect for Lana to let Biz call her out like that. Unfortunately, Biz seems to be able to read into her silence.

“Ahh,” he says, rubbing his chin like some wise old wizard or something. “I see. YOU don’t want to see the trio. Lana banana here does.” He laughs at his own joke, as if half their grade hasn’t been affectionately calling Lana that for years. “So, what’s up, what’s the plan? You finally gonna tell Rundy over there how badly you want him?”

Lana’s face turns the colour of a tomato. “What? No,” she splutters. “I just want to talk to him.”

“Talk to him? With your tongue?”

Hannah digs the toe of her shoe into the ground, resisting the urge to kick Biz in the shins. If the hockey team weren’t doing so well right now, she wouldn’t think twice about it. But alas.

It’s okay, though, because Biz gets distracted by something behind them, a new round of hollering and cheering as a fury adolescent sized Coyote makes its way out the back door and into the crowd on the lawn.

“HOWLER!” Biz yells, along with a few other hockey buddies, who all start a stampede over to the school’s mascot.

“Principal Tippett is going to be pissed if that costume gets back to school smelling like alcohol, puke and who even knows what else,” Hannah sighs.

Thankfully, the commotion around Howler helps better clears a path to the porch, and Hannah and Lana head over, able to see David, Oliver and Mikkel all shoulder to shoulder in the swing, cans of some weird foreign beer that they must have scored from their parents.

“Lana!” David says once he catches sight of them, jumping up from his seat on the swing, and paying the price for it as he stops still to admire Lana and her outfit, and has the swing knock into the back of his legs. He shakes it off and steps forward to meet Lana as she and Hannah take the last step.

“You came,” he says, his face looking like a kid who just woke up on Christmas morning.

“Of course I came,” Lana smiles in return, clearly running her eyes over him, taking in the nice jeans he’s wearing, paired with a white button down and an army print jacket. “You look so great, Dave.”

“I could say the same about you,” he replies, hands balling awkwardly at his sides like he wants to touch her, but can’t.

Hannah is used to this by now, so she skirts past them and takes David’s spot on the swing, politely declining when Oliver offers her a drink. “So,” she says, nodding in front of them. “Do you think tonight will be the night these two finally get their shit together?”

Mikkel laughs as Oliver groans, begrudgingly saying he hopes not, since he chose the night after Prom when they all made their bets. Mikkel chose Lana’s birthday, which was a week ago, on which they all had the pleasure of watching David gift Lana a nice locket necklace, complete with a photo of him and her, but all that night ended with was a thankful kiss on the cheek.

David pulls out his phone and shows something on it to Lana, and as she giggles, a lock of hair falls in her face. The three spectators on the swing all take a collective deep breath in as David reaches out to tuck it back behind Lana’s ear. There’s a moment there, where it feels like the world stops and everything else falls away, and it’s just David cupping Lana’s face and Lana looking into his eyes, where it seems like it might finally happen. It’s magical.

It’s ruined by none other than Biz, not a second later, as he crops up right in between the two of them and throws an arm over their shoulders, tugging them together.

“You two finally got together!” He crows, proud, like he made it happen himself. “Thank god, because no offense, Rundy, but it was really getting old, watching you stare lovingly at the back of Lana’s head in English class, and writing wrong answers just so she’d tutor you after school.”

This is news to Hannah, but Mikkel and Oliver let out a rush of air at the same time, as if they knew all along.

“Y—you did that?” Lana asks in a small voice.

David flushes under the lights of the lanterns, and rubs the back of his neck again. “I—uh.”

“Oh, and you, Lana banana, you were no better,” Biz continues, turning his gaze on her. “Coming to all of our games and tracking David on the ice and the bench the whole time, practically drooling when you talked to him afterwards, watching him flushed and dripping with sweat.”

David’s embarrassed expression melts away, replaced by one of confusion, and then interest. “Is that true?”

Hannah watches Lana open her mouth to say something, then close it again, eyeing Biz uncomfortably, and she finally gets off the swing.

“Okay you,” she says, pulling Biz away from them. “You’ve run your big mouth, now leave them alone.”

“Oh,” Biz says, taking her hand, bringing it up to the smirk of his lips. “You wanna get out of here? Go somewhere, just the two of us?”

