When We're Both Thirty

“You’re not actually serious are you?” Gerard asks. He tugs away from Mikey as he’s pulled off of the train reluctantly. Mikey has given him literally no real reason for anything in the past day. He’s been pulling Gerard along with him for twenty seven years, but he’s never gotten used to it. Mikey is probably the only thing linking Gerard with humanity still. Without him, Gerard would be a hermit with a large collection of birds. Maybe stamps. Or both. Birds and stamps.

“Like, we’re not actually doing this,” Gerard continues when Mikey keeps tugging. Really, if there was any doubt in Gerard’s mind about where they’re going, he would have voiced it fifty minutes ago. He’s kind of curious though. He wants to know what’s going on in Mikey’s freaky little head. In all actuality, it’s more like Mikey’s slightly below average sized head.

“You’re not that dumb,” Mikey says, still pulling him.

“No, I mean I’ve figured out where we’re going, but why are we going there is the biggest question,” Gerard says.

“Because,” Mikey says.

“Oh god, you’re just like he who must not be named. Because is not a reason, Mikey.”

“Voldemort?”

“Yes Voldemort, of course I was talking about Voldemort,” Gerard says sarcastically.

“Gerard, you cannot go around saying things like ‘he who must not be named’ and expect people not to make Harry Potter jokes, got that? This is the 21st century. If you want to go somewhere that people don’t know what Harry Potter is, you will have to use a time machine.”

Gerard groans, and sighs when Mikey amazingly is able to hail a cab in under five seconds. Maybe it’s his death glare. No one else Gerard has ever met is able to get a taxi that quickly. Now obviously it’s true that Gerard only really knows like six people, but Mikey is astonishingly talented in getting what he wants. It’s probably that murderous vibe he gives off. Gerard’s still not quite sure that his brother isn’t Norman Bates.

“Wow, so we’re just going to barge in unannounced then?” Gerard asks, “Is this some sort of plot? What are we actually doing?”

“We’re getting in a cab, Gerard,” Mikey says to him, as if Gerard just grew a third head, and Gerard groans loudly. He thinks about running away for a moment before realizing that Mikey has longer legs. And he’s superhuman.

“But what is going to happen when we arrive at our destination?”

“We are going to get out of the cab and pay the kind sir for his troubles,” Mikey replies when Gerard sits down next to him. He makes a loud sighing sound and tries to find an infallible way to ask a question that won’t result in Mikey answering with something to keep him in a circle of confusion.

“Okay, Mikey, why on earth did you decide to drag me out of bed at two in the afternoon on a Monday to go to our old house in the middle of shitville New Jersey?”

“That is not the name of this town,” Mikey says, after telling the cabbie the address. For some reason it smells like burnt rubber and fish in the cab, and Gerard would really like to pretend he’s not curious of why that is.

“I will punch you in the face, mikeyway, don’t think I won’t.”

“We need to pick up something,” he replies.

“Something that we can’t get in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world?” Gerard asks, blinking at him.

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well alright then, that’s all the information I need, don’t bother telling me what it is that we’re getting,” Gerard says as sarcastically as he can manage.

“Okay, I won’t then,” Mikey replies, and that’s when he turns his head and starts to look out the window.

Gerard is suddenly stuck in a situation where he really wants to smack Mikey in the face, and he also really wants to shove Mikey out of the cab. There’s really nothing else on his brain other than that.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with Frank does it?” Gerard asks.

“I’m not answering any more questions.”

“You haven’t answered a single one of my fucking questions yet!”

“I’ve answered all of them,” Mikey replies, “just because you didn’t like the answers does not mean that the questions were not asked.”

“You’re such a prick,” Gerard sighs, and he slouches in his seat, turning to look out the other window because he’s pretty much done with Mikey.

“Call me whatever you want, if I turn up missing, you’ll be the first person they look at,” Mikey says with a shrug.

“But I’ll do a real good job at hiding your body. That is, if you’ll even have a body after I’m done with you.”

“You sick bastard. You’re just a wannabe villain on an episode of Criminal Minds.”

“Go ahead, Mikey, you can kill me if you want. Just remember that the same applies to you,” Gerard says.

