she said, "I can't find a thing I don't like about you." (and I'm like, "don't worry, you will.")

[backslash]

Freshman Year

"Okay, here's the deal," Taylor said, folding her hands like a prayer and leveling them at Robin more like a threat, moving with enough force to make her whole body sway and the skirt of her black-and-white polka-dotted dress swish around her legs. She didn't have to raise her voice, since the two of them were huddled in the hallway outside the school gym. The music of the homecoming dance pulsed and swelled just on the other side of the wall, but it didn't overwhelm them enough out here to make yelling necessary.

The basketball team had bombed it again at the homecoming game, which you'd think would not have put everyone in a partying mood, but Tay was pretty sure you could just put a bunch of people in a room together with some flashing lights and bopping music and the party would invent itself. Parties were pretty neat like that. Homecoming was cooler than prom, anyway, because you didn't have to get a date to attend.

Apparently you did sometimes stand outside the homecoming dance in order to plot how to get someone a date, though.

"So you just gotta, like, not appear nervous, first of all," Taylor explained. Robin looked nervous already, but that might also have been the fact that his formal shirt and formal jacket were both red and kind of making his face look red also. "And don't wait for a slow song to come on. You have to uhh what's the word, insinuate yourself first, right? Insinuate yourself into a group. Like right now, while the jumping songs are on, and then when a slow song comes on you just like. Give someone your arm."

She didn't think it was all that complicated, really. Dances had followed the same formula since middle school, and Taylor had always pretty happily taken the arm of whoever offered it to her. Once the guys had gotten over their deathly fear of contracting cooties just from touching a girl without a protective barrier of roughhousing, it was pretty simple. She'd danced with her female friends too, even during slow dances. It was totally easy to just ask a girl to dance!

"You don't really need to say anything while the music is playing, also. You wait until after and then you can just be like, 'hey want some punch'? And then go get her some punch. And don't spill it. That's really important." God, she was a total pro at this. She could totally go and just ask a girl out to show him how it was done.

That wasn't weird, right?

[Pippi]

Man, this was all way more complicated than it had any right to be.

Robin nodded along as Taylor gave her instructions, head starting to resemble the little sippy bird his old man kept on his desk the longer her spiel went on for. Most of it, to be totally honest, was going in one ear and right out the other, which like, wasn’t Taylor’s fault really, he was sure everything she was saying was sound and made sense.

But it also wasn’t really his fault either, cause he sure as hell wasn’t trying to ignore the advice he, himself, had specifically asked for. It was just real hard to focus right now when it felt like his shirt collar was trying its hardest to strangle him where he stood. It definitely hadn’t been this tight when he’d first put it on, right? And, hey, maybe it was just the crappy lighting in the corridor, but his shirt and his jacket suddenly looked like they were seriously different shades of red; like, one was definitely a Ferrari red, the other was a Prema red, no doubt at all. Did it matter though? Maybe it was better that they were different shades, actually. Man, he was totally sweating, worrying about this. Wait, how much was he sweating? Was it visible? God, if he had left huge pit stains on his clothes then he might as well just walk down this corridor and out the front door and never come back to school, ever.

It probably seemed real weird on the surface, that he was overthinking and getting all worked up over the prospect of asking a girl out, given he’d spent every weekend for the past year driving around circuits in a vehicle made out of nothing but tubing and engines. But, here was the thing; he really didn’t wanna mess this up. There were already a couple of total losers inside the gym who’d somehow managed to nab a girl way out of their league for a dance, and there wasn’t any way he was gonna get shown up in that regard, not at Homecoming.

And, hey, everything you did, you had to do for the first time, right? Nothing weird about getting nervous before a leap of faith, right?

“Okay, yeah, got it.”

Robin took a few quick breaths, pumping himself up. He ran his hand through his hair - man, it always felt naked without a cap to accompany it - then flashed a grin at Taylor.

“Easy. Get into a group, incinerate myself into it, give the cutest girl in the group my arm, offer her punch. Yeah. Easy.”

