The Chasing of Moons

“Hey,” Frank says, throwing his books down onto the desk next to Gerard, who’s already seated with his eyes focused on the rain pattering against the window. The drops glide slowly down the glass pane and distort the shapes of the trees outside.

“Jesus fucking Christ, you scared me!” Gerard shouts when Frank’s book hits the desk.

“Sorry,” Frank replies, “so I didn’t see you yesterday.”

“I was at the dentist,” Gerard replies.

“All day?” Frank asks.

“I had a cavity.”

“All day?” Frank asks again.

“Fuck, I didn’t want to go to school when my lip felt like it weighed four pounds, okay?” Gerard says.

“Or you were avoiding me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Gerard replies.

“That’s not really what flattery is,” Frank replies. “Anyway, where were you at lunch if you weren’t trying to avoid me?”

“Talking to teachers,” Gerard replies.

“So you just conveniently were nowhere around me for almost a day and a half plus the weekend. Interesting.”

“Would you give that up?” Gerard asks, “I don’t care about you. I’m not trying to avoid you, I am simply indifferent.”

“Yeah?” Frank asks, “Then why are you always trying to pretend that you hate my guts.”

“I do hate your guts.”

“You can’t be both indifferent and hate my guts at the same time,” Frank says, because he’s pretty sure that you have to choose one or the other. Either you don’t care about someone or you hate them, but you can’t hate and not care about someone.

“Yes I can.”

“Well, here’s a question then, if I were standing in the middle of the street and a bus were coming and I didn’t see it, would you let it run me over?” Frank asks.

“I-,” Gerard starts and then stops looks down at his pencil, up at the whiteboard and then over at Frank with this weird expression on his face. “Well, like, I’d warn you. I hate you but I don’t want you to get hit by a fucking bus.”

“So you’re not indifferent and you don’t hate me,” Frank says.

“Yes, I do hate you, and I am indifferent, but I’m also a human and I don’t want to be responsible for letting someone actually get hit by an actual fucking bus.”

“Yeah but if you really were indifferent to me than you’d let me get hit, and if you really hated me you’d be taking pictures,” Frank says.

“No, I just don’t want a guy to get hit by a bus,” Gerard says, “I’m human, I’m not a monster.”

“Well you can say that all you want, but I’m taking that as an admittance that you like me.”

“Like you?” Gerard asks, in an attempt to make the word ‘you’ sound like it’s the most preposterous word that has ever been spoken by anyone, but it’s not working. If Frank didn’t already know that Gerard likes him, he sure would know now. Actually, he probably wouldn’t. Frank is almost incapable of understanding how anyone on this planet could ever possibly like him, and it’s not because he’s self-conscious or anything, he just feels like everyone else is a million times better than he is. Sure that itself sounds self-conscious, but Frank falls in love with practically every stranger he meets, and he thinks the best of people and he finds it hard to believe that, out of all the billions of people in this world, why would Gerard want him? There’s so many dozens of people with better senses of humor, more muscles, better voices, more talent, and everything else that you might find attractive in a person, and that just leaves him being the guy left out.

For example, Pete is easily the funniest person Frank knows, and Brendon’s the best singer. His mother can make any math problem her bitch, and even Mikey, who Frank barely knows, is a fucking badass mind reader. Gerard seems to have this magic about him to get you to smile if he makes eye contact with you. Or maybe that’s just his way with Frank. There’s bound to be some sort of connection between them if all this magic time traveling shit is real, because, like, fuck, the idea that it’s just a coincidence that all this stuff is happening to them seems unlikely. He doubts that they were just picked at random as the one couple who would literally have fucking time travel become possible for them to be together, because that’s seriously not as great a story in the slightest. There’s got to be something cosmic between them. Something that makes Frank’s heart stutter like a car driving along a gravel road whenever he makes eye contact with the guy.

“I didn’t mean that you were tripping over yourself in love with me, I just mean that you like me in the way that you don’t dislike me,” Frank sighs.

“You’re wrong about that, but you’re right that I’m not in love with you. Is that even possible?”

“I’ll have you know, I’m perfectly lovable,” Frank pouts.

“I bet you Satan said the very same thing.”

“Why would Satan think of himself as lovable? What does Satan have to do with anything anyway?”

“Well what’s love got to do with it?” Gerard asks.

“I see what you did there,” Frank says, looking at him with a sideways glare, “You should be disappointed in yourself.”

“Nope,” Gerard says, and then he turns away with too much finality for Frank. He spends a few seconds just looking at Gerard, looking at the side of his face that he can see, half covered by his hair. It’s not as greasy looking as it had been the other day. Frank wonders if it’s the kind of hair that you could run your fingers through or if it’s too tangled and gross. He hopes he’ll get to find out someday. He can’t honestly remember what Gee’s hair had been like. He was too caught up in the moment.

“Gerard?” Frank asks after there’s been about a minute of silence while he searches for something to say.

“What?” he snaps, turning to look at Frank. Frank quickly checks the clock to see that the bell will ring in about a minute, but their teacher isn’t going to be coming in for at least another three or four minutes. He’s never been on time.

“You were, uh, right about Pete. Pete liking Mikey, I mean,” Frank says.

“I know I was,” Gerard replies, snarling like Frank just told him that circles are circular, or that water is wet, or that republicans are sexist.