“Please,” Hannah scoffs, looking him over, the drops of beer on the front of his shirt, the mess of his short hair and his barely-there stubble. “You’re a mess.”

“A mess you wanna be all over.”

“Doubt it,” Hannah mumbles. “Come on, you need to get out of here. Put something presentable on.”

“Trying to get me out of my clothes already, huh?” Biz waggles his eyebrows, his feet falling into step as he lets Hannah lead him. “You should at least buy me dinner first, Mercer. I’m not that kind of girl.”

-^-
Thankful that the layout of the house hasn’t changed since she attended Biz’s fifth birthday party here, Hannah manages to drag him up the stairs, to his room on the far left. It’s as messy as she presumes it to be, and there’s a web page open on his laptop, in plain sight on his desk, that she could have done without seeing, but on the whole, she’s not knocked out by any potent smell of hockey gear, dirty clothes or old food, so she counts it as a success. Then, she pushes Biz down onto his bed, which, funnily enough, is tidy and made.

“Straight to it, huh?” he says, reaching his hands out to her waist.

“Uh-uh,” she warns, sliding his hands off, pushing a hand to his shoulder to shove him back down. “Stay.”

“Like I’m going anywhere.”

Regardless, Hannah makes a quick trip across the hall to the bathroom, thankful to find a glass on the bench, and fills it with water before heading back. His clothes are hanging in his closet and folded in his draw nicely, which only comes as a small surprise, since he is a pretty good dresser. Hannah tries to grab the first shirt she can get her hands on, before she gets too distracted with the underwear and boxes of condoms also in the draws.

She throws the flannel button-up shirt at Biz’s head and tell him to put it on. He takes off his current one and gets one hand through the new one before he whines for Hannah to help him. She puts the glass of water in one of his hands, and wrangles his other through the sleeve. When she sits on the edge of the bed and starts to do the buttons for him, she feels him watching her.

She chews her lip to stop herself from asking about it, and tries to keep her eyes on the task at hand, and not on the faint cut on his lip from a hockey fight, which she is now at eye level with. It’s not hot, she tells herself. It’s so not hot.

“Why’re you mad still?” Biz asks, leaning back a little, making Hannah lean forward. “I got Lana and Rundy together at last! I thought you’d be happy with me. Grateful, even.”

Hannah laughs a little. “You just cost me $50,” she tells him. “Oliver, Mikkel and I had a bet going.”

Biz is quiet as Hannah does the last button, but once she’s finished, he gently takes her hands and holds them in his own.

“Biz—” she starts, but is cut off when he presses a finger to her lips.

“How about we stop with all this playing-hard-to-get bullshit,” he proposes, “and you let me take you out to a movie?”

“Biz—”

“Fine. A dinner too, then. You can just plan the whole date. Make it add up to $50 if you really want, just say you’ll come out with me.”

Be it the quiet, removed feeling of being up here, secluded in his room, or the effort of so many years of anger and denial, Hannah doesn’t know what it is exactly that makes her let her wall down, look at Biz and say, “Why?”

Biz smiles, but it’s not mocking. It’s genuine and it’s warm, the smile he rarely ever uses, and it works like a charm on Hannah. “Because you’re tired of pretending you hate me,” he says, low and soft. “Because you’ve been in love with me since Kindergarten, and you’re finally ready to accept that, and let me take care of you.”

Hannah bites her lip, glancing up at him from under her long lashes. “Since Kindergarten? When you stuck gum in my hair and my Mom had to cut it out and cut my hair into a bob?”

Biz smiles at the memory. He takes one of his hands and touches it to the back of Hannah’s head, running it over her hair, which now finishes halfway down her back.

“I was trying to get your attention,” he says. “And I haven’t stopped trying since.”

“Ughhh,” Hannah groans, feeling her heart clench.

“Come on, you love it. You love me.”

“I have no idea why,” Hannah admits, wriggling her hands free and fisting them in the material of his shirt, pulling their bodies together. “You’re basically the worst,” she mumbles against his lips.

“Yeah,” Biz agrees, sliding his hand to her neck, cupping her face with it, strumming his thumb over her cheek. “But to you, I’ll be the best.”

-^-