His grin lasted for about a second longer, before he turned to face the window, squinting as he peered at his reflection, adjusting his previous ruffling with uncertain fingertips.

“My hair looks good, right?” Robin asked, eyes still fixed on the echo of his hair in the window. “Goes well with the shirt, yeah?"

He didn't totally get what that phrase meant, honestly, but it was something his mom sometimes said when she was preparing for dinner dates with friends of the family, so maybe Taylor would get it.

"Like, I know the red looks good, but is it the sorta colour that only looks good in a racing context? Does it look too much like a suit? A, uh, driver’s suit, not a suit ‘n tie suit. Is it too… Ferrari-y?”

He glanced over his shoulder, finally.

“Does any of that make sense?”

[backslash]

"Yeah, yeah- no? Yeah. Yeah." Taylor thought that she answered Robin's run-down of the steps in order, save for stumbling over his wording. Was it incinerate? Now she wasn't sure.

"But anyway!" She snapped back to attention, nodding so forcefully that her hair was in danger of falling out of its updo. "Your hair looks great." Honestly it was hard for guys with short hair to have bad hair days. She was kind of jealous, especially when the humidity picked up and made her hair frizz like hell no matter how much she combed it.

"And, uh, like..." Taylor gestured at Robin's clothes in a half-shrug. "I don't think anyone's going to call you out if it looks like Ferrari? Ferraris are fancy and uhh... girls don't want guys, they want cars and money?" She offered a lopsided grin, and her thoughts that trailed a half-second behind her actions hoped fervently that Robin recognized that she was quoting song lyrics and not being defeatist.

"Look the lights are down low anyway. Nobody will notice, it's fine. It's fiiine." She punctuated her point by gripping Robin by the shoulders and steering him back towards the gym doors. "Go do it now, while the music's still up. I'm going to... go to the water fountain."

She was actually going to lurk in the doorway and supervise, and maybe run in and throw confetti on Robin when he succeeded. Probably not the second one. She didn't have any confetti. But maybe in spirit.

Come on, it wasn't hard to talk to girls, but. Uh. Positive reinforcement!

[Pippi]

God bless Taylor, like, really and truly. She had stuck with Robin for several years now, they were - he wouldn’t say best friends, cause it was kinda weird and lame for your best friend to be a girl, right? - good friends, and she put up him whenever he talked about F1 at length, which was cool of her. He could tell, whenever he went on about the previous weekend’s Grand Prix, that she really didn’t get it in the slightest, but she still chose to listen anyway, which he totally appreciated.

But holy crap, she could be a lot sometimes. Like right now, in fact; she was bouncing through her points so rapidly that Robin wasn’t completely certain what she was ‘yeahing’ and ‘no-ing’ anymore - although that might have been because his brain felt like it had just gotten off a particularly noisy and probably-not-OSHA-compliant carnival ride - and she moved like she was using all of her muscles in every single action. He actually felt himself flinch when she nodded, half-expecting her to end up headbutting him instead. She was like a… what was it called… the big windy thing, the natural disaster thingy that- oh, yeah, a hurricane, that was it. She was just like a human hurricane sometimes.

Robin’s face was itself going through a whirlwind of emotions, ping-ponging between confident and uncertain as fast as he could blink. Was it true, what Taylor said? Was that what girls were actually into? He guessed it would be good if he did look like a Ferrari, in that case, but he didn’t actually own a car yet, would they be expecting him to? Maybe he could lie and say that he owned one of his grandpa’s classic car- No, wait, what the hell, he was being stupid, nobody here was able to drive, he’d look like a total moron if he said something like that.

At least his hair looked good. He knew it did, of course. He had just been, uh, testing Taylor. Or something.

“Well,” Robin said, and then Taylor was grabbing his shoulders and shunting him back towards the gym doors, and his words were replaced by a kind of flustered, indignant spluttering. He was really tempted to dig his heels in and just stall for another five minutes… or hours… but Taylor was right, there was only so much prep time in the world. You had to leave the pitlane at some point, after all!