“I mean, like, Mikey’s not exactly an innocent party in the whole ordeal either,” Frank replies.

“No, of course he’s not, he’s flirting back, but your friend started it. It’s weird,” Gerard says. “Mikey keeps talking about ‘my friend Pete’ at dinner like they’ve known each other for years.”

“What about you?” Frank asks.

“What about me?” Gerard asks.

“I mean, do you think Pete’s okay?” Frank asks, not sure if that’s really the question he meant to ask at all. Obviously the question that he most wants to ask is if Gerard wants to marry him, but he feels like that might be a little preemptive considering he is not dating Gerard, he has known Gerard for a week, they are only eighteen, Gerard hates him, and Frank is still hung up on the whole letter and the weekend before last and all the works. It’s not his fault is was a great weekend. It was a very very very nice weekend. Gee was there. He didn’t have any clothes on. It was a wonderful experience.

“I think he’s weird,” Gerard replies.

“Well yeah, I mean, everyone does,” Frank replies, “We had to write an essay on what we love most in this world in sixth grade and Pete wrote his on pizza. To be fair though, Brendon wrote his on himself before the teacher told him he wasn’t allowed to.”

“And what was yours about?”

“What?” Frank asks, “Oh, uh, you know. The usual.”

“And the usual would be?”

“Uh, like, well... Star Wars.”

Gerard turns his head, but Frank swears that he can see him smiling for a second which makes him grin too, and blush all along the sides of his face and even down to his neck. He’s not sure why that’s embarrassing, but he really wishes he’d written about something cool like some obscure indie band, or a badass action movie, or supermodels or something, but no, no his thesis was about who shot first. In conclusion, Han Solo. In defense of the other side of the argument, fuck off you snot rag it was Han, bite me.

“I think that’s basically your personalities all boiled down to the center,” Gerard says.

“Yep pretty much. Brendon had to write about house pets though, because he wasn’t trusted to pick his own topic. But if you think he’s incapable of writing an any number of pages paper about himself than you would be very surprised to read the encyclopedia series he could put out.”

“If he’s so stuck up why do you hang out with him?”

“Stuck up doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. Like, he’s a good dude, Brendon just makes Narcissus look like an average Joe,” Frank says.

“You’re awfully sweet about the guy who is supposedly your best friend,” Gerard says, sardonically.

“What? Brendon. Brendon is my best friend? No, if he tells you that he’s a liar. My best friend is my pet rock.”

“You have a pet rock?”

“Well, he was originally my moms, she was a child of the seventies, so they were like ‘in’ back then, but yes, I have a pet rock and his name is Dimitrius.”

“That’s such an inappropriate name for a rock.”

“He prefers boulder-American, and I’m not the one who named him,” Frank responds.

“I’m starting to question whether this rock really exists or not. Excuse me, boulder-American,” Gerard says and there’s no mistaking it this time that he’s smiling. Frank thinks that maybe the key to his heart is to get him to laugh. So if he has to, he will read out every joke he ever finds to Gerard ever. He will invest in thousands of popsicles and a blow dryer.

“No, Dimitrius is as real as you or me, or Ryan Seacrest or someone else who is completely real.”

“Wow, and he’s more important than either Brendon or Pete?”

“They’re just place fillers until I infiltrate Taylor Swift’s squad.”

Gerard snorts at that and Frank’s pretty sure he smiles wider than he ever has before, because there’s nothing better than hearing Gerard laugh. He laughs really stupidly, like a goose combined with the giggle of an evil girl from a horror movie, and also there’s a hint of a train horn, and Frank thinks he could keel over dead from how much it makes his heart swell. It’s honestly probably the stupidest laugh he’s ever heard and that is why he’s already picking out china patterns.

“That’s a beautiful dream,” Gerard says, doing his best not to look at Frank, and he supposes that that’s alright. For now at least, Gerard doesn’t have to look at him. He can get by just making him laugh, and someday he’s going to write Gerard a standup routine, or literally anything. He’ll do it. He’d do anything. He’s a hopeless romantic who’s watched too many chick flicks with his mother. Family movie night is an on and off affair though, and Frank always picks thrillers or horror, so she has every right to combat that with the entire repertoire of Sandra Bullock’s movie career.

“I’m aware,” Frank nods, “and what’s yours then?”

“My what?”

“Dream that’s totally farfetched and idiotic,” Frank responds.

“Win a million dollars?”

“That’s fucking cliché, unacceptable. I need a better answer from you,” Frank replies.

“Ugh, I don’t know. I guess, like, no I don’t know,” Gerard says, which isn’t a very decisive sentence, but at least he’s got the guy both talking and smiling. It’s a win for Frank.

“Aw, bummer,” Frank says, “You sure? Nothing? Win an Oscar? Live in a mansion? Discover Atlantis? Breathe the same air as Morgan Freeman?”

Gerard just shakes his head, “I guess I’ll just have to get back to you on that one.”

Frank shrugs, because this is probably the longest amount of time he’s gotten Gerard talking to him, so it’s already a success. If only he could get him to stop trying to hate him. He thinks that’s their biggest problem here, Gerard is trying too hard to hate him that he’s completely unaware of the fact that Frank is flirting his fucking ass off. If the guy would only open his eyes he would see how transparent Frank’s flirting attempts really are.

“I’ll be waiting for that,” Frank says.