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“Hey, guess who I am!” Fred yells behind him. Hal turns around, but Fred has his back turned to him. He must have been talking to someone else. Just as Hal turns back around, Fred yells, “Hal! Take a guess!”
“Fred?” He turns again, but Fred still has his back to him. He questions if Fred is playing a joke on him - heaven knows it wouldn’t be the first time - but this mean kind of ‘I wasn’t talking to you!’ joke is more Hermione’s style than his. “Are you talking to me?”
“Duh, Hal!” Fred half turns his head over his shoulder. “Take a guess!” And he juts a thumb downwards.
Hal sees it then. The red baseball cap tucked into the back pocket of his jeans and a studded belt around his thin waist. His white t-shirt is rolled up at his shoulders in a way that would make Hal’s own mother cry about wrinkles.
“You’re Bruce Springsteen.” Hal leaves out a comment about Fred having been Bruce Springsteen last year as well. “Really cool!”
Fred groans and spins around. “No! I’m the cover of Born in the USA!”
“Oh, yeah.” Hal bites his tongue. Bruce Springsteen was obviously the man on the cover of his own album. “Sorry. I see it now.”
“I did the belt myself.” He hooks a thumb into his belt loop. “Well, Alice did it with this bedazzler she has. I hope my mom doesn’t notice, she just got me this for church.” Fred slides past Hal and helps himself to a cup of punch. “Can you believe my mom brought up at a PTA meeting that I was allergic to pineapples just so they wouldn’t stick any frozen chunks of them in the punch this year? How embarrassing.” He takes a gulp and finally looks Hal up and down. “Oh, cool. Are you supposed to be your dad?”
Hal’s face heats up. Sure, he was in a checkered suit jacket that had once belonged to his dad and was wearing an old pair of his eyeglasses that he’d popped the lenses out of. But he still didn’t think -
“Of course he’s not, Freddy.” FP comes up behind Fred and, with great carelessness, yanks the baseball cap out of Fred’s back pocket and shoves it on his head. “He’s obviously supposed to be a nerd.”
Hal knows FP isn’t a mean person per se. Fred calls him misunderstood. Hal’s sister calls him a jackass. Hal just tries to stay off his bad side. Or out of his way most days. He could never get over the feeling like he was third wheeling it around FP and Fred, even if there were other people around.
“You got suspenders on under there?” FP asks. He makes some weak attempt to grab at Hal’s jacket to check but his other arm is around Fred and he’d have to relinquish that to get close enough. “You like my costume?” FP flashes open his red jacket to reveal a plain white t-shirt as well. “Jim Stark. You know. Rebel Without a Cause?”
“Yeah, I get it.” Hal nods. He knows the red jacket is from the closet of Fred’s older brother but he doesn’t bring that up either. “Really cool.”
“Really lazy is what it is.” Hal jumps at the voice beside him. He hadn’t even noticed her come up beside them. Alice grabs a popcorn ball off the refreshment table - Hal’s mom had spent yesterday making a hundred of them for this occasion - and bites into one. “Isn’t that Oscar’s jacket?”
“Shut up, Al,” Fred hisses as he shoves the red cap back in his pocket. His eyes dart around as if the 19-year-old Oscar would be caught dead at a high school dance or anywhere near his 15-year-old brother for that matter. “It’s still a good costume.”
“As if.” When Alice’s eyes finish rolling she looks Hal up and down, popcorn ball still held in her hand. “You’re not a nerd.”
It’s his cue to say something but his throat is suddenly as dry as sandpaper and he wishes the paper cup clutched in his hand wasn’t empty. Alice’s outfit is skin tight and all black. The shirt isn’t leather but the pants most definitely are. Her blonde hair, usually so big and wild, is half tamed by a black mask and a headband with a pair of cat ears on top. Red lipstick is painted on her lips and, sure enough, a cat tail is clipped to the back of her pants.
“What’s wrong, Hal?” Fred grins broady. “Cat got your tongue? Get it? Because Alice is a cat? I -”
“Lets go harass the DJ into playing better music.” FP turns towards the stage and he half expects him to put his free arm over Alice and tug her along as well. “If I hear The Monster Mash one more fucking time I’m going to lose it.” He doesn’t make a grab for Alice. Just keeps his one arm tightly around Fred and walks them towards where the DJ is set up. They don’t even say goodbye.
“You’re Buddy Holly, right?” He looks back to Alice with wide eyes. “Hal?”
Most days he can’t make the connection between the Alice who sits in front of him in honors English and the Alice who used to play baseball in the park with him and Fred when they were kids. (Alice was okay and Hal was terrible but Fred was amazing and that kind of made up for everything else.) But today he sees some of that fun back in her eyes as she takes him in. He doesn’t see the girl in the Serpent jacket. He sees the girl with dirty hands and messy hair who he used to share cookies with.
“Yeah,” he finally gets out. He holds up his cup. “Sorry, I need to -”
“Yeah, I’d love some.”
“Right,” he coughs out. He turns back to the hardly touched refreshment table, really hoping his peers will make a better dent in the mountain of popcorn balls. He refills his cup and fills a second for Alice. When he turns back around she’s taken a few steps closer to him.
“Shouldn’t you go with them?” he asks after taking a long sip of punch. He notices her eyes are on FP and Fred who seem to be arguing with the DJ quite passionately. “I thought you like, came with FP?”
Alice’s cup pauses halfway to her mouth in a scowl. “Oh gross. I mean sure we like, walked here together. We walk to school together every day. Doesn’t mean we came together.” She takes a sip, her lips half pursed in a smile. “Didn’t you come here with Fred?”