“Okay,” he said, rolling his shoulders, bouncing on his heels like a prize boxer. “Okay, yeah, cool. Let’s do this.”

…

Oh, shit, tornado, that was another perfect way of describing Taylor. Heh. Taylor Tornado. She’d probably like that, actually, he’d have to-

Augh, no, crap, come on, focus!

Robin ran his hand through his hair again, straightened out his jacket, and pushed the gym doors open, stepping into the breach.

[backslash]

After more or less shoving Robin into the gym, every great journey starting with a single step or like, five or six steps against your will and all that, Taylor backed away from the doorway. She dithered for a second and then spun on her heel and darted down the hall, the soles of her ballet flats slapping loudly against the floor. The echoes of her footfalls seemed to hang in the hall's muffled atmosphere, with only the noise leaking from the doorway and the throb of the beat coming through the walls signifying what was on the other side.

She'd said she was going to the water fountain so you know, she might as well do that to make sure her alibi was all lined up. She was sure that Robin wasn't going to set anything on fire while she wasn't watching. That's your top-tier, A-plus level of confidence in your friends right there. "Won't destroy anything or kill anyone if I turn my back for five minutes." You don't get personal confidence like that with everyone!

Taylor bent and drank, gulping down several mouthfuls of ice-cold water, and finally straightened up when the cold started to make her teeth hurt. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she walked back towards the main gym doors at a more sedate pace. She'd left a pink lip gloss smear on the back of her hand after wiping her mouth, and she rubbed at it distractedly as she moved back into the perfect spying position in the doorway.

[Pippi]

Taylor’s spying adventures did not last very long in the slightest.

There was a dejected look on Robin’s face as he hurried back towards the gym entrance, visible even with his head down and through the dim lighting, like he was a walking beacon of disappointment. He moved quickly, pushing through the bustling crowd on the dancefloor, ignoring any murderous glares or irritated yelps shot his way by the people he was jostling. He was a man on a mission, clutching a little red cup so tightly in his hand it was a miracle it hadn’t crumpled up into a useless wad of plastic.

The doors burst open as Robin powered through them, swinging shut behind him with a dull thud. He ran his hand through his hair and let out a very long, very low sigh, but he kept on walking, not breaking his stride until he was halfway down the corridor. Then his head snapped up, and he screeched to a halt so suddenly there could have been smoke coming out of his shoes, his heels leaving marks on the lino.

He turned around and stared at Taylor, his eyes wide open like he was looking at a ghost instead of his good friend who had just missed witnessing him strike out hard. He opened his mouth, and for a few seconds, no words came out.

“Uhhh…”

Robin, very visibly, deflated in front of Taylor’s very eyes. His shoulders sagged, his hand still clutching the cup fell down to his side, threatening to pour what was remaining of the liquid inside of it all over the floor and his feet. There was a blotchy, uneven stain on the left-hand side of his jacket, a dark maroon patch on his Ferrari red ensemble.

“Hey, Taylor, you remember that thing you said? About not spilling the punch?”

[backslash]

Taylor took in the sad mess before her, and also Robin, and she grimaced. She wanted to say something comforting, but she'd used up her pep talk and uhhhh how do you come back from this one? She almost reached out to give him a hug or a friendly shoulder pat or something, but then she noticed the punch stain once again and drew her arm back, folding it against her stomach.

"Ouch, dude." Yeah, knocked it out of the park on that reassurance.

"...This'll be funny in five years?"

[Pippi]

Robin wondered just how feasible it was to actually leap through a closed window without getting ripped to shreds by glass shards.

Even with the (admittedly pretty huge) con of potential horribly painful death by laceration, the pros of doing so were sounding pretty darn inviting right now. It would be a real quick exit, an immediate escape route from this incredibly mortifying situation; if a hole wasn’t gonna come along and open up beneath him, then he was just gonna have to make one himself. And it’d definitely be something that everyone at school talked about for months afterwards. Better to be ‘Robin Valenti, the dude who smashed through a window’ than ‘Robin Valenti, the moron who spilled punch all down his stupid bright red suit’.