“Oh you silly boy. Do you honestly think I’m a rookie when it comes to disposing of bodies?” he asks, and Gerard looks around at him to see him smiling lightly, but it’s not a real smile. It’s the kind of smile you actually would expect to find on an episode of Criminal Minds. Mikey is seriously just one offhanded comment away from becoming a serial killer, but Gerard doesn’t mind it so much. He kind of feels bad for Mikey’s coworkers who should live in constant fear that they’re working with a sociopath, but that’s not Gerard’s problem. If he ever were to really become a mass murderer, Gerard’s the safest he could possibly be, because Mikey wouldn’t hurt him. Gerard would be much safer actually.

Gerard’s memorized the drive to the house, because he did live there for, like, twenty years. Now granted, he was a small child for much of that time, but he’s got enough sense to at least know when they’re on the same street as the one he grew up on.

“Oh god,” Gerard groans, looking around, feeling like a kid. “I’ve been avoiding mom’s calls for over two weeks, you know. She’s gonna be so pissed at me, and here we are just dropping in unannounced.”

“No, she’s not in,” Mikey says.

“What? How could you possibly know that?”

“Because I’m her favorite kid,” Mikey shrugs, and Gerard gives him an unamused face accompanied by a shove of the elbow into his ribs. “Or maybe I called her and told her to leave because I figured out a way for you to get a boyfriend, but it would require her to be away for an hour. She thought it sounded like a good trade off. So the house is empty, and as long as I hold up my end of the deal, which is to say, as long as you and Frank are in a relationship by the end of the week, then everything will be great.”

“Well it looks like you’re not going to be able to hold up your end of the deal, because I am not going to-”

“You want to test me Gerard?” Mikey asks. “I will not take no for an answer. You’re miserable. Suck it up, breathe it in. Breathe your miserable air and stop lying through your teeth. We both know you’re in love with Frank. Stop denying it. I know a way to make sure everything will turn out alright. I’m about ninety percent certain this plan will work, okay? Just do as I say, and as long as you listen to me, you’ll have the love of your life in less than a week.”

“Okay, fine. I’m listening, what do you plan on doing?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Mikey says quickly, as he hops out of the taxi.

Five minutes later, Gerard’s sitting on the steps in front of the house after refusing to actually go in. He’s not sure why, he’s just afraid that it’s going to remind him of his childhood and the last thing he needs to think about is Frank. He looks at the house next door for a good couple of minutes remembering all the times he’s spent over there. Even though he knows it’s not true, Gerard feels as though he spent more time in that house than the one behind him.

He remembers all the times that he’d played in Frank’s room. For some reason they played hide and seek a lot. Like, Gerard remembers at least a hundred different games, and he always hid in the same fucking place. His small brain really misunderstood the ‘hide’ part of hide and seek. If it was Frank’s house, he always hid in the guy’s closet. Some sort of teenage prophecy or something probably.

Gerard just feels his entire childhood hitting him in the stomach like some sort of bat. He remembers kissing Frank under the mistletoe and how they had made a big scene of it, pretending that it was the grosses thing that had ever happened. He remembers the time that they had to draw a picture of their best friend in art class and Gerard’s drawing of Frank looked like a potato with toothpicks sticking out of it. He remembers the time that he and Frank played tag with the kid who lived across the street and they teamed up on him which caused him to never want to play with them again. He remembers all the times he and Frank used to sit on one of their lawns and eat animal crackers and drink juice boxes. For some reason Frank always wanted the camels and Gerard always wanted the elephant animal crackers so they traded.

He remembers when they used to draw chalk on the sidewalk and play hopscotch and they never gave a shit when one of the older girls told them that ‘hopscotch was for girls’. He remembers when they would pretend to play chess in the living room at Gerard’s house. Neither of them knew how to play, though, so they were just moving the pieces around as if they were playing checkers. He remembers having a water gun fight with Frank and they got mad at each other for all of three minutes before they resolved everything when they realized how stupid it was of them to get angry. That was over a little water, and yet they were too immature to settle that other argument.

Gerard hates how stupid it is. He hates how his whole life is like a parallel universe to the one he really should’ve lived. He just wishes his life were the movie 13 Going on 30. He wants to wake up in his basement to find that the past twenty five years have all been a dream. He wants to leave that room and go kiss Frank and have this part of his life just stop existing. He wants it all to go away. Gerard just wants to be with Frank. He wants that, and if he could have that, he’d let the past years go. He’s say ‘fuck it’ and be with Frank, and everything would be okay again. That’s really all that he wants. Just a second chance, or a chance to start over. He knows he can’t have those years back, but still, he can’t help but to think about them.