He normally does walk to school with Fred but his mom said he’d been long gone when he knocked on his door earlier. “I didn’t. I actually came here with Penelope tonight.” Alice’s arms fold over her chest and she gives him a look he can’t quite place. A mixture of irritation and disbelief. “I mean we literally just drove here in the same car. My sister I mean, she drove the two of us.” He points to Penelope, quite impressively dressed in a perfect replica of Ariel’s blue dress from The Little Mermaid, matching bow in her hair and all. Hermione, decked out in a look from some Madonna music video, had beckoned her and the rest of the cheerleaders to hang out with her the second the dance started and she didn’t look like she was getting away anytime soon.
“Cool.” Alice’s tone is suddenly frosty as she looks towards Penelope and Hermione and the rest of the cheerleaders. “Must suck when your date ditches you.”
“She’s not my date, really.” Hal gulps and admits, “I was supposed to come with Hiram actually.”
Alice’s eyes widen and her tone lightens. “Oh?”
“I mean,” he can feel his face getting red again, “me and Hiram and Marty were supposed to do this whole group costume thing. And then it all got kind of screwed up.”
“So you went as Buddy Holly instead?” she teases. His face burns but he can’t hold in his smile.
“How’d you know who I was supposed to be?”
“Because I’m not an idiot.” She gestures. “The glasses and the clothes. All you need is a guitar.”
“I didn’t feel like carrying one all night.” He also knows Fred would be his only chance of borrowing a guitar and his old friend didn’t approve much of his friendship with the rich new kid in town. “So Hiram decided me and him and Marty would dress up as ‘the day the music died.’ I’d be Buddy Holly and he’d be Ritchie Valens and Marty would be the Big Bopper. And - well, I don’t know. Hiram was really excited about it but then Marty said he didn’t know who the Big Bopper was and he didn’t want to do it. So Hiram decided it wouldn’t work with just the two of us, so,” he points to Hiram arguing with some senior halfway across the gym, decked out in a white jumpsuit and sunglasses.
“Elvis? Real original.” Alice rolls her eyes at Hiram. “But you decided to do it anyway.”
“No, actually Hiram forgot to tell me the plan changed until this morning and it was too late for me to pull together another costume, so here I am.”
Alice actually laughs at that. She’s not laughing at him, but with him. Her nose scrunches up in that way it does that he wishes he didn’t notice but he can’t help it because it’s quite possibly the cutest thing he’s ever seen.
“I like your Catwoman costume,” he gets out and Alice’s face suddenly drops and she eyes him through a veil of suspicion. “Sorry,” he stammers out, “I thought -”
“How’d you know I was Catwoman?” she asks suddenly. “Everyone thinks I’m just a cat.”
Hal shrugs and when he realizes that isn’t good enough for Alice he gets out, “Why would a cat wear a mask? Plus like,” he gestures to her clothes without actually looking at her body, in fact he tries very hard to not look at anything but her big blue eyes, “like the leather and everything.”
He almost expects her to slap him but she does that laugh again. The nose scrunching laugh and she actually touches his arm with her free hand to steady herself.
“Like why would a cat wear a mask, right?” She shakes her head but she’s still smiling. “I’d just draw on whiskers with eyeliner if I was a cat. Everyone is so stupid.”
“Yeah,” Hal agrees, although all he can really focus on is how warm her hand feels through his jacket. He wishes he knew some witty thing to say, something to keep her laughing like that.
“Oh no, is Marty dressed as Batman?” The smile drops from her lips and all too soon she lets go of his arm, leaving a cold, empty sensation on it.
“No, I don’t think -” But Marty was standing by the gym entrance wearing a mask and a cape. Underneath he seemed to be wearing black jeans and a Batman t-shirt. “I’m sure he’s just like - a bat or something.”
Alice gapes at him for just a little too long. So long in fact that when she finally does start laughing he can’t help but join in too.
“You’re so stupid,” she gets out after a snort that he thinks is the cutest sound he’s ever heard. It’s different than when she called everyone else stupid for thinking she was just a cat. Affectionate almost.
He sees Marty join Hiram and the senior backs off from whatever they were fighting about. Hiram’s head turns this way and that but before he makes out where Hal is, Alice slides her hand into his.
“Where are we -”
“I wanna dance.” She tugs him towards the dance floor where the music has shifted from playing Werewolves of London to Bad Moon Rising. Hal doesn’t know if this is really a song to dance to but he lets her pull him anyway. “I mean, that’s the point of these things, right?”
Her hand is sticky in his from the popcorn ball but he hardly notices as she pulls him under the hundreds of lights decorating the school gym. Fred and FP are just a few feet away, banging their heads up and down like they’re at a metal concert. Alice’s hands are on his shoulders, pushing him into a swaying position before he can even question how one dances to this song.
Hiram tries waving him over but Hal ignores him. Marty leers at Alice and gives him a thumbs up, but before Hal can turn Alice away and out of sight, she laughs.
“You don’t need to protect me from idiots like that, really.” He didn’t even realize she noticed the boys watching them. “I’m a big girl, I can protect myself.”
She’s actually quite small, but Hal doesn’t argue with her. He knows she’d square up against Marty better than he would any day. She can take care of herself.
“I know,” he says quickly. “I’d rather just save you from needing to do that in the first place.”
She opens her mouth to argue, maybe to tell him she doesn’t need saving period, but she stops. After a few more seconds of nothing but Creedence Clearwater Revival (and Fred and FP’s shouting) she mutters, “Thanks.”