And if it did end up killing him, then, hey, that’d definitely overshadow him making an idiot of himself on the dancefloor.

Taylor seemed uncertain as to how she should go about dealing with this, which Robin really, really could not blame her for in the slightest. The punch was seeping into his dress shirt now, the patch all damp and sticky and gross to touch, and, oh crap, he really hoped that it would all come out in the wash. Yet more reason to get the heck out of here and go home so he could change into clothes that didn’t smell of tropical fruit and sweat and embarrassment.

“Maybe,” he muttered, unable to look Taylor in the eye, fixing his gaze on the floor instead. “Once I’ve changed my name and fled the country, maybe. I’ll keep in touch, don’t worry. I was thinking of something like ‘Vincenzo’, that sounds pretty cool and mysterious, right?”

He sighed and rubbed his left arm, glancing up to look into Taylor’s eyes instead.

“I think I kinda stumbled over the words as well, and I'm like, 70% sure I asked her if she wanted a punch instead, so, yeah…”

[backslash]

"Vincenzo Valenti?" Taylor asked, because obviously that was the most important part of what Robin had just said, and the Dunkaccino bit from that awful Adam Sandler movie played on fast-forward in her brain for about 5 seconds before she refocused.

"I mean, there are worse things you could have said." Like any part of the Dunkaccino sequence, for example. Still, Taylor knew that wasn't exactly going to turn Robin's night around, and she scratched at the side of her jaw with a fingernail, frowning in thought. "But like... okay, you struck out, I guess, but maybe nobody saw your face clearly?"

Nope. Nope. She just had that stupid fake commercial playing on a loop in her head now and it kept taking over her thoughts. Maybe that was her karmic comeuppance for taking part in this. That wasn't really fair, though. Taylor didn't think that encouraging Robin to put himself out there was a bad thing, even if she was a bit pushy about it, and his part in that definitely wasn't. It was more like the universe pranking them, in a kind of mean-spirited way.

"...Want me to call my mom and see if she'll take us to get Frosties?" The best way to bounce back from a night of disappointment, obviously. Taylor knew that her mom would probably be down if she just asked. The only real alternative that she could think of was going in there herself and showing him how it was done, and that prrrrobably wouldn't be good for morale.

Oh, and it'd be kind of weird if she just went in and started hitting on girls. She guessed.

[Pippi]

“Yeah, I… I think I’d like that.”

Robin only responded to the last thing Taylor said, cause like, first off, it was the most important thing to consider, given it was his free ticket to getting outta here that didn’t involve vanishing through the floor or getting ripped to shreds by flying glass. Second off… was there something wrong with ‘Vincenzo Valenti’? He’d thought it was pretty cool, honestly, but Taylor repeating it back to him as a question suddenly made it sound pretty not cool at all. Pretty dumb, in fact. Or maybe, oh jeez, was there some like, serial killer or porn star or something who already had that name? Aw, dang it. That would be just the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it? Maybe he should have chosen a driver’s name instead, like Michael, or Alain, or Kimi.

Or, maybe, he should think about this when there wasn’t tropical fruit punch threatening to permanently stain his jacket.

Speaking of, Taylor was right in that probably nobody had seen his face in the low light of the gym, but they sure as heck had seen somebody spill punch down himself, and then seen that exact same somebody hastily exit the room without looking at anyone, so if somebody decided to re-enter the dancefloor with a conspicuous stain on their clothes, well…

It was easy to put two and two together, so, yeah, Frosties was pretty much the only viable option.

“She wasn’t even that cute, y’know, actually,” Robin muttered, kicking his foot against the floor and leaving a scuff mark. “Like, she looked good from a distance, but then I got all close and she was… and, like, anyway, she doesn’t know what she’s missing out on, so obviously she’s not that smart, and… uh…”

He rubbed his arm again and looked sheepishly at his best friend.

“You’re sure your mom won’t mind?”