What if they hadn’t been torn apart? What if Gerard made it home after school on the day where everything went wrong, and they’d had a rational conversation about it? Sure they were only six, but they might’ve been able to sit down and think things through. What if they’d gotten preachy Savannah expelled? What if they only got closer after fourth grade? What if they still sat next to each other on the school bus to and from school, and on field trips? When they took that trip to the science museum in fourth grade, what if they’d played with all the exhibits together? What if they had been on the same team in fifth grade when they had to play dodge ball in gym class? What if Gerard hadn’t made it a goal to hit Frank in the head with as many dodge balls as he could?

What if they had each other on the first day of sixth grade at a brand new school with an almost entirely new group of people? What if they were sitting in Frank’s bedroom after school, when Gerard accidentally blurted out that he was gay, and Frank had helped him get through that crisis in his life? Maybe instead of bottling it up for three years, and being ashamed of himself in the mirror, Gerard would have actually gotten someone to talk to, Frank, someone who understood him completely.

What if Frank had snuck into Gerard’s bedroom sometime in the middle of the summer when they were supposed to be asleep? What if they’d been talking on his bed, listening to the sound of the crickets from the open window, sitting in front of a fan because the air conditioning always gave out during the hotter months? What if Gerard had just gotten the nerve up to kiss him, and Frank kissed him back? What if their song was some dumbass pop song that was playing when they first kiss? Maybe it was Paranoid Android, or even fucking Wannabe by the Spice Girls.

What if they snuck out of school in ninth grade to hide in the bathroom and talk to each other? What if they’d made a huge deal of making plans to be alone so they could lose their virginities but they ended up chickening out and it only brought them closer?

What if they’d gotten to go to prom together, but snuck out because they got bored and went to an ice cream store instead. Maybe they danced alone to that stupid fucking Spice Girls song on Gerard’s Walkman.

What if they graduated as that stupid clingy couple that plan to stay in touch throughout college? What if they’d been voted cutest couple in their class superlatives, or what if they’d been bullied to all hell, but didn’t give a shit about it, because they had each other?

What if they went to different colleges and went through four years of hell because they never got to see each other. What if they would spend hours at night talking on the phone until one or both of their college roommates started to yell at them. What if they would find dumb things at gift shops and think of each other, and buy those stupid things and send them, because they wanted to make sure that the other knows they still care?

What if they moved in together after college and supported each other for the first couple years until one of them had enough money to buy the other a ring, and they wouldn’t have had enough for a big wedding so they had it in front of their two houses.

Most of all, what if they’d made it? If they really made it. They could’ve been together for the rest of their lives, Gerard bringing home flowers if Frank had a bad day, and Frank watching all of TNG with him even though he likes Captain Kirk better.

Gerard looks around him at the space between their houses. It’s just a patch of grass. That’s all that’s there. Except, there’s never been a wedding on that grass. There’s never been a fourteen year old Frank tip toeing through that small space and rattling on Gerard’s window. There’s never been a sixteen year old Gerard on the sidewalk where the school bus would come, asking Frank if you can see the hickey he’d given him the night before. There’s never been any of those things.

Instead, there’s a thirty year old man with eyes much older than that, sitting on the steps to his house looking like someone he knows just died. In a way, that’s what it does feel like. Gerard hangs his head and whimpers, feeling like someone’s tunneling through his insides, wishing that he could just take everything back.

He looks up when he hears the sound of the door closing and Mikey starting to hop down the steps. Gerard looks up, pulling himself to his feet at his arrival.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Gerard asks.

“Yep,” Mikey nods. Gerard just sighs and starts to head down the steps, leaving Mikey to stare at him, not moving. Gerard realizes that he’s not following when he doesn’t hear Mikey’s feet against the pavement.

“What?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is I needed to pick up?” Mikey asks holding up the generic paper bag he must’ve grabbed from the kitchen to house whatever it is they came here for.

“Would you tell me if I asked?”

“No,” Mikey admits.

“Then why should I ask in the first place?”

Mikey shrugs, but walks quickly to catch up with Gerard. “Why do you looks so sad all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” Gerard lies, looking back at their two houses solemnly, his eyes focusing on the spot where there will never be a wedding.