[backslash]

"Yeah, totally! She'll probably be glad to pick us up early, honestly." Taylor's parents needed sleep like all old people did, and they didn't really care for her mostly-nonexistent sleep schedule. Even stuff like this, which was a sanctioned school event and not just Taylor staying up under the covers with a computer game, could make them grumble about the hour that it finally ended.

Anyway, if she was able to tell her mom that Robin had gone and spilled punch all over himself trying to impress a girl, and made sure to clarify that the girl wasn't her, maybe her mom would stop being so nudge-nudge-wink-wink about one of Tay's best friends being a dude. There were only so many exaggerated gagging noises that she could make in response to that suggestion to explain how thinking of Robin in that way was about as appealing as dating her brother.

Also, it'd be kind of mean to do the whole "gag me and die" routine about it right now since he was all down about not getting a dance partner. Taylor would have to save that bit for later.

"I can go ahead and call her." Tay patted her pockets - Did she mention the dress had pockets? It had pockets, and it was great. - and came up with her incredibly awesome and up-to-date battered hot pink flip phone. She flipped it open, managed to not flip it out of her hand and send it flying across the hall - that had happened before - and quickly tapped through her contacts to find her mom's number. It rang only a couple of times before her mom picked up, sounding groggy already.

"Hey Mom, it's me. Can you pick us up from the school? We want Wendy's."

There was some grumbling on the other end of the line, but it resolved itself into tired agreement, making Taylor bounce on the balls of her feet in excitement. "Thanks! We'll be waiting out front!" She chirped and hung up, realizing only belatedly that her mom had started to say something else when she'd flipped the phone shut. "Oops. Oh well."

[Pippi]

He stood awkwardly to one side as Taylor called her mom, arms hanging limply by his side, trying to shift his body in such a way so that the damp and sticky patch wasn’t pressing too much into his chest. He wondered what he would have done, here, if Taylor hadn’t been around, if she’d been sick or, like, not in his life at all. Would his parents have picked him up early? Probably, yeah, honestly, although his mom would definitely have moaned about how her evening had been cut short and how his dad couldn’t come and get him cause he’d already had a glass of wine, so she would HAVE to drive over she GUESSED.

Not a chance of getting Wendy’s, though. She would have just given him the usual, terrible, unsatisfying as heck answer of ‘we have food at home’.

Yet another point in Taylor’s favour, that. He watched her as she talked, more than a little baffled at just how animated she was getting while talking to someone who couldn’t even see her, especially cause she’d been bouncing around like that all fricking night already. He smiled at it, though, even with embarrassment still burning his cheeks and punch soaking his skin. He couldn’t be too surprised. She’d always been like this, a nonstop battery of energy, constantly charged and ready to go, which, nicely enough, meant she was always ready to help him out when things got tight. He could have real easily blamed her for this whole, awkward mess; she’d been the one to encourage him to go for it and ask that girl for a dance, after all. But, nah. Wasn’t her fault. Robin was sure her advice had been good, he’d just been the one to mess it all up and make himself look like an idiot in the process. And, look, here she was once again, ready to help clean up after his mess and provide a quick getaway from the scene of the crime.

Honestly, sometimes, he really didn’t know what he’d do without her.

He tilted his head to the side slightly as Taylor hung up, evidently cutting the conversation with her mom off before it had quite finished; not the first time she’d done that, and he was certain it wouldn’t be the last. He aimed his smile at her, before sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck.

“Hey, uh, thanks. And whatever,” he mumbled. Man, he clearly hadn’t gotten a proper grip on his words yet still, he was stumbling all over them. “Tonight has, like, kinda sucked a whole bunch, obviously, so, y’know… thanks. For… thanks.”

He looked away for a moment, briefly feeling just as dumb as he had a few moments ago inside the gym.

“It’ll probably be funny. In a couple years, like you said, yeah? We’ll all laugh about it and… hey, uh, you don’t think people will still be talking about it then, right? Like… like, that’s not gonna be the first thing people think of when they see me, like, I’m not gonna ask a girl out two years from now and she’ll laugh at me and go ‘Aren’t you the dweeb who spilled punch all over himself?’ and walk off, right? That’s not gonna happen. Is it?”